Word: stendhal
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LAMIEL (256 pp.) - Stendhal - New Directions...
...Stendhal carried in his mind's eye an exact portrait of Lamiel, the heroine of his last novel. "She is a little too tall and too thin," he noted. "I have seen her between the Bastille and the Porte St. Denis, and in the steamboat from Honfleur to Havre; her head is the perfection of Norman beauty; a superb high forehead, blond cendré [ash-blond] hair, an admirable and faultless little nose, blue eyes not quite big enough, chin narrow but a little too long; her face is a perfect oval and one can only take exception...
Rags to Bitchery. Lamiel was to begin her life in an orphanage, become a Parisian courtesan, marry a duke, and die the mistress of a robber-chief. From autumn 1839 to spring 1842 Stendhal sketched the outline of her progress from rags to riches. He described her adoption by a childless couple, her entry as a servant-companion into the household of a duchess, her initiation into the facts of upper-class life, i.e., mingled boredom, bitchery, fear and arrogance. He did portraits of varying completeness of the men in her life, ranging from a Machiavellian, hunchbacked doctor...
...hurried on with his rough draft, Stendhal omitted many a detail, skipped from point to point with the eagerness of a writer who knows that most of the machinery of his story, to say nothing of the polish, can be worked in later. He introduced many minor characters by name only, breathing a mere suggestion of life into them. Lamiel was beginning to look more & more like the plan of one of Balzac's great social histories when Stendhal suddenly took sick and died...
This portrait of the artist as a middle-aged mediocrity is sometimes so subtle in its investigation of the intricacies of love that it recalls Stendhal. In the superb English translation of Angus Davidson, Conjugal Love moves with the assurance of a little masterpiece...