Sundays with Stendhal 9

From On Love, the chapter on love in the United States ... Stendhal offers us ... Jingle Bells! Who ever would have thought?

In the Winter ... American young people of both sexes drive about night and day over the snow in sleighs, gaily travelling distances of fifteen or twenty miles without anyone to chaperone them; and nothing untoward ever occurs.

(In this conjecture about the Americans of roughly 1830, Stendhal, who never actually visited the place but had a great many opinions about it, was, we must observe, quite mistaken. There was, in fact, Much Untowardness.)

Sundays with Stendhal 8

It is only in order to avoid being cooked in the next world in a cauldron of boiling oil that Madame de Trouvel resists Valmont. I cannot understand why the thought of having a cauldron of boiling oil as a rival does not drive Valmont away through sheer contempt.

(On Love, chapter 57, 'The Thing Called Virtue'.)

Sundays with Stendhal 7

Julien, in the drawing room of Madame de Fervaques, paying court to the Marechale in order to move Mathilde to jealousy ...

Surrounded by persons who were eminently moral, but who often had not one idea in an evening, Madame de Fervaques was profoundly impressed by everything that bore a semblance of novelty; but, at the same time, she felt that she owed it to herself to be shocked by it. ...

'How is it,' she asked him the following evening, with an air of indifference which seemed to him unconvincing, 'that you speak to me of London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, it appears, after leaving the Opera?'

Julien was greatly embarrassed; he had copied the letter line for line from the Russian's originals, without thinking of what he was copying, and apparently had forgotten to substitute for the words London and Richmond, which occurred in the original, Paris and Saint-Cloud. He began two or three excuses, but found it impossible to finish any of them; he felt himself on the point of giving way to an outburst of helpless laughter.

At length, in his search for the right words, he arrived at the following idea: 'Exalted by the discussion of the most sublime, the highest intersts of the human soul, my own, in writing to you, must have become distracted.' ...

He left the Hotel de Fervaques in hot haste. That evening, as he looked over the original text of the letter which he had copied the night before, he very soon came to the fatal passage where the young Russian spoke of London and Richmond. Julien was quite surprised to find this letter almost tender. It was this contrast between the apparent frivolity of his talk and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of his letters that had marked him out.

The length of his sentences was especially pleasing to the Marechale; this was not the cursory style brought into fashion by Voltaire, that most immoral of men!

(The Red and the Black, part II, chapter 58, "Manon Lescaut.")

Sundays with Stendhal 6

I admit, sometimes I fear this is me:

The Baron could not produce epigrams; he required at least four sentences of six lines each to be brilliant.

(The Red and the Black, part II, chapter 34, "The Hotel de La Mole.")

Sundays with Stendhal 5 (delayed)

The canons of political correctness of France of 1830:

So long as you did not speak lightly of God, or of the clergy, or of the King, or of the men in power, or of the artists patronised by the court, or of anything established; so long as you did not say anything good of Berenger, or of the opposition press, or of Voltaire, or of Rousseau, or of anything that allowed itself the liberty of a little freedom of speech; so long, above all, as you did not talk politics, you could freely discuss anything you pleased.

There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns, no blue riband that can prevail against a drawing-room so constituted. The smallest living idea seemed an outrage. Despite good tone, perfect manners, the desire to be agreeable, boredom was written on every brow. the young men who came to pay their respects, afraid to speak of anythng that might lead to their being suspected of thinking, afraid to reveal some forbidden reading, became silent after a few elegantly phrased sentences on Rossini and the weather.

(The Red and the Black, Part II, Chapter 34, "The Hotel de La Mole.")

Sundays with Stendhal 4.5 (special midweek edition)

Professor Erik Jensen, Case Western, has posted a much discussed essay on SSRN, here, addressing that vital question of the law professor dress code or dress non-code. It has elicited some comment among the law professoriat, including this rather decisive thumbs-down from Professor Stephen Bainbridge, UCLA, here, and a more agnostic referral over to the apparently even worse dressing among philosophers by Professor Larry Solum, Illinois, here. And Althouse, here.

