It is interesting to turn back and flutter the pages of that perennially delightful book, Promenades dans Rome. Italy may truthfully be said to have been engraved upon the author's heart. Under the heading Manner of Travelling From Paris to Rome, dated March 25, 1828, he tells his readers, few but fit, how he made that wonderful trip.

One of the best ways, writes Stendhal, is to take a post-chaise, or a calèche, light and made in Vienna. Carry little baggage. It only means vexation at the various custom-houses, bother with the police—who treat all travellers as spies or suspected persons—and it will surely attract bandits. Besides, prices are instantly doubled when a post-chaise arrives. There is the mail-coach. It rolls along comfortably. In its capacious interior one may sleep, watch the scenery, converse, or read. You can go to Béfort or Basel if you desire to pass the north of la Suisse, or to Pontarlier or Ferney, if desirous of reaching the Simplon. You may take the mail to Lyons or Grenoble, and pass by Mont Cenis; or until Draguignan if you wish to escape the mountains and enter Italy by the beautiful highway, the work of M. de Chabral. You arrive at Nice and pass on to Genoa. This is the ideal route for scenery.

But, continues Stendhal, the most expeditious and the interesting way, the one he usually took, begins with a forty-eight hour ride in the diligence as far as Béfort; a carriage for which you pay a dozen francs will conduct you to Basel. Once there you may take a diligence for Lucerne—that singular and dangerous lake, the theatre of William Tell's exploits, remarks Stendhal impressively (they believed in the Tell legend, those innocent times)—and attain Altdorf. Here Tell and the apple will arouse your imagination. Then Italy may be entered by Saint Gothard, Bellinzona, Como, and Milan. Via the Simplon was more to the taste of our writer. He often took the diligence, which at Basel went to Bern; arriving in the Rhône valley by way of Louèche and Tourtemagne, he would find his baggage, which had gone around by Lausanne, Saint Maurice, and Sion. He tells us that the conductor of the excellent diligence plying between Lausanne and Domo d'Ossola was a superior man; a glimpse of his calm Swiss features drives away all fear of danger. For ten years three times a week this conductor has passed the Simplon. He did not encounter avalanches. Anyhow, the Simplon route is less dangerous than Mont Cenis; there are fewer precipices and the edge of the road is bordered by trees; if the horses ran away the coach would not be overturned into the abyss. And since the opening of the Simplon route, Stendhal gravely notes, only forty travellers have perished, nine of them unhappy Italian soldiers returning from Russia. Are not these details of a savoury simplicity, like the faded odour of sandal-wood which meets your nostrils when you open some old secretary of your grandparents?

Kept by a man from Lyons was a fine inn on the Simplon route in those days. Stendhal never failed to record where could be found good wines, cooking, and clean sheets. He usually paid twelve francs for a carriage to Domo d'Ossola, Lac Majeur (Lago Maggiore) vis-à-vis to the Borromean Islands. Four hours in a boat to Sesto Calende, and five hours in a fast coach—behold, Milan! Or you can reach Milan via Varese. Milan to Mantua in the regular diligence. Thence to Bologna by a carriage, there the mail-coach. You go to Rome by the superb routes of Ancona and Loreto. You must pay thirty or thirty-five francs on the coach between Milan and Bologna. Stendhal assures us that he often found good company in the carriages that traverse the distance from Bologna to Florence. It took two days to cover twenty leagues and cost twenty francs. From Florence to Rome he consumed four or five days, going by Perugia in preference to Siena. Once he travelled in company with three priests, of whom he was suspicious until the ice was broken; then with joyous anecdotes they passed the time, and he is surprised to find these clerical men, who said their prayers openly three times a day without being embarrassed by the presence of strangers, were very human, very companionable. With his accustomed naïve expression of pleasure, he writes that they saved him considerable annoyance at the custom-house.

And to-day, eighty years later, we take a train de luxe at Paris and in thirty hours we are in the Eternal City. It is swifter, more comfortable, and safer, our way of travelling, than Stendhal's, but that we see as much as he did we greatly doubt. The motor-car is an improvement on the mail-coach and the express train; you may, if you will, travel leisurely and privately from Paris to Rome. Or, why not hire a stout little carriage and go through Tuscany in an old-fashioned manner as did the Chevalier de Pensieri-Vani! Few may hope to store as many memories as Stendhal, yet we should see more than the occupants of railroad drawing-rooms that whiz by us on the road to Rome.

