the two men faced each other like a couple of cats with their backs up and their whiskers bristling.  No wonder!  But Beyle’s true attitude towards his great contemporaries was hardly even one of hostility:  he simply could not open their books.  As for Chateaubriand, the god of their idolatry, he loathed him like poison.  He used to describe how, in his youth, he had been on the point of fighting a duel with an officer who had ventured to maintain that a phrase in Atala—­’la cime indeterminee des forets’—­was not intolerable.  Probably he was romancing (M.  Chuquet says so); but at any rate the story sums up symbolically Beyle’s attitude towards his art.  To him the whole apparatus of ’fine writing’—­the emphatic phrase, the picturesque epithet, the rounded rhythm—­was anathema.  The charm that such ornaments might bring was in reality only a cloak for loose thinking and feeble observation.  Even the style of the eighteenth century was not quite his ideal; it was too elegant; there was an artificial neatness about the form which imposed itself upon the substance, and degraded it.  No, there was only one example of the perfect style, and that was the Code Napoleon; for there alone everything was subordinated to the exact and complete expression of what was to be said.  A statement of law can have no place for irrelevant beauties, or the vagueness of personal feeling; by its very nature, it must resemble a sheet of plate glass through which every object may be seen with absolute distinctness, in its true shape.  Beyle declared that he was in the habit of reading several paragraphs of the Code every morning after breakfast ‘pour prendre le ton.’  This again was for long supposed to be one of his little jokes; but quite lately the searchers among the MSS. at Grenoble have discovered page after page copied out from the Code in Beyle’s handwriting.  No doubt, for that wayward lover of paradoxes, the real joke lay in everybody taking for a joke what he took quite seriously.

This attempt to reach the exactitude and the detachment of an official document was not limited to Beyle’s style; it runs through the whole tissue of his work.  He wished to present life dispassionately and intellectually, and if he could have reduced his novels to a series of mathematical symbols, he would have been charmed.  The contrast between his method and that of Balzac is remarkable.  That wonderful art of materialisation, of the sensuous evocation of the forms, the qualities, the very stuff and substance of things, which was perhaps Balzac’s greatest discovery, Beyle neither possessed nor wished to possess.  Such matters were to him of the most subordinate importance, which it was no small part of the novelist’s duty to keep very severely in their place.  In the earlier chapters of Le Rouge et Le Noir, for instance, he is concerned with almost the same subject as Balzac in the opening of Les Illusions Perdues—­the position of a young man in a provincial town, brought