Ten Novels And Their Authors (11 page)

(1)

In 1826 a virtuous young Englishman, but of literary inclinations, stayed for a while in Paris on his way to Italy, and presented the letters of introduction he had brought with him. One of the persons whose acquaintance he thus made took him to see Madame Ancelot, wife of a well-known dramatist, who received her friends on Tuesday evenings. Looking about him, he presently noticed a very fat little man who was talking with animation to a small group of his fellow-guests. He had enormous whiskers and wore a wig, and he was dressed in tight violet-coloured trousers which emphasised his corpulence, a dark-green coat with full tails, a lilac waistcoat, with a frilled shirt and a great flowing cravat. So odd was his appearance that the young Englishman could not but ask who he was. His companion mentioned a name. It meant nothing to him.

‘He makes us all nervous,’ the Frenchman went on. ‘He’s a republican, although he served under Bonaparte, and, with conditions as they are now, it’s dangerous to listen to the indiscreet things he says. At one time he had quite a good position, and he was on the Russian campaign with the Corsican. He’s probably telling his anecdotes about him now. He has a collection of them, and never misses a chance to repeat them. If you’re interested, I’ll present you to him when I get the opportunity.’

The opportunity came, and the little fat man greeted
the stranger with amiability. After some desultory conversation, the young Englishman asked him whether he had ever been to England.

‘Twice,’ he replied.

He said that in London he’d stayed with two friends of his at the Tavistock Hotel. Then, with a chuckle, he went on to say that he would tell him of a curious adventure he’d had there. He’d been bored to death in London, and one day he complained to the valet he’d engaged that there was no pleasant company to be had; whereupon the valet, thinking he wanted women, after making enquiries gave him an address in Westminster Road where he and his friends could go on the following night, without fear of unpleasantness. When they discovered that the Westminster Road was in a poverty-stricken suburb, where they might be robbed and murdered, one of the party refused to go; but the other two, having armed themselves with daggers and pistols, started off in a cab. They were set down at a tiny cottage, and three pale young working girls came out and invited them in. They sat down and had tea, and finally spent the night there. The girl had been very much alarmed when, before undressing, he had significantly put his pistols on the chest of drawers. The young Englishman listened with embarrassment to the detailed and frank account the funny fat little man gave of the experience, and when he returned to his companion told him how shocked, how embarrassed, he had been by the story which he, a perfect stranger, had been obliged to listen to.

‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ said his friend, laughing. ‘It’s well known that he’s impotent.’

The youth blushed, and to change the conversation mentioned that the fat man had told him that he wrote for English reviews.

‘Yes, he does a certain amount of hackwork like that. He’s published one or two books at his own expense, but nobody reads them.’

‘What did you say his name was?’

‘Beyle. Henri Beyle. But he isn’t of any importance; he has no talent.’

This episode, I must confess, is imaginary; but it may very well have taken place, and it reflects accurately enough the opinion in which Henri Beyle, better known to us now as Stendhal, was held by his contemporaries. He was at that time forty-three. He was writing his first novel. Owing to the vicissitudes of his life, he had acquired a variety of experience such as few novelists can boast of. He had been thrown, in a period of great change, with men of all kinds and all classes, and so had gained as wide a knowledge of human nature as his own limitations permitted. For even the most observant and acute student of his fellow-creatures can only know them through the medium of his own personality. He knows them not as they really are, but as they appear to him distorted by his peculiar idiosyncrasy.

Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble in 1783, the son of an attorney, a man of property and of some consequence in the city; his mother, the daughter of a distinguished and cultured doctor, died when he was seven. I cannot in these pages give more than a summary account of Stendhal’s life, for it would need a book to describe it adequately, and I should have to go into the social and political history of the time; fortunately such a book has been written, and if the reader of
Le Rouge et le Noir
is sufficiently interested to want to know more about its author than I propose to tell him, he cannot do better than to read the lively and well-documented biography which Mr. Matthew Josephson has published under the title:
Stendhal, or The Pursuit of Happiness
.

