IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
275
artfully contrived intrigue in particular (together with passion) plays
a decisive role in his plot construction, while the historical forces
which are the basis of it hardly appear. Naturally all this can be
explained by his political viewpoint, which was democratic-repub–
lican; this alone sufficed to render him immune to Romantic His–
toricism; besides which the emphatic manner of such writers as
Chateaubriand displeased him in the extreme. On the other hand,
he treats even the classes of society which, according to his views,
should be closest to him, extremely critically and without a trace of
the emotional values which Romanticism attached to the word "peo–
ple." The practically active bourgeoisie with its respectable money–
making, inspired him with unconquerable boredom, he shudders at
the
"vertu republicaine"
of the United States, and despite his
ostensible lack of sentimentality he regrets the fall of the
ancien
regime. "Ma foi, l'esprit manque,"
he writes in chapter 30 of
Henri
Brulard, "chacun reserve toutes ses forces pour un me-tier qui lui don–
ne un rang dans le: monde."
No longer is birth or intelligence or the
self-cultivation of the
honnete homme
the deciding factor-it is
ability in some profession. This is no world in which Stendhal–
Dominique can live and breathe. Of course, like his heroes, he too
can work and work efficiently, when that is what is called for. But
how can one take anything like practical professional work seriously
in the long run! Love, music, passion, intrigue, heroism-these are
the things that make life worthwhile....
Stendhal is an aristocratic son of the
ancien regime grande bour–
geoisie,
he will and can be no nineteenth-century bourgeois. He says
it himself time and again: My views were Republican even in my
youth but my family handed down their aristocratic instincts to me
(Brulard,
ch. 14); since the Revolution theater audiences have be–
come stupid;
I
was a liberal myself (in 1821), and yet
I
found the
liberals outrageously silly
(Souvenirs d'egotisme,
ch.
6);
to converse
with a prominent prOVincial merchant makes me dull and unhappy all
day
(Egotisme,
ch.
7
and
passim)-these
and similar remarks, which
sometimes also refer to
his
physical constitution
(aLe nature m'a don–
ne les nerfs delicats et la peau sensible d'une femme," Brulard,
ch.
32), occur plentifully. Sometimes he has pronounced accesses of
socialism: in 1811, he writes, energy was to be found only in the
class
"qui est en lutte avec les vrais besoins" (Brulard,
ch. 2). But
