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Good Reading : May 2007
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MAY 2007 ı goodreading 23 classics the presence of twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms to open the gates of France to them. Guaranteeing this support is a burden, you’ll tell me; gentlemen, our heads remain on our shoulders at this price. And Stendhal’s social commentary is astute. He understands the power of the priesthood and perhaps the dawning power of the press: ‘Yet men like this [priests] are the only moral teachers available to the common people, and how would the latter fare without them? Will newspapers ever succeed in replacing priests?’ He diagnoses the symptom of the increasingly influential new class, the bourgeoisie, that will so nauseate Flaubert: ‘BRINGING IN MONEY: this is the key phrase which settles everything in Verrières.’ Balzac (1799–1850) commented that Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) ‘often contains a whole book in a single page’, and so it is with The Red and the Black. Stendhal writes with such urgency, cramming his pages with such remarkable, breathtakingly unexpected events, that his novel encompasses the length and breadth of a whole society. And his chatty nar rator often breaks from the story to engage directly with the reader, discussing cur rent fashions, politics, mores and modes of thought, which gives the novel a topical immediacy that was unheard of in Stendhal’s day: in Paris, love is born of fiction.The young tutor and his shy mistress would have found three or four novels, and even couplets from the Théâtre de Madame, clarifying their situation.The novels would have outlined for them the roles they had to play, and given them a model to imitate. Stendhal was born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble in 1783. His beloved mother died when he was seven and he was left in the care of his domineering father, a barrister in Grenoble’s high court of justice. As soon as he could, Stendhal left Grenoble for Paris to seek his fortune and escape his father, whom he resented. Stendhal arrived in Paris at a fateful moment – in 1799, the day after Napoleon Bonaparte took power with the coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire. Napoleon was to be the shaping force not only of the age but of Stendhal’s life and novels. Stendhal had shown an interest in literature and mathematics, and his father expected him to go to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Instead, in Paris, Stendhal was taken up by his father’s cousin Noel Daru and his sons Pierre and Martial, powerful members of Napoleon’s bureaucracy. Pierre and Martial educated their provincial relative in the ways of a Parisian dandy and found him a position as a clerk in Napoleon’s Ministry of War. When Napoleon decided to attack the Austrians in Italy, Stendhal was offered a commission and travelled through the Alps to join Napoleon’s ar my in Italy. Here, especially in Milan, Stendhal discovered the pleasures of Italian culture, as well as the hardships of military life. His dreams of noble military life were dashed by the coarseness of military men. In 1802, aged nineteen, Stendhal returned to Paris and began to write. In Paris, Stendhal was given one of the top government positions in the empire and mixed with the cream of Parisian society, including Napoleon’s sisters, Prince Metternich, Mme de Staël, Mme Récamier and the painter Jacques-Louis David. He even had an audience with the Empress, Marie-Louise, before joining Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, where he witnessed the bur ning of Moscow. When Napoleon was defeated in 1814, Stendhal could not bring himself to live in Restoration France, so he settled in Milan. Here he published his first books on art, music and travel, under the pseudonym ‘Alexandre César Bombet’. In the climate of fear and opportunism in Restoration France, spies and counterfeit activities were rife. Beyle himself adopted about two hundred different names, including ‘William Crocodile’, and finally settled with ‘Stendhal’ for his novels, a name that he used for the first time in 1817 when he published his travel book Rome, Naples and Florence in 1817. Stendhal, who never married, had many affairs and fell madly in love with Metilde Dembowski in Milan in 1818. His unrequited passion for her haunted him for the rest of his life. Stendhal left Milan in 1821 and moved to Paris, where his sharp intellect and original wit were much celebrated in the salons. His first novel, Armance, was published in 1827. Three years later, aged forty-seven, he published The Red and the Black, dedicated ‘To the Happy Few’. The ‘happy few’ were the small group of people who espoused the view of life Stendhal named ‘beylism’, those who believed in the value of passion, energy and originality, who constantly questioned the customs and codes of the day while appearing to confor m to them, in order to be happy. Following the July Revolution of 1830 and the ascendancy of ‘the bourgeois monarch’ Louis-Philippe, Stendhal was appointed French consul in the port of Civitavecchia in the Papal States. He eventually returned to Paris due to ill-health – probably due to syphilis – and in 1842, after dinner with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stendhal collapsed in the street and died soon after. His self-composed epitaph was: ‘He lived, He wrote, He loved’. Stendhal predicted that his work would not be appreciated for another fifty years. His novels, with their penetrating, ironic portraits of contemporary society, were shocking in his day and his genius was not widely appreciated until after his death. Many later writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were influenced by his vision, including Nietzsche, Proust and Camus. Classics: Books for Life by Jane Gleeson-White is published by Knopf Australia, rrp $34.95 Stendhal writes with such urgency, cramming his pages with such remarkable, breathtakingly unexpected events, that his novel encompasses the length and breadth of a whole society. And his chatty narrator often breaks from the story to engage directly with the reader, which gives the novel a topical immediacy unheard of in Stendhal’s day. Marie-Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal
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