French writer. Stendhal, literary pseudonym of Henri Beyle. Contemporary of the romanticism, author of two of the most famous novels of the XIXe century - Red and Black and the Charterhouse of Parma - and like such registered voter among the novelists of the real-world, between Balzac and Flaubert, Stendhal is however resolutely elsewhere: at one time when to write became a trade, though having written much, there remained a dilettante, which adored the literature, as he loved the women and Italy.

Energy, passion, horror of hypocrisy, desire of the naturalness, drive out with happiness, or egotism: all these words draw the silhouette of Stendhal.

If one adds the immoderate taste of the joke to them, fascination for the pseudonyms and the disguises, the certainty finally not to be understood that at the XXe century - that he imagined less conformist that his century -, one obtains an exact portrait of that whose modernity continues in the claim of individualism and freedom.

Confidences of “Henri Brulard”
Under the transparent pseudonym (Henri Brulard has the same initial ones as Henri Beyle), the Life of Henri Brulard undoubtedly delivers essence: less adventures that fractures, less of the actions which the fragile wire which bound them and which, patiently reeled by the narrator, reveal the coherence of an existence. Without worrying about the chronology, the text stops on urgent shocks, attitudes, sentences which the memory reinterprets in the work of the writing. As often as possible, in a preoccupation of precision and perhaps with an authentification for oneself, it is accompanied by sketch, plans, drawings.

In the center, the family clan, clearly cleaved: the side of the father, egoist, petty, middle-class stupid entiché of aristocratic prejudices, perfectly reactionary, with dreadful aunt Séraphie, genuine mantle, and the black tyrant occupied to poison the childhood of Henri, the Raillane abbot; the side of the mother, charming, merry, soft, speaking Italian and adoring the music, and of the good grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, Voltairean got excited of freedom.

In the middle of the text, between the evocations of Grenoble, the birthplace, that of the house of the holidays, the memories of any early childhood and some rough feelings, the drama: “My mother, Mrs Henriette Gagnon, were a charming woman and I was in love with my mother. I hasten to add that I lost it when I was seven years old.” Of this mourning on arrival in Italy - the true fatherland, since it was mythiquement that of his/her mother -, the Life of Henri Brulard describes a personality torn, impassioned, revolted, resolutely liberal and atheistic: formed at the central School of Grenoble, Henri, in spite of a heteroclite teaching staff, learns how to like mathematics, logic, the clear thought against conformism and hypocrisy. Its theory of the style - precis like that of the Civil code - and its taste of the small true facts, like that of the diagrammings, come from there.

Been able at Paris in 1799 to present itself to Polytechnique, Stendhal gives up and engages it in the army of Italy: the discovery of Milan, in the army of the First consul, definitively fixes one of the components of happiness stendhalien. Italy, to which the French Army comes to bring freedom in this last epic moment which prolongs the revolutionary adventure, is ground of the love, the music, of the found mother, the only ground of possible happiness, that he wants to join at any price.  

But it is necessary well to return: in Paris, Stendhal tries to succeed, in the middle of many and generally unhappy loves. It becomes, thanks to his cousin Pierre Daru, intendant of the Emperor (what is worth to him to travel, in Germany, in Vienna, in Hungary) then listener with the Council of State: in 1811, Stendhal is with the apogee of this fashionable career which he dreamed.  

Studies, criticisms and lampoons
While being divided between its passion for Angela Pietragrua, the voyages and the obligations of its load, it begins its first work, a History of painting in Italy. But it loses of it a part during the retirement of Russia. The fall of Napoleon breaks his career: deprived by resources, it will live in Milan until 1821 because in Italy, which is not the ground of appearing, to be poor is not a shame. It is there that it meets the love which undoubtedly the most counted in its life, that of Métilde Dembowska. In 1815, it had published a new text of “criticism”, musical this time, Vies of Haydn, Mozart and Métastase, under the pseudonym of Louis-Alexandre Bombet, and in 1817 a text halfway between the walk of the impassioned tourist and the art critic, Rome, Naples and Florence. From 1820, the writer works with love (1822) and, of return to Paris, with a romantic proclamation insolate and funny, Racine and Shakespeare, published in 1823, then in 1825, at the same time as with another lampoon, Of a new plot against the industrialists.  

Romantic aspirations
In Paris - although it frequently turns over to Italy and that it travels to England, where it collaborates in several reviews -, Stendhal attends the liberal living rooms as well as the romantic coteries, which is a contradiction: those which hold some then for liberalism not only economic, but as political are nothing less as romantic. Stendhal, whose culture is already cosmopolitan and the abundant critical reflection, is openly romantic, in its vision of art, and more still in its lifestyle. He refuses the guns of the traditional beauty - the Beautiful depends for him on the opinion - and it is in this spirit that he made discover Raphaël and Corrège, whose Virgins seem to him more upsetting that all Venus antiques; he preaches a modern art, whose single function must be to give the most possible pleasure to the subject which tastes it passionately.  

