On Love E-Book

- Stendhal

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 502

Beschreibung

Mortimer came back trembling from a long journey; he loved Jenny; she had not answered her letters. When he arrived in London, he rides a horse and picks her up from his country house. He arrives, she was walking in the park; he runs there, his heart racing; he meets her, she extends her hand to him, receives him with trouble: he sees that he is loved. As she walked through the park alleys with her, Jenny's dress embarrassed herself in a thorny acacia bush. Later on, Mortimer was happy, but Jenny was unfaithful. I maintain that Jenny never loved him; he cites as proof of his love the way she received him when she returned from the continent, but he could never give me the slightest detail. Only he flinches visibly as soon as he sees an acacia bush; it is really the only distinct memory he has kept of the happiest moment of his life. Under the guise of a psychological and sociological analysis of love, he expresses his unfortunate passion for Matilde Viscontini Dembowski. It is in this book that he invents and describes the famous phenomenon of crystallization. An essay on the feeling of love in which he tries to categorize and analyze the different types of emotions. The most famous idea is that of "crystallization": the lover sees the loved one under the prism of perfection and makes an idealized image of him.

Leseprobe

On Love

Pages de titreON LOVEBOOK IBOOK IIBOOK IIIAPPENDIXCopyright

Stendhal

ON LOVE

ON LOVE

That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest man's case.

The Pirate.

INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION

Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book to all but a very select few—"a hundred readers only": they are rather warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's De l'Amour justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures—not even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that the twentieth would find his ideas at least more comprehensible. The ideas of genius in one age are the normal spiritual food for superior intellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of a mystery to the general public; but the ideas, which he agitated, are at present regarded as some of the most important subjects for immediate enquiry by many of the keenest and most practical minds of Europe.

A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an idea of the breadth of Stendhal's treatment of love. He touches on every side of the social relationship between man and woman; and while considering the disposition of individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant, if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, conscious throughout of the intimate connexion in any given age between its conceptions of love and the status of woman.

Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it is generally "passion-love," but more particularly "love à l'italienne."[1] The thing in itself is always the same—it is the love of a man and a woman, not as husband and wife, not as mistress and lover, but as two human beings, who find the highest possible pleasure, not in passing so many hours of the day or night together, but in living one life. Still more, it is the attachment of two free fellow-creatures—not of master and slave.

Stendhal was born in 1783—eight years before Olympe de Gouges, the French Mary Wollstonecraft, published her Déclaration des Droits des Femmes. That is to say, by the time Stendhal had reached mental maturity, Europe had for some time been acquainted with the cry for Women's Rights, and heard the earliest statement of the demands, which have broadened out into what our age glibly calls the "Woman Question." How, may we ask, does Stendhal's standpoint correspond with his chronological position between the French Revolution and the "Votes for Women" campaign of the present day?

Stendhal is emphatically a champion of Women's Rights. It is true that the freedom, which Stendhal demands, is designed for other ends than are associated to-day with women's claims. Perhaps Stendhal, were he alive now, would cry out against what he would call a distortion of the movement he championed. Men, and still more women, must be free, Stendhal holds, in order to love; his chapters in this book on the education of women are all an earnest and brilliant plea to prove that an educated woman is not necessarily a pedant; that she is, on the contrary, far more lovable than the uneducated woman, whom our grandfathers brought up on the piano, needlework and the Catechism; in fine, that intellectual sympathy is the true basis of happiness in the relations of the two sexes. Modern exponents of Women's Rights will say that this is true, but only half the truth. It would be more correct to say that Stendhal saw the whole truth, but forbore to follow it out to its logical conclusion with the blind intransigeance of the modern propagandist. Be that as it may, Stendhal certainly deserves more acknowledgment, as one of the pioneers in the movement, than he generally receives from its present-day supporters.

Stendhal was continually lamenting his want of ability to write. According to him, a perusal of the Code Civil, before composition, was the best way he had found of grooming his style. This may well have something to do with the opinion, handed on from one history of French literature to another, that Stendhal, like Balzac—it is usually put in these very words—had no style. It is not, correctly speaking, what the critics themselves mean: to have no style would be to chop and change from one method of expression to another, and nothing could be less truly said of either of these writers. They mean that he had a bad style, and that is certainly a matter of taste. Perhaps the critics, while condemning, condemn themselves. It is the severe beauty of the Code Civil which, makes them uncomfortable. An eye for an eye and a spade for a spade is Stendhal's way. He is suspicious of the slightest adornment: everything that is thought clearly can be written simply. Other writers have had as simplified a style—Montesquieu or Voltaire, for example—but there is scant merit in telling simply a simple lie, and Voltaire, as Stendhal himself says, was afraid of things which are difficult to put into words. This kind of daintiness is not Stendhal's simplicity: he is merely uncompromising and blunt. True, his bluntness is excessive. A nice balance between the severity of the Code Civil and the "drums and tramplings" of Elizabethan English comes as naturally to an indifferent pen, whipped into a state of false enthusiasm, as it is foreign to the warmth of genuine conviction. Had Stendhal been a little less vehement and a little less hard-headed, there might have been fewer modifications, a few less repetitions, contradictions, ellipses—but then so much the less Stendhal. In that case he might have trusted himself: as it was he knew his own tendency too well and took fright. Sometimes in reading Carlyle, one wishes that he had felt the same kind of modesty: he, certainly, could never have kept to the thin centre line, and we should have had another great writer "without a style." Effect meant little to Stendhal, hard fact and clearness everything. Perhaps, he would often have made his meaning clearer, if he had been less suspicious of studied effect and elaborate writing. Not infrequently he succeeds in being colloquial and matter-of-fact, without being definite.

Stendhal was beset with a horror of being artistic. Was it not he who said of an artist, whose dress was particularly elaborate: "Depend upon it, a man who adorns his person will also adorn his work"? Stendhal was a soldier first, then a writer—Salviati[2] is a soldier. Certainly it is his contempt for the type of person—even commoner, perhaps, in 1914 than in 1814—who carries his emotions on his sleeve, which accounts for Stendhal's naive disclaimer of personal responsibility, the invention of Lisio[3] and Salviati, mythical authors of this work on love—all a thin screen to hide his own obsession, which manages, none the less, to break through unmasked on almost every page.

