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Updated: April 30, 2025
The two old taverns at Arles are quite unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the modern world, when Stendhal passed that way, and the lumbering diligence deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are to-day. Vieilles auberges de France, one ought to enjoy their gritty floors and greasy windowpanes.
Walter Pater wrote criticism that is beautiful literature. If Ruskin missed Whistler, he is in good company, for Sainte-Beuve, the prince of critics, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was unfair. Yet, consider the Osrics embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve's style. He, like many another critic, was superior to his subject. And that is always fatal to the water-flies.
Surely no woman ever was associated senti- mentally with three figures more diverse, a disqualified sovereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad French painter. Stendhal, in his "Me- moires d'un Touriste," says that this work of art represents her as a cook who has pretty hands.
The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental style.
With the woman it was otherwise; from her first meeting with the youth of twenty to the day of her death, absent or present, he was the object of an idolatry in which all her faculties united: her being was penetrated by a self-sustaining passion which could not cease till it had consumed her. De Stendhal is the only novelist who could have drawn such a character.
'Oh, well! he exclaimed, somewhat dashed. 'As Stendhal was a Frenchman, and his book doesn't deal with gambling at all, I think I may stick to my title. I thought of it myself, you know. 'Oh yes, dearest. I know you did, Geraldine said eagerly. 'You think I'd better alter it? Geraldine glanced at the floor. 'You see, she murmured, 'Stendhal was a really great writer. He started, shocked.
Germany has had her Goethe to do this; France her Stendhal; in Russia we find that fearless curiosity for all problems, which is the sign of a youthful, perhaps too youthful nation; while in Spain, on the other hand, we have an old and experienced people, with a long training away from Christianity under the dominion of the Semitic Arabs, who undoubtedly left some of their blood behind, but I find great difficulty in pointing out any man over here who could serve as a useful guide to the heights of the Nietzschean thought, except one, who was not a Britisher.
He jumped up with a "God bless me!" when he saw me. "Mynheer Stendhal?" I asked. "Yes," he said in good English. "What is it, boy?" "Take me in quick," I said. "They're after me." In another minute, after Mr. Stendhal had read my note, I was skinning off my clothes in an upper bedroom. Within three minutes I was dressed like a Dutch boy, in huge baggy striped trousers belonging to Stendhal's son.
The soldiers of Harold thought that the Normans were all priests, because they were "shavelings;" and it is only natural that soldiers should in all countries be bearded. It is almost impossible to shave during a campaign. Stendhal, the French novelist and critic, was remarkable as the best, perhaps the only, clean- shaved man in the French army during the dreadful retreat from Moscow.
It is a curious book, which can still be met with sometimes on the quays. It is adorned by a lithograph of Henry Monnier's, which is, I don't know why, a caricature of Stendhal. Fongeray is the pseudonym of two Liberals of the Restoration, Dittmer and Cavé.
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