Stendhal

The Grenoble boy who wanted out

Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble, in the Alps of south-eastern France, on 23 January 1783. His father, Chérubin Beyle, was a lawyer at the Parlement du Dauphiné, the regional high court; his mother, Henriette Gagnon, was the daughter of one of the city's leading doctors, and she died when the child was seven. That death organised everything that followed. He detested his father and the pious, provincial, money-minded Grenoble he stood for, and he attached himself instead to his maternal grandfather, Dr Henri Gagnon, who became — in his grandson's own words in Vie de Henry Brulard, 'The Life of Henry Brulard', the autobiography he wrote under yet another invented name and never published — his real father and his intimate friend, and who opened up to him letters, the sciences and the books of the Enlightenment.

In 1799, aged sixteen, he left his native town for Paris and never made his life in Grenoble again. His hatred of the place was not a later literary pose: escaping it is what his best-known self-portrait, Vie de Henry Brulard, spends its energy on. The Musée Stendhal in Grenoble now occupies both the flat he was born in and his grandfather's apartment, and is built around exactly that pair of rooms and that pair of men — the father he fled and the grandfather he loved.

Paris, the ministry, and Milan

What Paris gave him first was a job. His cousin Pierre Daru, a senior official of the war administration who would rise to run Napoleon's military supply, got him into the ministry of the armies, and that clerkship opened a career that ran military, then administrative, then diplomatic — decades of official posts that funded a writer who could not have lived by writing. It also moved him around Europe, and the move that mattered was to Milan, where he lived until 1821 and which he called his patrie de cœur, the homeland of his heart. Italy, in his books, is the place where poetry and true feelings are still possible; France is where one calculates.

Milan also gave him the wound he wrote from. De l'amour (1822) — "On Love", presented as a treatise, structured like a system — is in substance the secret journal of an unhappy passion he had conceived at Milan for Métilde Dembowski, a Milanese noblewoman who did not return it. It is the book where his lifelong subject first shows itself whole: what a person feels, tracked with the coldness of an official report. Later he would be posted abroad again, this time as a French consul — the official who represents his country's citizens and trade in a foreign city — and the surviving portrait of him in consular uniform is one of the few images of the working half of his life.

The Paris decade, 1821–1830

The decade from 1821 to 1830 is his Paris decade, and it is the one that produced the novels. Forced out of Milan in 1821 and back in a country he liked much less, he lived in the capital as a man of the salons — the private drawing rooms where Restoration Paris did its talking, flirting and political calculation — and he wrote them from the inside. His novel of 1827 announces it in the title: Armance, ou Quelques scènes d'un salon de Paris en 1827 — "Armance, or a few scenes from a Paris salon in 1827". He is one of the few great French novelists whose Paris is not the street but the reception room, and whose subject there is what people say when they are calculating.

What Le Rouge et le Noir is about

Le Rouge et le Noir — The Red and the Black — was published in November 1830 and subtitled Chronique du XIXe siècle, "a chronicle of the nineteenth century". Julien Sorel is a carpenter's son with an education, too clever and too proud for the position society has for him. He becomes tutor in the household of M. de Rênal and has an affair with Madame de Rênal, his employer's wife; he goes to a seminary, the college where Catholic priests are trained; he rises into a great aristocratic house and makes Mathilde de La Mole, an arrogant young noblewoman, fall genuinely in love with him. When Madame de Rênal, out of jealousy, denounces him and destroys the marriage he has almost secured, he goes into a church and shoots her twice. At his trial he insists the crime was premeditated, and is sentenced to death — arriving, too late, at the understanding that succeeding in this society was never worth anything.

The title names two careers. Red is military glory, the route to advancement that Napoleon's wars had opened to poor and gifted young men and that the Restoration had closed again; black is the Church, and with it the careerism and calculated piety that had replaced glory as the way up. The plot was not invented: Stendhal took it from the trial of Antoine Berthet, a young man who had trained for the priesthood and was condemned to death at Grenoble in 1827 for shooting his former employer's wife in a church. What he drew from the case was that the energy and ambition of France had not disappeared — it had merely been pushed down into the class that had no legitimate use for it.

Seven weeks, and La Chartreuse de Parme

La Chartreuse de Parme — The Charterhouse of Parma, a charterhouse being a monastery of the silent Carthusian order — was written between 4 November and 26 December 1838 and published in 1839. It follows Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian aristocrat who runs off to join Napoleon at Waterloo, the 1815 battle that ended the emperor for good, and wanders through it without ever grasping what is happening around him: the episode that made the book famous for showing a great historical event as a confused muddle at ground level. The rest is Italian court politics, imprisonment in the fortress of Parma, and Fabrice's love for Clélia Conti, the governor's daughter. It is the fullest version of the Italy he wanted: fast, passionate, indifferent to French self-accounting.

In 1840 Honoré de Balzac, then the most conspicuous novelist in France, devoted a long and resounding article to praising it in the Revue parisienne, the monthly magazine he was then writing and publishing almost single-handed. That review is very nearly the whole of Stendhal's contemporary recognition, and it came two years before he died.

"To the happy few"

Stendhal died in Paris on 23 March 1842, of a stroke. He was fifty-nine, and famous mainly among a small circle. He had spent his career writing for an audience he knew was not there — dedicating himself, in the English phrase he liked, "to the happy few" — and he was explicit about when they would arrive. "I shall be read in 1880," he wrote; and, "I shall be understood in 1935."

He was not far off. His private manuscripts — the journals, the unfinished novels, the autobiography Vie de Henry Brulard — were only studied and published from the 1880s onward, and it was that material, arriving forty years late, that produced the modern reading of him. Prosper Mérimée, the novelist and short-story writer who had known him, published a short memoir titled with his friend's initials — H. B., for Henri Beyle — barely seven years after his death, and closed it with a prophecy that has aged remarkably well: "I imagine that some critic of the twenty-first century will discover Beyle's books in the jumble of nineteenth-century literature, and will do them the justice they never found with his contemporaries."