there, as if in a welcoming prison:
Because of the forebodings that troubled me, I wanted to make this refuge a perpetual prison for me, to confine me to it for life, and removing every possibility and hope of getting off it – to forbid me any kind of communication with the mainland so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and that it might also forget mine.5
The ‘real’ prison in which the fictive assassin is locked up is very similar to the metaphorical prison where the man who considered himself condemned by his fellow beings would have liked to end his life. It is also inside a prison that the young Fabrice del Dongo – whom the reader of The Charterhouse of Parma is led to believe is the illegitimate son of one of these children of the people whom the French Revolution turned into generals – tastes happiness, by looking at Clélia’s window, that worldly intrigues, success as a preacher, and the possession of women would never equal. The carpenter’s son smokes cigars on the terrace, the son of the marquise is busy doing woodwork that will yield his square patch of sky and a view onto the window with the birdcages. This role reversal amounts to the same (in)occupation: thinking of nothing except the present moment, enjoying nothing other than the pure feeling of existence, and maybe the pleasure of sharing it with an equally sensible soul. The son of the Geneva watchmaker very precisely designated the content of this enjoyment: ‘The precious far niente was the first and the principal enjoyment I wanted to savor in all its sweetness, and all I did during my sojourn was in effect only the delicious and necessary occupation of a man who has devoted himself to idleness.’6
It is important to grasp the power of subversion of this innocent far niente. Far niente is not laziness. It is the enjoyment of otium. Otium is specifically the time when one is expecting nothing, precisely the kind of time that is forbidden to the plebeian, whom the anxiety of emerging from his condition always condemns to waiting for the effect of chance or intrigue. This is not the lack of occupation but the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations. The ancient opposition of patricians and plebeians is in effect firstly a matter of different ‘occupations’. An occupation is a way of being for bodies and minds. The patrician occupation is to act, to pursue grand designs in which their own success is identified with the destiny of vast communities. Plebeians are bound to do – to make useful objects and provide material services to meet the needs of their individual survival. The time that shaped Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo witnessed the upheaval of this ancient hierarchy. Usually we only recall its most visible aspect: the sons of the people who want to act and get involved in the great matters of communities at the cost of creating a reign of revolutionary terror. And the responsibility for this terror is readily attributed to the author of the Social Contract. The other aspect of the egalitarian revolution is less easily accounted for: the promotion of this quality of sensible experience where one does nothing, a quality equally offered to those whom the old order separated into men of pleasure and men of work and that the new order still divides into active and passive citizens. This state of suspension, the sensible state freed from the interests and hierarchies of knowledge and enjoyment, was characterized by Kant as the object of the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment. Schiller made it into the object of a play drive that blurs the old opposition between form and content. The former saw the principle of a new kind of common sense, likely to unite still distant classes, within this universality without concept. The latter opposed the violent revolution of political institutions with an aesthetic education of humanity drawing a new principle of freedom from this sensible equality. But neither of the two concealed the debt owed to the first theoretician of this disinterested sensible state. It was Rousseau who had theorized it before them under the name ‘reverie’.
Stendhal hardly knew Kant and Schiller. On the other hand, he felt a youthful passion for the author of the New Heloise, followed by a mature man’s aversion for his argumentative lovers and his exaltation of rustic simplicity. And in the author of the Social Contract, he did not despise the supposed inspiration for the sans-culottes, but the father of a democracy that he identified with the power of Manhattan shopkeepers and artisans with whom he was obsessed all the more as he had never had the chance to meet a single one. But, by rejecting the author of the Social Contract, we are not yet rid of the one who wrote the Confessions and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Stendhal dismissed the equality of citizens, but only in order better to identify the sovereign good with another equality, the equality of that pure enjoyment of existence and of the shared sensible moment that makes all the intrigues of good society, and class differences, seem derisive. Julien and Fabrice equally enjoy the supreme happiness of the plebeian in prison, of Rousseau’s joy lying in his barque – the happiness of expecting nothing from the future, enjoying a present without gaps, without the bite of a mourned or a regretted past, or a feared or hoped for future. And it is not difficult to recognize each one of the steps in the ‘conquest’ of Madame de Rênal as so many souvenirs of exceptional sensible moments evoked by the author of the Confessions: a maternal woman, like Madame de Warens, who welcomes the son of the artisan and the dead woman at her door; butterfly chases that recall a famous cherry-picking episode; a hand grasped and kissed, like Mademoiselle Galley’s on the evening of a day spent in the country; tearfully embraced knees that recall the silent moment of happiness spent in Turin at Madame Basile’s knees … In the same way, one can easily find young Jean-Jacques’s treasured walnut tree in Fabrice’s beloved chestnut tree, and the evenings on the shores of the Lac de Bienne in a certain evening on the shores of lake Como, where universal silence is only disturbed at equal intervals by the small waves dying on the shore.
What matters here is clearly not Stendhal’s ambivalence as a novelist towards the writer who inspired him in his youth. It is the textual transfer of the philosopher’s childhood memories and reveries into the heart of action novels that tell us about the enterprises of an admirer of Napoleon and the son of one of his generals. It is how these narratives bear witness to the twisted relation between the growth of the novelistic form and the rise of plebeians in the new society. One and the other only coincide, in effect, through a singular play of profit and loss. The sensitive plebeian who sets out to conquer society does so at the cost of sacrificing the only happiness that could satisfy him: the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations in the equality found in the pure sharing of a sensation or an emotion. He is condemned, he condemns himself, to the bitterness and the deceptions of the other equality: equality as a form of revenge against humiliation, sought in the network of intertwined intrigues of all those who occupy or strive to occupy some position in society, to exert or strive to exert some influence. The most dim-witted of young gentlemen will always have the means to push the overly gifted plebeian back into the mediocrity of his condition, the slightest Jesuit from some sub-prefecture will always have the power to ruin his audacious enterprises. For they have already sacrificed sensible happiness to social performance. The Russian aristocrats, ridiculous champions of vain success, sum up the entire affair in some praise and a maxim: while congratulating Julien on possessing a naturally cold appearance ‘a thousand miles from the sensation of the moment’, they invite him to ‘always do exactly the contrary of what people expect’.7 One could hardly give a better definition of the means of never attaining happiness, disguised as an unfailing recipe for success. For happiness only exists in present sensation where there is nothing to wait for and nothing to fake.
It is true that the sorrow of characters normally makes for the happiness of books. This was the case for those great misfortunes that constituted the subject of tragedy for Aristotle. It also applied to the adventures punctuating Don Quixote’s quest for feats from another time, as it did to Tom Jones or Jacob profiting from the modern confusion of conditions and sentiments, and even to the non-adventures of Tristram Shandy. The novelist could choose whether to give happiness to his characters at the end of their tribulations. The essence of the matter lay in the agreement between these tribulations and the sinuous line of the novel. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac still laid claim to this sinuous line that placed the adventures of the modern sons of the countryside in continuity with those of ancient masters. But only in order to doubt, a few pages later, whether any novel could ever rival the sober genius of a few lines of news in brief:
