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tion, and never did anything except abruptly and with enthusiasm. However, he got it into his head that he acted in conformity with reason. “One must be guided in everything by LO-GIQUE”, he would say, pausing between the first syllable and the remainder of the word. But he had no patience for those whose logic differed from his own.’ In fact, Stendhal was every bit a fully-fledged nineteenth-­century writer of self-exploration, and he anticipated his own discovery in the twentieth (in his autobiography La Vie de Henry Brulard he addresses readers in 1935, not his contemporaries). Long before Flaubert and Proust, he was aware of the fitfulness and ambiguity of memory, its elusiveness when we try to snare it. Hence his famous digressive style, the comic zigzag he took from the celebrated author of Tristram Shandy. Stendhal had his mnemonic devices too. As a young boy in Grenoble he had been made to take drawing lessons by his father: this got him out of the house, which he found stifling. The 175 sketches scattered throughout the text of his autobiography, showing mostly street scenes or room arrangements, reminded him of that brief moment of freedom, and served as a visual framework for his writing. Feeling that there was truth in spontaneity, he wrote quickly (his autobiography was written over four months in the winter of 1835); and although he often presents exact dates in his writings (an early talent for mathematics had allowed him at sixteen to quit the damp provincialism of Grenoble and enter the new École polytechnique in Paris), he was often slapdash in respect of actual chronology. What counted for Stendhal was the sharp, acutely characterised, discriminating account of motive or emotion. ‘Love has always been for me the most important of affairs, or rather the only matter of account’, he wrote, as if the ending of the sentence had only occurred to him once he had voiced the beginning. His famously mineralogical book on love talked about it in terms of a ‘crystallisation’. A thinker had to be dry, clear, without illusions: a banker, he once wrote, might have the requisite character ‘to make discoveries in philosophy’. And there is his famous, light, Mozartian touch: he was as unsparing of himself as he was of others, the young provincial who hoped to cut a figure in the world and become a celebrated Don Juan even though he didn’t have the physique (or, indeed, the inheritance) for it; writing his autobiography under an assumed 4  A Doctor’s Dictionary
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name at fifty-three he is prepared to acknowledge that all he will be able to convey about his life of vagabondage and gallantry is the ‘chasse au bonheur’—the pursuit of happiness and not the experience itself. There is no cynicism in the writing, only a serene wistfulness. Stendhal’s commitment to the brisk, discursive, associative feel of experience makes it an exhilarating experience to read his journals and travel books. Every situation in his life seems to lend itself to epigrammatic expression; and anecdotes themselves are occasions for expansive writing: in 1837–38, on leave from his consular job at Cività Vecchia and visiting his own country, he dashed off a book called Memoirs of a Tourist. Here is a nice piece of hearsay reported in its pages which he scribbled down in Lyons, on May 19: Three days ago Mr. Smith, an English puritan who had been living here for ten years, decided it was time to end his life. He swallowed the contents of an ounce bottle of Prussic acid. Two hours later after being very sick he was anywhere but on the point of dying, and to pass the time rolled about on the floor. His landlord, an honest cobbler, was working in his shop in the room beneath: startled by the inhabitual din and fearing that his furniture was getting a battering, he went upstairs. He knocked on the door; no reply; so he entered the room through a boarded-up door. He was aghast to see his tenant prostrate on the floor, and sent for M. Travers, well-known surgeon and friend of the sick man. The surgeon came, treated Mr. Smith, and very quickly brought him out of danger. Then he asked him: ‘What the devil did you drink?’ ‘Some Prussic acid.’ ‘Impossible, six drops would have killed you in a jiffy.’ ‘Well, they told me it was Prussic acid.’ ‘Who sold it to you then?’ ‘The little chemist on the Quai de Saône.’ ‘But usually you get your prescriptions made up at Girard, your neighbour right across the street here, the best pharmacist in Lyons!’ ‘That’s true, but the last time I bought some medicine from him, I had the impression he was overcharging me.’ A | anecdote  5

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tion, and never did anything except abruptly and with enthusiasm. However, he got it into his head that he acted in conformity with reason. “One must be guided in everything by LO-GIQUE”, he would say, pausing between the first syllable and the remainder of the word. But he had no patience for those whose logic differed from his own.’ In fact, Stendhal was every bit a fully-fledged nineteenth-­century writer of self-exploration, and he anticipated his own discovery in the twentieth (in his autobiography La Vie de Henry Brulard he addresses readers in 1935, not his contemporaries). Long before Flaubert and Proust, he was aware of the fitfulness and ambiguity of memory, its elusiveness when we try to snare it. Hence his famous digressive style, the comic zigzag he took from the celebrated author of Tristram Shandy. Stendhal had his mnemonic devices too. As a young boy in Grenoble he had been made to take drawing lessons by his father: this got him out of the house, which he found stifling. The 175 sketches scattered throughout the text of his autobiography, showing mostly street scenes or room arrangements, reminded him of that brief moment of freedom, and served as a visual framework for his writing. Feeling that there was truth in spontaneity, he wrote quickly (his autobiography was written over four months in the winter of 1835); and although he often presents exact dates in his writings (an early talent for mathematics had allowed him at sixteen to quit the damp provincialism of Grenoble and enter the new École polytechnique in Paris), he was often slapdash in respect of actual chronology. What counted for Stendhal was the sharp, acutely characterised, discriminating account of motive or emotion. ‘Love has always been for me the most important of affairs, or rather the only matter of account’, he wrote, as if the ending of the sentence had only occurred to him once he had voiced the beginning. His famously mineralogical book on love talked about it in terms of a ‘crystallisation’. A thinker had to be dry, clear, without illusions: a banker, he once wrote, might have the requisite character ‘to make discoveries in philosophy’. And there is his famous, light, Mozartian touch: he was as unsparing of himself as he was of others, the young provincial who hoped to cut a figure in the world and become a celebrated Don Juan even though he didn’t have the physique (or, indeed, the inheritance) for it; writing his autobiography under an assumed

4  A Doctor’s Dictionary

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