The translation makes no attempt to hide these peculiarities or even to make too definite a sense from a necessarily doubtful passage.[4] Its whole aim is to reproduce Stendhal's essay in English, just as it stands in French. No other English translation of the whole work exists: only a selection of its maxims translated piece-meal.[5] Had a translation existed, we should certainly not have undertaken another. As it is, we have relied upon a great sympathy with the author, and a studied adhesion to what he said, in order to reconstruct this essay—encouraged by the conviction that the one is as necessary as the other in order to obtain a satisfactory result. Charles Cotton's Montaigne seems to us the pattern of all good translations.

In spite of the four prefaces of the original, we felt it advisable to add still another to the English translation. Stendhal said that no book stood in greater need of a word of introduction. That was in Paris—here it is a foreigner, dressed up, we trust, quite à l'anglaise, but still, perhaps, a little awkward, and certainly in need of something more than the chilly announcement of the title page—about as encouraging as the voice of the flunkey, who bawls out your name at a party over the heads of the crowd already assembled. True, the old English treatment of foreigners has sadly degenerated: more bows than brickbats are their portion, now London knows the charm of cabarets, revues and cheap French cooking.[6]

The work in itself is conspicuous, if not unique. Books on Love are legion: how could it be otherwise? It was probably the first topic of conversation, and none has since been found more interesting. But Stendhal has devised a new treatment of the subject. His method is analytical and scientific, but, at the same time, there is no attempt at bringing the subject into line with a science; it is no part of erotology—there is no

Greek ending with a little passing bell

That signifies some faith about to die.[7]

His faith is unimpeachable and his curiosity and honesty unbounded: this is what makes him conspicuous. In claiming to be scientific, Stendhal meant nothing more than that his essay was based purely upon unbiassed observation; that he accepted nothing upon vague hearsay or from tradition; that even the finer shades of sentiment could be observed with as much disinterested precision, if not made to yield as definite results, as any other natural phenomena. "The man who has known love finds all else unsatisfying"—is, properly speaking, a scientific fact.

Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love. This love—see it in the Symposium of Plato, in Dante or in the Dialoghi of Leone Ebreo—is more than a human passion, it is also the amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle, the force of attraction which, combined with hate, the force of repulsion, is the cause of universal movement. In this way love is not only scientifically treated, it embraces all other sciences within it. Scientists will smile, but the day of Science and Art with a contemptuous smile for each other is over. True, the feeling underlying this cosmic treatment of love is very human, very simple—a conviction that love, as a human passion, is all-important, and a desire to justify its importance by finding it a place in a larger order of things, in the "mystical mathematics of the kingdom of Heaven." Weaker heads than Plato are also pleased to call love divine, without knowing very clearly what they mean by divinity. Their ignorance is relative; the allegorical representation of Eros—damned and deified alternately by the poets—is in motive, perhaps, not so far from what we have called the scientific, but, perhaps, might better have named the cosmic, treatment.

In a rough classification of books on Love one can imagine a large number collected under the heading—"Academic." One looks for something to express that want of plain dealing, of terre-à-terre frankness, which is so deplorable in the literature of Love, and is yet the distinctive mark of so much of it. "Academic" comprehends a wide range of works all based on a more or less set or conventional theory of the passions. It includes the average modern novel, in which convention is supreme and experience negligible—just a traditional, lifeless affair, in which there is not even a pretence of curiosity or love of truth. And, at the same time, "academic" is the label for the kind of book in which convention is rather on the surface, rather in the form than in the matter. Tullia of Aragon, for example, was no tyro in the theory and practice of love, but her Dialogo d'Amore is still distinctly academic. Of course it is easy to be misled by a stiff varnish of old-fashioned phrase; the reader in search of sincerity will look for it in the thought expressed, not in the manner of expression. There is more to be learnt about love from Werther, with all his wordy sorrows, than from the slick tongue of Yorick, who found it a singular blessing of his life "to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with someone." But, then, just because Werther is wordy, all his feelings come out, expressed one way or another. With Tullia, and others like her, one feels that so much is suppressed, because it did not fit the conventional frame. What she says she felt, but she must have felt so much more or have known that others felt more.

This suppression of truth has, of course, nothing to do with the partial treatment of love necessary often in purely imaginative literature. No one goes to poetry for an anatomy of love. Not love, but people in love, are the business of a playwright or a novelist. The difference is very great. The purely imaginative writer is dealing with situations first, and then with the passions that cause them.

Here it is interesting to observe that Stendhal, in gathering his evidence, makes use of works of imagination as often as works based upon fact or his own actual experience.[8] Characters from Scott are called in as witnesses, side by side with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Mariana Alcaforado.

The books mentioned by Stendhal are of two distinct kinds. There are those, from which he draws evidence and support for his own theories, and in which the connexion with love is only incidental (Shakespeare's Plays, for example, Don Juan or the Nouvelle Héloïse), and others whose authors are really his forerunners, such as André le Chapelain.[9] Stendhal gives some account of this curious writer, who perhaps comes nearer his own analytical method than any later writer. In fact, we have called Stendhal unique perhaps too rashly—there are others he does not mention, who, in a less sustained and intentional way, have attempted an analytical, and still imaginative, study of love. Stendhal makes no mention of a short essay on Love by Pascal, which certainly falls in the same category as his own. It is less illuminating than one might expect, but to read it is to appreciate still more the restraint, which Stendhal has consciously forced upon himself. Others also since Stendhal—Baudelaire, for instance—have made casual and valuable investigations in the Stendhalian method. Baudelaire has here and there a maxim which, in brilliance and exactitude, equals almost anything in this volume.[10]

And then—though this is no place for a bibliography of love—there is Hazlitt's Liber Amoris. Stendhal would have loved that patient, impartial chronicle of love's ravages: instead of Parisian salons and Duchesses it is all servant-girls and Bloomsbury lodging-houses; but the Liber Amoris is no less pitiful and, if possible, more real than the diary of Salviati.

