IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
271
official and a cold-blooded organizer who did not lose
his
calm
even in danger. When Napoleon's fall threw him out of the saddle, he
was in his thirty-second year. The first, active, successful, and bril–
liant part of his career was over. Thenceforth he has no profession
and no place claims him. He can go where he pleases, so long as
he has money enough and so long as the suspicious officials of the
post-Napoleonic period have no objection to his sojourns. But
his
financial circumstances gradually become worse; in 1821 he is exiled
from Milan, where he had settled, by Metternich's police; he goes to
Paris, and there he lives for another nine years, without a profession,
alone, and with very slender means. Mter the July Revolution his
friends get him a post in the diplomatic service; since the Austrians
refuse him an
exequatur
for Trieste, he has to go as consul to the
little port of Civita Vecchia; it is a dreary place to live, and there
are those who try to get him into trouble if he prolongs his visits
to Rome unduly; to be sure, he is allowed to spend a few years in
Paris on leave-so long, that is, as one of his protectors is Minister
of Foreign Affairs. Finally he falls seriously
ill
in Civita Vecchia
and is given another leave in Paris; he dies there in 1842, smitten
by apoplexy in the street, not yet sixty. This is the second half of
his life; during
this
period, he acquires the reputation of being a
witty, eccentric, politically and morally unreliable man; during this
period, he begins to write. He writes first on music, on Italy and
Italian art, on love; it is not until he is forty-three and is in Paris
during the first flowering of
I
the Romantic movement (to which he
contributed in his way) that he publishes his first novel.
From this sketch of his life it should appear that he first reached
the point of accounting for himself, and the point of realistic writing,
when he was seeking a haven in
his
"storm-tossed boat," and
dis–
covered that, for his boat, there was no fit and safe haven; when,
though in no sense weary or discouraged, yet already a man of
forty, whose early and successful career lay far behind him, alone
and comparatively poor, he became aware, with all the sting of
that knowledge, that he belonged nowhere. For the first time, the
world around him became a problem; his feeling that he was dif–
ferent from other men, until now borne easily and proudly, doubt–
less now first became the predominant concern of his consciousness
and hence the recurring theme of
his
literary activity. Stendhal's
