Memoirs of an Egotist

By Stendhal

This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528765312

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHEN Henri Beyle (Stendhal) devoted the leisure of an Italian summer fortnight to writing Memoirs of an Egotist, he had for nearly eighteen months been French consul at Civita Vecchia. This was long enough for him to become desperately bored both with his post and the place itself. Nobody of interest ever disembarked at the dreary little port to bring him news of Paris, and the captains of coasting-vessels from Marseilles made but indifferent company. Inspection of cargo-lists, endorsement of passports, and disputes with the harbour authorities, filled his daily round, while the attempt to carry out his duties conscientiously was continually hampered by friction with his assistant, Lysamaque Tavernier, a shady character of mingled Greek and French extraction, whose accountancy was as questionable as his bearing was cringingly insolent. Moreover, Tavernier, as Beyle suspected, was in the habit of writing to the French ambassador in Rome, and even to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, accusing his chief of mismanaging consular affairs and granting himself too frequent leave.

The Ministry, in any case, looked on Beyle with no favourable eye. After Charles X, the last ruling member of the Bourbon dynasty, had been driven from France by the three days’ revolution of July, 1830, the government of the new and liberal monarch, Louis-Philippe, who replaced him, was flooded with demands for office from innumerable anti-Bourbon partisans. Although Beyle, who had never concealed his detestation of the fallen dynasty, and whose sallies against it had greatly contributed to the rare gaiety of the radical salons he frequented, did nothing to force his own claims, they were pressed on his behalf by influential friends, like the philosopher Tracy, until he was appointed consul at Trieste. Count Molé, the Foreign Secretary, regarded him with a benevolence not shared by the Ministry as a whole. Its officials, who knew Beyle’s identity with Stendhal, the author of a treatise on love and a scandalous novel that had recently appeared, Le Rouge et le Noir, considered authorship of such a nature incompatible with administrative capacity. They felt themselves the more justified, and looked forward only to trouble on Beyle’s account, when Metternich refused to accept him at Trieste on the ground that he had been expelled from Milan in 1828 as the author of works of revolutionary tendency inimical to the Austrian regime. Then, after he had at last been cased in Civita Vecchia, instead of following office routine in grateful obscurity, he created further annoyance in Paris by a mistaken zeal which impelled him to compose intelligent and statesmanlike despatches on the political situation in Italy, as though he were the Minister’s personal adviser. He was sharply reminded that a consulate is not an embassy.

Thus unhappy in his office, Beyle found scanty relief in his surroundings when the day’s work was over. To him, it seemed that the town of Civita Vecchia, the country round, and the sea and the sky, combined in one unchanging dullness. Also, the inhabitants of Civita Vecchia, port of the Papal States, were ultra-catholic and ultraconservative; in increasing degree they looked askance on Beyle as a foreigner, a Frenchman, and the representative of a liberal monarchy. Although on feast-days he solemnly attended Mass, there was little doubt of his being neither pious nor respectable, and the better-class townsfolk, whose doors remained rigorously closed to him, were the more confirmed in this opinion when he took lodgings in the house of the local antiquarian, Donato Bucci, one of Civita Vecchia’s few liberals. Luckily, they knew nothing of Stendhal, and were unaware that Beyle considered the convicts chained in the galleys in the harbour his most interesting neighbours.

He had, however, one place of escape; Rome was not too far away, and there he spent those absences from duty which grew more and more frequent, and of which Tavernier told tales to his superiors. In Rome he found acquaintances, if hardly friends, and, above all, facilities for intelligent conversation. At the French embassy he was a welcome guest, though the ambassadress appreciated him more than the ambassador; at the Villa Medici, the residence of scholarship students from the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, he had entry to the Director’s weekly receptions. Several Roman drawing-rooms were open to him, and at the Café Lepri there was always the chance of a discussion with native and foreign artists and writers. In the protecting capital, Beyle showed himself at his full worth, and found due appreciation. Yet at the end of those Roman evenings when he had peppered the talk with squibs of paradox, sometimes wilfully making himself more alarming than amiable, but at any rate enjoying himself, the darker moods that came with loneliness were not to be denied. Rome, after all, was not to be compared with his adorable Milan, now for ever barred to him by the Austrian police; Roman society lacked the necessary element of passion, and, cosmopolitan though Beyle liked to count himself, there were too many foreigners in the city. The true Italian savour was adulterated there.

In comparison, he had perhaps really been happier in Paris, where he passed the greater part of the nine-and-a-half years between leaving Milan and his appointment to Trieste. To Paris his thoughts kept returning in what he now found little better than exile. Severely as he had judged it at the time, it was the place of transition where he had changed, if not from nonentity to notoriety, at least from obscurity to some sort of distinction. But what sort of distinction exactly? What kind of a mark had he made on the Parisian world? He was unknown and almost friendless when he entered it; by the time he left, he had cultivated a wit and become a personality in a number of salons. But what kind of a personality, and, apart from what others saw in him, what did he see in himself? To answer these questions, and for a little time to relive the past, might bring relief in his present boredom and depression. It was true that he could find equal diversion in writing another novel, but his consular duties were sure to make the necessary continuity of effort impossible; on the other hand, he could pursue a work of self-examination intermittently. So, on a June day in Rome, he wrote the first pages of Memoirs of an Egotist.