There are certain books which, for the frequency of their mention in this work, demand especial attention of the reader—they are its commentary and furnish much of the material for its ideas.

In number CLXV of "Scattered Fragments" (below, p. 328) Stendhal gives the list as follows:—

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.

The novels of Cervantes and Scarron.

Manon Lescaut and Le Doyen de Killerine, by the Abbé Prévôt.

The Latin Letters of Héloïse to Abelard.

Tom Jones.

Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

Two or three stories by Auguste La Fontaine.

Pignotti's History of Tuscany.

Werther.

Brantôme.

Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi (Venice, 1760)—only the eighty pages on the history of his love affairs.

The Memoirs of Lauzun, Saint-Simon, d'Épinay, de Staël, Marmontel, Bezenval, Roland, Duclos, Horace Walpole, Evelyn, Hutchinson.

Letters of Mademoiselle Lespinasse.

All these are more or less famous works, with which, at least by name, the general reader is familiar. Brantôme's witty and entertaining writings, the Letters of a Portuguese Nun and those of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, perhaps the sublimest letters that have ever been written, are far less read than they deserve. The rest—excepting perhaps Scarron, Carlo Gozzi, Auguste La Fontaine, and one or two of the less-known Memoirs—are the common reading of a very large public.

This list of books is mentioned as the select library of Lisio Visconti, who "was anything but a great reader." Lisio Visconti is one of the many imaginary figures, behind which hides Stendhal himself; we have already suggested one reason for this curious trait. Besides Lisio Visconti and Salviati, we meet Del Rosso, Scotti, Delfante, Pignatelli, Zilietti, Baron de Bottmer, etc. etc. Often these phantom people are mentioned side by side with a character from a book or a play or with someone Stendhal had actually met in life. General Teulié[11] is a real person—Stendhal's superior officer on his first expedition in Italy: Schiassetti is a fiction. In the same way the dates, which the reader will often find appended to a story or a note, sometimes give the date of a real event in Stendhal's life, while at other times it can be proved that, at the particular time given, the event mentioned could not have taken place. This falsification of names and dates was a mania with Stendhal. To most of his friends he gave a name completely different from their real one, and adopted with each of them a special pseudonym for himself. The list of Stendhal's pseudonyms is extensive and amusing.[12] But he was not always thorough in his system of disguise: he is even known to have written from Italy a letter in cypher, enclosing at the same time the key to the cypher!

We have only to make a few additions to Lisio Visconti's list of books already mentioned, in order to have a pretty fair account of the main sources of reference and suggestion, to which Stendhal turned in writing his De l'Amour.[13] There are Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile. Stendhal holds that, except for very green youth, the Nouvelle Héloïse is unreadable. Yet in spite of its affectation, it remained for him one of the most important works for the study of genuine passion. Then we must add the Liaisons Dangereuses—a work which bears certain resemblances to Stendhal's De l'Amour. Both are the work of a soldier and both have a soldierly directness; for perfect balance and strength of construction few books have come near the Liaisons Dangereuses—none have ever surpassed it. There is the Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette and Corinne by Madame de Staël, whose typically German and extravagant admiration for Italy touched a weak spot in Stendhal. After Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, which Stendhal also refers to more than once, the works of Madame de Staël were, perhaps, the greatest working influence in the rise of Romanticism. What wonder, then, that Stendhal was interested? To the letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse and of the Portuguese Nun we must add the letters of Mirabeau, written during his imprisonment at Vincennes, to Sophie de Monnier. Further, we must add the writings of certain moral teachers whose names occur frequently in the following pages: Helvétius, whom Clarétie[14] amusingly calls the enfant terrible of the philosophers; de Tracy[15]; Volney, author of the once celebrated Ruines, traveller and philosopher. These names are only the most important. Stendhal's reading was extensive, and we might swell the list with the names of Montesquieu, Condillac, Condorcet, Chamfort, Diderot—to name only the moralists.

It is noticeable that almost all these books, mentioned as the favourite authorities of Stendhal, are eighteenth-century works. The fact will seem suspicious to those inclined to believe that the eighteenth century was a time of pretty ways and gallantry à la Watteau, or of windy mouthings about Cause and Effect, Duties and Principles, Reason and Nature. But, to begin with, neither estimate comes near the mark; and, moreover, Stendhal hated Voltaire almost as much as Blake did. It was not an indiscriminate cry of Rights and Liberty which interested Stendhal in the eighteenth century. The old régime was, of course, politically uncongenial to him, the liberal and Bonapartist, and he could see the stupidity and injustice and hollowness of a society built up on privilege. But even if Stendhal, like the happy optimist of to-day, had mistaken the hatred of past wrongs for a proof of present well-being, how could a student of Love fail to be fascinated by an age such as that of Lewis XV? It was the leisure for loving, which, as he was always remarking, court-life and only court-life makes possible, that reconciled him to an age he really despised. Moreover, the mass of memoirs and letters of the distinguished men and women of the eighteenth century, offering as it does material for the study of manners unparalleled in any other age, inevitably led him back to the court-life of the ancien régime. Besides, as has been already suggested, the contradiction in Stendhal was strong. In spite of his liberalism, he was pleased in later life to add the aristocratic "de" to the name of Beyle. With Lord Byron, divided in heart between the generous love of liberty which led him to fight for the freedom of Greece, and disgust at the vulgarity of the Radical party, which he had left behind in England, Stendhal found himself closely in sympathy when they met in Italy. It was the originality[16] of the men of the sixteenth century which called forth his genuine praises; even the statesmen-courtiers and soldiers of the heroic age of Lewis XIV awoke his admiration;[17] the gallant courtiers and incompetent statesmen of Lewis XV awoke at least his interest.

