6
PARTISAN REVIEW
geois with vague Royalist leanings, we have what is perhaps the
key to his whole attitude toward any kind of authority. Instead of
sympathizing with his father, who is on a list of suspects during
the Revolution, he ponders, "My father glories in execrating 'the
new order of things' (a term then fashionable among the aristo–
crats); what right have they to get angry?" This indignation not
so much at injustice as at lack of logic, indicated by the peculiar
emphasis on the word
right,
was to lead Stendhal to the rejection
of much besides paternal authority. It had already led to a com–
plete and final rejection of religion. At his mother's early death
his main feeling is one of astonishment-perhaps that such a thing
could happen to him. "I began to speak evil of God," he says
simply. It was not "right" that the warm circle of his mother's
affection should be intruded upon by the stupid fact of death.
But it is wholly unnecessary to prod further into what is the
open scandal of
Henri Brulard
and the
Souvenirs of Egotism.
It
will be enuugh to point to the more objective consequences. Turning
to his first attempt at narrative, the tenuous but rather charming
and too little read
Armance,
we find that the hero is a sensitive and
gifted young aristocrat-the precursor of Villiers' Axel, Huys·
mans' Des Esseintes, and the early Proustian characters-suffering
from a malady whose precise source is clear neither to himself
nor the reader. Octave's "sole pleasure consists in living isolated
and with nobody in the world having the right to address him a
word." Exception is made for his mother-the only person in the
world that he can love. Despite his avowed detestation of society
he is persuaded to put in an appearance at certain of the great
houses of the Faubourg, and in time becomes gradually involved
in a curious sort of intimacy with a young woman of his own class.
To call this a love-affair is inaccurate; it is one of the vaguest rela–
tionships in all fiction. The girl is hardly more than a substitute
for the mother as an audience for the hero's endless self-revela–
tions and articulated
horror vitae.
Finally he admits to her that he
cannot love either her or anyone else-because of a terrible secret
that sets him apart from all living men. This secret turns out to be
that he is a man altogether "without conscience." What is of course
puzzling is the complete lack of any overt wickedness in his be–
havior and the reader is left wondering as to the particular nature
of his crime. Yet other characters hint at sinister elements in his
