There were Courts of Love in France from the year 1150 to the year 1200. So much has been proved. The existence of these Courts probably goes back to a more remote period.
The ladies, sitting together in the Courts of Love, gave out their decrees either on questions of law—for example: Can love exist between married people?—
Or on the particular cases which lovers submitted to them.[1]
So far as I can picture to myself the moral side of this jurisprudence, it must have resembled the Courts of the Marshals of France established for questions of honour by Louis XIV—that is, as they would have been, if only public opinion had upheld that institution.
AndrÉ, chaplain to the King of France, who wrote about the year 1170, mentions the Courts of Love
- of the ladies of Gascony,
- of Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne (1144–1194),
- of Queen ElÉonore,
- of the Countess of Flanders,
- of the Countess of Champagne (1174).
AndrÉ mentions nine judgments pronounced by the Countess of Champagne.
He quotes two judgments pronounced by the Countess of Flanders.
Jean de Nostradamus, Life of the ProvenÇal Poets, says (p. 15):—
"The 'tensons' were disputes of Love, which took place between poets, both knights and ladies, arguing together on some fair and sublime question of love. Where they could not agree, they sent them, that they might get a decision thereon, to the illustrious ladies president who held full and open Court of Love at Signe and Pierrefeu, or at Romanin, or elsewhere, and they gave out decrees thereon which were called 'Lous Arrests d'Amours.'"
These are the names of some of the ladies who presided over the Courts of Love of Pierrefeu and Signe:—
- "Stephanette, Lady of Brulx, daughter of the Count of Provence.
- Adalarie, Viscountess of Avignon;
- AlalÈte, Lady of Ongle;
- Hermissende, Lady of PosquiÈres;
- Bertrane, Lady of Urgon;
- Mabille, Lady of YÈres;
- The Countess of Dye;
- Rostangue, Lady of Pierrefeu;
- Bertrane, Lady of Signe;
- Jausserande of Claustral."—(Nostradamus, p. 27.)
It is probable that the same Court of Love met sometimes at the Castle of Pierrefeu, sometimes at that of Signe. These two villages are just next to each other, and situated at an almost equal distance from Toulon and Brignoles.
In his Life of Bertrand d'Alamanon, Nostradamus says:
"This troubadour was in love with Phanette or Estephanette of Romanin, Lady of the said place, of the house of Gantelmes, who held in her time full and open Court of Love in her castle of Romanin, near the town of Saint-Remy, in Provence, aunt of Laurette of Avignon, of the house of Sado, so often celebrated by the poet Petrarch."
Under the heading Laurette, we read that Laurette de Sade, celebrated by Petrarch, lived at Avignon about the year 1341; that she was instructed by Phanette of Gantelmes, her aunt, Lady of Romanin; that "both of them improvised in either kind of ProvenÇal rhythm, and according to the account of the monk of the Isles d'Or(69), their works give ample witness to their learning.... It is true (says the monk) that Phanette or Estephanette, as being most excellent in poetry, had a divine fury or inspiration, which fury was esteemed a true gift from God. They were accompanied by many illustrious and high-born[2] ladies of Provence, who flourished at that time at Avignon, when the Roman court resided there, and who gave themselves up to the study of letters, holding open Court of Love, and therein deciding the questions of love which had been proposed and sent to them....
"Guillen and Pierre Balbz and Loys des Lascaris, Counts of Ventimiglia, of Tende and of Brigue, persons of great renown, being come at this time to visit Pope Innocent VI of that name, went to hear the definitions and sentences of love pronounced by these ladies; and astonished and ravished with their beauty and learning, they were taken with love of them."
At the end of their "tensons" the troubadours often named the ladies who were to pronounce on the questions in dispute between them.
A decree of the Ladies of Gascony runs:—
"The Court of ladies, assembled in Gascony, have laid down, with the consent of the whole Court, this perpetual constitution, etc., etc."
The Countess of Champagne in a decree of 1174, says:—
"This judgment, that we have carried with extreme caution, is supported by the advice of a very great number of ladies..."
In another judgment is found:—
"The knight, for the fraud that has been done him, denounced this whole affair to the Countess of Champagne, and humbly begged that this crime might be submitted to the judgment of the Countess of Champagne and the other ladies."
"The Countess, having summoned around her sixty ladies, gave this judgment, etc."
AndrÉ le Chapelain, from whom we derive this information, relates that the Code of Love had been published by a Court composed of a large number of ladies and knights.
AndrÉ has preserved for us the petition, which was addressed to the Countess of Champagne, when she decided the following question in the negative: "Can real love exist between husband and wife?"
But what was the penalty that was incurred by disobedience to the decrees of the Courts of Love?
We find the Court of Gascony ordering that such or such of its judgments should be observed as a perpetual institution, and that those ladies who did not obey should incur the enmity of every honourable lady.
Up to what point did public opinion sanction the decrees of the Courts of Love?
Was there as much disgrace in drawing back from them, as there would be to-day in an affair dictated by honour?