Stendhal's De l'Amour, and in less degree his novels, have had to struggle for recognition, and the cause has largely been the peculiarity of his attitude—his scepticism, the exaggerated severity of his treatment of idyllic subjects, together with an unusual complement of sentiment and appreciation of the value of sentiment for the understanding of life. It is his manner of thinking, much rather than the strangeness of his thoughts themselves, which made the world hesitate to give Stendhal the position which it now accords him. But at least one great discovery the world did find in De l'Amour—a novelty quite apart from general characteristics, apart from its strange abruptness and stranger truth of detail. Stendhal's discovery is "Crystallisation"; it is the central idea of his book. The word was his invention, though the thought, which it expresses so decisively, is to be found, like most so-called advanced ideas, hidden away in a corner of Montaigne's Essays.[18] Crystallisation is the process by which we love an object for qualities, which primarily exist in our fancy and which we lend to it, that is to say, imaginary or unreal qualities. While Montaigne, and others no doubt, had seen in this a peculiarity of love, Stendhal saw in it love's essential characteristic—one might say, its explanation, if love were capable of being explained. Besides, in this book Stendhal is seeking the how not the why of love. And he goes beyond love: he recognises the influence of crystallisation upon other sides of life besides love. Crystallisation has become an integral part of the world's equipment for thought and expression.

The crisis in Stendhal's posthumous history is Sainte-Beuve's Causeries des Lundis of January 2nd and 9th, 1854, of which Stendhal was the subject. Stendhal died in 1842. It is sometimes said that his reputation is a fictitious reputation, intentionally worked up by partisanship and without regard to merit, that in his lifetime he was poorly thought of. This is untrue. His artistic activities, like his military, were appreciated by those competent to judge them. He was complimented by Napoleon on his services prior to the retreat from Moscow; Balzac, who of all men was capable of judging a novel and, still more, a direct analysis of a passion, was one of his admirers, and particularly an admirer of De l'Amour. From the general public he met to a great extent with mistrust, and for a few years after his death his memory was honoured with apathetic silence. The few, a chosen public and some faithful friends—Mérimée and others—still cherished his reputation. In 1853, owing in great measure to the efforts of Romain Colomb and Louis Crozet, a complete edition of his works was published by Michel-Lévy. And then, very appropriately, early in the next year was heard the impressive judgment of Sainte-Beuve. Perhaps the justest remark in that just appreciation is where he gives Stendhal the merit of being one of the first Frenchmen to travel littérairement parlant.[19] Stendhal came back from each of his many and frequent voyages, like the happy traveller in Joachim du Bellay's sonnet, plein d'usage et raison—knowing the ways of men and full of ripe wisdom. And this is true not only of his travels over land and sea, but also of those into the thoughtful world of books.

An equally true—perhaps still truer—note was struck by Sainte-Beuve, when he insisted on the important place in Stendhal's character played by la peur d'être dupe—the fear of being duped. Stendhal was always and in all situations beset by this fear; it tainted his happiest moments and his best qualities. We have already remarked on the effect on his style of his mistrust of himself—it is the same characteristic. A sentimental romantic by nature, he was always on his guard against the follies of a sentimental outlook; a sceptic by education and the effect of his age, he was afraid of being the dupe of his doubts; he was sceptical of scepticism itself. This tended to make him unreal and affected, made him often defeat his own ends in the oddest way. In order to avoid the possibility of being carried away too far along a course, in which instinct led him, he would choose a direction approved instead by his intellect, only to find out too late that he was cutting therein a sorry figure. Remember, as a boy he made his entrance into the world "with the fixed intention of being a seducer of women," and that, late in life, he made the melancholy confession that his normal role was that of the lover crossed in love. Here lies the commentary on not a little in Stendhal's life and works.

The facts of his life can be told very briefly.

Henry Beyle, who wrote under the name of Stendhal, was born at Grenoble in 1783, and was educated in his native town. In 1799 he came to Paris and was placed there under the protection of Daru, an important officer under Napoleon, a relative and patron of his family. But he showed no fitness for the various kinds of office work to which he was put. He tried his hand at this time, unsuccessfully also, at painting.

In 1800, still under the protection of Daru, he went to Italy, and, having obtained a commission in the 6th regiment of Dragoons, had his first experience of active service. By 1802 he had distinguished himself as a soldier, and it was to the general surprise of all who knew him, that he returned to France on leave, handed in his papers and returned to Grenoble.

He soon returned to Paris, there to begin serious study. But in 1806, he was once more with Daru and the army,—present at the triumphal entry of Napoleon into Berlin. It was directly after this that he was sent to Brunswick as assistant commissaire des guerres.

He left Brunswick in 1809, but after a flying visit to Paris, he was again given official employment in Germany. He was with the army at Vienna. After the peace of Schoenbrunn he returned once more to Paris in 1810.

In 1812, he saw service once more—taking an active and distinguished part in the Russian campaign of that year. He was complimented by Napoleon on the way he had discharged his duties in the commissariat. He witnessed the burning of Moscow and shared in the horrors and hardships of the retreat.

In 1813 his duties brought him to Segan in Silesia, and in 1814 to his native town of Grenoble.

The fall of Napoleon in the same year deprived him of his position and prospects. He went to Milan and stayed there with little interruption till 1821; only leaving after these, the happiest, years of his life, through fear of being implicated in the Carbonari troubles.

In 1830, he was appointed to the consulate of Trieste; but Metternich, who, no doubt, mistrusted his liberal tendencies, refused to ratify his appointment, and he was transferred to Civita Vecchia. This unhealthy district tried his health, and frequent travel did not succeed in repairing it.

In 1841, he was on leave in Paris, where he died suddenly in the following year.

Stendhal's best-known books are his two novels: La Chartreuse de Parme and Le Rouge et le Noir. Besides these there are his works of travel—Promenades dans Rome and Rome, Florence et Naples; Mémoire d'un Touriste; his history of Italian painting; his lives of Haydn, Mozart and Rossini; L'Abbesse de Castro and other minor works of fiction; finally a number of autobiographical works, of which La Vie de Henri Brulard, begun in his fiftieth year and left incomplete, is the most important.

