Witticisms from Stendhal

I have been reading The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal and found something which really cracked me up. It is not that funny, but somehow. Here is his description how a woman plans to revenge a man in Italy:

She [the countess] multiplied her attentions to Limercati, seeking to awaken his love and subsequently to forsake him, reducing him to despair. In order to render such a scheme of revenge intelligible to French readers, I should explain that in Milan, a region quite remote from our own, a man may still be driven to despair by love.

So how does it compare with what people do in France? He says, in his book on Love, "The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse, as a luxury befitting a young man."

Stendhal was perhaps one of the greatest psychologists of love in literature. The Red and the Black is my favourite romantic novel. He is also credited with writing "the driest book about love ever written" (linked above), of course it will appear dry to those who don't get his irony and sense of humour. He shows that it is not just heart (or our emotions) which play tricks on us but rather our brain (the rational faculties) which force to see things in its own way, specially the kind of sweet hypocrisy and deceit that is involved in the act of falling in love. The keyword is "sweet", because unlike his fellow countryman and fellow novelist Flaubert he was not a bitter pessimist at all. Not that I have any problem with bitter pessimism but some liveliness and a sense of humour about bad things of life always helps.

Actually, I am finding The Charterhouse of Parma a little heavy-going and my pitiful ignorance of the history of the Napoleonic wars and general European history at the turn of the eighteenth century is not helping matters either. Looks like I will have to close the book and spend some time with the wikipedia!

To end here is another quote from the same page in the book:

That absurd courage known as resignation, the courage of a fool who lets himself be hanged without uttering a word, was not among countess's qualities.