374
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Viennet; was it the one ofTaine and Bourget who unearthed it? Or even
of Barres and Valery? The smell of violets now suggested by
La
Chartreuse de
Parme,
the Lucien Leuwen as understood by Valery, the Julien Sorel who
was flCstJanin and Henri Brulard's "monster" and then "Napoleonic" and
then "class conscious," all these have come to light because of literacy
awareness, but it did not invenr them, like the interpretations of the novel
itself.
It
was all in the
Rouge et Ie Noir
of 1830, and the stricken Beyle of
1842. Like the butterfly in its chrysalis. Time did not just polish
La
Char–
treuse
to change it from the book that Balzac talks about so well into the
Chartreuse
admired by Proust, it transformed it from a drama into an opera.
Stendhal, in his lifetime, probably did not feel his way towards this music as
we do; but what gave birth to Fabrice as seen by Proust, to Lucien Leuwen as
seen by Valery, if not the combination of these masterpieces or even simply
in the
arts
in general of elements at least heterogeneous and sometimes con–
tradictory, ofwhat Braque has called "what cannot be said?"
DIGRESSION
I want to explain how the metamorphosis of Stendhal's work began. A feel–
ing has grown that he lived the life of the'"happy few" like a Valery Lacbaud
of his time, forgetting that this metamorphosis is more than just aesthetic.
After the book was published in the
Journal des Debats
of 1830: Jules Janin
wrote:
He
takes his hero, his monster, with an admirable coolness,
through a thousand disgraceful actions and through a thousand stupidi–
ties which are worse. . . . Julien's stay in the seminary is the remarkable
part of this novel. Here the author is doubly enraging and horrific, it is
impossible to give a glimpse of this hideous picture; it struck
me
like the
fust ghost story that I heard from my nurse.
An
author such as this in
body and soul
goes
his way untroubled and remorseless, casting his
venom on everything he meets-youth, beauty, the graces and illusions
of life; even the fields, the forests and the flowers are disfigured and
crushed.
The traitor is hiding behind the curtains! which immediately shows us that
the
nature
of the critic's relationship to the novel has changed. Janin evi–
dently read
Le
Rouge et Ie Noir
in the light of what a novel ought
to
be;
then in the light of the seminarian Berthet; and then in the light of novels of
his own time which have almost all lapsed into oblivion. Finally he judged it
in
the light of what were regarded as established fictions-and not many of
these as yet were novels-but hardly as a way of life, as a human experience
to oppose to Stendhal's own. He judges the book according to convention.