But De l'Amour, Stendhal himself considered his most important work; it was written, as he tells us, in his happy years in Lombardy. It was published on his return to Paris in 1822, but it had no success, and copies of this edition are very rare. Recently it has been reprinted by Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons (in Chef d'Œuvres de la Littérature Française, London and Paris, 1912). The second edition (1833) had no more success than the first and is equally difficult to find. Stendhal was preparing a third edition for the press when he died in 1842. In 1853 the work made a new appearance in the edition of Stendhal's works published by Michel-Lévy, since reprinted by Calmann-Lévy. It contains certain additions, some of which Stendhal probably intended for the new edition, which he was planning at the time of his death.

Within the last year have appeared the first volumes of a new French edition of Stendhal's works, published by Messrs. Honoré and Edouard Champion of Paris. It will be the most complete edition of Stendhal's works yet published and is the surest evidence that Stendhal's position in French literature is now assured. The volume containing De l'Amour has not yet appeared.

The basis of this translation is the first edition, to which we have only added three prefaces, written by Stendhal at various, subsequent dates and all well worth perusal. Apart from these, we have preferred to leave the book just as it appeared in the two editions, which were published in Stendhal's own lifetime.

We may, perhaps, add a word with regard to our notes at the end of the book. We make no claim that they are exhaustive: we intended only to select some few points for explanation or illustration, with the English reader in view. Here and there in this book are sentences and allusions which we can no more explain than could Stendhal himself, when in 1822 he was correcting the proof-sheets: as he did, we have left them, preferring to believe with him that "the fault lay with the self who was reading, not with the self who had written." But, these few enigmas aside—and they are very few—to make an exhaustive collection of notes on this book would be to write another volume—one of those volumes of "Notes and Appendices," under which scholars bury a Pindar or Catullus. That labour we will gladly leave to others—to be accomplished, we hope, a thousand years hence, when French also is a "dead" language.

In conclusion we should like to express our thanks to our friend Mr. W. H. Morant, of the India Office, who has helped us to see the translation through the Press.

P. and C. N. S. W.

[1] See p. 195, below.

[2] See below, Chap. XXXI.

[3] See note at end of Chap. I, p. 21, below; also p. xiv and p. 157, n. 3, below.

[4] Stendhal confesses that he went so far "as to print several passages which he did not understand himself." (See p. 4, below.)

[5] Maxims of Love (Stendhal). (Royal Library, Arthur Humphreys, London, 1906).

[6] Lady Holland told Lord Broughton in 1815, that she remembered "when it used to be said on the invitation cards: 'No foreigners dine with us.'" (Recollections of a Long Life, Vol. I, p. 327).

[7] He does call it, once or twice, a "Physiology of Love," and elsewhere a "livre d'idéologie," but apologises for its singular form at the same time. (See Fourth Preface, p. 11, and Chap. III, p. 27, n. 1).

[8] See p. 63, n. 1, below.

[9] See p. 339, below.

[10] See Translators' note 11, p. 343, below.

[11] See p. 309, below.

[12] The list may be found in Les plus belles pages de Stendhal (Mercure de France, Paris, 1908, pp. 511–14).

[13] On p. 7, below, Stendhal refers to some of the "best" books on Love.

[14] Histoire de la Littérature Française (800-1900), Paris, 1907.

[15] See Translators' note 47, p. 353, below.

[16] See Chap. XLI, p. 159, below.

[17] See Chap. XLI, p. 160, n. 4, below.

[18] "Like the passion of Love that lends Beauties and Graces to the Person it does embrace; and that makes those who are caught with it, with a depraved and corrupt Judgment, consider the thing they love other and more perfect than it is."—Montaigne's Essays, Bk. II, Chapter XVII (Cotton's translation.) This is "crystallisation"—Stendhal could not explain it better.

We cannot here forgo quoting one more passage from Montaigne, which bears distinctly upon other important views of Stendhal. "I say that Males and Females are cast in the same Mould and that, Education and Usage excepted, the Difference is not great.... It is much more easy to accuse one Sex than to excuse the other. 'Tis according to the Proverb—'Ill may Vice correct Sin.'" (Bk. Ill, Chap. V).

[19] "In a literary sense."

PREFACE[1]

It is in vain that an author solicits the indulgence of his public—the printed page is there to give the lie to his pretended modesty. He would do better to trust to the justice, patience and impartiality of his readers, and it is to this last quality especially that the author of the present work makes his appeal. He has often heard people in France speak of writings, opinions or sentiments as being "truly French"; and so he may well be afraid that, by presenting facts truly as they are, and showing respect only for sentiments and opinions that are universally true, he may have provoked that jealous exclusiveness, which, in spite of its very doubtful character, we have seen of late set up as a virtue. What, I wonder, would become of history, of ethics, of science itself or of literature, if they had to be truly German, truly Russian or Italian, truly Spanish or English, as soon as they had crossed the Rhine, the Alps or the Channel? What are we to say to this kind of justice, to this ambulatory truth? When we see such expressions as "devotion truly Spanish," "virtues truly English," seriously employed in the speeches of patriotic foreigners, it is high time to suspect this sentiment, which expresses itself in very similar terms also elsewhere. At Constantinople or among savages, this blind and exclusive partiality for one's own country is a rabid thirst for blood; among civilised peoples, it is a morbid, unhappy, restless vanity, that is ready to turn on you for a pinprick.[2]

[1] [To the first edition, 1822.—Tr.]

[2] Extract from the Preface to M. Simond's Voyage en Suisse, pp. 7, 8.

PREFACE[1]

ThiS work has had no success: it has been found unintelligible—not without reason. Therefore in this new edition the author's primary intention has been to render his ideas with clearness. He has related how they came to him, and he has made a preface and an introduction—all in order to be clear. Yet, in spite of so much care, out of a hundred who have read Corinne, there are not four readers who will understand this volume.

Although it deals with Love, this little book is no novel, and still less is it diverting like a novel. 'Tis simply and solely an exact scientific description of a kind of madness which is very rarely to be found in France. The Empire of propriety, growing day by day wider, under the influence of our fear of ridicule much more than through the purity of our morals, has made of the word, which serves as title to this work, an expression, of which outspoken mention is avoided and which at times seems even to give offence. I have been forced to make use of it, but the scientific austerity of the language shelters me, I think, in this respect, from all reproach.