I can find nothing in AndrÉ or Nostradamus that puts me in a position to solve this question.
Two troubadours, Simon Boria and Lanfranc Cigalla, disputed the question: "Who is worthier of being loved, he who gives liberally, or he who gives in spite of himself in order to pass for liberal?"
This question was submitted to the ladies of the Court of Pierrefeu and Signe; but the two troubadours, being discontented with the verdict, had recourse to the supreme Court of Love of the ladies of Romanin.[3]
The form of the verdicts is conformable to that of the judicial tribunals of this period.
Whatever may be the reader's opinion as to the degree of importance which the Courts of Love occupied in the attention of their contemporaries, I beg him to consider what to-day, in 1822, are the subjects of conversation among the most considerable and richest ladies of Toulon and Marseilles.
Were they not more gay, more witty, more happy in 1174 than in 1882?
Nearly all the decrees of the Courts of Love are based on the provisions of the Code of Love.
This Code of Love is found complete in the work of AndrÉ le Chapelain.
There are thirty-one articles and here they are:—
CODE OF LOVE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY
- The allegation of marriage is not a valid plea against love.
- Who can dissemble cannot love.
- No one can bind himself to two loves at once.
- Love grows continually or wanes.
- That which a lover takes from another by force has no savour.
- Generally the male does not love except in full puberty.
- A widowhood of two years is prescribed to one lover for the death of the other.
- Without over-abundant reason no one ought to be deprived of his rights in love.
- No one can love, unless urged thereto by the persuasion of love (by the hope of being loved).
- Love will be driven out by avarice.
- It is not right to love her whom you would be ashamed to ask in marriage.
- True love has no desire for caresses except from the beloved.
- Love once divulged is rarely lasting.
- Success too easy takes away the charm of love; obstacles give it worth.
- Everyone who loves turns pale at the sight of the beloved.
- At the unexpected sight of the beloved the lover trembles.
- New love banishes old.
- Merit alone makes man worthy of love.
- Love that wanes is quickly out and rarely rekindled.
- The lover is always timid.
- Real jealousy always increases love's warmth.
- Suspicion, and the jealousy it kindles, increases love's warmth.
- He sleeps less and he eats less who is beset with thoughts of love.
- Every act of the lover ends in thought of the beloved.
- The true lover thinks nothing good but what he knows will please the beloved.
- Love can deny love nothing.
- The lover cannot have satiety of delight in the beloved.
- The slightest presumption causes the lover to suspect the beloved of sinister things.
- The habit of too excessive pleasure hinders the birth of love.
- The true lover is occupied with the image of the beloved assiduously and without interruption.
- Nothing prevents a woman from being loved by two men, nor a man by two women.[1]
Here is the preamble of a judgment given by a Court of Love.
Question: Can true love exist between married people?
Judgment of the Countess of Champagne: We pronounce and determine by the tenour of these presents, that love cannot extend its powers over two married persons; for lovers must grant everything, mutually and gratuitously, the one to the other without being constrained thereto by any motive of necessity, while husband and wife are bound by duty to agree the one with the other and deny each other in nothing.... Let this judgment, which we have passed with extreme caution and with the advice of a great number of other ladies, be held by you as the truth, unquestionable and unalterable.
In the year 1174, the third day from the Calends of May, the VIIth: indiction.[2]
NOTE ON ANDRÉ LE CHAPELAIN(70)
AndrÉ Le Chapelain appears to have written about the year 1176.
In the BibliothÈque du Roi may be found a manuscript (No. 8758) of the work of AndrÉ, which was formerly in the possession of Baluze. Its first title is as follows: "Hic incipiunt capitula libri de Arte amatoria et reprobatione amoris."
This title is followed by the table of chapters.
Then we have the second title:—
"Incipit liber de Arte amandi et de reprobatione amoris editus et compillatus a magistro Andrea, Francorum aulae regiÆ capellano, ad Galterium amicum suum, cupientem in amoris exercitu militari: in quo quidem libro, cujusque gradus et ordinis mulier ab homine cujusque conditionis et status ad amorem sapientissime invitatur; et ultimo in fine ipsius libri de amoris reprobatione subjungitur."
Crescimbeni, Lives of the ProvenÇal Poets, sub voce Percivalle Boria, cites a manuscript in the library of Nicolo Bargiacchi, at Florence, and quotes various passages from it. This manuscript is a translation of the treatise of AndrÉ le Chapelain. The Accademia della Crusca admitted it among the works which furnished examples for its dictionary.
There have been various editions of the original Latin. Frid. Otto Menckenius, in his Miscellanea Lipsiensia nova, Leipsic 1751, Vol. VIII, part I, pp. 545 and ff., mentions a very old edition without date or place of printing, which he considers must belong to the first age of printing: "Tractatus amoris et de amoris remedio Andreae cappellani Innocentii papae quarti."
