[1]What love is and whence it is so-called.What are the effects of love?Between whom love can exist.In what way love is won, kept, made to increase, to wane or to end.The way to know if love is returned, and what one of the lovers should do when the other proves faithless.[2]But lest perchance you are troubled by the obscurity of this discourse, I shall give you the argument:—From all antiquity there are four different degrees of love:The first consists in giving hope.The second in the offer of a kiss.The third in the enjoyment of the most intimate caresses.The fourth in the surrender of body and soul.
[1]What love is and whence it is so-called.What are the effects of love?Between whom love can exist.In what way love is won, kept, made to increase, to wane or to end.The way to know if love is returned, and what one of the lovers should do when the other proves faithless.
[1]
[2]But lest perchance you are troubled by the obscurity of this discourse, I shall give you the argument:—From all antiquity there are four different degrees of love:The first consists in giving hope.The second in the offer of a kiss.The third in the enjoyment of the most intimate caresses.The fourth in the surrender of body and soul.
[2]But lest perchance you are troubled by the obscurity of this discourse, I shall give you the argument:—
From all antiquity there are four different degrees of love:
The first consists in giving hope.
The second in the offer of a kiss.
The third in the enjoyment of the most intimate caresses.
The fourth in the surrender of body and soul.
1.The Portuguese Nun, Marianna Alcaforado, was born of a distinguished Portuguese family in the second half of the seventeenth century. About 1662, while still a nun, she fell in love with a French officer, the Chevalier de Chamilly, to whom she addressed her famous letters. The worthiness of the object of her passion may be judged by the fact that, on his return to Paris, the Chevalier handed over these letters to Sublingy, a lawyer, to be translated and published. They appeared in 1669, published by Barbin, under the titleLettres Portuguaises, and have since been often reprinted. Marianna Alcaforado died at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century.
There are only five original letters, though many editions contain the seven spurious letters, attributed to a "femme du monde"—they are already in Barbin's second edition.
There is an admirable seventeenth-century English translation of her letters by Sir Roger L'Estrange.
The passion of Héloïse for Abelard hardly calls for commentary. There is no clue to the identity of Captain de Vésel and Sergeant de Cento. A note in Calmann-Lévy's edition tells us that, in reply to enquiries about these two mysterious people, Stendhal said that he had forgotten their stories.
2.Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, by the famous Marquis de Sade, was published in Holland, 1791.
3.Cf. Coleridge,Love's Apparition and Evanishment:—
... Genial Hope,Love's eldest sister.
... Genial Hope,Love's eldest sister.
4.Cf. Chapter VIII, p.35below. The ideas contained in these two passages are the germ of a story written by Stendhal with the obvious intention of illustrating his theories. The story—"Ernestine"—is included in the Calmann-Lévy edition ofDe l'Amour.
5.Cf. a letter of Sir John Suckling "to a Friend to dissuade him from marrying a widow, which he formerly had been in love with":—
"Love is a natural distemper, a kind of Small Pox: Every one either hath had it or is to expect it, and the sooner the better."
6.Léonore: under this name Stendhal refers to Métilde Dembowski (néeViscontini). His passion for the wife of General Dembowski, with whom he became intimate during his stay in Milan (1814–1821), forms one of the most important chapters in Stendhal's life, but it is a little disappointing to enquire too deeply into the object of this passion. At any rate, as far as one can see, the great qualities which Stendhal discovered in Métilde Dembowski had their existence rather in his expert crystallisation than in reality. It was an unhappy affair. Métilde's cousin used her influence to injure Stendhal, and in 1819 she cut off all communication with him. Stendhal was still bemoaning his fate on his arrival in England, 1821. There is, none the less, something unconvincing in certain points in the history of this attachment; in spite of his sorrow, Stendhal seems to have consoled himself in the Westminster Road with "little Miss Appleby." It is worth noticing that Métilde Dembowski had been the confidante of Signora Pietra Grua, his former mistress, and it was from the date of Stendhal's discovery of the latter's shameless infidelity to himself and other lovers, that his admiration for Métilde seems to have started.
7.It is here worth turning to a passage from Baudelaire—which is given in the Translators' note(11)below. Liberty in love, he says, consists in avoiding the kind of woman dangerous to oneself. He points out that a natural instinct prompts one to this spontaneous self-preservation. Stendhal here gives a more exact explanation of the operation of this instinctive selection in love. Schopenhauer's conception of the utilitarian nature of bodily beauty is a more general application of the same idea. The breasts of a womanà laTitian are a pledge of fitness for maternity—therefore they are beautiful. Stendhal would have said a pledge of fitness for giving pleasure.
