Henry was educated at the Ecole Centrale of Grenoble. When he was ten years of age, Louis XVI was executed, and the precocious boy, to annoy his father, displayed undisguised glee at the news. He served the mass, an altar-boy at the Convent of the Propagation, and revealed unpleasant traits of character. His father he called by a shocking name, but the death of his mother, when he was seven, he never forgot. He loved her in true Stendhalian style. His maiden aunt Séraphie ruled the house of the elder Beyle, and Henry's two sisters, Pauline—the favourite of her brother—and Zenaïde, most tyrannically. His young existence was a cruel battle with his elders, excepting his worthy grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, an esprit fort of the approved eighteenth-century variety. On his book-shelves Henry found Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Holbach, and eagerly absorbed them. A great-aunt taught him that the pride of the Spaniard was the best quality of a man. When he heard of his aunt's death, he threw himself on his knees and passionately thanked the God in whom he had never believed. His father, Chérubin-Joseph Beyle, was chevalier of the Legion of Honor and his family of old though not noble stock. Its sympathies were aristocratic, royalist, while Henry—certainly not a radical in politics—loved to annoy his father by his Jacobin opinions. He in turn was ridiculed by the Dauphinois when he called himself de Stendhal. Not a lovable boy, certainly, and, it is said, scarcely a moral one. At school they nick-named him "la Tour ambulante," because of his thick-set figure. He preferred mathematics to all other studies, as he contemplated entering l'Ecole Polytechnique. November 10, 1799, found him in Paris with letters for his cousins Daru. They proved friendly. He was afterward, through the influence of Pierre Daru, minister of war, made lieutenant of cavalry, commissary and auditor of the Council of State. He served in the Italian campaign, following Napoleon through the Saint Bernard pass two days later. Aide-de-camp of General Michaud, he displayed sang-froid under fire. He was present at Jena and Wagram, and asked, during a day of fierce fighting, "Is that all?" War and love only provoked from this nonchalant person the same question. He was always disappointed by reality; and, as Rod adds, "Is that all?" might be the leit motiv of his life. Forced by sickness to retire to Vienna, he was at the top-notch of his life in Paris and Milan, 1810-1812. He left a brilliant position to rejoin the Emperor in Russia. In 1830 he was nominated consul at Trieste; but Metternich objected because of Stendhal's reputation as a political intrigant in Milan, ten years earlier—a reputation he never deserved. He was sent to Cività Vecchia, where he led a dull existence, punctuated by trips to Rome, and, at long intervals, to Paris. From 1814 to 1820 he lived in Milan, and in love, a friend of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, Monti. The police drove him back to Paris, and he says it was the deadliest blow to his happiness. For a decade he remained here, leading the life of a man around town, a sublimated gossip, dilettante, surface idler; withal, a hard worker. A sybarite on an inadequate income, he was ever the man of action. Embroiled in feminine intrigues, sanguine, clairvoyant, and a sentimentalist, he seldom contemplated marriage. Once, at Cività Vecchia, a young woman of bourgeois extraction tempted him by her large dot; but inquiries made at Grenoble killed his chances. Indeed, he was not the stuff from which the ideal husband is moulded. He did not entertain a high opinion of matrimony. He said that the Germans had a mania for marriage, an institution which is servitude for men. On a trip down the Rhône, in 1833, he met George Sand and Alfred de Musset going to Italy—to that Venice which was the poet's Waterloo and Pagello's victory. Stendhal behaved so madly, so boisterously, and uttered such paradoxes that he offended Madame Dudevant-Sand, who openly expressed her distaste for him, though admiring his brilliancy. De Musset had a pretty talent for sketching and drew Stendhal dancing at the inn before a servant. It is full of verve. He also wrote some verse about the French consul at Cività Vecchia:
"Où Stendhal, cet esprit charmant,
Remplissait si dévotement
Sa sinécure."
Sinecure it was, though ennui ruled; but he had his memories, and Rome was not far away. In 1832, while at San Pietro in Montorio, he bethought himself of his age. Fifty years would soon arrive. He determined to write his memoirs. And we have the Vie de Henri Brulard, Souvenirs d'Egotisme, and the Journal (1801-1814). In their numerous pages—for he was an indefatigable graphomaniac—may be found the thousand and one experiences in love, war, diplomacy that made up his life. His boasted impassibility, like Flaubert's, does not survive the test of these letters and intimate confessions. Mérimée, too, wrote to Jenny Dacquin without his accustomed mask. Stendhal is the most personal of writers; each novel is Henry Beyle in various situations, making various and familiar gestures.
His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of Paris. He preferred, however, a box at la Scala, listening to Rossini or watching a Viganò ballet, near his beloved Angela. But after seven years Milan was closed to him, and as he was known in a restricted circle at Paris as a writer of power, originality, and as an authority on music and painting, he returned there in 1821. He frequented the salon of Destutt de Tracy, whose ideology and philosophic writings he admired. There he saw General Lafayette and wrote maliciously of this hero, who, though seventy-five, was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. The same desire to startle that animated Baudelaire kept Beyle in hot water. He was a visitor at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, of Madame Ancelot, Baron Gérard, and Castellane, and on Sundays, at the salon of Etienne Délacluze, the art critic of the Débats, and a daily visitor at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his emphatic style, Victor Cousin, Thiers, and his host Délacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, and he usually did so with a brace of bon-mots that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his enemies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were said of him, though none quite so sharp as the remark made by a certain Madame Céline: "Ah! I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame Pasta must have had a benefit." This witticism was believed, because of the long friendship between the Italian cantatrice and the young Frenchman. He occupied a small apartment in the same building, though it is said the attachment was platonic.