A second edition of 1610 bears the following title:—
"Erotica seu amatoria Andreae capellani regii, vetustissimi scriptoris ad venerandum suum amicum Guualterium scripta, nunquam ante hac edita, sed saepius a multis desiderata; nunc tandem fide diversorum MSS. codicum in publicum emissa a Dethmaro Mulhero, Dorpmundae, typis Westhovianis, anno Una Caste et Vere amanda."
A third edition reads: "Tremoniae, typis Westhovianis, anno 1614.".AndrÉ divides thus methodically the subjects which he proposes to discuss:—
- Quid sit amor et unde dicatur.[1]
- Quis sit effectus amoris.
- Inter quos possit esse amor.
- Qualiter amor acquiratur, retineatur, augmentetur, minuatur, finiatur.
- De notitia mutui amoris, et quid unus amantium agere debeat, altero fidem fallente.
Each of these questions is discussed in several paragraphs.
Andreas makes the lover and his lady speak alternately. The lady raises objections, the lover tries to convince her with reasons more or less subtle. Here is a passage which the author puts into the mouth of the lover:—
"... Sed si forte horum sermonum te perturbet obscuritas," eorum tibi sententiam indicabo[2]
Ab antiquo igitur quatuor sunt in amore gradus distincti:
Primus, in spei datione consistit.
Secundus, in osculi exhibitione.
Tertius, in amplexus fruitione.
Quartus, in totius concessione personae finitur."
[1]
- What love is and whence it is so-called.
- What are the effects of love?
- Between whom love can exist.
- In what way love is won, kept, made to increase, to wane or to end.
- The way to know if love is returned, and what one of the lovers should do when the other proves faithless.
TRANSLATORS' NOTES
1. The Portuguese Nun, Marianna Alcaforado, was born of a distinguished Portuguese family in the second half of the seventeenth century. About 1662, while still a nun, she fell in love with a French officer, the Chevalier de Chamilly, to whom she addressed her famous letters. The worthiness of the object of her passion may be judged by the fact that, on his return to Paris, the Chevalier handed over these letters to Sublingy, a lawyer, to be translated and published. They appeared in 1669, published by Barbin, under the title Lettres Portuguaises, and have since been often reprinted. Marianna Alcaforado died at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century.
There are only five original letters, though many editions contain the seven spurious letters, attributed to a "femme du monde"—they are already in Barbin's second edition.
There is an admirable seventeenth-century English translation of her letters by Sir Roger L'Estrange.
The passion of HÉloÏse for Abelard hardly calls for commentary. There is no clue to the identity of Captain de VÉsel and Sergeant de Cento. A note in Calmann-LÉvy's edition tells us that, in reply to enquiries about these two mysterious people, Stendhal said that he had forgotten their stories.
2. Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, by the famous Marquis de Sade, was published in Holland, 1791.
3. Cf. Coleridge, Love's Apparition and Evanishment:—
... Genial Hope,
Love's eldest sister.
4. Cf. Chapter VIII, p. 35 below. The ideas contained in these two passages are the germ of a story written by Stendhal with the obvious intention of illustrating his theories. The story—"Ernestine"—is included in the Calmann-LÉvy edition of De l'Amour.
5. Cf. a letter of Sir John Suckling "to a Friend to dissuade him from marrying a widow, which he formerly had been in love with":—
"Love is a natural distemper, a kind of Small Pox: Every one either hath had it or is to expect it, and the sooner the better."
6. LÉonore: under this name Stendhal refers to MÉtilde Dembowski (nÉe Viscontini). His passion for the wife of General Dembowski, with whom he became intimate during his stay in Milan (1814–1821), forms one of the most important chapters in Stendhal's life, but it is a little disappointing to enquire too deeply into the object of this passion. At any rate, as far as one can see, the great qualities which Stendhal discovered in MÉtilde Dembowski had their existence rather in his expert crystallisation than in reality. It was an unhappy affair. MÉtilde's cousin used her influence to injure Stendhal, and in 1819 she cut off all communication with him. Stendhal was still bemoaning his fate on his arrival in England, 1821. There is, none the less, something unconvincing in certain points in the history of this attachment; in spite of his sorrow, Stendhal seems to have consoled himself in the Westminster Road with "little Miss Appleby." It is worth noticing that MÉtilde Dembowski had been the confidante of Signora Pietra Grua, his former mistress, and it was from the date of Stendhal's discovery of the latter's shameless infidelity to himself and other lovers, that his admiration for MÉtilde seems to have started.
7. It is here worth turning to a passage from Baudelaire—which is given in the Translators' note (11) below. Liberty in love, he says, consists in avoiding the kind of woman dangerous to oneself. He points out that a natural instinct prompts one to this spontaneous self-preservation. Stendhal here gives a more exact explanation of the operation of this instinctive selection in love. Schopenhauer's conception of the utilitarian nature of bodily beauty is a more general application of the same idea. The breasts of a woman À la Titian are a pledge of fitness for maternity—therefore they are beautiful. Stendhal would have said a pledge of fitness for giving pleasure.
