Stendhal, 1840
1bis Place Jean Achard, 38000 Grenoble, France
Stendhal was educated at the Ecole Centrale at Grenoble (nowadays Lycée Stendhal)
1bis Place Jean Achard, 38000 Grenoble, France
Stendhal was educated at the Ecole Centrale at Grenoble (nowadays Lycée Stendhal)
(Stendahl's obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski i...)
Stendahl's obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski is at the heart of this book. For her part, she neither returned his love nor understood him. In an attempt to expain his feelings to her—and to exorcize his love—he dissects his passion. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal constructed a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.
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1822
(Armance is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restora...)
Armance is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restoration, published anonymously in 1827. It was Stendhal's first novel, though he had published essays and critical works on literature, art, and travel since 1815.
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1827
(A French lowborn, Julien Sorel wants more for himself tha...)
A French lowborn, Julien Sorel wants more for himself than what life gave him. So he starts to slowly climb the social ladder using his keen intelligence, from an acolyte of the Church and tutor of a wealthy family to a private secretary of a diplomat. His past mistakes however will forever haunt him.
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1830
(The Charterhouse of Parma is a compelling novel of passio...)
The Charterhouse of Parma is a compelling novel of passion and daring. Set at the beginning of the 19th-century in northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo. The novel's great achievement is to conjure up the excitement and romance of youth while never losing sight of the harsh realities which beset the pursuit of happiness.
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1839
(Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious hones...)
Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious honesty and indignation that his book was to remain unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, Stendhal revisits his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and bares his rebellious heart. His adored mother, who died when he was only seven; a father devoted only to his own social ambitions; the aunt whose daily cruelties passed for care: these are among the indelible portraits in a work that captures the sights, sounds, places, and characters of Stendhal's youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with preternatural clarity and immediacy.
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1890
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1892
(The complete novels and novellas of Stendhal in the chron...)
The complete novels and novellas of Stendhal in the chronological order of their original publication.
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Marie-Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble, France on the 23rd of January 1783. His father, Chérubin Beyle, was a barrister in Grenoble’s high court of justice. The son and the father were never on good terms. Stendhal’s mother, Henriette Gagnon, died when he was seven, and this loss increased his sense of solitude and his resentment toward his father. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline.
Until Beyle was twelve years old he was educated by a priest, who succeeded in inspiring him with a lasting hatred of clericalism. He was then sent to the newly established Ecole Centrale at Grenoble (nowadays Lycée Stendhal). As a student he grew interested in literature and mathematics.
In 1799 Beyle was sent to Paris with a letter of introduction to the Daru family, with which the Beyles were connected. Pierre Daru offered him a place in the ministry for war, and with the brothers Daru he followed Napoleon to Italy. Most of his time in Italy was spent at Milan, a city for which he conceived a lasting attachment. Much of his Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) seems to be autobiographical of this part of his life. He was a spectator of the battle of Marengo, and afterwards enlisted in a dragoon regiment.
With rapid promotion he became adjutant to General Michaud; but after the peace of Amiens in 1802 he returned to study in Paris. There he met an actress, Melanie Guilbert, whom he followed to Marseilles. His father cut off his supplies on hearing of this escapade, and Beyle was reduced to serving as clerk to a grocer. Melanie Guilbert, however, soon abandoned him to marry a Russian, and Beyle returned to Paris. Through the influence of Daru he obtained a place in the commissariat, which he filled with some distinction from 1806 to 1814. Charged with raising a levy in Brunswick of five million francs, he extracted seven; and during the retreat from Moscow he discharged his duties with efficiency.
On the fall of Napoleon he refused to accept a place under the new regime, and retired to Milan, where he met Silvio Pellico, Manzoni, Lord Byron and other men of note. At Milan he contracted a liaison with a certain Angelina P., whom he had admired fruitlessly during his earlier residence in that city. In 1814 he published, under the pseudonym of Alexandre Cesar Bombet, his Lettres ecrites de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur, Joseph Haydn, suivies d'une vie de Mozart, et de considerations sur Metastase et Vital present de la musique en Italie. His letters on Haydn were borrowed from the Haydini (1812) of Joseph Carpani, and the section on Mozart had no greater claim to originality. The book was reprinted (1817) as Vies de Haydn, Mozart et Mitastase. His Histoire de la peinture en Italie (2 vols., 1817) was originally dedicated to Napoleon.