8.The well-known Dr. Edwards, in whose house Stendhal was introduced to one side of English life—and a very bourgeois side. He was introduced by a brother of Dr. Edwards, aman given to the peculiarly gloomy kind of debauch of which Stendhal gives such an exaggerated picture in his account of England. See note31below.
9.This brings to mind Blake's view of imagination and "the rotten rags" of memory.
10.Bianca e Faliero ossia il consiglio di tre—opera by Rossini (1819).
11.Cf. Baudelaire,Choix de maximes consolantes sur l'amourinLe Corsaire Satan(March 3, 1846) and reprinted inŒuvres Posthumes, Paris, 1908.
"Sans nier les coups de foudre, ce qui est impossible—voyez Stendhal...—il faut que la fatalité jouit d'une certaine élasticité qui s'appelle liberté humaine.... En amour la liberté consiste à éviter les catégories de femmes dangereuses, c'est-à-dire dangereuses pour vous."
["Without denying the possibility of 'thunderbolts,' for that is impossible (see Stendhal)—one may yet believe that fatality enjoys a certain elasticity, called human liberty.... In love human liberty consists in avoiding the categories of dangerous women—that is, women dangerous for you."]
12.Paul Louis Courier (1772–1825) served with distinction as an officer in Napoleon's army. He resigned his commission in 1809, in order to devote himself to literature, and especially to the study of Greek. His translation ofDaphnis and Chloe, from the Greek of Longus, is well known, and was the cause of his long controversy with Del Furia, the under-librarian of the Laurentian Library at Florence, to which Stendhal here refers. Courier had discovered a complete manuscript of this romance in the famous Florentine Library. By mistake, he soiled with a blot of ink the page of the manuscript containing the all-important passage, which was wanting in all previously known manuscripts. Del Furia, jealous of Courier's discovery, accused him of having blotted the passage on purpose, in order to monopolise the discovery. A lively controversy followed, in which the authorities entered. Courier was guilty of nothing worse than carelessness, and, needless to say, got the better of his adversaries, when it came to a trial with the pen.
13.The Viscomte de Valmont and the Présidente de Tourvel are the two central figures in Choderlos de Laclos'Liaisons Dangereuses(1782).
14.Modern criticism has made it uncertain who Dante's la Pia really was. The traditional identification is now given up, but there seems no reason to doubt the historical fact of the story.
15.Napoleon crowned himself with the Iron Crown of the old Lombard kings at Milan in 1805.
16.The reader is aware by now that Salviati is none other than Stendhal. The passage refers to the campaign of 1812, in which Stendhal played a prominent part, being present at the burning of Moscow.
17.Don Carlos, Tragedy of Schiller (1787); Saint-Preux—from Rousseau'sNouvelle Héloïse.
18.Stendhal's first book. For the history of this work, which is an admirable example of Stendhal's bold method of plagiarism, see the introduction to the work in the complete edition of Stendhal now in course of publication by Messrs. Champion (Paris, 1914) or Lumbroso,Vingt jugements inédits sur Henry Beyle(1902), pp. 10 and ff.
19.Jacques le Fataliste—by Diderot (1773).
20.The note, as it stands, in the French text, against the word "pique," runs as follows:—
"I think the word is none too French in this sense, but I can find no better substitute. In Italian it is 'puntiglio,' and in English 'pique.'"
21.TheLettres à Sophiewere written by Mirabeau (1749–1791) during his imprisonment at Vincennes (1777–1780). They were addressed to Sophie de Monnier; it was his relations with her which had brought him into prison. They were published in 1792, after Mirabeau's death, under the title:Lettres originales de Mirabeau écrites du donjon de Vincennes.
22.Catherine Marie, Duchesse de Montpensier, was the daughter of the Duc de Guise, assassinated in 1563. In 1570 she married the Duc de Montpensier. She was lame, but she had other reasons besides his scoffing at her infirmity for her undying hatred of Henry III; for she could lay at his door the death of her brother Henry, the third Duke. She died in 1596.
23.Julie d'Étanges—the heroine of Rousseau'sNouvelle Héloïse.