I know one or two Secretaries of Legation who will, at their return, be able to tender me their services. Till then what can I say to the people who deny the facts of my narration? Beg them not to listen to it.

The form I have adopted may be reproached with egoism. A traveller is allowed to say: "I was at New York, thence I embarked for South America, I made my way back as far as Santa-Fé-de-Bogota. The gnats and mosquitoes made my life a misery during the journey, and for three days I couldn't use my right eye."

The traveller is not accused of loving to talk of himself: all his me's and my's are forgiven; for that is the clearest and most interesting manner of telling what he has seen.

It is in order, if possible, to be clear and picturesque, that the author of the present voyage into the little-known regions of the human heart says: "I went with Mme. Gherardi to the salt mines of Hallein.... Princess Crescenzi said to me at Rome.... One day at Berlin I saw handsome Capt. L...." All these little things really happened to the author, who passed fifteen years in Germany and Italy. But more observant than sensitive, he never encountered the least adventure himself, never experienced a single personal sentiment worthy of narration. Even supposing that he had the pride to believe the contrary, a still greater pride would have prevented him from publishing his heart and selling it on the market for six francs, like those people who in their lifetime publish their memoirs.

Correcting in 1822 the proofs of this kind of moral voyage in Italy and Germany, the author, who had described the objects the day that he had seen them, treated the manuscript, containing the detailed description of all the phases of this malady of the soul called Love, with that blind respect, shown by a scholar of the fourteenth century for a newly unearthed manuscript of Lactantius or Quintius Curtius. When the author met some obscure passage (and often, to say the truth, that happened), he always believed that the fault lay with the self who was reading, not with the self who had written. He confesses that his respect for the early manuscript carried him so far as to print several passages, which he did not understand himself. Nothing more foolish for anyone who had thought of the good graces of the public; but the author, seeing Paris again after long travels, came to the conclusion that without grovelling before the Press a success was not to be had. Well, let him who brings himself to grovel keep that for the minister in power! A so-called success being out of the question, the author was pleased to publish his thoughts exactly as they had come to him. This was once upon a time the procedure of those philosophers of Greece, whose practical wisdom filled him with rapturous admiration.

It requires years to gain admittance to the inner circle of Italian society. Perhaps I shall have been the last traveller in that country. For since the Carbonari and the Austrian invasion, no foreigner will ever be received as a friend in the salons, where such reckless gaiety reigned. The traveller will see the monuments, streets and public places of a city, never the society—he will always be held in fear: the inhabitants will suspect that he is a spy, or fear that he is laughing at the battle of Antrodoco and at the degradations, which, in that land, are the one and only safeguard against the persecution of the eight or ten ministers or favourites who surround the Prince. Personally, I really loved the inhabitants and could see the truth. Sometimes for ten months together I never spoke a word of French, and but for political troubles and the Carbonari I would never have returned to France. Good-nature is what I prize above all things.

In spite of great care to be clear and lucid, I cannot perform miracles: I cannot give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. So the people of great fortunes and gross pleasures, who have made a hundred thousand francs in the year preceding the moment they open this book, had better quickly shut it, especially if they are bankers, manufacturers, respectable industrial folk—that's to say, people with eminently positive ideas. This book would be less unintelligible to anyone who had made a large sum of money on the Stock Exchange or in a lottery. Such winnings may be found side by side with the habit of passing hours together in day-dreams, in the enjoyment of the emotion evoked by a picture of Prud'hon, a phrase of Mozart, still more, a certain peculiar look of a woman who is often in your thoughts. 'Tis not in this way that these people "waste their time," who pay ten thousand workmen at the end of each week: their minds work always towards the useful and the positive. The dreamer, of whom I speak, is the man they would hate, if they had time; 'tis him they like to make the butt of their harmless jokes. The industrial millionaire feels confusedly that such a man has more estime for a thought than for a bag of money.

I invite the studious young man to withdraw, if in the same year as the industrial gained a hundred thousand francs, he has acquired the knowledge of modern Greek, and is so proud of it that already he aspires to Arabic. I beg not to open this book every man, who has not been unhappy for imaginary reasons, reasons to which vanity is stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in the salons.

I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of these very salons by an affectation that never lapses for an instant. Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of real feelings? In fact this work has been their bête noire: they say that the author must be a wretch.

To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibility and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of the salon, but in the eyes of a certain person in the salon; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)—or even to enter the salon where the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself—these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change in the tariff of Columbia.[2]

The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak, the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called the Passion of Love.

Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical figure, but on one condition—that it exists already on the blackboard, for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling, something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can a passion be seen?

This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.

Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula. Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as the Nouvelle Héloïse, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and Manon Lescaut, have been written in France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches its full height scarcely ever.

What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it described—without ever feeling it—in hundreds of celebrated volumes, what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness? I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness."

Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase behind the other books—I should even leave a few pages uncut.

'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily, those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet to possess enough penetration to judge a priori of the degree of exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered description of these weaknesses.

The grave persons, who enjoy in society their reputation as safe men with no romantic nonsense, are far nearer to the understanding of a novel, however impassioned, than of a book of philosophy, wherein the author describes coldly the various stages of the malady of the soul called Love. The novel moves them a little; but before the philosophic treatise these sensible people are like blind men, who getting a description of the pictures in a museum read out to them, would say to the author: "You must agree, sir, that your work is horribly obscure." What is to happen if these blind men chance to be wits, established long since in possession of that title and with sovereign claims to clairvoyance? The poor author will be treated prettily. In fact, it is what happened to him at the time of the first edition. Several copies were actually burnt through the raging vanity of very clever people. I do not speak of insults all the more flattering for their fury: the author was proclaimed to be coarse, immoral, a writer for the people, a suspicious character, etc. In countries outworn by monarchy, these titles are the surest reward for whoever thinks good to write on morals and does not dedicate his book to the Mme. Dubarry of the day. Blessed literature, if it were not in fashion, and interested those alone for whom it was written!

