Chapter XXXVII

, p. 132) on a passage where, for once, he actually acknowledges a thought from La Rochefoucauld:--

"The reader will have recognised, without my marking it each time, several other thoughts of celebrated writers. It is history which I am attempting to write, and such thoughts are the facts."

44. The monitorial system (_Enseignement mutuel_) was introduced into France soon after the Bourbon Restoration; but it was not, like our monitorial system, designed with a view primarily to the maintenance of discipline, but rather to supplying the want of schools and masters and remedying the official indifference to popular education, which then existed in France. As such, it was warmly espoused by the liberals, and as warmly opposed by the reactionaries. The monitors, it was thought, could hand on to the younger pupils the knowledge they had already received; after the Revolution of 1830, when no longer the object of political controversy, the system gave way to more practical and efficient methods of public instruction.

45. Porlier (Don Juan Diaz), born in 1783, was publicly hanged in 1815 as the result of a conspiracy against Ferdinand VII of Spain. After having been one of the most active and bravest supporters of Ferdinand's cause in the effort to re-establish his throne and the national honour, he now sacrificed his life to an unsuccessful attempt to set up a constitutional government.

Antonio Quiroga (born 1784), also after having distinguished himself in the national struggle against Napoleon, was tried for complicity in the conspiracy, after the fall of Porlier. After a series of adventures, in which he was more lucky than Riego, his

[Pg 353] subaltern, to whom he owed so much, he again distinguished himself, after a temporary withdrawal from active service in 1822, by the stout opposition he offered to the French invasion of 1823. His efforts, however, were of no avail and he escaped to England, and thence made his way to South America. Some years later he returned to Spain, was nominated Captain General of Grenada, and died in 1841.

Rafael del Riego (born 1785), after serving against the French, first became prominent in connexion with the effort to restore the constitution which Ferdinand had abolished in 1812. He was elected by his troops second in command to Quiroga, whom he himself proposed as their leader. This rising was a failure and Riego was exiled to Oviedo, his birthplace. After being repeatedly recalled and re-exiled, he ended by being one of the first victims of Ferdinand's restoration in 1823, and was dragged to the place of execution at the back of a donkey, amid the outrages of the mob.

46. Father Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), the famous historian of the Council of Trent, a Servite monk, and the ecclesiastical adviser of the Venetian Government, at a time when it seemed not impossible that Venice would break away, like Northern Europe, from the Roman Catholic Church.

47. Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) was, according to Stendhal, our only philosopher. It is on Tracy, one of the Ideologists, that Stendhal, one might say, modelled his philosophic attitude. Tracy's _Idéologie_ (1801), he says, gave him "milles germes de pensées nouvelles"--gave him also his worship of logic. He was equally impressed by the _Traité de la Volonté_ (1815). Cf. Picavet's Sorbonne Thesis (Paris, 1891) _Les Idéologues_, pp. 489-92, in which he speaks of Stendhal as "a successor and a defender, _mutatis mutandis_, of the eighteenth-century 'Idéologues.'"

48. Giovanni Luigi Fiescho (15 23-1547), a great Genoese noble, formed a conspiracy in 1547 against the all-powerful Admiral of the Republic, Andrea Doria. The state fleet in the harbour was to be seized, but in attempting this Fiescho was drowned, and the conspiracy collapsed.

[Pg 354] 49. Henri Grégoire (1750-1831), one of the most original fearless and sincere of the Revolutionary leaders, was the constitutional Bishop of Blois, who refused to lay down his episcopal office under the Terror, and when the Reign of Terror was over, took an active part in restoring Religion and the Church. He resigned his bishopric in 1801. Napoleon made him a count but he was always hostile to the Empire. He was a staunch Gallican, and never forgave Napoleon his concordat with the Papacy. He was naturally hated and feared by the Royalists at the Restoration, but he remained popular with the people, and was elected a member of the lower chamber in 1819, though he was prevented by the Government from sitting.

50. _La Génie du Christianisme_, by Chateaubriand (1802).

51. See note 47.

52. See note 37.

53. See note 37.

54. Johannes von Müller--the German historian (1752-1809).

55. La Trappe--the headquarters (near Mortagna) of a monastic body, the Trappists, a branch of the Cistercian order. The word is used for all Trappist monasteries.

56. Samuel Bernard (1651-1739), son of the painter and engraver of the same name, was a man of immense wealth and the foremost French financier of his day. He was born a Protestant, not, as has been thought, a Jew, but became a Catholic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He was ennobled and became the Comte de Coubert (1725).

57. Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), a celebrated mathematician and scientist.

58. Hazlitt, in a note to his essay on _Self-Love and Benevolence_, remarked on Stendhal's absurdly exaggerated praise of Helvétius. After quoting this passage, he adds: "My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal fallacy."

[Pg 355] Hobbes and Mandeville, he says, had long before stated, and Butler answered, this fallacy, which not unfrequently vitiates Stendhal's psychological views.

59. Francois Guillaume Ducray-Duminil (1761-1819), the author of numerous sentimental and popular novels.

60. The _Argonautica_ of Apollonius of Rhodes (222-181 B. C.).

61. Jean Francois de la Harpe (born 1739) is frequently mentioned by Stendhal in this hostile spirit. After winning considerable notoriety, without very much merit, La Harpe in 1786 became professor of literature at the newly founded Lycée. Having started as a Voltairian philosopher, and still apparently favourable to the Revolution, he was none the less arrested in 1794 as a suspect and put into prison. There he was converted from his former Voltairian principles to Roman Catholicism. He died in 1803.

62. _Notices sur Mme. de la Fayette, Mme. et Mlle. Deshoulières, lues à l'Académie française_, Paris, 1822.

63. Pierre Jean de Béranger (born 1780): The bold patriotic songs, which had made Béranger's name, brought him in 1828, for the second time, into prison. He refused office after the revolution (1830), for the principles of which he had already suffered; he died in 1848.

64. _La Gazza Ladra_, an opera by Rossini.

65. Antoine Marie, Comte de Lavalette (1769-1830) was one of Napoleon's generals. After the Bourbon restoration of 1815 he was condemned to death, but escaped, chiefly owing to his wife's help.

66. Alessandro, Conte Verri, the contemporary of Stendhal and a distinguished _littérateur_ (1741-1816).

67. Montenotte (April, 1796), and Rivoli (January, 1797), two victories in Bonaparte's Italian campaign.

[Pg 356] 68. The existence of these Courts of Love has been denied by many modern historians. For a brief statement of the arguments against their historical existence the English reader may be referred to Chaytor, _The Troubadours_ (in the _Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature_, 1912), pp. 19-21. But while the direct evidence for their existence is very flimsy, the direct evidence against them is no less so.

69. The monk of the Isles d'Or, on whose manuscript Nostradamus professed to rely, is now considered to be a purely fictitious person, an anagram on a friend's name.

70. The date of André le Chapelain's treatise is a disputed point. Stendhal gives its date as 1176; Reynouard and others, 1170. Others again have placed it as late as the fourteenth century, though this has been proved impossible, since thirteenth-century writers refer to the book. The probability is that it was written at the beginning of the thirteenth or end of the twelfth century--there is no evidence to fix the date with precision. For a full discussion of the question see the preface to the best modern edition of the work--_Andreae Capellani ... De Amore_ (recensuit E. Trojel), 1892.

71. Cf. Montesquieu, _Lettres Persanes_, passim, and especially Letter 48: ".... Our foreign demeanour no longer gives offence. We even profit by people's surprise at finding us quite polite. Frenchmen cannot imagine that Persia produces men.