Read Online Ideas and the Novel by Mary McCarthy - Free Book Online Page A

it. Milan is drunk on the elixir of freedom, untasted since the Middle Ages, and Fabrice del Dongo is the child of those intoxicating weeks. I am recalling that paean to put it in the gloomy context of The Red and the Black. It cannot be an accident that the history Julien learned, the only history he knew, was precisely the history of that pure, still undefiled period. Here, briefly, the two novels, otherwise so unlike each other, join. From the Italian campaign of 1796, in which the veteran Surgeon-Major had won his croix de guerre, the carmagnole dated, having had its fiery baptism four years earlier at Carmagnola, a town of Piedmont occupied by the revolutionaries. The war dance or dance of liberty came home with the armies, and the music, in double time, served the troops of the Revolution as a marching song. When Napoleon became First Consul, he forbade the playing of the tune.
    This marked the end of the honeymoon. The tempering of Stendhal’s own ardor may date from the Russian campaign, in which he served; there trees of liberty were noticeable by their absence, and the army of freedom had turned into a war machine. Or it may have had more to do with the onset of middle age—he was forty-seven when he published The Red and the Black —than with any reasoned reassessment of Napoleon as the bearer of glad tidings to the peoples of the world. It perhaps means something in our context that the young Fabrice’s experience of the battle of Waterloo is simply one of utter, aimless confusion; this child conceived in the brio of the victorious Revolution is unaware of being present at a tragedy of epic proportions, unaware, in fact, of being present at a battle of any kind.
    But if Stendhal’s feelings toward the putative author of the Mémorial seem to be reserved, if not ambivalent, in The Red and the Black, there can be no question about his clear, objective understanding of the force of Napoleon as idea. This force is shown as a fact, in competition with other facts and hence productive of irony. For Julien Sorel it proves to be a destructive force, but which nevertheless lifts him out of the ordinary, and there is much that is mean and ordinary in him, starting with a small, almost brutishly low forehead that is far from resembling Stendhal’s own broad expanse of brow.
    In striking contrast, Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, is noble in appearance; I spoke of his “beauté surhumaine.” Lucien even has some drops of noble blood in him, on his mother’s side. Where Julien with his calculations and retentive memory is the soul of prose, Lucien is a poet. Yet Lucien, too, has the example of Napoleon before him as an ignis fatuus, and, like a general, he, too, thinks in terms of conquest. He sees himself, after an undecided skirmish at Angoulême, as the conqueror of Paris, moving boldly from success to success. To his awed friends he is “a young eagle”—a step higher on the scale of predators than the circling hawk that Julien envied. He is “the great man of the provinces” before he has published a word and, of course, a “genius,” that is, super-humanly gifted. In the Parisian milieus he enters, Napoleon’s star is still visibly beckoning to the obscure and untried. A poorly dressed young man in thick-soled shoes is said to resemble an engraving of a well-known portrait of Napoleon, an engraving which is “a whole poem of ardent melancholy, restrained ambition, hidden activity.” Can this be the same portrait as the one Julien owned?
    Balzac himself draws the obvious moral; he speaks of “l’exemple de Napoléon, si fatal au Dix-neuvième siècle par les prétentions qu’il inspire à tant de gens médiocres” (“the example of Napoleon, so fatal for the Nineteenth century because of the pretensions it inspires in so many mediocrities”). He is thinking of Lucien and his generation, but the remark could serve as an epigraph for both his own novel and Stendhal’s—if you grant that Julien