Well. I am afraid that I live a few blocks from my law school, often ride my bike, almost always walk back and forth between my campus and office a couple of times each day ... and when I'm not teaching class, I do indeed frequently show up in shorts and a T-shirt. In the classroom, I usually wear nice denim and a button down shirt or a polo shirt. I have tried experimenting this year with a sports coat to see if the students are somehow more respectful of my age and experience - well, they are still basically surfing the internet, so answer is no. My dean once told me years ago, only partly tongue in cheek, that I had singlehandedly lowered dress standards at the law school. It is often hot and muggy in DC - today it is over 80 degrees on October 22, though the humidity is low - especially if you grew up with the humidities on the West Coast that are currently contributing to the burn-down of southern California, and rather than scruffy, I regard myself as environmentally correct by walking and biking to school. So there. Of course, even if I didn't have environmental virtue to fall back on, I'm sure I would do exactly the same thing anyway.

But as to the question of neckties ... well, I was reminded of this passage from The Red and the Black. Julien has been on a secret mission for his employer, the Marquis de La Mole, to London, and is on his way back via Strasbourg, when he runs into his old friend, the Russian Prince Korasoff - I will post bits of their charming conversation over time, but for the moment, a special midweek Stendhal post - per neckties, which began their sartorial existence as cravats:

"Come into this shop," the Prince said, "look at that charming black cravat; you would say it was made by John Anderson of Burlington Street; do me the pleasure of buying it, and throwing right away that dreadful black rope which you have round your neck."

***

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. They have now reached the days of Louis XV.

(The Red and the Black, part II, Chapter 54, Strasbourg.)

(The last quoted bit about the Russians is, naturally, directed at the Volokhs - all of them! Even the ungenetically-linked co-Conspirators!)

ps. I fully understand Althouse's and Jensen's Tom Wolfe description:

[H]e had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old...

Quite right and likely applies to me, ossified seven year old. And yet, when it comes to some level of comfort ... I just can't seem to much care. Probably I have a certain circuit loose - my older brother the neuropsychiatrist points out that a sign of senility and dementia, and depression, is lack of attention to personal appearance, a loss of vital interaction with the world and an awareness of how the world sees you. But the fact is, I was never able to write a comprehensible word in a suit, back in law practice - all of it waited, or a whole lot of it waited, until I got home and was able to change into something comfortable and get out of the suit and actually write. I have no idea why.

Althouse mentions comfort in a suit. I pulled down Hollander's two superb books on fashion, Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits. Hollander talks about how suits look great and are comfortable and all that. Hmm. Possibly if you not an overweight middle age guy with a paunchy stomach. They do indeed make you look better than a lot of other clothing, true. But I don't find them comfortable.

However, more interesting to me is that suits, and semi formal, uniform clothing for men homogenize in a different way - they make younger men look older and older men look younger. They equalize the underdevelopment of youth and the coming decrepitude of age, in each case by covering them up with the same standard uniform, and therefore convey a certain equality of power across generations.

The New York Times's reporting on France

My French friend, who doubtless would prefer not to be named, finds the coverage of France by the New York Times insipid and infuriating. "Does the Times think we are children?" he asked me (I paraphrase from memory) back at the time of the election. "America's leading newspaper seems unaware there are serious issues of economics, politics, state policy, and all its Paris correspondent thinks about is making cliched comparisons between France and the United States about women, divorce, affairs by politicians. Does she know anything else? New York liberals think we are Disneyland. At least American conservatives want to talk about real things."

I was flattered that the "conservatives" he meant included me. I am highly francophilic, although I can't speak French - I have taken enough classes in order to be able to read Stendhal, Char, Cendrars, and Camus in the original with a dictionary, but that's more or less it - and this friend tells me that I am not so much a conservative as the American cognate of a center-right Gaullist, which is also highly flattering and in its way very astute. He describes himself as a center-left Gaullist - but what matters, he says, is the Gaullist part. French Gaullists and American Gaullists clash, he says, because what they share is that neither one is in the least bit apologetic for speaking for the interests of his country and, more importantly, its honor. He adds, still annoyed, that the "best way America and France could immediately improve relations would be for the Times to replace Elaine Sciolino with someone who understood more finance and less fashion." Banish her, he said, to where she really belongs, in the "Style section and Travel."

