Forgery

In Stendhal's aesthetics it is almost invariably music and painting which are presented as the superlative instances of the sort of qualities that his fiction seeks to achieve: Correggio's paintings exemplify the strategies which Stendhal adopts in the portrayal of his fictional characters; and the music of Mozart and ‘le divin Cimarosa’ creates the sort of emotional state in its listeners that Stendhal would like his own writing to inspire in his readers. Fiction, on the other hand, seems to provide the model for all that is opposed to these sublimities, proposing a repertoire of vraisemblances that feeds the vanity and the self-interested calculations of the baser forms of human action. The novel, as we have seen, is much more likely to find itself on the side of the vile Sancho Panzas than on that of the sublime Don Quixotes.

To make matters worse – and this is the issue which this chapter will be concerned with – the problem of the vilifying effects of the vraisemblable is compounded by the disastrous consequences wrought specifically by the material existence of writing itself within the tales told in Stendhal's novels.