8. The well-known Dr. Edwards, in whose house Stendhal was introduced to one side of English life—and a very bourgeois side. He was introduced by a brother of Dr. Edwards, a man given to the peculiarly gloomy kind of debauch of which Stendhal gives such an exaggerated picture in his account of England. See note 31 below.
9. This brings to mind Blake's view of imagination and "the rotten rags" of memory.
10. Bianca e Faliero ossia il consiglio di tre—opera by Rossini (1819).
11. Cf. Baudelaire, Choix de maximes consolantes sur l'amour in Le Corsaire Satan (March 3, 1846) and reprinted in Œuvres Posthumes, Paris, 1908.
"Sans nier les coups de foudre, ce qui est impossible—voyez Stendhal...—il faut que la fatalitÉ jouit d'une certaine ÉlasticitÉ qui s'appelle libertÉ humaine.... En amour la libertÉ consiste À Éviter les catÉgories de femmes dangereuses, c'est-À-dire dangereuses pour vous."
["Without denying the possibility of 'thunderbolts,' for that is impossible (see Stendhal)—one may yet believe that fatality enjoys a certain elasticity, called human liberty.... In love human liberty consists in avoiding the categories of dangerous women—that is, women dangerous for you."]
12. Paul Louis Courier (1772–1825) served with distinction as an officer in Napoleon's army. He resigned his commission in 1809, in order to devote himself to literature, and especially to the study of Greek. His translation of Daphnis and Chloe, from the Greek of Longus, is well known, and was the cause of his long controversy with Del Furia, the under-librarian of the Laurentian Library at Florence, to which Stendhal here refers. Courier had discovered a complete manuscript of this romance in the famous Florentine Library. By mistake, he soiled with a blot of ink the page of the manuscript containing the all-important passage, which was wanting in all previously known manuscripts. Del Furia, jealous of Courier's discovery, accused him of having blotted the passage on purpose, in order to monopolise the discovery. A lively controversy followed, in which the authorities entered. Courier was guilty of nothing worse than carelessness, and, needless to say, got the better of his adversaries, when it came to a trial with the pen.
13. The Viscomte de Valmont and the PrÉsidente de Tourvel are the two central figures in Choderlos de Laclos' Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).
14. Modern criticism has made it uncertain who Dante's la Pia really was. The traditional identification is now given up, but there seems no reason to doubt the historical fact of the story.
15. Napoleon crowned himself with the Iron Crown of the old Lombard kings at Milan in 1805.
16. The reader is aware by now that Salviati is none other than Stendhal. The passage refers to the campaign of 1812, in which Stendhal played a prominent part, being present at the burning of Moscow.
17. Don Carlos, Tragedy of Schiller (1787); Saint-Preux—from Rousseau's Nouvelle HÉloÏse.
18. Stendhal's first book. For the history of this work, which is an admirable example of Stendhal's bold method of plagiarism, see the introduction to the work in the complete edition of Stendhal now in course of publication by Messrs. Champion (Paris, 1914) or Lumbroso, Vingt jugements inÉdits sur Henry Beyle (1902), pp. 10 and ff.
19. Jacques le Fataliste—by Diderot (1773).
20. The note, as it stands, in the French text, against the word "pique," runs as follows:—
"I think the word is none too French in this sense, but I can find no better substitute. In Italian it is 'puntiglio,' and in English 'pique.'"
21. The Lettres À Sophie were written by Mirabeau (1749–1791) during his imprisonment at Vincennes (1777–1780). They were addressed to Sophie de Monnier; it was his relations with her which had brought him into prison. They were published in 1792, after Mirabeau's death, under the title: Lettres originales de Mirabeau Écrites du donjon de Vincennes.
22. Catherine Marie, Duchesse de Montpensier, was the daughter of the Duc de Guise, assassinated in 1563. In 1570 she married the Duc de Montpensier. She was lame, but she had other reasons besides his scoffing at her infirmity for her undying hatred of Henry III; for she could lay at his door the death of her brother Henry, the third Duke. She died in 1596.
23. Julie d'Étanges—the heroine of Rousseau's Nouvelle HÉloÏse.
24. Stendhal, we must remember, is writing as a staunch liberal in the period of reaction which followed the fall of Napoleon and the end of the revolutionary period. Stendhal had been one of Napoleon's officers, and the Bourbon restoration put an end to his career. His liberalism and his pride at having been one of those who followed Napoleon's glorious campaigns, colour everything he writes about the state of Europe in his time. In reading Stendhal's criticisms of France, England and Italy, we must put ourselves back in 1822—remember that in France we have the Royalist restoration, in England the cry for reform always growing greater and beginning to penetrate even into the reactionary government of Lord Liverpool (Peel, Canning, Huskisson), in Italy the rule of the "Pacha" (see below, note 29) and the beginning of Carbonarism (of which Stendhal was himself suspected, see below, note 27), and the long struggle for unity and independence.