In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela Pietragrua. He loved her. Eleven years later, when he returned to Italy, this love was revived. He burst into tears when he saw her again. Quello è il chinese! explained the massive Angela to her father. Even that lovetap did not disconcert the furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made him miserable by her coquetries. The feminine characters in his novels and tales are drawn from life. His essay on Love is a centaine of experiences crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man of too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation in the presence of a woman he loved, displayed surprising delicacy. Where he could not respect, he could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; he abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for him a mixture of moonshine, esprit, and physical beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though he never viewed woman exactly from the same angle as did Dante; or, perhaps, his many Beatrices proved geese.
Stryienski relates that, on their return from Italy in 1860, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie visited Grenoble and, in the municipal library, saw a portrait of Stendhal. "But that is M. Beyle, is it not?" cried the Empress. "How comes his portrait here?" "He was born at Grenoble," responded Gariel, the librarian. She remembered him, this amusing mature friend of her girlhood. The daughters of Madame de Montijo, Eugénie and Paca, met Beyle through Mérimée, who was intimate with their mother. The two girls liked him; he spun for them his best yarns, he initiated them into new games; in a word, he was a welcome guest in the household, and there are two letters in the possession of Auguste Cordier, one addressed to Beyle by E. Guzman y Palafox dated December, 1839, when the future Empress of the French was thirteen; the other from her sister Paca, both affectionate and of a charm. The episode was a pleasant one in the life of Beyle.
Mérimée also arranged a meeting between Victor Hugo and Beyle in 1829 or 1830. Sainte-Beuve was present, and in a letter to Albert Collignon, published in Vie littéraire, 1874, he writes of the pair as two savage cats, their hair bristling, both on the defensive. Hugo knew that Beyle was an enemy of poetry, of the lyric, of the "ideal." The ice was not broken during the evening. Beyle had an antipathy for Hugo, Hugo thoroughly disliked Beyle. And if we had the choice to-day between talking with Hugo or Beyle, is there any doubt as to the selection?—Beyle the raconteur of his day. He was too clear-sighted to harbour any illusions concerning literary folk. Praise from one's colleagues is a brevet of resemblance, he has written. Doesn't this sound like old Dr. Johnson's "The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life"?
III
Prosper Mérimée has told us that his friend and master, Henry Stendhal-Beyle, was wedded to the old-fashioned theory: a man should not be in a woman's company longer than five minutes without making love; granting, of course, that the woman is pretty and pleasing. This idea Stendhal had imbibed when a soldier in the Napoleonic campaign. It was hussar tactics of the First Empire. "Attack, attack, attack," he cries. His book De l'Amour practically sets forth the theory; but like most theoreticians, Stendhal was timid in action. He was a sentimentalist—he the pretended cynic and blasé man of the world. Mérimée acknowledges that much of his own and Stendhal's impassibility was pure posing. Nevertheless, with the exceptions of Goethe and Byron, no writer of eminence in the last century enjoyed such a sentimental education as Stendhal. At Weimar the passionate pilgrim may see a small plaque which contains portraits of the women beloved by Goethe—omitting Frederike Brion. True to the compass of Teutonic sentimentality, Goethe's mother heads the list. Then follow the names of Cornelia, Kätchen Schönkopf, Lotte Buff, Lili Schönemann, Corona Schröter, Frau von Stein, Christiane Vulpius—later Frau von Goethe—Bettina von Arnim, Minna Herzlieb, and Marianne v. Willemer; with their respective birth and death dates. Several other names might have been added, notably that of the Polish pianiste Goethe encountered at Marienbad. The collection is fair-sized, even for a poet who lived as long as Goethe and one who reproached Balzac with digging from a woman's heart each of his novels. To both Goethe and Stendhal the epigram of George Meredith might be applied: "Men may have rounded Seraglio Point. They have not yet doubled Cape Turk."
The wonder is that thus far no devoted Stendhalian has prepared a similar carton with the names and pictures of their master's—dare we say?—victims. Stendhal loved many women, and like Goethe his first love was his mother. For him she was the most precious image of all, and he was jealous of his father. This was at the age of seven; but the precocity of the boy and his exaggerated sensibility must be remembered—which later brought him so much unhappiness and so little joy. A casual examination of the list of his loves, reciprocated or spurned, would make a companion to that of Weimar. Their names are Mélanie Guilbert-Louason, Angela Pietragrua, Mlle. Beretter, the Countess Palffy, Menta, Elisa, Livia B., Madame Azur, Mina de Grisheim, Mme. Jules, and la petite P. The number he loved without consolation was still larger. Despite his hussar manœuvres, Stendhal was easily rebuffed. It is odd that Goethe's and Stendhal's fair ones, upon whom they poured poems and novels, did not die—that is, immediately—on being deserted. Goethe relieved the pain of many partings by writing a poem or a play and seeking fresh faces. Stendhal did the same—substituting a novel or a study or innumerable letters for poems and plays. He believed that one nail drove out another; which is very soothing to masculine vanity. But did any woman break her heart because of his fickleness? Frau von Stein of all the women loved by Goethe probably took his defection seriously. She didn't kill herself, however. He wounded many a heart, yet the majority of his loves married, and apparently happily. Stendhal, ugly as he was, slew his hundreds; they recovered after he had passed on to fresh conquests; a fact that he, with his accustomed sincerity, did not fail to note. Yet this same gallant was among the few in the early years of the nineteenth century to declare for the enfranchisement, physical and spiritual, of woman. He was a féministe. But, in reality, his theory of love resembled that of the writer who said that "it was simple and brief, like a pressure of the hand between sympathetic persons, or a gay luncheon between two friends of which a pleasant memory remains, if not also a gentle gratitude toward the companion." I quote from memory.