(3 of 3)
Even these delights palled when Stendhal became convinced that his every move was watched by agents of Louis XVIII. He adopted fantastically naive measures to outwit them, such as writing illegible letters in anagrams and using at least 1,000 pseudonyms, including "Th. Jefferson." Recent research has shown that Louis XVIII's agents did indeed have a dossier on dashing Henri Beyle—but only a drab, uncrystallized report, beginning: "He is a fat fellow . . . always lives with some actress . . . and comes home every night at twelve."
Immense Pyramid. "It was you who created romanticism," wrote one of his admirers, "but you created it pure, natural, charming, amusing . . . and they [Victor Hugo and his followers] made of it a howling monster. Create something else."
Stendhal proceeded to do just that; at the age of 40 he began his career as a novelist. His material was mostly at hand—including a hundred volumes of carefully collected MSS. recording the wild history of prominent Italian families, out of which Stendhal concocted five of the six Shorter Novels (The Abbess of Castro, The Duchess of Palliano, Vanina Vanini, Vittoria Accoramboni, The Cenci, Armance), now reprinted for the first time in one volume by Publisher Liveright. But the bulk of the material was diaries and journals containing his own precise, day-to-day reports on just about everything he had ever felt or witnessed.
Through most of the pages of his principal novels (The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, Lucien Leuwen, Lamiel) raced, inevitably, a youthful, arrogant hero, slimmer and handsomer than Stendhal himself but carrying with incredible fire and vitality the torch of pride, passion and crystallization. Around this central figure were grouped the numerous personalities of Stendhal's vast experience as rebel, soldier, courtier, and student-in-exile.
Lottery Ticket. Unlike his wilder contemporaries' romanticism, Stendhal's was cool, calculated, psychological and bursting with witty self-ridicule—the first portrayal, says Author Josephson, of "the neurotic personality that appears in legions in the 20th Century." It was so far ahead of his time that Stendhal expected no readers for 100 years. "I have taken," he said, "a ticket in a lottery, in which the winning number is 1936." Not until the turn of the century did France discover Stendhal—60 years after self-exiled Henri Beyle had succumbed to a heart attack. He embraced death as he had embraced his ladies, with a crystallizing eye:
"But Madame," he wrote, "death is only a word, devoid of sense for most men. It takes only an instant, and in general one does not feel it. One suffers, one is astonished at strange sensations which come upon him, and suddenly one suffers no more, the moment is past, one is dead. Have you ever ridden in a boat through the rapids under the bridge of the Saint-Esprit on the Rhone, near Avignon? The passengers all talk about it in advance; they are afraid; finally they perceive the passage ahead at a certain distance ; all at once the boat is seized by the current and in the twinkling of an eye one sees the bridge left behind."