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This, however, was but a momentary vision of mahogany, and black gowns, and white blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all rather secret and whispery before he was sitting next his mother in the front row, with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and taking off his gloves for the last time.
The trouble is that every one is a critic, your gallery-god as well as the most stately practitioner of the art severe. Balzac was an excellent critic when he saluted Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme as a masterpiece; as was Emerson when he wrote to Walt Whitman.
In the whole of French literature it would be difficult to point to a figure at once so important, so remarkable, and so little known to English readers as Henri Beyle. Most of us are, no doubt, fairly familiar with his pseudonym of 'Stendhal'; some of us have read Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme; but how many of us have any further knowledge of a man whose works are at the present moment appearing in Paris in all the pomp of an elaborate and complete edition, every scrap of whose manuscripts is being collected and deciphered with enthusiastic care, and in honour of whose genius the literary periodicals of the hour are filling entire numbers with exegesis and appreciation? The eminent critic, M. André Gide, when asked lately to name the novel which stands in his opinion first among the novels of France, declared that since, without a doubt, the place belongs to one or other of the novels of Stendhal, his only difficulty was in making his choice among these; and he finally decided upon La Chartreuse de Parme. According to this high authority, Henri Beyle was indisputably the creator of the greatest work of fiction in the French language, yet on this side of the Channel we have hardly more than heard of him! Nor is it merely as a writer that Beyle is admired in France. As a man, he seems to have come in, sixty or seventy years after his death, for a singular devotion. There are 'Beylistes, or 'Stendhaliens, who dwell with rapture upon every detail of the master's private life, who extend with pious care the long catalogue of his amorous adventures, who discuss the shades of his character with the warmth of personal friendship, and register his opinions with a zeal which is hardly less than sectarian. But indeed it is precisely in these extremes of his French devotees that we shall find a clue to the explanation of our own indifference. Beyle's mind contained, in a highly exaggerated form, most of the peculiarly distinctive elements of the French character. This does not mean that he was a typical Frenchman; far from it. He did not, like Voltaire or Hugo, strike a note to which the whole national genius vibrated in response. He has never been, it is unlikely that he ever will be, a popular writer. His literary reputation in France has been confined, until perhaps quite lately, to a small distinguished circle. 'On me lira, he was fond of saying, 'vers 1880'; and the 'Beylistes' point to the remark in triumph as one further proof of the almost divine prescience of the great man. But in truth Beyle was always read by the élite of French critics and writers 'the happy few, as he used to call them; and among these he has never been without enthusiastic admirers. During his lifetime Balzac, in an enormous eulogy of La Chartreuse de Parme, paid him one of the most magnificent compliments ever received by a man of letters from a fellow craftsman. In the next generation Taine declared himself his disciple; a little later 'vers 1880, in fact we find Zola describing him as 'notre père
In his remarkable novel, Le Rouge et Le Noir, and in some parts of his later work, La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing ever since.
"But a soldier of France is welcome everywhere," the girl falters. A mist rises to Raoul's eyes. He bears the cross of the Legion of Honor on his breast. The perfume from her hair is blown across his face. "Les violettes de Parme." The artist sinks in the soldier. Springing to the window, the girl's assenting hand, cold as ice, is clasped in his palm. "Isabel!" he cries. She trembles like a leaf.
Having recovered possession of her estates, thanks to the amnesty proclaimed by the Emperor Francis Joseph, she sought in literary labour a field for the activity of her restless intellect. Balzac points to that great female artist and republican, the Duchess of San-Severins, in Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme," as a portrait of the princess.
Everyone says of her, 'How perfectly impenetrable! I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret." "I test people," said Eeldrop, "by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing upon memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco.
Afterwards he followed various occupations at Paris and Marseilles; went through the Russian campaign of 1812; and returned to Italy, where he began to establish a reputation as a critic of music and of painting. "La Chartreuse de Parme," his most successful work of fiction, was written in the winter of 1830.
To our uninstructed seaman the scent seemed to exhale from the tulips; it recalled his attention from the gannets, and he drew in deep breaths of it, pondering the parterres of Kaiserskroon and Duchesse de Parme bold scarlet splashed with yellow of golden Chrysoloras, of rosy white Cottage Maids.
She stepped out of the carriage, keeping her head turned in an opposite direction, but almost immediately a crisp rustling of skirts, a strong odour of violette de parme, and a loud "Say! is that you?" proclaimed that the search was at an end.
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