[6.] Léonore: under this name Stendhal refers to Métilde Dembowski (née Viscontini). His passion for the wife of General Dembowski, with whom he became intimate during his stay in Milan (1814–1821), forms one of the most important chapters in Stendhal's life, but it is a little disappointing to enquire too deeply into the object of this passion. At any rate, as far as one can see, the great qualities which Stendhal discovered in Métilde Dembowski had their existence rather in his expert crystallisation than in reality. It was an unhappy affair. Métilde's cousin used her influence to injure Stendhal, and in 1819 she cut off all communication with him. Stendhal was still bemoaning his fate on his arrival in England, 1821. There is, none the less, something unconvincing in certain points in the history of this attachment; in spite of his sorrow, Stendhal seems to have consoled himself in the Westminster Road with "little Miss Appleby." It is worth noticing that Métilde Dembowski had been the confidante of Signora Pietra Grua, his former mistress, and it was from the date of Stendhal's discovery of the latter's shameless infidelity to himself and other lovers, that his admiration for Métilde seems to have started.
[7.] It is here worth turning to a passage from Baudelaire—which is given in the Translators' note [(11)] below. Liberty in love, he says, consists in avoiding the kind of woman dangerous to oneself. He points out that a natural instinct prompts one to this spontaneous self-preservation. Stendhal here gives a more exact explanation of the operation of this instinctive selection in love. Schopenhauer's conception of the utilitarian nature of bodily beauty is a more general application of the same idea. The breasts of a woman à la Titian are a pledge of fitness for maternity—therefore they are beautiful. Stendhal would have said a pledge of fitness for giving pleasure.
[8.] The well-known Dr. Edwards, in whose house Stendhal was introduced to one side of English life—and a very bourgeois side. He was introduced by a brother of Dr. Edwards, a man given to the peculiarly gloomy kind of debauch of which Stendhal gives such an exaggerated picture in his account of England. See note [31] below.
[9.] This brings to mind Blake's view of imagination and "the rotten rags" of memory.
[10.] Bianca e Faliero ossia il consiglio di tre—opera by Rossini (1819).
[11.] Cf. Baudelaire, Choix de maximes consolantes sur l'amour in Le Corsaire Satan (March 3, 1846) and reprinted in Œuvres Posthumes, Paris, 1908.
"Sans nier les coups de foudre, ce qui est impossible—voyez Stendhal...—il faut que la fatalité jouit d'une certaine élasticité qui s'appelle liberté humaine.... En amour la liberté consiste à éviter les catégories de femmes dangereuses, c'est-à-dire dangereuses pour vous."
["Without denying the possibility of 'thunderbolts,' for that is impossible (see Stendhal)—one may yet believe that fatality enjoys a certain elasticity, called human liberty.... In love human liberty consists in avoiding the categories of dangerous women—that is, women dangerous for you.">[
[12.] Paul Louis Courier (1772–1825) served with distinction as an officer in Napoleon's army. He resigned his commission in 1809, in order to devote himself to literature, and especially to the study of Greek. His translation of Daphnis and Chloe, from the Greek of Longus, is well known, and was the cause of his long controversy with Del Furia, the under-librarian of the Laurentian Library at Florence, to which Stendhal here refers. Courier had discovered a complete manuscript of this romance in the famous Florentine Library. By mistake, he soiled with a blot of ink the page of the manuscript containing the all-important passage, which was wanting in all previously known manuscripts. Del Furia, jealous of Courier's discovery, accused him of having blotted the passage on purpose, in order to monopolise the discovery. A lively controversy followed, in which the authorities entered. Courier was guilty of nothing worse than carelessness, and, needless to say, got the better of his adversaries, when it came to a trial with the pen.
[13.] The Viscomte de Valmont and the Présidente de Tourvel are the two central figures in Choderlos de Laclos' Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).