In the time of the Cid, Corneille was nothing for M. le Marquis de Danjeau[3] but "a good fellow." Today the whole world thinks itself made to read M. de Lamartine: so much the better for his publisher, but so much the worse, and a hundred times the worse, for that great poet. In our days genius offers accommodation to people to whom, under penalty of losing caste, it should never so much as give a thought.

The laborious and active, very estimable and very positive life of a counsellor of State, of a manufacturer of cotton goods or of a banker with a keen eye for loans finds its reward in millions, not in tender sensation. Little by little the heart of these gentlemen ossifies: the positive and the useful are for them everything, and their soul is closed to that feeling, which of all others has the greatest need of our leisure and makes us most unfit for any rational and steady occupation.

The only object of this preface is to proclaim that this book has the misfortune of being incomprehensible to all who have not found time to play the fool. Many people will feel offended and I trust they will go no further.

[1] [May, 1826.—Tr.]

[2] "Cut this passage out," say my friends. "Nothing could be truer, but beware of the men of business: they'll cry out on the aristocrat." In 1812 I was not afraid of the Treasury: so why should I be afraid of the millionaire in 1820? The ships supplied to the Pasha of Egypt have opened my eyes in their direction, and I fear nothing but what I respect.

[3] Vide p. 120 of Mémoires de Danjeau (Édition Genlis).

PREFACE[1]

I write for a hundred readers only and of these unhappy charming beings, without hypocrisy or moral cant, whom I would please, I know scarcely a couple. Of such as lie to gain consideration as writers, I take little heed. Certain fine ladies should keep to the accounts of their cook and the fashionable preacher of the day, be it Massillon or Mme. Necker, to be able to talk on these topics with the women of importance who mete out consideration. And to be sure, in France this noble distinction is always to be won by turning high priest of any fad.

To anyone who would read this book I would say: In all your life have you been unhappy six months for love?

Or, was your soul ever touched by sorrow not connected with the thought of a lawsuit, with failure at the last election, or with having cut a less brilliant figure than usual last season at Aix? I will continue my indiscretions and ask if in the year you have read any of those impudent works, which compel the reader to think? For example, Émile of J. J. Rousseau, or the six volumes of Montaigne? If, I should say, you have never suffered through this infirmity of noble minds, if you have not, in defiance of nature, the habit of thinking as you read, this book will give you a grudge against its author: for it will make you suspect that there exists a certain happiness, unknown to you and known to Mlle. de Lespinasse.

[1] [May, 1834.—Tr.]

PREFACE[1]

I come to beg indulgence of the reader for the peculiar form of this Physiology of Love. It is twenty-eight years (in 1842) since the turmoil, which followed the fall of Napoleon, deprived me of my position. Two years earlier chance threw me, immediately after the horrors of the retreat from Russia, into the midst of a charming town, where I had the enchanting prospect of passing the rest of my days. In happy Lombardy, at Milan, at Venice, the great, or rather only, business of life is pleasure. No attention, there, to the deeds and movements of your neighbour; hardly a troubled thought for what is to happen to you. If a man notice the existence of his neighbour, it does not enter his head to hate him. Take away from the occupations of a French provincial town jealousy—and what is left? The absence, the impossibility of that cruel jealousy forms the surest part of that happiness, which draws all the provincials to Paris.

Following the masked balls of Carnival, which in 1820 was more brilliant than usual, the noise of five or six completely reckless proceedings occupied the society of Milan an entire month; although they are used over there to things which in France would pass for incredible. The fear of ridicule would in this country paralyse such fantastic actions: only to speak of them I need great courage.

One evening people were discussing profoundly the effects and the causes of these extravagances, at the house of the charming Mme. Pietra Grua(6), who happened, extraordinarily enough, not to be mixed up with these escapades. The thought came to me that perhaps in less than a year I should have nothing left of all those strange facts, and of the causes alleged for them, but a recollection, on which I could not depend. I got hold of a concert programme, and wrote a few words on it in pencil. A game of faro was suggested: we were thirty seated round a card-table, but the conversation was so animated that people forgot to play. Towards the close of the evening came in Col. Scotti, one of the most charming men in the Italian army: he was asked for his quantum of circumstances relative to the curious facts with which we were busy, and, indeed, his story of certain things, which chance had confided to his knowledge, gave them an entirely new aspect. I took up my concert programme and added these new circumstances.

This collection of particulars on Love was continued in the same way, with pencil and odd scraps of paper, snatched up in the salons, where I heard the anecdotes told. Soon I looked for a common rule by which to recognise different degrees in them. Two months later fear of being taken for a Carbonaro made me return to Paris—only for a few months I hoped, but never again have I seen Milan, where I had passed seven years.

Pining with boredom at Paris, I conceived the idea of occupying myself again with the charming country from which fear had driven me. I strung together my scraps of paper and presented the book to a publisher. But soon a difficulty was raised: the printer declared that it was impossible to work from notes written in pencil and I could see that he found such copy beneath his dignity. The printer's young apprentice, who brought me back my notes, seemed quite ashamed of the more than doubtful compliment, which had been put into his mouth: he knew how to write and I dictated to him my pencil notes.

I understood, too, that discretion required me to change the proper names, and, above all, abridge the anecdotes. Although no one reads in Milan, the book, if ever it reached there, might have seemed a piece of wicked mischief.

So I brought out an ill-fated volume. I have the courage to own that I despised at that period elegance in style. I saw the young apprentice wholly taken up with avoiding sentence-endings that were unmusical and odd sounds in the arrangement of words. In return, he made throughout no scruple of changing details of fact, difficult to express: Voltaire himself is afraid of things which are difficult to tell.

The Essay on Love had no claim to merit except the number of the fine shades of feeling, which I begged the reader to verify among his memories, if he were happy enough to have any. But in all this there was something much worse: I was then, as ever, very inexperienced in the department of literature and the publisher, to whom I had presented the MS., printed it on bad paper and in an absurd format. In fact a month later, when I asked him for news of the book—"On peut dire qu'il est sacré,"[2] he said, "For no one comes near it."

