recovered, but his spirit rebelled. He complains bitterly that he not only had to sleep in the house but also to dine with the family. He none the less knit a firm friendship with his cousin Martial Daru, a brainless and amiable youth who subsequently at Milan and at Brunswick taught him the elementary rules of amoristic etiquette.
The Marengo campaign gave him an opportunity of practising that Napoleonic worship which was his one and only religion. The influence of the Darus procured him a commission, and the passage of the St. Bernard was one of the landmarks of his life. He drank to the full the intoxication of victory which attended the entry into Milan of the youthful army, and conceived for the Countess Angela Pietragrua, "a sublime wanton a la Lucrezia Borgia," a passion which ten years subsequently was duly rewarded. The Milan period was, according to that epitaph which he penned himself, "the finest in his life." "He adored music and literary renown, set great store by the art of giving a good blow with the sabre and was wounded in the foot by a thrust received in a duel. He was aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General Michaud. He distinguished himself. He was the happiest and probably the maddest of men when on the conclusion of the peace the minister of war ordered the subaltern aides-de-camp to return to their regiments."
Returning to Grenoble on furlough, he fell in love with Mdlle. Victorine Bigillon, the sister of one of his best friends, whom he suddenly followed to Paris, although his leave would appear to have been limited to Grenoble. Reprimanded by the authorities he sent in his resignation, and "madder than ever started to study with the view of becoming a great man." His experiences, subjective and objective, during this period are described in his journal with a detail, a lucidity, an honesty which are worthy of some mention. For we see now officially scheduled and officially annotated all those heterogeneous qualities which made up the sum of this man's psychology; his rigid intellectualism, his sentimentality, his ambition, his artistic enthusiasm, his constant flow of analytical energy (directed now against the external world, now against himself, yet scarcely for a single moment losing itself in a complete abandon), his love of witty conversation, whether his own or that of others, the sweep of his intellectual ideals, his intolerance of bores and fools, that apprehensive self-consciousness which so often made him the dupe of the fear of being duped, his exuberant joie de vivre, and "that love of glory and sensibility which are only for the intimes friends."
And extraordinarily stimulating are the reflections, charmingly interspersed with English phrases, in this breviary of intellectual egoism, where the I and the Me enter into a Holy Alliance in their heroic conspiracy against the rest of the world. It was mainly this self-consciousness which induced Beyle deliberately to set himself to become a psychologist. "Nearly all the misfortunes of life," writes our twenty-year-old philosopher, "come from the false notions we have concerning that which happens to us. Must know men thoroughly." And how he scolds himself when he fails to live up to his ideal, and when "his accursed mania for being brilliant results in his being more occupied in making a deep impression than in guessing others." And so it is that he reflects, "what a fool I am not to have the knack of drawing out each man to tell his story, which might prove so useful to me," and that the man, who was subsequently to style himself by profession "an observer of the human heart" developed that "universal desire to know all that passes within a man." Though, however, his love of psychology was thus, as we have seen, to some extent a case of reaction from his own nervousness and of externalised introspection, it is impossible to deny the purity of his intellectual enthusiasm. At an age when even the chastest of prose writers may well be pardoned for wallowing in the debauchery of purple patches, he inscribes in his journal that the sole quality in style is lucidity. It was this deeply rooted abhorrence of floridity and ostentation that on a subsequent occasion nearly induced him to fight a duel with a man who had praised unduly the well known "la cime indéterminable des arbres" of Chateaubriand, that bête noire of Stendhal's of whom he prophesies in English, "This man shall not outlive his century." In the sphere of philosophy, characteristically enough his logical and mathematical turn of mind embraced with natural love and facility the materialism of the French sceptics.
"Helvetius opened wide to him the doors of the world," and he became on terms of affectionate friendship with the aged philosopher Destutt Tracy. So radical indeed was Stendhal's philosophic bias, that on one occasion, feeling presumably more studious than amorous, he neglects an assignation with the lady whom he was pursuing, to plunge with even greater gusto into a hundred pages of Adam Smith. Though, too, he habitually worked twelve hours a day, he would appear to have cut a frequent figure in both those formal and Bohemian sets of the capital which offered such refreshing contrasts and facilities to artistic young men.
His love for Victorine proved unreciprocated. There followed innocuous passages with a respectable demi-vierge, referred to in the journal as Adèle of the Gate. But Stendhal found his chief distraction in that society of authors, men of the world, and actresses whom he met at the house of Dugazon, a celebrated teacher of theatrical elocution. In this variegated set, where the mutual relations and complications of the various members provided a chronic source of interest and speculation, Stendhal met a young mother, named Mélanie Guilbert (the Louason of the journal), "a charming actress who had the most refined sentiments and to whom I never gave a son." To this lady Stendhal set himself to lay a siege, which was eventually successful after a quite unnecessary duration.
The demeanour of Stendhal in society is highly instructive. A man of such abnormal sensitiveness that "the least thing moved him and made the tears come to his eyes," he encased himself in an "irony which was imperceptible to the vulgar," and, posing with marked success as both a cynic and a roué, notes with interest "the terrifying effect which his particular kind of wit produced on society." But if his deliberate brilliancies won him respect rather than popularity, they certainly consolidated his own selfestimation. "Maximum of wit in my life—Je me suis toujours vu aller mais sans gêne pour cela," runs one of these honest confidences which he made to himself, "without lying, without deceiving himself, with pleasure, like a letter to a friend." He needed, however, the audience of a salon to put him on his mettle, and would appear, at any rate during this period, to have been somewhat ineffective in tête-à-tête. His journal records a lamentable succession of muddled opportunities, of occasions when he was too natural to observe his companion with sufficient acumen, and of occasions when he was not natural enough. It was the latter characteristic, however, which predominated, and even though the emotion of his love was genuine, its expression was a bookish and theatrical formulation of an already rehearsed ideal, directed quite as much to the critical approbation of his own consciousness as to the actual object of his wooing. Yet the full gusto of a rich joie de vivre palpitates in this incessant cerebration. Time after time do we come upon the entry that such and such a day was the happiest in his life. And if at times "his only distraction was to observe his own state, it was none the less a great one." His very sensibility becomes a source of gratification, and he will congratulate himself that he has perhaps lived more in a day than many of his more stolid friends will live in the whole of their life. The financial problem pressed irksomely upon him at this period, and, combining business and sentiment, he obtained a position in a house at Marseilles, in which town Louason had obtained an engagement. Whether however because of parental pressure or because the distractions of business had cured him of his passion, he soon left Marseilles for Grenoble, and subsequently returned to Paris.
The campaigns of 1806 to 1809 offered new scope to the ambition of Beyle, who always rose successfully to practical emergencies and was, as he tells us himself, "most simple and most natural in the greatest dangers." He was present at the battle of Jena, came several times into personal contact with Napoleon, and discharged with singular efficiency the fiscal administration of the state of Brunswick.
The next landmark in his life, however, is his passion for the wife of his relative, the punctilious but aged M. Daru, a passion the various nuances of which are faithfully recorded in those sections of his journal headed "The Life and Sentiments of Silencious Harry," "Memoirs of my life during my amour for the Gräfin P——y," the narrative of the intrigue between Julien and Mathilde in Le Rouge et le Noir, and the posthumous fragment entitled "Le Consultation de Banti," a piece of methodical deliberation on the pressing question, "Dois-je ou ne dois-je pas avoir la duchesse?" which, it is believed, is quite unparalleled in the whole history of eroticism. For with