STENDHAL
13
innocent sort. This is also one interpretation to be placed on a
passage in a letter written by her after his abandonment of her–
in any case, one of the most pathetic documents in literary
biography:
I assure you again of my loyal devotion and genuine ten·
derness; I have already given you sufficient proofs of both, and
you have replied only with vague letters, saying that you love
me, that you still love me, and that I will realize it two weeks
from now when I see you again. All of that means only that
when we meet you will make love to me a great deal, and swear
you adore me, and that you live again now that you are with me,
and all that sort of thing. That may seem like a great deal to
you, but I am afraid it has very little real meaning to me, espe·
cially when I consider your conduct as a whole, and your charac–
ter as a whole; it cannot prove to me that you love me as I wish
you to and as I must be loved if I am ever to be happy and at
peace. And that is why I beg you to be frank with me....
Of course it cannot be proved definitely that Henri Beyle
suffered from a real or psychopathic impotence. Nor is it to be
supposed that even if such proof were available it would ade–
quately explain everything in his life and work. But if the value
of any hypothesis is to be tested by the number of things that it
allows us to put together we have here an extremely fertile
hypothesis. Not only does it suggest the reason for the obsessive
repetition of the frustration-pattern in the novels and the peculiar
opacity of his treatment of love but also his attitudes toward many
other unrelated subjects. For the dislocation of the love-object,
which here may now possibly be more closely defined as an en–
forced separation of sentiment from its appropriate object, is not
a single aspect of an individual; it affects every aspect of his being.
Very generally, it determines what may be called the domi–
nant personality-tone-in Stendhal's case, the sense of self-humil–
iation. Like Lucien Leuwen, who compels a beautiful and virtuous
woman to fall in love with him simply because she has once seen
him fall off a horse, his sole impulse is to
prove
himself to himself
by some objective and incontrovertible gesture. But since this can–
not be accomplished in any direct and sincere fashion he resorts
to two extreme stratagems-deception and violence.
It
is clearly
the first that explains the fondness for intrigue, masquerade and
pseudonymity already indicated. And most of the characters have
the same secretive cunning about them: Octave has his "terrible
