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.
[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).
[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."