24.Stendhal, we must remember, is writing as a staunch liberal in the period of reaction which followed the fall of Napoleon and the end of the revolutionary period. Stendhal had been one of Napoleon's officers, and the Bourbon restoration put an end to his career. His liberalism and his pride at having been one of those who followed Napoleon's glorious campaigns, colour everything he writes about the state of Europe in his time. In reading Stendhal's criticisms of France, England and Italy, we must put ourselves back in 1822—remember that in France we have the Royalist restoration, in England the cry for reform always growing greater and beginning to penetrate even into the reactionary government of Lord Liverpool (Peel, Canning, Huskisson), in Italy the rule of the "Pacha" (see below, note29) and the beginning of Carbonarism (of which Stendhal was himself suspected, see below, note27), and the long struggle for unity and independence.
25.Charles Ferdinand, Duke de Berri (1778–1820), married a Bourbon Princess and was assassinated by a fanatic enemy of the Bourbons.
26.Bayard. Pierre Bayard (1476–1524), the famous French knight "without fear or reproach."
27.Of all foreign countries then to which Stendhal went Italy was not only his favourite, but also the one he knew and understood best. He was pleased in later years to discover Italian blood in his own family on the maternal side. The Gagnon family, from which his mother came, had, according to him, crossed into France about 1650.
He was in Italy with little interruption from 1814–1821, and again from 1830–1841 as consul at Civita Vecchia, during which time he became intimately acquainted with the best, indeed everykind of Italian society. He tells us that fear of being implicated in theCarbonaritroubles drove him from Italy in 1821.
One can well believe that a plain speaker and daring thinker like Stendhal would have been looked upon by the Austrian police with considerable suspicion.
28.Racine and Shakespeare. Very early in life Stendhal refused to accept the conventional literary valuations. Racine he put below Corneille—Racine, like Voltaire, he says, fills his works with "bavardage éternel." Shakespeare became for Stendhal the master dramatist, and he is never tired of the comparison between him and Racine. Cf.Rome, Naples et Florence(1817), andHistoire de la Peinture en Italie(1817). Finally he published his work on the subject:Racine et Shakespeare par M. de Stendhal(1823).
29.Stendhal knew Italy and was writing in Italy in the dark period that followed the fall of Napoleon. The "Pacha" is, of course, the repressive and reactionary government, whether that of the Austrians in Lombardy, of the Pope in Rome, or of the petty princes in the minor Italian states. See above, note27.
30.Count Almaviva—character from Beaumarchais'Marriage de Figaro, first acted April, 1784. The play was censored by Louis XVI and produced none the less six months later. Its production is an event in the history of the French Revolution. Almaviva stands for the aristocracy and cuts a sad figure beside Figaro, a poor barber.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with England
31.Baretti, Dr. Johnson's friend, has the reputation of having learnt English better than any other foreigner. Stendhal might well claim a similar distinction for having acquired in a short stay a grasp so singularly comprehensive of England—of English people and their ways. He was four times in England—in 1817, 1821, 1826, and 1838—never for a whole year in succession, and on the first occasion merely on a flying trip. But Stendhal had not only a great power of observing and assimilating ideas; he was also capable of accommodating himself to association with the most varied types. Stendhal was as appreciative of Miss Appleby—hislittle mistress in the Westminster Road—as of Lord Byron and Shelley: he was at home in the family circle of the Edwards and the Clarkes. From the first he was sensible of the immense value of his friendship with the lawyer, Sutton Sharpe (1797–1843). Sharpe was one of those Englishmen who seem made for the admiration of foreigners—possessing all the Englishman's sense and unaffected dignity and none of his morbid reserve or insularity. Porson, Opie, Flaxman, Stothard were familiar figures in the house of Sharpe's father, and Sharpe and his charming sister continued to be the centre of a large and intelligent circle. In 1826 Sharpe took Stendhal with him on circuit. Stendhal was often present in court and learnt from his friend, who in 1841 became Q. C., to admire the real character, so rarely appreciated abroad, of English justice. He took this opportunity of visiting also Manchester, York, and the Lake district. Likewise to Sharpe he owed the privilege of meeting Hook, the famous wit and famous bibber, at the Athenaeum. He was present even at one of Almack's balls—the most select entertainment of that time.