25. Charles Ferdinand, Duke de Berri (1778–1820), married a Bourbon Princess and was assassinated by a fanatic enemy of the Bourbons.
26. Bayard. Pierre Bayard (1476–1524), the famous French knight "without fear or reproach."
27. Of all foreign countries then to which Stendhal went Italy was not only his favourite, but also the one he knew and understood best. He was pleased in later years to discover Italian blood in his own family on the maternal side. The Gagnon family, from which his mother came, had, according to him, crossed into France about 1650.
He was in Italy with little interruption from 1814–1821, and again from 1830–1841 as consul at Civita Vecchia, during which time he became intimately acquainted with the best, indeed every kind of Italian society. He tells us that fear of being implicated in the Carbonari troubles drove him from Italy in 1821.
One can well believe that a plain speaker and daring thinker like Stendhal would have been looked upon by the Austrian police with considerable suspicion.
28. Racine and Shakespeare. Very early in life Stendhal refused to accept the conventional literary valuations. Racine he put below Corneille—Racine, like Voltaire, he says, fills his works with "bavardage Éternel." Shakespeare became for Stendhal the master dramatist, and he is never tired of the comparison between him and Racine. Cf. Rome, Naples et Florence (1817), and Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (1817). Finally he published his work on the subject: Racine et Shakespeare par M. de Stendhal (1823).
29. Stendhal knew Italy and was writing in Italy in the dark period that followed the fall of Napoleon. The "Pacha" is, of course, the repressive and reactionary government, whether that of the Austrians in Lombardy, of the Pope in Rome, or of the petty princes in the minor Italian states. See above, note 27.
30. Count Almaviva—character from Beaumarchais' Marriage de Figaro, first acted April, 1784. The play was censored by Louis XVI and produced none the less six months later. Its production is an event in the history of the French Revolution. Almaviva stands for the aristocracy and cuts a sad figure beside Figaro, a poor barber.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with England
31. Baretti, Dr. Johnson's friend, has the reputation of having learnt English better than any other foreigner. Stendhal might well claim a similar distinction for having acquired in a short stay a grasp so singularly comprehensive of England—of English people and their ways. He was four times in England—in 1817, 1821, 1826, and 1838—never for a whole year in succession, and on the first occasion merely on a flying trip. But Stendhal had not only a great power of observing and assimilating ideas; he was also capable of accommodating himself to association with the most varied types. Stendhal was as appreciative of Miss Appleby—his little mistress in the Westminster Road—as of Lord Byron and Shelley: he was at home in the family circle of the Edwards and the Clarkes. From the first he was sensible of the immense value of his friendship with the lawyer, Sutton Sharpe (1797–1843). Sharpe was one of those Englishmen who seem made for the admiration of foreigners—possessing all the Englishman's sense and unaffected dignity and none of his morbid reserve or insularity. Porson, Opie, Flaxman, Stothard were familiar figures in the house of Sharpe's father, and Sharpe and his charming sister continued to be the centre of a large and intelligent circle. In 1826 Sharpe took Stendhal with him on circuit. Stendhal was often present in court and learnt from his friend, who in 1841 became Q. C., to admire the real character, so rarely appreciated abroad, of English justice. He took this opportunity of visiting also Manchester, York, and the Lake district. Likewise to Sharpe he owed the privilege of meeting Hook, the famous wit and famous bibber, at the Athenaeum. He was present even at one of Almack's balls—the most select entertainment of that time.
With an acquaintance with England at once so varied, so full and yet so short, as regards direct intercourse with the country and people, it is rather natural that Stendhal was wary of subscribing to any one very settled conception of the English. He felt the incongruity of their character. At one time he called them "la nation la plus civilisÉe et la plus puissante du monde entier"—the most civilised and powerful people on the face of the earth; at another they were only "les premiers hommes pour le steam-engine"; and then, he merely felt a sorrowful affection for them—as for a people who just missed getting the profit of their good qualities by shutting their eyes to their bad.
As for Stendhal's knowledge of English literature—of that the foundations were laid early in life. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare was a very early passion (cf. Translators' note 28). As years went on, his acquaintance with English thought and English literature became steadily wider. Significant is his familiarity with Bentham, whose views were congenial to Stendhal: Stendhal quotes him more than once. Hobbes he was ready to class with Condillac, HelvÉtius, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy, as one of the philosophers most congenial and useful to his mind. For the rest, the notes and quotations in this book leave no doubt of the extent of his English reading—they give one a poorer opinion of his purely linguistic capacities; Stendhal's own English is often most comical. For a very complete consideration of his connexion with England see Stendhal et l'Angleterre, by Doris Gunnell (Paris, 1909). Cf. also Chuquet's Stendhal-Beyle (Paris, 1902), Chap. IX, pp. 178 and ff.
