The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830Stendhal
General
The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
Stendhal
Ambition -- Fiction; Bildungsromans; Church and state -- Fiction; France -- Fiction; Young men -- France -- Fiction
It is, moreover, to this period that we date Stendhal's liaison with
Mme. Daru the wife of his aged relative, M. Daru. This particular
intrigue has, moreover, a certain psychological importance in that
Mme. Daru constituted the model on whom Mathilde de la Mole was drawn
in _The Red and the Black_. The student and historian consequently who
is anxious to check how far the novelist is drawing on his experience
and how far on his imagination can compare with profit the description
of the Mathilde episode in _The Red and the Black_ with those sections
in Stendhal's Journal entitled the _Life and Sentiments of Silencious
Harry_, _Memoirs of my Life during my Amour with Countess Palfy_,
and also with the posthumous fragment, _Le Consultation de Banti_, a
piece of methodical deliberation on the pressing question. "Dois-je ou
ne dois-je pas avoir la duchesse?" written with all the documentary
coldness of a Government report. It is characteristic that both Bansi
and Julien decide in the affirmative as a matter of abstract principle.
For they both feel that they must necessarily reproach themselves in
after life if they miss so signal an opportunity.
Disgusted by the Restoration, Stendhal migrated in 1814 to Milan, his
favourite town in Europe, whose rich and varied life he savoured to
the full from the celebrated ices in the entreates of the opera, to
the reciprocated interest of Mme. Angelina Pietragrua (the Duchesse
de Sansererina of the Chartreuse of Parma), "a sublime wanton à la
Lucrezia Borgia" who would appear to have deceived him systematically.
It was in Milan that Stendhal first began to write for publication,
producing in 1814 _The Lives of Haydn and Mozart_, and in 1817 a series
of travel sketches, _Rome, Naples, Florence_, which was published in
London.
It was in Milan also than Stendhal first nursed the abstract thrills
of his grand passion for Métilde Countess Dunbowska, whose angelic
sweetness would seem to have served at any rate to some extent as a
prototype to the character of Mme. de Rênal. In 1821 the novelist was
expelled from Milan on the apparently unfounded accusation of being
a French spy. It is typical of that mixture of brutal sensuality and
rarefied sentimentalism which is one of the most fascinating features
of Stendhal's character, that even though he had never loved more than
the lady's heart, he should have remained for three years faithful to
this mistress of his ideal.
In 1822 Stendhal published his treatise, _De l'Amour_, a practical
scientific treatise on the erotic emotion by an author who possessed
the unusual advantage of being at the same time an acute psychologist
and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by
concrete practice and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself and
observe in others into broad general principles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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