3 Clichés of Romantic literature, especially after Châteaubriand's immensely popular short novels, René and Atala, which Stendhal despised.
Chapter Eleven: A Young Girl's Imperial Dominion
seen or been involved in really grand deeds. My uncle, the Duke of N———, was at the Battle of Wagram."4 "What has force of character got to do with swinging a saber? And when they do it, they're always talking about it!" said her cousin. "Well! I like those stories. To be in a genuine battle, one of Napoleon's, where ten thousand soldiers were killed, that really tests your courage. Exposing yourself to danger lifts the soul, preserves it from the boredom in which, alas, my poor worshipers are immersed. And boredom is contagious. Have they ever thought of doing anything extraordinary? They're trying to win me: now there's a wonderful adventure! I'm rich, and my father will push his son- in-law. Ah, if only my father could find me, instead, someone who was just a tiny bit amusing!" As you can see, Mathilde's way of looking at things, lively, candid, picturesque, had a bad effect on how she talked. Her remarks often seemed to her exceedingly polite friends in rather poor taste. Had she been less in fashion, they might almost have said that her way of talking was a bit overcolored to be true feminine delicacy. For her part, she was certainly unfair to the handsome cavaliers who filled the Bois de Boulogne.5 She did not look to the future with terror—that would phrase it too forcefully—but with a disgust distinctly rare at her age. What could she hope for? Wealth, noble birth, intelligence, beauty, all had been heaped on her by the hands of Fate, or so people said to her, and so she believed. So this was how she thought, she who was the most envied heiress of the Faubourg Saint- German, at the time when she began to take pleasure in walking with Julien. His pride amazed her; she admired the shrewdness of this petty bourgeois. Just as Father Maury had done, she assured herself, he'd know how to make himself a bishop. During these walks, the fashion in which our hero criticized some of her ideas, his honest, earnest opposition, soon began to preoccupy her; she thought about what he said; she told her cousin every little detail of their conversations, though she found herself unable to do justice to their full flavor. And suddenly an idea flashed on her: "I'm lucky enough to be in love," she told herself, in an incredible ecstatic joy. "I'm in love, I'm in love, I am, I am! A young girl at my age, beautiful, spirited, where could I find such emotion, except in love? There's no point even trying, I could never fall in love with Croisenois, Caylus, and all the others. They're perfect, maybe too perfect, but—in a word—they all bore me." She reviewed in her head all the descriptions of passion she'd read in Manon Lescaut, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, in The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, etc., etc.6 Of course, it could only be a grand passion: a frivolous love was unworthy of a girl her age, a girl of her birth. For her, the only thing that deserved the name love was the heroic emotion occurring, in the whole of French history, during the days of Henry III and of Bassompierre, Richelieu's antagonist. Such love never wavered, vulgarly, when it met with obstacles: quite to the contrary, obstacles led to