His friendship with some Italian patriots brought him in 1821 under the notice of the Austrian authorities, and he was exiled from Milan. In Paris he felt himself a stranger, as he had never recognized French contemporary art in literature, music or painting. He frequented, however, many literary salons in Paris, and found some friends in the “ideologues” who gathered round Destutt de Tracy. He was the most closely allied with Prosper Merimee, a dilettante and an ironist like himself. He published at this time his Essai sur l’amour (1822), of which only seventeen copies were sold in eleven years, though it afterwards became famous, Racine et Shakespeare (1823-1825), Vie de Rossini (1824), D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels (1825), Promenades dans Rome (1829), and his first novel, Armance, ou quelques scenes de Paris en 1827 (1827).
After the Revolution of 1830 he was appointed consul at Trieste, but the Austrian government refused to accept him, and he was sent to Civita Vecchia instead. Le Rouge et le noir, chronique du XIXe siecle ((The Red and the Black, 2 vols., 1830) appeared in Paris after his departure. Although it is today acclaimed as a masterpiece, it had to wait 50 years and long after the death of its author to begin to achieve that status.
He had published in 1838 Memoires d’un touriste, and in 1839 La Chartreuse de Parme (2 vols.), which was the last of his publications, and the first to secure any popular success, though his earlier writings had been regarded as significant by a limited public. It was enthusiastically reviewed by Balzac in his Revue Parisienne (1840). Beyle remained at Civita Vecchia, discharging his duties as consul perfunctorily and with frequent intervals of absence until his death, which took place in Paris on the 23rd of March 1842. He wrote his own epitaph, describing himself as a Milanese.
His posthumous works include a fragmentary Vie de Napoleon (1875); Melanges d’art et de litterature (1867); Chroniques italiennes (1885), including “L’Abbesse de Castro,” “Les Cenci,” “Vittoria Accoramboni,” “Vanina Vanini,” “La Duchesse de Palliano,” some of which has appeared separately; Romans et nouvelles and Nouvelles inedites (1855); Correspondance (2 vols., 1855); Lamiel (ed. C. Stryienski, 1889); his Journal 1801-1814 (ed. Stryienski and F. de Nion, 1888), of which the section dealing with the Russian and German campaigns is unfortunately lost; Vie de Henri Brulard (1890), a disguised autobiography, chiefly the history of his numerous love affairs; Lettres intimes (1892); Lucien Leuwen (ed. J. de Mitty, 1894); Souvenirs d’égotisme (ed. C. Stryienski, 1892), autobiography and unpublished letters.
Stendhal became known for his critical analysis of characters’ consciousness. He is also considered one of the forerunners of ‘realism’. Some of his most popular realist works include ‘The Red and the Black’ and ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’, both of which were originally written in French and translated to English much later. His works were considered extremely unique and complex compared to the other writers of the 19th century.
(Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious hones...)
1890(The complete novels and novellas of Stendhal in the chron...)
(Armance is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restora...)
1827(Stendahl's obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski i...)
1822(A French lowborn, Julien Sorel wants more for himself tha...)
1830(The Charterhouse of Parma is a compelling novel of passio...)
1839A loyal Bonapartist Stendhal followed Napoleon closely during his military campaigns. During his time in Italy he became friends with Milanese liberals and Carbonari patriots.
From his schooling, as well as from an intensive study of Ideologue writings (especially those of Destutt de Tracy) that he began in 1804, Stendhal formed his world view. He sought to understand man by learning the workings of his mind and above all his emotions, the latter of which Stendhal believed were rooted in man's physiological nature. Stendhal hoped through this study to be able to dominate those about him. The principal keys were consciousness of self, awareness of the primal role of will, and excellence of memory in order to ensure recall of all relevant facts. In the happiness principle (la chasse au bonheur, the pursuit of happiness) Stendhal saw the central dynamic drive of man.
Stendhal also elaborated a doctrine he called "egotism" or "Beylism." Stendhal later wrote of this doctrine in detail in a series of works not published until long after his death: his Journal (1888), his Life of Henri Brûlard (1890), and his Memoirs of Egotism (1892). The doctrine, the name of which is deceptive to speakers of English, urges a deliberate following of self-interest and views the external world solely as a theater for personal energies.