With an acquaintance with England at once so varied, so full and yet so short, as regards direct intercourse with the country and people, it is rather natural that Stendhal was wary of subscribing to any one very settled conception of the English. He felt the incongruity of their character. At one time he called them "la nation la plus civilisée et la plus puissante du monde entier"—the most civilised and powerful people on the face of the earth; at another they were only "les premiers hommes pour le steam-engine"; and then, he merely felt a sorrowful affection for them—as for a people who just missed getting the profit of their good qualities by shutting their eyes to their bad.
As for Stendhal's knowledge of English literature—of that the foundations were laid early in life. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare was a very early passion (cf. Translators' note28). As years went on, his acquaintance with English thought and English literature became steadily wider. Significant is his familiarity with Bentham, whose views were congenial to Stendhal: Stendhal quotes him more than once. Hobbes he was ready to class with Condillac, Helvétius, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy, as one of the philosophers most congenial and useful to his mind. For the rest, the notes and quotations in this book leave no doubt of the extent of his English reading—theygive one a poorer opinion of his purely linguistic capacities; Stendhal's own English is often most comical. For a very complete consideration of his connexion with England seeStendhal et l'Angleterre, by Doris Gunnell (Paris, 1909). Cf. also Chuquet'sStendhal-Beyle(Paris, 1902), Chap. IX, pp. 178 and ff.
32.Of the three Englishmen referred to here, James Beattie (1735—1803), the author ofThe Minstrel(published 1771–1774), and Richard Watson (1737–1816), Bishop of Llandaff (1782), a distinguished chemist and a man of liberal political views, will both be familiar to readers of Boswell. The third, John Chetwode Eustace (1762?-1815) was a friend of Burke and a Roman Catholic, who seems to have given some trouble to the Catholic authorities in England and Ireland. HisTour through Italy, to which Stendhal refers, was published in 1813.
33.The Divorce Bill, introduced in 1820 into the House of Lords by George IV's ministers, to annul his marriage with Queen Caroline, but abandoned on account of its unpopularity both in Parliament and in the country generally.
34.The Whiteboys were a secret society, which originated in Ireland about 1760 and continued spasmodically till the end of the century. In 1821 it reappeared and gave great trouble to the authorities; in 1823 the society adopted another name. The yeomanry was embodied in Ulster in September 1796, and was mainly composed of Orangemen and Protestants. The body was instrumental in disarming Ulster and in suppressing the rebellion of 1798—not, it has been maintained, without unnecessary cruelty.
35.Sir Benjamin Bloomfield (1786–1846), a distinguished soldier, ultimately did get his peerage in 1825. In 1822 he had resigned his office of receiver of the duchy of Cornwall, having lost the King's confidence after many years of favour.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with Spain
36.Stendhal's personal knowledge of Spain was less extensive than that of Italy, England and Germany. He was early interested in the country and its literature. In 1808 at Richemont he was reading aHistoire de la guerre de la succession d'Espagne, and the same year speaks of his plan of going to Spain to study thelanguage of Cervantes and Calderon. In 1810 he actually took Spanish lessons and the next year applied from Germany for an official appointment in Spain. In 1837 he made his way as far as Barcelona.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with Germany
37.In 1806 Stendhal returned to Paris from Marseilles whither he had followed the actress Melanie Guilbert and taken up a commercial employment in order to support himself at her side. He now again put himself under the protection of Daru, and followed him into Germany, though at first without any fixed title. He was not at Jena, as he pretends (being still in Paris the 7th October), but on the 27th of the month he witnessed Napoleon's triumphal entry into Berlin. Two days later he was nominated by Daru to the post of assistantcommissaire des guerres.
Stendhal arrived in Brunswick in 1806 to take up his official duties. Although his time was occupied with a considerable amount of business, he found leisure also for visiting the country at ease. In 1807 he went as far as Hamburg. His observations on the country and people are occurring continually in his works, particularly in his letters and in hisVoyage à Brunswick(inNapoléon, ed. de Mitty, Paris, 1897), pp. 92–125. In 1808 he left Brunswick, but soon returned with Daru to Germany. This time he was employed at Strasbourg—whence he passed to Ingolstadt, Landshut, etc., etc. Facts prove that he was not at the battle of Wagram, as he says in hisLife of Napoleon. He was at the time at Vienna, where he managed to remain for theTe Deumsung in honour of the Emperor Francis II after the evacuation by the French. He returned in 1810, after the peace of Schonnbrunn, to Paris. It was during his stay in Brunswick that Stendhal made the acquaintance of Baron von Strombeck, for whom he always preserved a warm affection. He was a frequent guest at the house of von Strombeck and a great admirer of his sister-in-law, Phillippine von Bülow—who died Abbess of Steterburg—la celeste Phillippine. Baron von Strombeck is referred to in this work as M. de Mermann. See generally Chuquet,Stendhal-Beyle, Chap. V.
