by
Stendhal
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
- a likeable, excellent fellow, handsome but devoid of wit, M. Barot, a banker from Charleville, then busy gaining a fortune of eighty thousand francs' annual income;
- an officer retired on half-pay, decorated at Waterloo, absolutely deprived of wit, and if such a thing is possible, even more of imagination, foolish, but with perfect manners, and having had so many women that he had become sincere on their subject.
lol
[...] He was defending, as a solicitor, one of those poor idiots who get involved in conspiracy when they have only two thirds or three quarters of the courage needed for such a preposterous action. [...]
lol
[...] This Mme Lavenelle is as dry as a piece of parchment and in any case has no wit, and above all no passion, and it's quite impossible for her to be affected other than by the sturdy thighs of a company of grenadiers parading through the garden of the Tuileries in white kerseymere knickerbockers.
my god lol
[...] When I left Lussinge the most dismal time of the day would begin for me. I went, in that year's great heat, to seek the shade and a little coolness beneath the great chestnut trees of the Tuileries. 'Since I can't forget her, wouldn't I do better to kill myself?' I'd think. Everything was burdensome to me. I still had in 1821 that residual passion for painting in Italy which had made me write on that subject in 1816 and '17. I'd got to the Museum with a ticket that Lussinge had procured for me. The sight of those masterpieces merely reminded me all the more intensely of Brera and Metilde. When I came across the corresponding French name in a book, I would change color.
<3
He had learnt music in the same way that a scholar from the Academy of Inscriptions learns or pretends to learn Persian. He had learnt to admire such and such a piece, the first quality always lay in a sound that was just right, in a phrase that was perfectly correct.
ha
At the sight of him all hats are quickly raised. His hair is graying and he is dressed in gray. He is a knight of several orders. He has a high forehead, an aquiline nose and, on the whole, his face is rather well proportioned; on first impression, it even seems to combine the dignity of a small-town mayor with the kind of charm that one may still find in a man of forty-eight or fifty. But the visitor from Paris is soon taken aback by his smug and conceited air, compounded with a hint of narrowness and lack of imagination. One senses before long that this man's chief talent is to make his debtors pay him exactly on time and to pay his own debts as late as possible.
She was a naive soul who had never presumed so far as to judge her husband, or admit to herself that he bored her. She supposed, without saying so, that there could be no tenderer relationship between husband and wife. She especially liked M. de Renal when he told her about his plans for their children, one of whom he had slated for the army, the second for the bench, and the third for the church. In short, she found M. de Renal far less tiresome than all the other men of her acquaintance.
his horror of eating with the servants was not instinctive with Julien; in order to make his fortune, he would have done far more disagreeable things than that. He had borrowed this aversion from Rousseau's Confessions. It was the only book by which his imagination had formed any idea of society. collection of the bulletins of the Grand Army and the Memorial de Sainte-Helene completed his Koran. He would have died for those three works. He had no faith in any other. Following the old surgeon major's lead, he regarded all the other books in the world as lies, written by cheats for the sake of getting ahead. Besides a fiery soul, Julien had one of those amazing memories that so often go hand in hand with foolish- ness. To win over old Father Chelan, on whom he saw clearly that his whole future depended, he had memorized the whole New Testament in Latin. He also knew the book Du Pape, by M. de Maistre,* and believed as little in the one as in the other.
lol
"That was your offer. I won't deny it," said old Sorel, speaking even more slowly; then, with the inspiration of genius something that will astonish only those who do not know the peasants of Franche-Comte he added, looking M. de Renal straight in the eye: "We can do better."
At these words the mayor's face dropped. He recovered and after a weighty conversation, two good hours long, in which not a word was left to chance, the peasant's shrewdness won out over that of a rich man, who had no need of it to live. All the numerous articles that were to regulate Julien's new life had been given final shape; not only was his salary set at four hundred francs, but it was to be paid in advance, on the first of each month.
lol
In Paris, Julien's relationship with Mme. de Renal would have been simplified very quickly; but in Paris, love is the child of fiction. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found their position clarified for them in three or four novels, even in the couplets sung at the Gymnase.* The novels would have outlined the parts they should play, have shown the model to be imitated; and sooner or later, vanity would have compelled Julien to imitate this model, although with no pleasure and perhaps boggling.
In a small town in the Aveyron or in the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the torrid climate. But as matters stand, under our duller kies, a poor young man, ambitious only because his refined nature requires some of the pleasures money can buy, is coming into daily contact with a thirty-year-old woman, one who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and who does not take the novels for a model of conduct in any respect. Things go slowly; things happen gradually in the provinces; people are more natural there.