(2)

Stendhal has described at length his life as child and boy, and it is interesting to study, because during this
period he conceived prejudices which he maintained to his life’s end. On the death of his mother, whom he loved, as he says, with a lover’s love, he was left to the care of his father and his mother’s sister. His father was a grave, conscientious man; his aunt strict and devout. He hated them. Though belonging to the middle class, the family had aristocratic leanings, and the Revolution, which broke out in 1789, filled them with dismay. Stendhal claims that his childhood was miserable, but it does not appear from his own account that he had much to complain of. He was clever, argumentative and very much of a handful. When the Terror reached Grenoble, Monsieur Beyle was placed on the list of suspects; he thought he owed this to a rival lawyer, named Amar, who wanted his practice. ‘But Amar,’ said the smart little boy, ‘has put you on the list of those suspected of not loving the republic, and it is certain that you do not love it.’ True, of course; but not very pleasant for a middle-aged gentleman who is in danger of losing his head to hear from the lips of his only son. Stendhal accused his father of a horrid stinginess, but he seems always to have been able to wheedle money out of him when he wanted it. He was forbidden to read certain books, but, as thousands upon thousands of children the world over have done since books were first printed, he read them on the sly. His chief complaint was that he was not permitted to mix freely with other children; but his life cannot have been so solitary as he liked to make out, since he had two sisters, and other little boys shared his lessons with the Jesuit priest who was his tutor. He was, in fact, brought up as children in the well-to-do middle class were brought up at the time. Like all children, he looked upon ordinary restraints as the exercise of outrageous tyranny; and when he was obliged to do lessons, when he was not allowed to do exactly as he chose, regarded himself as treated with monstrous cruelty.

In this he resembled most children, but most children,
when they grow up, forget their grievances. Stendhal was unusual in that, at fifty-three, he harboured his old resentments. Because he hated his Jesuit tutor, he became violently anti-clerical, and to the end of his life could hardly bring himself to believe that a religious person might be sincere; and because his father and aunt were devoted royalists, he became ardently republican. But when one evening, being then eleven years old, he slipped out of the house to go to a revolutionary meeting, he had something of a shock. He found the proletariat dirty and smelly, vulgar and ill-spoken. ‘In short, I was then as I am today,’ he wrote, ‘I love the people, I hate their oppressors, but it would be a perpetual torture for me to live with the people … I had, and I have still, the most aristocratic tastes, I would do everything for the happiness of the people, but I would sooner, I believe, pass two weeks every month in prison than live with shopkeepers.’

The boy was clever and a good mathematician, and at sixteen he persuaded his father to let him go to Paris to enter the École Polytechnique to prepare himself for a career in the army. But this was only an excuse to get away from home. When the day came for him to present himself for the entrance examination, he stayed away. His father had given him an introduction to a connection of his, a Monsieur Daru, whose two sons were in the War Office. Pierre, the elder, held an important position, and after some time, at the request of M. Daru, his father, he engaged the youth, who was at a loose end and for whom some occupation had to be found, as one of his many secretaries. Napoleon set out on his second campaign in Italy, the brothers Daru followed him, and a little later Stendhal joined them at Milan. After some months on the clerical staff, Pierre Daru got him a commission in a regiment of dragoons, but, enjoying the gaieties of Milan as he did, he made no attempt to join it and, taking advantage of his patron’s absence, he wheedled a certain
General Michaud into making him his A.D.C. When Pierre Daru came back, he ordered Stendhal to join his regiment; but this, on one pretext and another, he avoided doing for six months, and when at last he did, found himself so bored that on a plea of illness he got leave of absence to go to Grenoble, and there resigned his commission. He saw no action, but this did not prevent him from boasting in after years of his prowess as a combatant; and indeed in 1804, when he was looking for a job, he wrote a testimonial himself (which General Michaud signed) in which he certified to his gallantry in various battles in which it has been proved he could not possibly have been engaged.

