MARIE-HENRI BEYLE (STENDHAL)

(1783-1842)

BY FREDERIC TABER COOPER

Marie-Henri Beyle, French novelist and man of letters, who is better known under his bizarre pseudonym of Stendhal, is a somewhat unusual figure among French writers.  He was curiously misappreciated by his own generation, whose literary movements he in turn confessedly ignored.  He is recognized to-day as an important link in the development of modern fiction, and is even discussed concurrently with Balzac, in the same way that we speak of Dickens and Thackeray, Emerson and Lowell.

[Illustration:  HENRI BEYLE]

There is nothing dramatic in Stendhal’s life, which, viewed impartially, is a simple and somewhat pathetic record of failure and disillusion.  He was six years older than Balzac, having been born January 23d, 1783, in the small town of Grenoble, in Dauphine, which, with its narrow prejudices and petty formalism, seemed to him in after years “the souvenir of an abominable indigestion.”  He early developed an abnormal sensibility, which would have met with ready response had his mother lived, but which a keen dread of ridicule taught him to hide from an unsympathetic father and a still more unkind aunt,—­later his step-mother, Seraphie Gagnon.  He seemed predestined to be misunderstood—­even his school companions finding him odd, and often amusing themselves at his expense.  Thus he grew up with a sense of isolation in his own home, and when, in 1800, he had the opportunity of going to some distant relatives in Paris, the Daru family, he seized it eagerly.  The following year he accompanied the younger Darus to Italy, and was present at the battle of Marengo.  This was the turning-point of Stendhal’s career.  He was dazzled by Napoleon’s successes, and fascinated with the beauty and gayety of Milan, where he found himself for the first time in a congenial atmosphere, and among companions animated by a common cause.  His consequent sense of freedom and exaltation knew no bounds.  Henceforth Napoleon was to be his hero, and Italy the land of his election; two lifelong passions which furnish the clew to much that is enigmatic in his character.

During the ensuing years, while he followed the fortunes of Napoleon throughout the Prussian campaign and until after the retreat from Moscow, Italy was always present in his thoughts, and when Waterloo ended his political and military aspirations he hastened back to Milan, declaring that he “had ceased to be a Frenchman,” and settled down to a life of tranquil Bohemianism, too absorbed in the paintings of Correggio and in the operas of Rossini to be provident of the future.  The following years, the happiest of his life, were also the period of Stendhal’s chief intellectual growth,—­due quite as much to the influence exerted on him by Italian art and music as by his contact