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"Les grands Dieux savent seuls si l'ame est immortelle, Mais le juste travaille a leur oeuvre eternelle." My birthplace. My father and mother. Circumstances of their marriage. Their short married life. Birth of their child. Death of my mother. Her character and habits. My father as a widower. Dulness of his life. Its degradation.
It was not that he was lacking in observation, that he had no eye for detail, or no power of expressing it; on the contrary, his vision was of the sharpest, and his pen could call up pictorial images of startling vividness, when he wished. But he very rarely did wish: it was apt to involve a tiresome insistence. In his narratives he is like a brilliant talker in a sympathetic circle, skimming swiftly from point to point, taking for granted the intelligence of his audience, not afraid here and there to throw out a vague 'etc. when the rest of the sentence is too obvious to state; always plain of speech, never self-assertive, and taking care above all things never to force the note. His famous description of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme is certainly the finest example of this side of his art. Here he produces an indelible impression by a series of light touches applied with unerring skill. Unlike Zola, unlike Tolstoi, he shows us neither the loathsomeness nor the devastation of a battlefield, but its insignificance, its irrelevant detail, its unmeaning grotesquenesses and indignities, its incoherence, and its empty weariness. Remembering his own experience at Bautzen, he has made his hero a young Italian impelled by Napoleonic enthusiasm to join the French army as a volunteer on the eve of the battle go through the great day in such a state of vague perplexity that in the end he can never feel quite certain that he really was at Waterloo. He experiences a succession of trivial and unpleasant incidents, culminating in his being hoisted off his horse by two of his comrades, in order that a general, who has had his own shot from under him, might be supplied with a mount; for the rest, he crosses and recrosses some fields, comes upon a dead body in a ditch, drinks brandy with a vivandière, gallops over a field covered with dying men, has an indefinite skirmish in a wood and it is over. At one moment, having joined the escort of some generals, the young man allows his horse to splash into a stream, thereby covering one of the generals with muddy water from head to foot. The passage that follows is a good specimen of Beyle's narrative style: En arrivant sur l'autre rive, Fabrice y avait trouvé les généraux tout seuls; le bruit du canon lui sembla redoubler; ce fut
Good gracious, gentlemen! enough of this foolish talk! Let them cut this Lambernier's throat and put an end to the subject! The theatre for dramatic music, the church for sacred! Le vin, le jeu; les belles, Voila mes seuls amours." A general protestation rose from the whole table at this verse, which was roared out in a lugubrious voice.
Read the campaign of Moscow, said another gentleman to me, you will there see the French character: "Les François sont les seuls dans l'univers qui pourroient rire meme en gelant."
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