He might have been a bit of a dick who always had his ready for you if you were of a comely stripe, but he wrote about women with his heart full for them, and he did so with nuance, grace, and kindness, while not stinting on his knowledge of what people of either sex could do to one another. Dating, if we are to call it that, became a form of research for him.
Or, you might say he was gathering field notes, which, yes, sounds weird, but even as Stendhal objectified women and used them for his carnal purposes, he was coming to know a lot about them. You might say Stendhal dated serially or you might say he had a thing for racking up sexual conquests. He dug the military and the theater, serving in Napoleon’s army, engineering a rescue on a river that was much discussed, then sojourning in Italy where he picked up some dandified ways, which played well in Paris, where he went through woman after woman. He disliked his father, thinking he wasn’t creative enough, and doted on his mother, who died when he was seven. He went by a lot of different names in France in the first half of the 19th century, being King Pseudonym. This middle bit, that’s when you know you’re hooked.”īut if ever there was a born literary dissector, that would be the Frenchman Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as the novelist Stendhal. This part here, that takes care of the arousal. To pin it to a dissecting tray, fold back the layers, and say, “see that part over there? That makes for skipped heart beats. For all of the works of prose that focus on the subject of love-surely the greatest theme and mystery in literature-it’s curious how rarely authors get clinical about the subject.
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