14
PAR1'1SAN REYIEJ1'
secret" from the world; Julien confides only in the mountains and
the skies the extent of his Napoleonic campaign against society.
But
deception actually turns out to be self-deception, and, as we
have seen, all of them come to a bad end. The Machiavellian will
does not easily displace the wounded sensibility of which it is the
inverted expression. But since it is through his celebration of the
other mode of self-assertion, the mode of violence, that Stendhal
has probably had his most concrete influence we must look at the
manner in which this is represented in his work.
Violence in the crude sense finds its symbol in the familiar
figure of the outlaw or criminal. Ferrante Palla, the nationalist
revolutionary poet in the
Charterhouse,
is rendered with such
brio
as to emerge the only truly heroic character in that novel. At the
end Julien succeeds in becoming what he has subconsciously de·
sired to be all along-an enemy of society in deed as well as in
thought. In the notes for
Lamiel
we are told that the hero was to
be an arch-criminal named Valbayre, who would declare, "I am
waging war on society, which is waging war on me." Symbolically
enough, the heroine was to avenge his death by burning down the
Palace of Justice, in the ashes of which her own bones were to be
found. Even mild-tempered Fabrizio seems to be delighted when
referred to as the "great culprit." Undoubtedly, there is a survival
here of the Noble Brigand tradition of Schiller and Byron-a pop–
ular literary tradition. And Stendhal was among the first to intro–
duce that nostalgic glorification of the exploits and misdeeds of
the Italian city-princes of the Renaissance which was to be carried
so far by Burckhardt. But what is important is the manner in
which these outside influences are modified to suit the necessities
of a particular sort of temperament at a particular moment of time.
The criminal-type is no longer the confused and sometimes
philanthropically motivated rebel of the romantic period; he is
more cerebral; he has taken on a Latin sharpness and lucidity of
mind. There has also intervened the grand example of Napoleon–
the criminal among the nations. He now knows that what he is
against is not a class but the whole of society-even the
idea
of
society. Of all the men at a ball, Mathilde de la Mole is interested
only in a picturesque Spanish conspirator who is under sentence
of death. "I can see nothing but a sentence of death that dis·
tinguishes a man," she remarks, "it is the only thing that cannot