38.Triumph of the Cross. In Arthur Schuig's sprightly, but inaccurate, German edition ofDe l'Amour—Über die Liebe(Jena, 1911)—occurs this note:—
"Stendhal names the pieceLe Triomphe de la Croix, but mustmean eitherDas Kruez an der Ostsee(1806), orMartin Luther oder die Weihe der Kraft(1807)—both tragedies by Zacharias Werner."
39.The Provencal story in this chapter, and the Arabic anecdotes in the next, were translated for Stendhal by his friend Claude Fauriel (1772–1806)—"the only savant in Paris who is not a pedant," he calls him in a letter written in 1829 (Correspondance de Stendhal, Paris, Charles Brosse, 1908, Vol. II, p. 516). A letter of 1822 (Vol. II, p. 247) thanks M. Fauriel for his translations. "If I were not so old," he writes, "I should learn Arabic, so charmed am I to find something at last that is not a mere academic copy of the antique.... My little ideological treatise on Love will now have some variety. The reader will be carried beyond the circle of European ideas." Saint-Beuve relates that he was present when Fauriel showed Stendhal, then engaged on hisDe l'Amour, an Arab story which he had translated. Stendhal seized on it, and Fauriel was only able to recover his story by promising two more like it in exchange. M. Fauriel is referred to p.188, note 3, above.
40.The reference is to a piece by Scribe (1791–1861).
41.Stendhal had no first-hand knowledge of America.
42.Stendhal was writing before Whitman and Whistler; yet he had read Poe.
43.The entire material for these three chapters, and to a very great extent their language too, is taken straight from an article in theEdinburgh Review—January 1810—by Thomas Broadbent. See for a full comparison of the English and French, Doris Gunnell—Stendhal et l'Angleterre, Appendix B.
Stendhal has not only adapted the ideas—he has to a great extent translated the words of Thomas Broadbent. He has changed the order of ideas here and there—not the ideas themselves—and in some cases he has enlarged their application. Where he has translated the English word for word, it has often been possible in this translation to restore the original English, which Stendhal borrowed and turned into French. Where we have done this, we have printed the words, which belong to Thomas Broadbent, in italics.
However, as Stendhal often introduced slight, but important, changes of language, we also give below, as an example of his methods, longer passages chosen from the article in theEdinburgh Review, to compare with the corresponding passages literally translated by us from Stendhal.
These are the passages:—
P.225, l. 2:
"As if women were more quick and men more judicious, as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of expression and men for stronger powers of attention."
"As if women were more quick and men more judicious, as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of expression and men for stronger powers of attention."
P.228, l. 9:
"Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to one sex as to the other.... Vanity and conceit we shall of course witness in men and women, as long as the world endures.... The best way to make it more tolerable is to give it as high and dignified an object as possible."
"Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to one sex as to the other.... Vanity and conceit we shall of course witness in men and women, as long as the world endures.... The best way to make it more tolerable is to give it as high and dignified an object as possible."
P.229, l. 21:
"Women have, of course, all ignorant men for enemies to their instruction, who being bound (as they think) in point of sex to know more, are not well pleased in point of fact to know less."
"Women have, of course, all ignorant men for enemies to their instruction, who being bound (as they think) in point of sex to know more, are not well pleased in point of fact to know less."
P.230, l. 24:
"The same desire of pleasing, etc.... We are quite astonished in hearing men converse on such subjects to find them attributing such beautiful effects to ignorance."
"The same desire of pleasing, etc.... We are quite astonished in hearing men converse on such subjects to find them attributing such beautiful effects to ignorance."
P.232, l. 31:
"We do not wish a lady to write books any more than we wish her to dance at the opera."
"We do not wish a lady to write books any more than we wish her to dance at the opera."
P.237, l. 13:
"A merely accomplished woman cannot infuse her tastes into the minds of her sons...."By having gained information a mother may inspire her sons with valuable tastes, which may abide by them through life and carry him up to all the sublimities of knowledge."