After spending three months at home, Stendhal went to live in Paris on a small, but sufficient, allowance from his father. He had two objects in view. One was to become the greatest dramatic poet of the age. For this purpose, he studied a manual of playwriting and assiduously frequented the theatre. He seems, however, to have had little power of invention, since over and over again one finds him unscrupulously remarking in his diary how he could take a play he had just seen and work it over into one of his own; and he was certainly no poet. His other object was to become a great lover. For this nature had ill equipped him. He was somewhat undersized, an ugly, plump young man with a big body and short legs, a large head and a mass of black curly hair; his mouth was thin, his nose thick and prominent; but his brown eyes were eager, his feet and hands small, and his skin as delicate as a woman’s. He was proud to declare that to hold a sword raised blisters on his hand. He was, besides, shy and awkward. Through his cousin, Martial Daru, Pierre’s younger brother, he was able to frequent the
salons
of some of the ladies whose husbands the Revolution had enriched; but he was sadly tongue-tied in company. He could think of clever things to say, but could never summon up the courage to say them. He never knew
what to do with his hands, and he bought a cane so that by playing with it he should make some use of them. He was conscious of his provincial accent, and it may be that it was to cure himself of this that he entered a dramatic school. Here he met a small-part actress, Mélanie Guil-bert by name, two or three years older than himself, and, after some hesitation, decided to fall in love with her. He hesitated partly because he was not sure whether she had a greatness of soul equal to his own and partly because he suspected that she was suffering from a venereal disease. Having presumably satisfied himself on both these points, he followed her to Marseilles, where she had an engagement, and where for some months he worked at a wholesale grocer’s. He came to the conclusion that she was not, either spiritually or intellectually, the woman he had thought; and it was a relief to him when, her engagement having come to an end, lack of money obliged her to return to Paris.

Stendhal was highly sex-conscious, but not particularly sexual; indeed, until some very frank letters were discovered from one of his later mistresses, it was commonly suspected that he was impotent. That is what the hero of his first novel,
Armance
, was. It is not a good novel. André Gide, however, greatly admired it; for a reason, I think, which is not hard to guess: it corroborated his own conviction, derived of course from his peculiar relations with his wife, that it is possible to be deeply in love without sexual desire. But there is all the difference between loving and being in love. It is possible to love without desire, but without desire impossible to be in love. Stendhal was evidently not impotent. He made his condition clear in the chapter of
De l’Amour
which he entitled “Fiasco”. To put it bluntly, his fear of not coming up to the scratch on occasion made him unable to do so, and thus gave rise to the rumours which mortified him. His passions were cerebral, and to possess a woman was chiefly a satisfaction to his vanity. It assured him of his
own virility. Notwithstanding his high-flown phrases, there is no sign that he was capable of tenderness. He admits frankly that most of his love affairs were unfortunate, and it is not hard to see why. He was faint-hearted. When in Italy, he asked a brother officer how to go about it to win a woman’s ‘favours’, and solemnly wrote down the advice he received. He laid siege to women by rule, just as he had tried to write plays by rule; and he was affronted when he discovered that they thought him ridiculous, and surprised when they discerned his insincerity. Intelligent as he was, it seems never to have occurred to him that the language a woman understands is the language of the heart, and that the language of reason leaves her cold. He thought he could achieve by stratagem and chicanery what can only be achieved by feeling.

Some months after Mélanie left him, Stendhal once more found himself n Paris. This was in 1806. By this time Pierre, now Count Daru, was more important than ever. Stendhal’s conduct in Italy had caused Pierre to form a poor opinion of his cousin, and it was only on his wife’s persuasion that he was induced to give him another chance. After the battle of Jena his younger brother, Martial, was assigned to serve at Brunswick, and Stendhal accompanied him as deputy commissary of war. He performed his duties so capably that, when Martial Daru was called elsewhere, he succeeded him. Stendhal abandoned the idea of being a great dramatist and decided to make a career for himself in the bureaucracy. He saw himself as a Baron of the Empire, a Knight of the Legion of Honour and, finally, as Prefect of a department with a princely stipend. Ardent republican though he was, and looking upon Napoleon as a tyrant who had robbed France of her liberty, he wrote to his father asking him to buy him a title. He added the
particule
to his name, and called himself Henri De Beyle. But notwithstanding this foolishness, he was a competent and resourceful administrator; and
in an uprising occasioned by a French officer who in a dispute with a German civilian drew his sword and killed him, he behaved with notable courage. In 1810, having gained promotion, he was once more in Paris, with an office in a superb suite in the Palais des Invalides and a handsome salary. He acquired a cabriolet with a pair of horses, a coachman and a man-servant. He took a chorus-girl to live with him. But this did not suffice: he felt that he owed it to himself to have a mistress he could love, and whose position would add to his prestige. He decided that Alexandrine Daru, Pierre’s wife, would fill the bill. She was a handsome woman many years younger than her distinguished husband, and the mother of his four children. There is no sign that Stendhal gave a thought to the kindness and long-suffering tolerance with which Count Daru had treated him, nor that, since he owed his advancement to him and his career depended on his good graces, it was neither politic nor elegant to seduce his wife. Gratitude was a virtue unknown to him.