Italian Chronicles

In discussing Stendhal's work several times, I have noted his peculiar attitude to Italy: that second patriotism which in the end almost prevailed over the French one and made him love everything, the Italian land, the cities, the architecture, the music, the painting, and above all the Italian woman. The impressions which the young boy had received when he entered Milan with Bonaparte's army, his first love, his first duel, his first battle, all of this impressed itself deeply in his heart and tied him forever to this country. Stendhal longs for Italy wherever his fate takes him; in Paris or in Smolensk or near Moscow.

In Paris in particular he always felt bad; his aching self-love is always alert, always tense in this huge concentration of people; here, in this country where people care less about the opinions of others but let life flow, fishing out of it hours of happiness, Stendhal experiences a rest of the nerves.

For the author of the book On Love , Italy, the homeland of love, will always remain dear, unique. Which does not prevent him - when fate sentenced him to permanent residence in an Italian town - from longing for Paris. Such is the human heart!

The second fanatical love that this seemingly cold man carried in his heart was Napoleon . But was Napoleon not also a part of Italy? He was a part of the race, especially for Stendhal, who saw in the great Corsican the incarnation of the condottieri or tyrants of the Italian Middle Ages. And from these three loves, Italy, Napoleon and the Renaissance, grew Stendhal's religion: the cult of energy, the cult of passion, blind in its pursuit of the goal, wise and clairvoyant in devising means, a passion that does not shrink from any consequence - that is beauty!

Especially when this beauty takes the form of a beautiful woman, Stendhal is ready to fall on his face in adoration before it. He seeks it in history—not the official one, woven, according to him, from lies and platitudes—but in true history, the history of customs, revealed under the pen of naive chroniclers. He recreates them from imagination in his works. The heroines of his novels are the natural sisters of the heroines of those Italian Chronicles : Duchess Sanseverina and Vanina Vanini; Matilda de la Mole and Helena Campireali—who can tell what is history and what is imagination?

Exiled from Italy—one might use the expression—to France, Stendhal languished in Paris, which was unsympathetic to him, until the July Revolution, which, as we know, was indirectly a return to the stage of the old Bonapartists. Stendhal once again became an official figure: he became French consul in Civita-Vecchia. Bored enough in that town—oh, the good love that left him no time for boredom had passed—he rummaged through old manuscripts and in them, as he himself describes (if he is not mystifying us a bit, because even that must be expected in Stendhal), he found these chronicles. How he must have delighted in them! How many treasures he found for himself in these yellowed pages, over which he could have set as a motto the words he had written somewhere: “Love is a delightful flower, but one must have the courage to pinch it from the edge of terrible precipices.”

How many documents he would find here for the work he had been working on but never wrote: The History of Energy in Italy!

However, this cult of energy, ruthless to the point of immorality, was not a literary doctrine in Stendhal: it was deeply rooted in the era, in the conditions that brought him up. The post-revolutionary era itself had already produced a certain atrophy of moral feelings; and what a school of savagery Napoleon's Grande Armée must have been! Let us compare the theories of Stendhal, who in practice was quite distant from them, being himself a rather sentimental lover all his life, with the heroes of Balzac, the castaways of Napoleonism, Philippe Bridau, Maxentius Gilet.

However, this social feature concerns Stendhal here only in passing. Five Italian chronicles have five women as heroines; their medallions are carved by the stylus of a conscious artist.

Stendhal's role as a writer is quite peculiar here. He tries to make himself as little known as possible. In the fullness of Romanticism, with these themes in his hands as if created to excite the romantic imagination, he tries to become a dry chronicler. He translates whole pages (in a style, as always, rather careless) from the Italian original: barely here and there a touch, a line, necessary to bring out the energy of the features; sometimes, before beginning the story, he allows himself a short essay, always full of original thoughts. He moves away somewhat from this impersonal dryness of style in the longest of the chronicles, in The Abbess of Castro; and now it becomes clear to us why Stendhal was right to defend himself so much against the wind of Romanticism blowing from all sides: for in this work he was not able to avoid romantic coloring of the subject.

Four Italian chronicles date back to the Renaissance ; the fifth, Vanina Vanini, was taken by the writer from contemporary times. It constitutes a link between ancient Italy and the one Stendhal knew personally; at the same time it constitutes a link between Stendhal the chronicler and Stendhal the poet, who created one of his most energetically drawn characters, the Duchess Sansverina in The Hermitage of Parma . Thus the Italian Chronicles constitute an almost indispensable contribution to understanding Stendhal as a novelist and as a follower of that philosophy which he himself christened Beylism. And the spirit of these Chronicles, apparently impersonal, sparing in expression to the point of exaggeration, we will find in the works of more than one of his successors, starting with the author of Carmen and Colomba, Prospero Mérimée, also a persistent seeker of energy.

I will not say that the history of the Duchess of Palliano or Victoria Accoramboni fills one with admiration for that Renaissance, which is customarily spoken of with pious adoration. Stendhal claims that these customs were necessary for the era to produce Raphael and Benvenuto Cellini: if so, let us say with consolation that we had Wyspiański at a cheaper cost...

Tadeusz Zelenski Boy

Book printed on Century Laid ribbed cotton paper and set with the Walbaum font.

Volume 340 pages

Edition: 25 copies.

Handmade binding with case.