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Glittering Notoriety. Yet he was no flop. Before he was 30 he had risen to the post of supply commissary in the Grand Army, and served as military governor of Brunswick in occupied Prussia (he took his pen name from the little German town of Stendal). He returned to France a member of "that hierarchy of five or six hundred top officials through whom the Empire was ruled."
But the pursuit of beauty, the attainment by "great souls" of the maximum "passional love," still seemed to him "the wonder of civilization." His own ardor was overshadowed by his egotism, his thirst for glory and prestige under the Emperor. "I looked superb," he noted one day during this glittering period, "my hair done in thick black curls, my face fine; cravat, jabot, two vests—superb; breeches of cashmere . . . noble and assured carriage."
His sharp tongue (he once described Novelist Sir Walter Scott as "a dwarf who is determined not to lose an inch of his stature"), his always unexpected views ("It gives one somewhat the desire to be buried," he remarked on seeing the tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo), his dogmatic epigrams ("The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist") won him a drawing-room notoriety that his face and figure could never have won.
Sparkling Crystals. When Napoleon fell, Henri Beyle, who had participated in the disastrous invasion of Russia, fell with him. Disgraced, penniless, the young, atheistic republican stood on a Paris sidewalk and stared at the "hideous apparition" of "fat King Louis XVIII." Henri fled to Italy.
There he wrote his famed study De I'Amour, in which he presented his theory (now commonplace among psychologists) of love as a process of "crystallization." Love, he claimed, was like a ragged, bare branch that falls into a salt-mine, and when taken out a few months later is so richly coated with sparkling crystals that it appears beautiful beyond belief. Thus the passionate imagination of love renders a loved one beautiful—and, in the process, stimulates the soul of the lover to triumphs of estheticism.
In monarchist, classicist France, a few young, unknown romantics such as Victor Hugo took fire from De I'Amour. But it received only two reviews—both of which were written secretly by Stendhal himself. In Germany, the aging Goethe read History of Painting in Italy and Rome, Naples and Florence—the enthusiastic studies of Italian painters and passions signed "M. de Stendhal, former cavalry officer," and remarked appreciatively, "This man knows how to use others with skill." It was an apt remark, for it was Stendhal's habit to lift his material from others' books and then calmly "crystallize" it into his own extravagant views.
Romantic Disguise. He likewise crystallized the facts of life. There were the endless pursuits—sometimes in romantic disguise—of ladies of fashion; once, even, there were three ecstatic days spent hidden in the pitch-black cellar of a chateau, while the loved one (whose husband had come home unexpectedly) periodically lowered food, a chamber pot, and herself on the end of a rope.