Bookish passions

De l'Amour was written seven years before Stendhal began his career as a novelist with Armance, and nearly a decade before he consolidated that career with the publication of Le Rouge et le Noir. Given the chronology of Stendhal's literary output, which places his “physiology of love” between the Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817) and Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 on one side, and Racine et Shakespeare (1823) on the other, De l'Amour lends itself to being considered either as a thinly disguised autobiographical response to his unhappy and one-sided affair with Mathilde Dembowski, or as a theoretical treatise on human passion, which the later novels will duly exemplify in narrative form. However, one could equally well – and in my opinion, more profitably – read it as a kind of anticipation or rehearsal of the problem that Stendhal was to confront in the writing of the novels proper. This is because, as conceived by Stendhal, both the lover and the novelist share the same vulnerability to the repetitions and imitations of the century of platitude. In the face of a culture of imitation it is as hard for the lover to guarantee the authenticity of his passion as it is for the novelist to keep his hold on the real.