32. Of the three Englishmen referred to here, James Beattie (1735—1803), the author of The Minstrel (published 1771–1774), and Richard Watson (1737–1816), Bishop of Llandaff (1782), a distinguished chemist and a man of liberal political views, will both be familiar to readers of Boswell. The third, John Chetwode Eustace (1762?-1815) was a friend of Burke and a Roman Catholic, who seems to have given some trouble to the Catholic authorities in England and Ireland. His Tour through Italy, to which Stendhal refers, was published in 1813.
33. The Divorce Bill, introduced in 1820 into the House of Lords by George IV's ministers, to annul his marriage with Queen Caroline, but abandoned on account of its unpopularity both in Parliament and in the country generally.
34. The Whiteboys were a secret society, which originated in Ireland about 1760 and continued spasmodically till the end of the century. In 1821 it reappeared and gave great trouble to the authorities; in 1823 the society adopted another name. The yeomanry was embodied in Ulster in September 1796, and was mainly composed of Orangemen and Protestants. The body was instrumental in disarming Ulster and in suppressing the rebellion of 1798—not, it has been maintained, without unnecessary cruelty.
35. Sir Benjamin Bloomfield (1786–1846), a distinguished soldier, ultimately did get his peerage in 1825. In 1822 he had resigned his office of receiver of the duchy of Cornwall, having lost the King's confidence after many years of favour.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with Spain
36. Stendhal's personal knowledge of Spain was less extensive than that of Italy, England and Germany. He was early interested in the country and its literature. In 1808 at Richemont he was reading a Histoire de la guerre de la succession d'Espagne, and the same year speaks of his plan of going to Spain to study the language of Cervantes and Calderon. In 1810 he actually took Spanish lessons and the next year applied from Germany for an official appointment in Spain. In 1837 he made his way as far as Barcelona.
Stendhal's Acquaintance with Germany
37. In 1806 Stendhal returned to Paris from Marseilles whither he had followed the actress Melanie Guilbert and taken up a commercial employment in order to support himself at her side. He now again put himself under the protection of Daru, and followed him into Germany, though at first without any fixed title. He was not at Jena, as he pretends (being still in Paris the 7th October), but on the 27th of the month he witnessed Napoleon's triumphal entry into Berlin. Two days later he was nominated by Daru to the post of assistant commissaire des guerres.
Stendhal arrived in Brunswick in 1806 to take up his official duties. Although his time was occupied with a considerable amount of business, he found leisure also for visiting the country at ease. In 1807 he went as far as Hamburg. His observations on the country and people are occurring continually in his works, particularly in his letters and in his Voyage À Brunswick (in NapolÉon, ed. de Mitty, Paris, 1897), pp. 92–125. In 1808 he left Brunswick, but soon returned with Daru to Germany. This time he was employed at Strasbourg—whence he passed to Ingolstadt, Landshut, etc., etc. Facts prove that he was not at the battle of Wagram, as he says in his Life of Napoleon. He was at the time at Vienna, where he managed to remain for the Te Deum sung in honour of the Emperor Francis II after the evacuation by the French. He returned in 1810, after the peace of Schonnbrunn, to Paris. It was during his stay in Brunswick that Stendhal made the acquaintance of Baron von Strombeck, for whom he always preserved a warm affection. He was a frequent guest at the house of von Strombeck and a great admirer of his sister-in-law, Phillippine von BÜlow—who died Abbess of Steterburg—la celeste Phillippine. Baron von Strombeck is referred to in this work as M. de Mermann. See generally Chuquet, Stendhal-Beyle, Chap. V.
38. Triumph of the Cross. In Arthur Schuig's sprightly, but inaccurate, German edition of De l'Amour—Über die Liebe (Jena, 1911)—occurs this note:—
"Stendhal names the piece Le Triomphe de la Croix, but must mean either Das Kruez an der Ostsee (1806), or Martin Luther oder die Weihe der Kraft (1807)—both tragedies by Zacharias Werner."
39. The Provencal story in this chapter, and the Arabic anecdotes in the next, were translated for Stendhal by his friend Claude Fauriel (1772–1806)—"the only savant in Paris who is not a pedant," he calls him in a letter written in 1829 (Correspondance de Stendhal, Paris, Charles Brosse, 1908, Vol. II, p. 516). A letter of 1822 (Vol. II, p. 247) thanks M. Fauriel for his translations. "If I were not so old," he writes, "I should learn Arabic, so charmed am I to find something at last that is not a mere academic copy of the antique.... My little ideological treatise on Love will now have some variety. The reader will be carried beyond the circle of European ideas." Saint-Beuve relates that he was present when Fauriel showed Stendhal, then engaged on his De l'Amour, an Arab story which he had translated. Stendhal seized on it, and Fauriel was only able to recover his story by promising two more like it in exchange. M. Fauriel is referred to p. 188, note 3, above.
40. The reference is to a piece by Scribe (1791–1861).
41. Stendhal had no first-hand knowledge of America.
42. Stendhal was writing before Whitman and Whistler; yet he had read Poe.
43. The entire material for these three chapters, and to a very great extent their language too, is taken straight from an article in the Edinburgh Review—January 1810—by Thomas Broadbent. See for a full comparison of the English and French, Doris Gunnell—Stendhal et l'Angleterre, Appendix B.
