[23.] Julie d'Étanges—the heroine of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse.
[24.] Stendhal, we must remember, is writing as a staunch liberal in the period of reaction which followed the fall of Napoleon and the end of the revolutionary period. Stendhal had been one of Napoleon's officers, and the Bourbon restoration put an end to his career. His liberalism and his pride at having been one of those who followed Napoleon's glorious campaigns, colour everything he writes about the state of Europe in his time. In reading Stendhal's criticisms of France, England and Italy, we must put ourselves back in 1822—remember that in France we have the Royalist restoration, in England the cry for reform always growing greater and beginning to penetrate even into the reactionary government of Lord Liverpool (Peel, Canning, Huskisson), in Italy the rule of the "Pacha" (see below, note [29]) and the beginning of Carbonarism (of which Stendhal was himself suspected, see below, note [27]), and the long struggle for unity and independence.
[25.] Charles Ferdinand, Duke de Berri (1778–1820), married a Bourbon Princess and was assassinated by a fanatic enemy of the Bourbons.
[26.] Bayard. Pierre Bayard (1476–1524), the famous French knight "without fear or reproach."
[27.] Of all foreign countries then to which Stendhal went Italy was not only his favourite, but also the one he knew and understood best. He was pleased in later years to discover Italian blood in his own family on the maternal side. The Gagnon family, from which his mother came, had, according to him, crossed into France about 1650.
He was in Italy with little interruption from 1814–1821, and again from 1830–1841 as consul at Civita Vecchia, during which time he became intimately acquainted with the best, indeed every kind of Italian society. He tells us that fear of being implicated in the Carbonari troubles drove him from Italy in 1821.
One can well believe that a plain speaker and daring thinker like Stendhal would have been looked upon by the Austrian police with considerable suspicion.
[28.] Racine and Shakespeare. Very early in life Stendhal refused to accept the conventional literary valuations. Racine he put below Corneille—Racine, like Voltaire, he says, fills his works with "bavardage éternel." Shakespeare became for Stendhal the master dramatist, and he is never tired of the comparison between him and Racine. Cf. Rome, Naples et Florence (1817), and Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (1817). Finally he published his work on the subject: Racine et Shakespeare par M. de Stendhal (1823).
[29.] Stendhal knew Italy and was writing in Italy in the dark period that followed the fall of Napoleon. The "Pacha" is, of course, the repressive and reactionary government, whether that of the Austrians in Lombardy, of the Pope in Rome, or of the petty princes in the minor Italian states. See above, note [27].
[30.] Count Almaviva—character from Beaumarchais' Marriage de Figaro, first acted April, 1784. The play was censored by Louis XVI and produced none the less six months later. Its production is an event in the history of the French Revolution. Almaviva stands for the aristocracy and cuts a sad figure beside Figaro, a poor barber.