Stendhal: Greatness in Paperback

And a bottle of champagne

Anyone who’s had the pleasure of walking along the banks of the Seine when the bookstalls are open knows that the French have a great tradition of publishing paperbacks. Of course, a personal library crammed with hardcover leather-bound books is a dream but, for most of us, the price of a collection like that would be prohibitive and the size of the books would make it hard to actually read any of them.

As much as I’d like to be the sort of person who could be found swishing a snifter of Armagnac in his personal library on the average evening, pipe smoldering and big leather tome in hand, my reality involves—and is likely to keep involving—a paperback stuffed into my coat pocket. French publishers have always been happy to supply crisp little copies of good books (published at low cost but still with good covers and typefaces) that can keep us reading until the domestic dream is realized.

If you’re ever dallying among the bookstalls of Paris or—more likely—among the shelves of your local secondhand shop, you could do worse than to pick up a paperback copy of a novel by Stendhal. English literature is blessed with many great adventure novelists: Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Robert Louis Stevenson all come to mind. But no nation seems to have perfected the genre like the French, who gave us Dumas, Hugo, and Jules Verne.

Stendhal is part of that great tradition but, while Dumas and Hugo are masters of the swashbuckling plot, where swords are perpetually rattling in their scabbards and people always seem to be running from gendarmes, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black is more interested in matters of the heart. If you’re going to start somewhere, I’d recommend The Red and the Black, which combines the sort of forbidden love you find in Jane Eyre with plenty of sweeping vistas from the Swiss-French border and at least one very dangerous flintlock pistol.

Plotwise, The Red and the Black gets more done in sixty-five pages than most novels I’ve read in their entirety. But it’s the author’s sense of how the mind and the heart work together, sometimes guiding us aright and sometimes plunging us into fogs of moral confusion, which makes his work so worthwhile, not to mention his propensity for turning out elegant sentences over and over again, like a jukebox playing the hits. “After moral poisoning,” he writes at one point, “one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.” A novelist would be lucky to write one sentence like that in a hundred pages, but Stendhal's works are stuffed with them.

This is a book worth taking with you on the train, chipping away at its elegant largesse bit by bit whenever you have a minute. The best part about the paperback tradition is that it reminds us that good art doesn’t need to be reserved for ideal situations: we can keep it by our sides to ease and elevate all the little inconveniences of the day. If we do so, avoiding the debasing temptation to pull out our phones, we’ll not only be better entertained but also better people in the end. As Stendhal said himself, “A novel is a mirror carried along a high road,” and it’s only after some time in front of a mirror that we can be our best.

---

Like what you’re reading here? The best way to help out is to spread the word. Your friends are good people—they deserve good writing, too.