"A merely accomplished woman cannot infuse her tastes into the minds of her sons....
"By having gained information a mother may inspire her sons with valuable tastes, which may abide by them through life and carry him up to all the sublimities of knowledge."
P.237, l. 27:
"Mankind are much happier for the discovery of barometers, thermometers, steam-engines and all the innumerable inventions in the arts and the sciences.... The same observation is true of such works as those of Dryden, Pope, Milton and Shakespeare."
"Mankind are much happier for the discovery of barometers, thermometers, steam-engines and all the innumerable inventions in the arts and the sciences.... The same observation is true of such works as those of Dryden, Pope, Milton and Shakespeare."
Stendhal's habit of quoting without acknowledgment from all kinds of writings is so curious, that it demands a word to itself. His wholesale method of plagiarism has been established in other works beside the present one; almost the whole of his first work—La Vie de Haydn(1814)—is stolen property. See above, note18. Goethe was amused to find his own experiences transferred to the credit of the author ofRome, Naples et Florence!
If there is any commentary necessary on this literary piracy—it is to be found in a note by Stendhal (videabove, Chapter XXXVII, p.132) on a passage where, for once, he actually acknowledges a thought from La Rochefoucauld:—
"The reader will have recognised, without my marking it each time, several other thoughts of celebrated writers. It is history which I am attempting to write, and such thoughts are the facts."
"The reader will have recognised, without my marking it each time, several other thoughts of celebrated writers. It is history which I am attempting to write, and such thoughts are the facts."
44.The monitorial system (Enseignement mutuel) was introduced into France soon after the Bourbon Restoration; but it was not, like our monitorial system, designed with a view primarily to the maintenance of discipline, but rather to supplying the want of schools and masters and remedying the official indifference to popular education, which then existed in France. As such, it was warmly espoused by the liberals, and as warmly opposed by the reactionaries. The monitors, it was thought, could hand on to the younger pupils the knowledge they had already received; after the Revolution of 1830, when no longer the object of political controversy, the system gave way to more practical and efficient methods of public instruction.
45.Porlier (Don Juan Diaz), born in 1783, was publicly hanged in 1815 as the result of a conspiracy against Ferdinand VII of Spain. After having been one of the most active and bravest supporters of Ferdinand's cause in the effort to re-establish his throne and the national honour, he now sacrificed his life to an unsuccessful attempt to set up a constitutional government.
Antonio Quiroga (born 1784), also after having distinguished himself in the national struggle against Napoleon, was tried for complicity in the conspiracy, after the fall of Porlier. After a series of adventures, in which he was more lucky than Riego, hissubaltern, to whom he owed so much, he again distinguished himself, after a temporary withdrawal from active service in 1822, by the stout opposition he offered to the French invasion of 1823. His efforts, however, were of no avail and he escaped to England, and thence made his way to South America. Some years later he returned to Spain, was nominated Captain General of Grenada, and died in 1841.
Rafael del Riego (born 1785), after serving against the French, first became prominent in connexion with the effort to restore the constitution which Ferdinand had abolished in 1812. He was elected by his troops second in command to Quiroga, whom he himself proposed as their leader. This rising was a failure and Riego was exiled to Oviedo, his birthplace. After being repeatedly recalled and re-exiled, he ended by being one of the first victims of Ferdinand's restoration in 1823, and was dragged to the place of execution at the back of a donkey, amid the outrages of the mob.
46.Father Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), the famous historian of the Council of Trent, a Servite monk, and the ecclesiastical adviser of the Venetian Government, at a time when it seemed not impossible that Venice would break away, like Northern Europe, from the Roman Catholic Church.
47.Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was, according to Stendhal, our only philosopher. It is on Tracy, one of the Ideologists, that Stendhal, one might say, modelled his philosophic attitude. Tracy'sIdéologie(1801), he says, gave him "milles germes de pensées nouvelles"—gave him also his worship of logic. He was equally impressed by theTraité de la Volonté(1815). Cf. Picavet's Sorbonne Thesis (Paris, 1891)Les Idéologues, pp. 489–92, in which he speaks of Stendhal as "a successor and a defender,mutatis mutandis, of the eighteenth-century 'Idéologues.'"
48.Giovanni Luigi Fiescho (15 23–1547), a great Genoese noble, formed a conspiracy in 1547 against the all-powerful Admiral of the Republic, Andrea Doria. The state fleet in the harbour was to be seized, but in attempting this Fiescho was drowned, and the conspiracy collapsed.