The "will to glory" is no more than the doctrine's external manifestation. Its essence is inward, an intense study of the self in order to give to the fleeting moments of life all the density of which they are capable. Although this is an admittedly elitist doctrine, Stendhal excused and justified it by his total sincerity. It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself.
To Stendhal, Italy and Napoleon were the supreme models of his doctrine. He proposed them to the "Happy Few" as guides, for he believed that the elite alone possess sufficient independence of judgment and strength of will to dare to be themselves. They alone may seek the supreme goal-happiness and the complete conscious realization of self-through self-analysis leading to self-knowledge and an awareness of how all others also seek their own ends; through a conscious hypocrisy to conceal their own goals; and through an unabating honesty with self.
Stendhal suggested the idea that the initial manifestation of love is no more than a "crystallization" about the loved one of qualities the lover wishes to find in him or her-a matter (to use a later terminology) of projection and ego-satisfaction little dependent upon the real qualities of the person who is loved. It is a form of self-love, then, and not real love. For Stendhal, if love is to be complete, it must become a discovery of the loved person and a loss of self in love of the other. This total absorption is the supreme manifestation of the ego, a transcendent state to which all art and nature then contribute.
Quotations:
“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”
“There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”
“If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us”
“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”
“Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.”
“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”
“A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded.
It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.”
“Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.”
“After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.”
“Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.”
“Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?”
“A man may meet a woman and be shocked by her ugliness. Soon, if she is natural and unaffected, her expression makes him overlook the faults of her features. He begins to find her charming, it enters his head that she might be loved, and a week later he is living in hope. The following week he has been snubbed into despair, and the week afterwards he has gone mad.”
“The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”
“I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.”
“An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”
“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”
“Presque tous les malheurs de la vie viennent des fausses idées que nous avons sur ce qui nous arrive. Connaître à fond les hommes, juger sainement des événements, est donc un grand pas vers le bonheur."
“Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.”
An elusive personality, the end product of a process of disillusionment, Stendhal showed a mocking exterior, ironic and skeptical, that masked his sensitive and wounded heart. He made a name for himself in the salons as a conversationalist and polemicist. His wit and unconventional views were much appreciated, and he had notable friendships and love affairs.
In spite of his egotism and the limitations of his ideas, his acute analysis of the motives of his personages has appealed to successive generations of writers, and a great part of the development of the French novel must be traced to him. Brunetiere has pointed out that Stendhal supplied the Romanticists with the notion of the interchange of the methods and effects of poetry, painting and music, and that in his worship of Napoleon he agreed with their glorification of individual energy. Stendhal, however, thoroughly disliked the Romanticists, though Sainte-Beuve acknowledged that his books gave ideas. Taine found in him a great psychologist; Zola actually claimed him as the father of the naturalist school; and Paul Bourget cited Le Rouge et le noir as one of the classic novels of analysis.
Stendhal used 187 different pseudonyms during his life, of which "Stendhal" was to become the most recognizable to the public.
Stendhal Syndrome is named after him. It is the phenomenon of people becoming overwhelmed by beautiful artwork. Stendhal commented on it in his writings on Florence.
Physical Characteristics: Stendhal suffered miserable physical disabilities in his final years as he continued to produce some of his most famous work. As he noted in his journal, he was taking iodide of potassium and quicksilver to treat his syphilis, resulting in swollen armpits, difficulty swallowing, pains in his shrunken testicles, sleeplessness, giddiness, roaring in the ears, racing pulse and "tremors so bad he could scarcely hold a fork or a pen". Modern medicine has shown that his health problems were more attributable to his treatment than to his syphilis.
Quotes from others about the person
The great secret of Stendhal, his great shrewdness, consisted in writing at once…thought charged with emotion.” - André Gide
“We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble.Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject. But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; circumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before him.” - Erich Auerbach
Stendhal had never been married, though, he was involved in a number of relationships and affairs with women throughout his life, including Angela Pietragrua, Melanie Guilbert, Mina de Griesheim, Angeline Bereyter, Mathilde Dembowski, Countess Clementine Curial and even his first cousin, Alexandrine Daru.
Prosper Mérimée (28 September 1803 – 23 September 1870) was an important French writer in the school of Romanticism, and one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.
