L audace de julien stendhal biography

Stendhal's first novel, Armance , was scorned by the critics. In the first of his two great novels, Le Rouge et le Noir tr. The Red and the Black , was published. The Red in the title symbolizes the army and liberalism, and the Black the reactionary clergy. It is, baldly, the story of a sensitive but calculating youth, Julien Sorel, who pursues his ambitions by seduction and is eventually guillotined for shooting his mistress.

Its sympathetic and acute character analysis and its picture of the period make it one of the world's great novels. After the accession of Louis Philippe, Stendhal was appointed consul at Trieste, but because Metternich objected to his books and liberal ideas, he was shifted to Civitavecchia in During a three-year leave of absence —39 , which he spent in Paris or in traveling about France, he wrote what many consider his greatest novel, La Chartreuse de Parme , tr.

The Charterhouse of Parma. Read more on Wikipedia Since , the English Wikipedia page of Stendhal has received more than 1,, page views. Others Born in Go to all Rankings. Others Deceased in Go to all Rankings. Others born in France Go to all Rankings. French born Writers Go to all Rankings. Also published was a more extended autobiographical work, thinly disguised as the Life of Henry Brulard.

His other works include short stories, journalism, travel books A Roman Journal , a famous collection of essays on Italian painting, and biographies of several prominent figures of his time, including Napoleon , Haydn , Mozart , Rossini and Metastasio. In Stendhal's classic On Love [ fr ] he describes or compares the "birth of love", in which the love object is 'crystallized' in the mind, as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome.

In the analogy, the city of Bologna represents indifference and Rome represents perfect love :. When we are in Bologna, we are entirely indifferent; we are not concerned to admire in any particular way the person with whom we shall perhaps one day be madly in love; even less is our imagination inclined to overrate their worth. In a word, in Bologna "crystallization" has not yet begun.

When the journey begins, love departs. One leaves Bologna, climbs the Apennines , and takes the road to Rome. The departure, according to Stendhal, has nothing to do with one's will; it is an instinctive moment. This transformative process actuates in terms of four steps along a journey:.

L audace de julien stendhal biography

This journey or crystallization process shown above was detailed by Stendhal on the back of a playing card while speaking to Madame Gherardi, during his trip to the Salzburg salt mine. Hippolyte Taine considered the psychological portraits of Stendhal's characters to be "real, because they are complex, many-sided, particular and original, like living human beings.

At that point it became suddenly evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore as a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. Erich Auerbach considers modern "serious realism" to have begun with Stendhal and Balzac. Simone de Beauvoir uses Stendhal as an example of a feminist author.

In The Second Sex de Beauvoir writes "Stendhal never describes his heroines as a function of his heroes: he provides them with their own destinies. Even Stendhal's autobiographical works, such as The Life of Henry Brulard or Memoirs of an Egotist , are "far more closely, essentially, and concretely connected with the politics, sociology, and economics of the period than are, for example, the corresponding works of Rousseau or Goethe ; one feels that the great events of contemporary history affected Stendhal much more directly than they did the other two; Rousseau did not live to see them, and Goethe had managed to keep aloof from them.

We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble. Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity.

There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject.

But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; circumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before him. Vladimir Nabokov was dismissive of Stendhal, in Strong Opinions calling him "that pet of all those who like their French plain".

In the notes to his translation of Eugene Onegin , he asserts that Le Rouge et le Noir is "much overrated", and that Stendhal has a "paltry style". In Pnin Nabokov wrote satirically, "Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy , Dreiser , and Mann were great writers. Michael Dirda considers Stendhal "the greatest all round French writer — author of two of the top 20 French novels, author of a highly original autobiography Vie de Henry Brulard , a superb travel writer, and as inimitable a presence on the page as any writer you'll ever meet.

In Stendhal was reportedly overcome by the cultural richness of Florence he encountered when he first visited the Tuscan city. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves ; the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.

The condition was diagnosed and named in by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini , who had noticed similar psychosomatic conditions racing heart beat, nausea and dizziness amongst first-time visitors to the city. In homage to Stendhal, Trenitalia named their overnight train service from Paris to Venice the Stendhal Express, though there is no physical distress connected to it.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. French writer — This article is about the writer. For the German city, see Stendal. Life [ edit ]. Pseudonyms [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Novels [ edit ].

Novellas [ edit ]. Biography [ edit ]. Autobiography [ edit ]. Non-fiction [ edit ]. Crystallization [ edit ]. Main article: Crystallization love. Critical appraisal [ edit ]. Stendhal syndrome [ edit ]. Main article: Stendhal syndrome. See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Stendhal: The Red and the Black. Cambridge University Press.