On Love

by Stendhal

PREFACE[1]

I come to beg indulgence of the reader for the peculiar form of this Physiology of Love. It is twenty-eight years (in 1842) since the turmoil, which followed the fall of Napoleon, deprived me of my position. Two years earlier chance threw me, immediately after the horrors of the retreat from Russia, into the midst of a charming town, where I had the enchanting prospect of passing the rest of my days. In happy Lombardy, at Milan, at Venice, the great, or rather only, business of life is pleasure. No attention, there, to the deeds and movements of your neighbour; hardly a troubled thought for what is to happen to you. If a man notice the existence of his neighbour, it does not enter his head to hate him. Take away from the occupations of a French provincial town jealousy—and what is left? The absence, the impossibility of that cruel jealousy forms the surest part of that happiness, which draws all the provincials to Paris.

Following the masked balls of Carnival, which in 1820 was more brilliant than usual, the noise of five or six completely reckless proceedings occupied the society of Milan an entire month; although they are used over there to things which in France would pass for incredible. The fear of ridicule would in this country paralyse such fantastic actions: only to speak of them I need great courage.

One evening people were discussing profoundly the effects and the causes of these extravagances, at the house of the charming Mme. Pietra Grua[(6)], who happened, extraordinarily enough, not to be mixed up with these escapades. The thought came to me that perhaps in less than a year I should have nothing left of all those strange facts, and of the causes alleged for them, but a recollection, on which I could not depend. I got hold of a concert programme, and wrote a few words on it in pencil. A game of faro was suggested: we were thirty seated round a card-table, but the conversation was so animated that people forgot to play. Towards the close of the evening came in Col. Scotti, one of the most charming men in the Italian army: he was asked for his quantum of circumstances relative to the curious facts with which we were busy, and, indeed, his story of certain things, which chance had confided to his knowledge, gave them an entirely new aspect. I took up my concert programme and added these new circumstances.

This collection of particulars on Love was continued in the same way, with pencil and odd scraps of paper, snatched up in the salons, where I heard the anecdotes told. Soon I looked for a common rule by which to recognise different degrees in them. Two months later fear of being taken for a Carbonaro made me return to Paris—only for a few months I hoped, but never again have I seen Milan, where I had passed seven years.

Pining with boredom at Paris, I conceived the idea of occupying myself again with the charming country from which fear had driven me. I strung together my scraps of paper and presented the book to a publisher. But soon a difficulty was raised: the printer declared that it was impossible to work from notes written in pencil and I could see that he found such copy beneath his dignity. The printer's young apprentice, who brought me back my notes, seemed quite ashamed of the more than doubtful compliment, which had been put into his mouth: he knew how to write and I dictated to him my pencil notes.

I understood, too, that discretion required me to change the proper names, and, above all, abridge the anecdotes. Although no one reads in Milan, the book, if ever it reached there, might have seemed a piece of wicked mischief.

So I brought out an ill-fated volume. I have the courage to own that I despised at that period elegance in style. I saw the young apprentice wholly taken up with avoiding sentence-endings that were unmusical and odd sounds in the arrangement of words. In return, he made throughout no scruple of changing details of fact, difficult to express: Voltaire himself is afraid of things which are difficult to tell.

The Essay on Love had no claim to merit except the number of the fine shades of feeling, which I begged the reader to verify among his memories, if he were happy enough to have any. But in all this there was something much worse: I was then, as ever, very inexperienced in the department of literature and the publisher, to whom I had presented the MS., printed it on bad paper and in an absurd format. In fact a month later, when I asked him for news of the book—"On peut dire qu'il est sacré,"[2] he said, "For no one comes near it."

It had never even crossed my mind to solicit articles in the papers: such a thing would have seemed to me an ignominy. And yet no work was in more pressing need of recommendation to the patience of the reader. Under the menace of becoming unintelligible at the very outset, it was necessary to bring the public to accept the new word "crystallisation," suggested as a lively expression for that collection of strange fancies, which we weave round our idea of the loved one, as true and even indubitable realities.