49.Henri Grégoire (1750–1831), one of the most original fearless and sincere of the Revolutionary leaders, was the constitutional Bishop of Blois, who refused to lay down his episcopal office under the Terror, and when the Reign of Terror was over, took an active part in restoring Religion and the Church. He resigned his bishopric in 1801. Napoleon made him a count but he was always hostile to the Empire. He was a staunch Gallican, and never forgave Napoleon his concordat with the Papacy. He was naturally hated and feared by the Royalists at the Restoration, but he remained popular with the people, and was elected a member of the lower chamber in 1819, though he was prevented by the Government from sitting.
50.La Génie du Christianisme, by Chateaubriand (1802).
51.See note47.
52.See note37.
53.See note37.
54.Johannes von Müller—the German historian (1752–1809).
55.La Trappe—the headquarters (near Mortagna) of a monastic body, the Trappists, a branch of the Cistercian order. The word is used for all Trappist monasteries.
56.Samuel Bernard (1651–1739), son of the painter and engraver of the same name, was a man of immense wealth and the foremost French financier of his day. He was born a Protestant, not, as has been thought, a Jew, but became a Catholic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He was ennobled and became the Comte de Coubert (1725).
57.Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), a celebrated mathematician and scientist.
58.Hazlitt, in a note to his essay onSelf-Love and Benevolence, remarked on Stendhal's absurdly exaggerated praise of Helvétius. After quoting this passage, he adds: "My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal fallacy."Hobbes and Mandeville, he says, had long before stated, and Butler answered, this fallacy, which not unfrequently vitiates Stendhal's psychological views.
59.Francois Guillaume Ducray-Duminil (1761–1819), the author of numerous sentimental and popular novels.
60.TheArgonauticaof Apollonius of Rhodes (222–181 B. C.).
61.Jean Francois de la Harpe (born 1739) is frequently mentioned by Stendhal in this hostile spirit. After winning considerable notoriety, without very much merit, La Harpe in 1786 became professor of literature at the newly founded Lycée. Having started as a Voltairian philosopher, and still apparently favourable to the Revolution, he was none the less arrested in 1794 as a suspect and put into prison. There he was converted from his former Voltairian principles to Roman Catholicism. He died in 1803.
62.Notices sur Mme. de la Fayette, Mme. et Mlle. Deshoulières, lues à l'Académie française, Paris, 1822.
63.Pierre Jean de Béranger (born 1780): The bold patriotic songs, which had made Béranger's name, brought him in 1828, for the second time, into prison. He refused office after the revolution (1830), for the principles of which he had already suffered; he died in 1848.
64.La Gazza Ladra, an opera by Rossini.
65.Antoine Marie, Comte de Lavalette (1769–1830) was one of Napoleon's generals. After the Bourbon restoration of 1815 he was condemned to death, but escaped, chiefly owing to his wife's help.
66.Alessandro, Conte Verri, the contemporary of Stendhal and a distinguishedlittérateur(1741–1816).
67.Montenotte (April, 1796), and Rivoli (January, 1797), two victories in Bonaparte's Italian campaign.
68.The existence of these Courts of Love has been denied by many modern historians. For a brief statement of the arguments against their historical existence the English reader may be referred to Chaytor,The Troubadours(in theCambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 1912), pp. 19–21. But while the direct evidence for their existence is very flimsy, the direct evidence against them is no less so.
69.The monk of the Isles d'Or, on whose manuscript Nostradamus professed to rely, is now considered to be a purely fictitious person, an anagram on a friend's name.
70.The date of André le Chapelain's treatise is a disputed point. Stendhal gives its date as 1176; Reynouard and others, 1170. Others again have placed it as late as the fourteenth century, though this has been proved impossible, since thirteenth-century writers refer to the book. The probability is that it was written at the beginning of the thirteenth or end of the twelfth century—there is no evidence to fix the date with precision. For a full discussion of the question see the preface to the best modern edition of the work—Andreae Capellani ... De Amore(recensuit E. Trojel), 1892.
71.Cf. Montesquieu,Lettres Persanes, passim, and especially Letter 48: ".... Our foreign demeanour no longer gives offence. We even profit by people's surprise at finding us quite polite. Frenchmen cannot imagine that Persia produces men.