It had never even crossed my mind to solicit articles in the papers: such a thing would have seemed to me an ignominy. And yet no work was in more pressing need of recommendation to the patience of the reader. Under the menace of becoming unintelligible at the very outset, it was necessary to bring the public to accept the new word "crystallisation," suggested as a lively expression for that collection of strange fancies, which we weave round our idea of the loved one, as true and even indubitable realities.

At that time wholly absorbed in my love for the least details, which I had lately observed in the Italy of my dreams, I avoided with care every concession, every amenity of style, which might have rendered the Essay on Love less peculiarly fantastic in the eyes of men of letters.

Further, I was not flattering to the public. Literature at that time, all defaced by our great and recent misfortunes, seemed to have no other interest than the consolation of our unhappy pride: it used to rhyme "gloire" with "victoire," "guerriers" with "lauriers,"[3] etc. The true circumstances of the situations, which it pretends to treat, seem never to have any attraction for the tedious literature of that period: it looks for nothing but an opportunity of complimenting that people, enslaved to fashion, whom a great man had called a great nation, forgetting that they were only great on condition that their leader was himself.

As the result of my ignorance of the exigencies of the humblest success, I found no more than seventeen readers between 1822 and 1833: it is doubtful whether the Essay on Love has been understood after twenty years of existence by a hundred connoisseurs. A few have had the patience to observe the various phases of this disease in the people infected with it in their circle; for we must speak of it as a disease, in order to understand that passion which in the last thirty years our fear of ridicule has taken so much trouble to hide—it is this way which sometimes leads to its cure.

Now and now only, after half a century of revolutions, engrossing one after another our whole attention, now and now only after five complete changes in the form and the tendencies of our government, does the revolution just begin to show itself in our way of living. Love, or that which commonly appropriates Love's name and fills its place, was all-powerful in the France of Lewis XV. Colonels were created by the ladies of the court; and that court was nothing less than the fairest place in the kingdom. Fifty years after, the court is no more; and the gift of a licence to sell tobacco in the meanest provincial town is beyond the power of the most surely established ladies of the reigning bourgeoisie or of the pouting nobility.

It must be owned, women are out of fashion. In our brilliant salons the young men of twenty affect not to address them; they much prefer to stand round the noisy talker dealing, in a provincial accent, with the question of the right to vote, and to try and slip in their own little word. The rich youths, who, to keep up a show of the good-fellowship of past times, take a pride in seeming frivolous, prefer to talk horses and play high in the circles where women are excluded. The deadly indifference which seems to preside over the relations of young men and the women of five-and-twenty, for whose presence society has to thank the boredom of marriage, will bring, perhaps, a few wise spirits to accept this scrupulously exact description of the successive phases of the malady called Love.

Seeing the terrible change which has plunged us into the stagnation of to-day, and makes unintelligible to us the society of 1778, such as we find it in the letters of Diderot to Mlle. Voland, his mistress, or in the Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, a man might ask the question, which of our successive governments has killed in us the faculty of enjoying ourselves, and drawn us nearer to the gloomiest people on the face of the earth? The only passable thing which that people have invented—parliament and the honesty of their parties—we are unable even to copy. In return, the stupidest of their gloomy conceptions, the spirit of dignity, has come among us to take the place of our French gaiety, which is to be found now only in the five hundred balls in the outskirts of Paris or in the south of France, beyond Bordeaux.

But which of our successive governments has cost us the fearful misfortune of anglicisation? Must we accuse that energetic government of 1793, which prevented the foreigners from coming to pitch their camp in Montmartre—that government which in a few years will seem heroic in our eyes and forms a worthy prelude to that, which under Napoleon, went forth to carry our name into all the capitals of Europe?

We shall pass over the well-meaning stupidity of the Directoire, illustrated by the talents of Carnot and the immortal campaign of 1796–1797 in Italy.

The corruption of the court of Barras still recalled something of the gaiety of the old order; the graces of Madame Bonaparte proved that we had no aptitude at that time for the churlishness and charnel-house of the English.

The profound respect, which despite the jealousy of the faubourg Saint-Germain, we could not but feel for the First Consul's method of government, and the men whose superior merit adorned the society of Paris—such as the Cretets and the Darus—relieves the Empire of the burden of responsibility for the remarkable change which has been effected, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the character of the French.

Unnecessary to carry my investigation further: the reader will reflect and be quite able to draw his own conclusions.

[1] [1842. As Stendhal died early in that year, this probably is his last writing.—Tr.]

[2] ["One might say it's taboo..." "Taboo" is a poor equivalent for "sacré," which means "cursed" as well as "blessed."—Tr.]

[3] ["Glory with victory, warrior with laurel."—Tr.]

BOOK I

ON LOVE

CHAPTER I OF LOVE

My aim is to comprehend that passion, of which every sincere development has a character of beauty.

There are four kinds of love.

1. Passion-love—that of the Portuguese nun(1), of Héloïse for Abelard, of Captain de Vésel, of Sergeant de Cento.

2. Gallant love—that which ruled in Paris towards 1760, to be found in the memoirs and novels of the period, in Crébillon, Lauzun, Duclos, Marmontel, Chamfort, Mme. d'Épinay, etc. etc.

'Tis a picture in which everything, to the very shadows, should be rose-colour, in which may enter nothing disagreeable under any pretext whatsoever, at the cost of a lapse of etiquette, of good taste, of refinement, etc. A man of breeding foresees all the ways of acting, that he is likely to adopt or meet with in the different phases of this love. True love is often less refined; for that in which there is no passion and nothing unforeseen, has always a store of ready wit: the latter is a cold and pretty miniature, the former a picture by the Carracci. Passion-love carries us away in defiance of all our interests, gallant love manages always to respect them. True, if we take from this poor love its vanity, there is very little left: once stripped, it is like a tottering convalescent, scarcely able to drag himself along.