Stendhal has not only adapted the ideas—he has to a great extent translated the words of Thomas Broadbent. He has changed the order of ideas here and there—not the ideas themselves—and in some cases he has enlarged their application. Where he has translated the English word for word, it has often been possible in this translation to restore the original English, which Stendhal borrowed and turned into French. Where we have done this, we have printed the words, which belong to Thomas Broadbent, in italics.However, as Stendhal often introduced slight, but important, changes of language, we also give below, as an example of his methods, longer passages chosen from the article in the Edinburgh Review, to compare with the corresponding passages literally translated by us from Stendhal.
These are the passages:—
P. 225, l. 2:
"As if women were more quick and men more judicious, as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of expression and men for stronger powers of attention."
P. 228, l. 9:
"Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to one sex as to the other.... Vanity and conceit we shall of course witness in men and women, as long as the world endures.... The best way to make it more tolerable is to give it as high and dignified an object as possible."
P. 229, l. 21:
"Women have, of course, all ignorant men for enemies to their instruction, who being bound (as they think) in point of sex to know more, are not well pleased in point of fact to know less."
P. 230, l. 24:
"The same desire of pleasing, etc.... We are quite astonished in hearing men converse on such subjects to find them attributing such beautiful effects to ignorance."
P. 232, l. 31:
"We do not wish a lady to write books any more than we wish her to dance at the opera."
P. 237, l. 13:
"A merely accomplished woman cannot infuse her tastes into the minds of her sons....
"By having gained information a mother may inspire her sons with valuable tastes, which may abide by them through life and carry him up to all the sublimities of knowledge."
P. 237, l. 27:
"Mankind are much happier for the discovery of barometers, thermometers, steam-engines and all the innumerable inventions in the arts and the sciences.... The same observation is true of such works as those of Dryden, Pope, Milton and Shakespeare."
Stendhal's habit of quoting without acknowledgment from all kinds of writings is so curious, that it demands a word to itself. His wholesale method of plagiarism has been established in other works beside the present one; almost the whole of his first work—La Vie de Haydn (1814)—is stolen property. See above, note 18. Goethe was amused to find his own experiences transferred to the credit of the author of Rome, Naples et Florence!
If there is any commentary necessary on this literary piracy—it is to be found in a note by Stendhal (vide above, Chapter XXXVII, p. 132) on a passage where, for once, he actually acknowledges a thought from La Rochefoucauld:—
"The reader will have recognised, without my marking it each time, several other thoughts of celebrated writers. It is history which I am attempting to write, and such thoughts are the facts."
44. The monitorial system (Enseignement mutuel) was introduced into France soon after the Bourbon Restoration; but it was not, like our monitorial system, designed with a view primarily to the maintenance of discipline, but rather to supplying the want of schools and masters and remedying the official indifference to popular education, which then existed in France. As such, it was warmly espoused by the liberals, and as warmly opposed by the reactionaries. The monitors, it was thought, could hand on to the younger pupils the knowledge they had already received; after the Revolution of 1830, when no longer the object of political controversy, the system gave way to more practical and efficient methods of public instruction.
45. Porlier (Don Juan Diaz), born in 1783, was publicly hanged in 1815 as the result of a conspiracy against Ferdinand VII of Spain. After having been one of the most active and bravest supporters of Ferdinand's cause in the effort to re-establish his throne and the national honour, he now sacrificed his life to an unsuccessful attempt to set up a constitutional government.
Antonio Quiroga (born 1784), also after having distinguished himself in the national struggle against Napoleon, was tried for complicity in the conspiracy, after the fall of Porlier. After a series of adventures, in which he was more lucky than Riego, his subaltern, to whom he owed so much, he again distinguished himself, after a temporary withdrawal from active service in 1822, by the stout opposition he offered to the French invasion of 1823. His efforts, however, were of no avail and he escaped to England, and thence made his way to South America. Some years later he returned to Spain, was nominated Captain General of Grenada, and died in 1841.
Rafael del Riego (born 1785), after serving against the French, first became prominent in connexion with the effort to restore the constitution which Ferdinand had abolished in 1812. He was elected by his troops second in command to Quiroga, whom he himself proposed as their leader. This rising was a failure and Riego was exiled to Oviedo, his birthplace. After being repeatedly recalled and re-exiled, he ended by being one of the first victims of Ferdinand's restoration in 1823, and was dragged to the place of execution at the back of a donkey, amid the outrages of the mob.
46. Father Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), the famous historian of the Council of Trent, a Servite monk, and the ecclesiastical adviser of the Venetian Government, at a time when it seemed not impossible that Venice would break away, like Northern Europe, from the Roman Catholic Church.
47. Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was, according to Stendhal, our only philosopher. It is on Tracy, one of the Ideologists, that Stendhal, one might say, modelled his philosophic attitude. Tracy's IdÉologie (1801), he says, gave him "milles germes de pensÉes nouvelles"—gave him also his worship of logic. He was equally impressed by the TraitÉ de la VolontÉ (1815). Cf. Picavet's Sorbonne Thesis (Paris, 1891) Les IdÉologues, pp. 489–92, in which he speaks of Stendhal as "a successor and a defender, mutatis mutandis, of the eighteenth-century 'IdÉologues.'"
48. Giovanni Luigi Fiescho (15 23–1547), a great Genoese noble, formed a conspiracy in 1547 against the all-powerful Admiral of the Republic, Andrea Doria. The state fleet in the harbour was to be seized, but in attempting this Fiescho was drowned, and the conspiracy collapsed.
49. Henri GrÉgoire (1750–1831), one of the most original fearless and sincere of the Revolutionary leaders, was the constitutional Bishop of Blois, who refused to lay down his episcopal office under the Terror, and when the Reign of Terror was over, took an active part in restoring Religion and the Church. He resigned his bishopric in 1801. Napoleon made him a count but he was always hostile to the Empire. He was a staunch Gallican, and never forgave Napoleon his concordat with the Papacy. He was naturally hated and feared by the Royalists at the Restoration, but he remained popular with the people, and was elected a member of the lower chamber in 1819, though he was prevented by the Government from sitting.
50. La GÉnie du Christianisme, by Chateaubriand (1802).
51. See note 47.
52. See note 37.
53. See note 37.
54. Johannes von MÜller—the German historian (1752–1809).
55. La Trappe—the headquarters (near Mortagna) of a monastic body, the Trappists, a branch of the Cistercian order. The word is used for all Trappist monasteries.
56. Samuel Bernard (1651–1739), son of the painter and engraver of the same name, was a man of immense wealth and the foremost French financier of his day. He was born a Protestant, not, as has been thought, a Jew, but became a Catholic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He was ennobled and became the Comte de Coubert (1725).
57. Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), a celebrated mathematician and scientist.
58. Hazlitt, in a note to his essay on Self-Love and Benevolence, remarked on Stendhal's absurdly exaggerated praise of HelvÉtius. After quoting this passage, he adds: "My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal fallacy." Hobbes and Mandeville, he says, had long before stated, and Butler answered, this fallacy, which not unfrequently vitiates Stendhal's psychological views.
59. Francois Guillaume Ducray-Duminil (1761–1819), the author of numerous sentimental and popular novels.
60. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (222–181 B. C.).
61. Jean Francois de la Harpe (born 1739) is frequently mentioned by Stendhal in this hostile spirit. After winning considerable notoriety, without very much merit, La Harpe in 1786 became professor of literature at the newly founded LycÉe. Having started as a Voltairian philosopher, and still apparently favourable to the Revolution, he was none the less arrested in 1794 as a suspect and put into prison. There he was converted from his former Voltairian principles to Roman Catholicism. He died in 1803.
62. Notices sur Mme. de la Fayette, Mme. et Mlle. DeshouliÈres, lues À l'AcadÉmie franÇaise, Paris, 1822.
63. Pierre Jean de BÉranger (born 1780): The bold patriotic songs, which had made BÉranger's name, brought him in 1828, for the second time, into prison. He refused office after the revolution (1830), for the principles of which he had already suffered; he died in 1848.
64. La Gazza Ladra, an opera by Rossini.
65. Antoine Marie, Comte de Lavalette (1769–1830) was one of Napoleon's generals. After the Bourbon restoration of 1815 he was condemned to death, but escaped, chiefly owing to his wife's help.
66. Alessandro, Conte Verri, the contemporary of Stendhal and a distinguished littÉrateur (1741–1816).
67. Montenotte (April, 1796), and Rivoli (January, 1797), two victories in Bonaparte's Italian campaign.
68. The existence of these Courts of Love has been denied by many modern historians. For a brief statement of the arguments against their historical existence the English reader may be referred to Chaytor, The Troubadours (in the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 1912), pp. 19–21. But while the direct evidence for their existence is very flimsy, the direct evidence against them is no less so.
69. The monk of the Isles d'Or, on whose manuscript Nostradamus professed to rely, is now considered to be a purely fictitious person, an anagram on a friend's name.
70. The date of AndrÉ le Chapelain's treatise is a disputed point. Stendhal gives its date as 1176; Reynouard and others, 1170. Others again have placed it as late as the fourteenth century, though this has been proved impossible, since thirteenth-century writers refer to the book. The probability is that it was written at the beginning of the thirteenth or end of the twelfth century—there is no evidence to fix the date with precision. For a full discussion of the question see the preface to the best modern edition of the work—Andreae Capellani ... De Amore (recensuit E. Trojel), 1892.
71. Cf. Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, passim, and especially Letter 48: ".... Our foreign demeanour no longer gives offence. We even profit by people's surprise at finding us quite polite. Frenchmen cannot imagine that Persia produces men.
