Books: Unfinished Symphony

LAMIEL (256 pp.) — Stendhal — New Directions ($2).

Stendhal carried in his mind's eye an exact portrait of Lamiel, the heroine of his last novel. "She is a little too tall and too thin," he noted. "I have seen her between the Bastille and the Porte St. Denis, and in the steamboat from Honfleur to Havre; her head is the perfection of Norman beauty; a superb high forehead, blond cendré [ash-blond] hair, an admirable and faultless little nose, blue eyes not quite big enough, chin narrow but a little too long; her face is a perfect oval and one can only...

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