Stendhal

Italian passion––”the passion that seeks its own satisfaction, and not to give one’s neighbor an enhanced idea of oneself”––is the life-blood of Stendhal’s Three Italian Chronicles. Gathered here are three long-out-of-print stories animated by life-and-death romances and sensational crimes. “The Cenci” and “The Abbess of Castro,” set in a brazen Renaissance, are the author’s versions of two antique chronicles he discovered in Italian libraries: “Vanina Vanini” is a Roman tale of the 1820s. All three give full rein to that special egoism of unswerving, passionate purpose Stendhal so adored in Napoleon and celebrated in all his heroes and heroines. Fused to that passion is his style, which imperturbably stage-manages urgent speech and violent intrigue. On this gemlike scale, his style as it charms and stings seems particularly vivid: for admirers of his novels, each of these stories gleams like an enameled miniature executed by a great master.

Féder, devenu veuf après un court mariage d’amour, s’installe à Paris, prêt à tout pour conquérir le monde et faire fortune. Séduite par sa mélancolie et son ambition, la belle Rosalinde, célèbre danseuse, devient sa maîtresse et le lance comme peintre à la mode. Le succès ne tarde guère. Un jour, un riche provincial demande à Féder de faire le portrait de Valentine, sa jeune épouse... Grand peintre de l’âme humaine et des passions qui l’animent, Stendhal, dans ce court roman, n’est pas s’en rappeler les plus belles pages de son chef-d’œuvre, Le Rouge et le Noir.

Attractive, clever, a cavalry officer and very rich, young Leuwen had everything necessary for happiness and success--everything except belief in himself and the social order of his time. It is the period of King Louis-Philippe, when an induced conservatism was atrophying France after the cataclysm of the Revolution and the glorious illusion that was Napoleon. Here is an historical novel which is the real thing--a portrait without equal of a time, a place, and the way conflicting groups of Frenchmen felt about each other and themselves. Lucien Leuwen comes down from Paris to serve with a regiment garrisoned in the provincial city of Nancy. There, though he is only a rich bourgeois, not of the nobility, he cleverly makes his way into society and dares to fall in love with the blue blood belle of the town. The magic cast by one of France's greatest novelists transports us completely into the hearts of Lieutenant Leuwen and the beautiful Bathilde de Chasteller as their love affair follows its torturous course.

The Telegraph takes up from where The Green Huntsman left off with the career of Lucien Leuwen, the fashionable young cavalry officer with "republican" leanings but aristocratic tastes. When his father, an influential banker, places him in a government office, Lucien is quickly involved in a series of intrigues. He is required to assist in the suppression of a murder, fix a provincial election, and to advance the interest of his father's cabal, carry on a cold-blooded love affair with the most beautiful hostess in Paris. Through Lucien's eyes, Stendhal uncovers the moral decay of a society in which a failing government keeps itself in power by force and trickery.