We have indications of Beyle’s own view of the work. In a letter to his friend Di Fiori he wrote, During my exile here, I am writing the history of my last journey to Paris, from June 1821 to November 1830. It amuses me to describe all the animal’s failings; I nowise spare him; it will be droll when he appears in the shop-windows of the Palais Royal, then Palais —, in 1860.

And on the first page of the manuscript is the following notice—

"Memoirs

I bequeath this examination to M. Abraham Constantin, the celebrated painter, with the trouble of giving it to some printer who is not a bigot, ten years after my death. Or to deposit it in a library if nobody wishes to print it. Cellini appeared 150 years after his death.

The next page bears this amplification, dated four days after the book was begun and showing that it was continued at Civita Vecchia—

"Codicil to the holograph testament of M. Henri Beyle, consul of France at Civita Vecchia.

"I, the undersigned, H.-M. Beyle, bequeath this present manuscript, containing chatter about my private life, to M. Abraham Constantin of Geneva, the celebrated painter, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, etc., etc. I beg M. A. Constantin to have this manuscript printed ten years after my death. I beg him to alter nothing, except that names may be changed and imaginary ones substituted for those I have written; for example, Mme. Durand or Mme. Delpierre might be printed instead of Mme. Doligny or Mme. Berthois.

"Civita Vecchia, 24 June, 1832.

"H. Beyle.

I should be quite pleased if all names were changed. They could be restored if by chance this gossip were reprinted fifty years after my death.

‘Chatter’ and ‘gossip’—the terms are a mere modesty of convention, befitting their formal context; what is significant is Beyle’s desire that the Memoirs should be printed. He was aware of their value for the study of history and of himself.

Constantin, with whom he shared an apartment in Rome on his flights from Civita Vecchia, did not, however, receive the manuscript. After Beyle’s sudden death while on leave in Paris, on 22nd March, 1842, at the age of fifty-nine, it passed with the rest of his papers and unfinished works into the hands of his cousin and executor, Romain Colomb, and was included in the mass of Stendhaliana left by him to the municipal library at Grenoble. Its first printing was in Casimir Stryienski’s edition of 1892, and in 1927 it appeared in the collected works of Stendhal edited by his most distinguished commentator, M. Henri Martineau.

The book, when it first came out, had its warmest welcome from Paul Bourget, then acquiring his reputation as a novelist and already of eminence as a critic. He declared it worthy to be placed beside the Confessions of Saint Augustine, Benjamin Constant’s Intimate Journal, Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, De Quincey’s Memoirs of An Opiumeater and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Beyle himself, with all his confidence in the verdict of posterity, could hardly have asked more; and had Bourget intended his praise for the literary merits of the Memoirs, it would indeed have been extravagant. But he was not addicted to over-emphasis, and his meaning becomes clear when we seek a common quality in the works he names; they are related neither in style nor subject; only the spirit of absolute sincerity in which they were written makes them akin. It is the same spirit which stamps the Memoirs throughout.

Some of the work remains in the form of a rough sketch; in one place Beyle notes that a passage of description will need inserting, or in another a word stands for what might become a paragraph—we shall never know, for instance, what part the mysterious lemons played in M. de Tracy’s life. Or a name may be given different spellings, like Lafayette and La Fayette. But when the roughness of composition is not simply textual, when Beyle keeps on dropping his frequent parentheses of ‘I think’ and ‘I believe,’ or scribbles a plan of the Tracy salon or the suburbs of Paris, one sees that such interruptions to the flow of his narrative are a part of his constant endeavour for its accuracy. Not to put down anything of which he is not quite sure, especially in regard to dates, counts as more important than a possible monotony of qualifications; certainly as more important than literary graces, even to the extent of provoking him to asides on the book’s bad writing and its tediousness. At all costs, the truth must come first.

Yet happily the truth also allows a place for several of Beyle’s—or Beyle-Stendhal’s—best chapters. He views himself like a scientific historian or a naturalist, without sparing the animal, as he wrote to Di Fiori, and we are convinced that the facts were as he describes. But beyond the facts, in spite of himself, other matters enter the book along with them and give it its atmosphere of very personal expression. As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and the deliberate cultivator of a wit, there emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the Shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment ran always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic. It is the Beyle of whom M. Léon Blum, in his admirable Stendhal et le Beylisme has written, ‘His ways of life in Paris, as he has described it in his Memoirs of an Egotist with so simple a charm, are those of a lonely old bachelor, slightly eccentric, who dribbles his