Stendhal

The Telegraph takes up from where The Green Huntsman left off with the career of Lucien Leuwen, the fashionable young cavalry officer with “republican” leanings but aristocratic tastes. When his father, an influential banker, places him in a government office, Lucien is quickly involved in a series of intrigues. He is required to assist in the suppression of a murder, fix a provincial election, and to advance the interest of his father’s cabal, carry on a cold-blooded love affair with the most beautiful hostess in Paris. Through Lucien’s eyes, Stendhal uncovers the moral decay of a society in which a failing government keeps itself in power by force and trickery.

Attractive, clever, a cavalry officer and very rich, young Leuwen had everything necessary for happiness and success––everything except belief in himself and the social order of his time. It is the period of King Louis-Philippe, when an induced conservatism was atrophying France after the catacalysm of the Revolution and the glorious illusion that was Napoleon. Here is an historical novel which is the real thing––a portrait without equal of a time, a place, and the way conflicting groups of Frenchmen felt about each other and themselves. Lucien Leuwen comes down from Paris to serve with a regiment garrisoned in the provincial city of Nancy. There, though he is only a rich bourgeois, not of the nobility, he cleverly makes his way into society and dares to fall in love with the blue blood belle of the town. The magic cast by one of France’s greatest novelists transports us completely into the hearts of Lieutenant Leuwen and the beautiful Bathilde de Chasteller as their love affair follows its torturous course.

Italian passion––“the passion that seeks its own satisfaction, and not to give one’s neighbor an enhanced idea of oneself”––is the life-blood of Stendhal’s Three Italian Chronicles. Gathered here are three long-out-of-print stories animated by life-and-death romances and sensational crimes. “The Cenci” and “The Abbess of Castro,” set in a brazen Renaissance, are the author’s versions of two antique chronicles he discovered in Italian libraries: “Vanina Vanini” is a Roman tale of the 1820s. All three give full rein to that special egoism of unswerving, passionate purpose Stendhal so adored in Napoleon and celebrated in all his heroes and heroines. Fused to that passion is his style, which imperturbably stage-manages urgent speech and violent intrigue. On this gemlike scale, his style as it charms and stings seems particularly vivid: for admirers of his novels, each of these stories gleams like an enameled miniature executed by a great master.

Among the tantalizingly unfinished works of the great French writer Stendhal (1783-1842) are the opening chapters of The Pink & the Green (Le Rose et le Vert), which tell of the obsessions of Mina Wanghen, a young, intelligent Prussian heiress from Königsberg. Enamoured of everything French and determined not to be forced into marriage with any of her countless German suitors, she decamps to Paris, where her illusions meet with Gaelic realities. Stendhal abandoned the novel in 1837; however, its seeds are found in the finished story “Mina de Vanghel,” completed in 1830 and published posthumously in 1853. Both works appear here side-by-side in English.