Feeling in love analyzes
But this same Stendhal wrote love, strange text, kind of monograph of this passion, which gave itself for goal “the detailed and meticulous description of all the feelings which compose named passion love”: romantic passion seems there put remotely by the analysis of the mechanisms of the love, according to a method which had fascinated the Beyle young person, that of the ideologists, which tried to understand how our ideas are formed, while breaking with traditional psychology. It is in love that celebrates it theory of “crystallization is”, according to which the spirit of the lover (E) works the reality of liked (E) with the image of its desires and in fact an ideal being. It is there too that - the first time is outlined many situations of the novel to come that a loved woman tightens you the hand, and that the promise is preferred with the realization.  

The year 1829 is that of a new connection (with Alberte de Rubempré, known as “Mrs. Azur”), of a newspaper of voyage, Promenades in Rome, of a news, “Vanina Vanini”, included later in the Italian Chronicles (of which the idea will germinate in 1833), tragic adaptations of stories written in Italy to the XVI E and XVII E centuries. Allured by their truth, Stendhal recomposes them according to its own fascinations: in “the Abbess of Castro”, “the Duchess of Palliano” or “Cenci” reigns violence, the murder, cruelty, the crimes of passion and appear the desire and energy apart from any moral consideration.  

At the end of 1829, by reading a fact various - a seminarist, Berthet, had been condemned to died to have tried to assassinate in a church his former mistress -, Stendhal has the idea of the Red and the Black, of which it will make another thing well that the account of an anecdote. Chronic subtitle the “of 1830” indicates it: the novel, published in December of this year, is made the table of the company of the Restoration. It gives to us the indication of a company sclerosed by its hierarchical system and thus incompetent to satisfy the ambitions of a hero like Julien Sorel, thus generating his loss.  

Obstructed by the insufficiency of its resources, Stendhal accepts in 1830 a post of consul in Trieste then with Civitavecchia. It is bored there, but it writes, reads and travels: Memories of a tourist (1838) proceeds of these brackets. In 1834, it begins a large political novel, Lucien Leuwen, meditation on the power and its traps, searches vain by the hero of an ideal to which to join, work that Stendhal will not complete: it is thrown in the Charterhouse of Parma (1839), where it returns to Italy, ground of elsewhere and the happiness, ultimate and poetic Utopia. Then it tries to give during female Julien Sorel with Lamiel, novel which will remain also unfinished. Stendhal dies of apoplexy in 1842.  

A model stendhalien?

Incompletion, as well as the “dispatched” outcome, is a constant feature of poetic the stendhalienne: in the so singular formula of its creation, which counts it is the naturalness, the taste of the true details, a malicious realism put in danger by the play of the novelist with his characters. Octave and Armance, Julien, Mrs. de Rénal, Mathilde, Lucien and over any Fabrice and Clélia are the true children of Stendhal: it stops them, criticism, sometimes makes fun of them and sometimes still is tenderized, while telling the history from the point of view of that which perceives it indeed; no the omniscience of the novelist, but a subjectivity which effectively brings closer its characters to the reader and which by way of companions. They like, enjoy a few rare moments délicieusement where happiness is only skimmed, then disappear, joining original unreality from where they had come and which was it me stendhalien, passion, madness, heat frays.  

If there exists a model stendhalien novel, the tempting share of play, the refusal of the spirit of serious characterize romantic which seems to go to the adventure without never being encumbered of knowing what the novel should be but while succeeding in making some one moment of pleasure and sometimes of happiness.

An Italian passion: Bologna

© Commune di Bologna

During its large turn, in 1816 Stendhal remained in Italy, and one of its stages was Bologna. In his newspaper of voyage, one finds many notes where it meticulously deepened what the city suggested to him on its arrival and during its stay.

An obvious characteristic according to the writer, is the feeling of freedom tested inside the walls of the city. It perceived this “freedom” in the conversations, which released from ease and promptness, it underlined the presence of mind besides of it; then he also says “where one laughs and where the women can evaluate a man in less than three minutes!”. He as deduces from his experiment downtown, as the love and the play were passions with the mode and that the music and painting were entertainments. The framework depicts by the writer is that of a city, which in 1816, offered already much: an opened city, full with resources, pleasures and of spirit. He notices that the population bolonaise is still related to Latin by the strange mania to often make Latin quotations, which surprised it agreeably. At the time (1816-1817), Bologna was a city which counted 60,000 inhabitants.

It was also struck by the hills which surround the enclosing walls, and very quickly it appreciated them to have admired there the panoramic sight, and the large trees against which the fortifications are leant. In the south-western zone of the Apennines, it dénomina “Bois de Boulogne” what is today the town of Casalecchio di Reno (with 6 kilometers of Bologna), which was to the XIX ^E century the destination of holiday in hill of bolonais.

At the time of its stay in Bologna, it also knew to seize the beauty of the streets and it even had preferred one of them: Via Castiglione. All that made appreciate the town of Bologna with Stendhal which never forgot it.