VII

Even in our days of hasty production the numerous books of Stendhal provoke respectful consideration. What leisure they had in the first half of the last century! What patience was shown by the industrious man who worked to ward off ennui! He must have written twenty-five volumes. In 1906 the Mercure de France printed nineteen newly discovered letters to his London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited London occasionally; he corresponded with Thomas Moore the poet, and once he spent an evening at a club in the company of the humourist Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his books suffice; the majority of them are negligible. Who wishes to read his lives of Rossini, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, posthumously published in 1876, is of more interest; Beyle had seen his subject in the flesh and blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth while for the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical kind would care to read the History of Painting in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prejudice; and Promenades dans Rome is a classic; not inferior are Mémoires d'un Touriste, or Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the influence of the Promenades has been pronounced. His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge et le Noir—which does not derive its title from the gambling game, but opposes the sword and the soutane, red and black—and La Chartreuse de Parme. The short stories show him at his best, his form being enforced to concision, his style suiting the brief passionate recitals of love, crime, intrigue, and adventure—for the most part, old Italian anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of Hewlett are influenced by Stendhal. L'Abbesse de Castro could hardly have been better done by Mérimée. In the same volume are Les Cenci, Vittoria Accoramboni, Vanina Vanini, and La Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. San Francesca a Ripa is a thrilling tale; so are the stories contained in Nouvelles Inédites, Féder (le Mari d'Argent), Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)—the latter Balzac might have signed; and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, which was at first given three other titles: Leuwen, l'Orange de Malte, Les Bois de Prémol. It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir. Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is Stendhal himself, and he is, like Julien Sorel, the first progenitor of a long line in French fiction; disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms caused by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the sultry dilettantism of Jean, duc d'Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice Barrès. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a remote modulation as might be imagined. Nor are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles Demailly and Coriolis, without the taint of beylisme. Lucien Leuwen is a highly organized young man who goes to a small provincial town where his happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the malice of his companions. There is a sincerer strain in the book than in some of its predecessors.

Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, is unpleasant; the theme is an impossible one—pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was sketched from life, Stendhal tells us, a companion to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an unhappy girl and her marriage to a babilan, Octave de Malivert, is a tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in 1888, contains an avant-propos by Stendhal dated from Cività Vecchia, May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are masterpieces of sly humour and ironical malice.) It is a very disagreeable fiction—Lamiel is the criminal woman with all the stigmata described by Lombroso in his Female Delinquent. She is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, coldness, and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, exclaimed, "Is that all?" after her first bought experience in love. She becomes attached to a scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace to avenge his death. She is burned to cinders. A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name, might have stepped from a page of Le Sage.

The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. Madame de Renal, who sacrifices all for Julien Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly of his characters. She is of the same sweet, maternal type as Madame Arnoux in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, though more impulsive. Her love passages with Julien are the most original in French fiction. Mathilde de la Môle, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish, has nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel is a caricature of her. What could be more evocative of Salome than her kneeling before Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the Chartreuse is like the conventional heroine of Italian romance. She is too sentimental, too prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. The queen of Stendhal women is Gina, la duchesse Sanseverina. She makes one of the immortal quartet in nineteenth-century fiction—the other three being Valérie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karénina. Perhaps if Madame de Chasteller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished portrait, she might have ranked after Gina in interest. That lovable lady, with the morals of a grande dame out of the Italian Renaissance, will never die. She embodies all the energy, tantalizing charm, and paradox of Beyle. And a more vital woman has not swept through literature since the Elizabethans. At one time he dreamed of conquering the theatre. Adolphe Brisson saw the ébauches for several plays; at least fifteen scenarios or the beginnings of them have been found in his literary remains. Nothing came of his efforts to become a second Molière.

Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La Chartreuse de Parme; so does Rod. The first novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains masterly characterisations, but it is depressing and in spots duller than the Chartreuse. Its author was too absorbed in his own ego to become a master-historian of manners. Yet what a book is the Chartreuse for a long day. What etched landscapes are in it—notably the descriptions of Lake Como! What evocations of enchanting summer afternoons in Italy floating down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, with the entrancing Duchess! The episodes of Parmesan court intrigue are models of observation and irony. Beyle's pen was never more delightful, it drips honey and gall. He is master of dramatic situations; witness the great scene in which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina participate. At the close you hear the whirring of the theatre curtain. Count Mosca, it is said, was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, he is also very much like Stendhal—Stendhal humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves. That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need not doubt; yet, like Metternich and Bismarck, he could be cynical enough to play the game honestly. Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the book, its passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, its noble bandit, its poisons, its hair-breadth escapes, duels and assassinations—these we must accept as the slag of Beyle's genius—there is ore rich enough in it to compensate us for the longueurs.