I doubt he has yet seen today's Week in Review in the Times, in which Sciolino has a major front page story on - the reform of the French economy? Non. The impending strike and its consequences? Non. Olivier Roy's new book on Islam and French secularism? Non. It is, instead, yet more cultural trivialities about Sarkozy and divorce - always the same shtick - the sophistication of the French versus the vulgarity and prudishness of the Americans. "L'Amour Has Little to Do With l'Etat." We might add that "L'Times's Coverage Has Little to Do with L'Real Issues of France But That L'Times Doesn't Seem to L'Notice or L'Care." The justification at the offices of the Times, I suppose, is that it has calculated, probably correctly, that this blather is what its Manhattan readership, and its cognates across American cities, want to read over Sunday brunch.

So when I quote Stendhal in the post below, "I crave leave to slander France," well, it's not me I'm talking about. I rarely jump onto the criticize-the-Times bandwagon; I have many close friends there, now and in the past (and, anyway, at some point I will think its stock price, even sans voting rights, will be low enough to warrant buying). When the Times wants to do something serious on Western Europe, it can always call on Christopher Caldwell or David Rieff, over at the NYT Magazine. But I thought my French friend should have some voice on what he regards as the thoughtless liberal American slander of France.

(Thanks, Glenn, for the Instalanche and welcome Instapunditeers!)

(ps. Continuing the Times's preference for trivialities regarding France, today's Week in Review, Sunday, November 4, 2007, has an article by someone or other on names of children in France. It mentions immigration issues and names, and tries to glue on something of weighty social significance of class and identity, but as the article itself says, there is a "lighter side" to French baby names, and the essay gives a good thousand words to it.)

Sundays with Stendhal 4

(From On Love, Chapter 42.)

I crave leave to slander France a little more.

(On my reason for this quotation, being in fact highly francophilic myself, see the above post.)

Sundays with Stendhal 3

Julien was now a dandy and understood the art of life in Paris. He greeted Mademoiselle de La Mole with perfect coolness. He appeared to remember nothing of the time when she asked him so gaily to tell her all about his way of falling gracefully from his horse.

Mademoiselle de La Mole found him taller and paler. There was no longer anything provincial about his figure or his attire; not so with his conversation: this was still perceptibly too serious, too positive. In spite of these sober qualities, and thanks to his pride, it conveyed no sense of inferiority; one felt merely that he still regarded too many things as important. But one saw that he was a man who would stand by his word.

"He is wanting in lightness of touch, but not in intelligence," Mademoiselle de La Mole said to her father, as she teased him over the Cross he had given Julien. "My brother has been asking you for it for the last eighteen months, and he is a La Mole!"

"Yes; but Julien has novelty. That has never been the case with the La Mole you mention."

(The Red and the Black, chapter 38, "What is the decoration that confers distinction?")

Sundays with Stendhal 2

After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants. They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

(The Red and the Black, Part One, Chapter 26, "The World, or What the Rich Lack")

Sundays with Stendhal

Seeing how Brian Leiter, Belle Lettre, and other bloggers post up poetry and other stuff on a weekly basis - and seeing how this blog is a little bit of anything - I thought I might try something similar. So, I am going to run a series for a while of quotes from Stendhal. Mostly they will come from The Red and the Black, but sometimes from other things, like the essay On Love, and from The Charterhouse of Parma, other places. As I think I have said (in fact I'm sure I have said repeatedly), I was introduced to The Red and the Black at the age of fourteen by a friend at school. I read it and immediately saw myself forever in Julien. I have reread the book on average somewhere between once a year and once every other year. A lot. When I was fifteen, I had a small business - I confess - writing English and history papers for money for the rich boys' school up in the hills above Claremont, and I wrote four papers for one class on The Red and the Black. Just this term, one of my European LLM students told me she was named for Clelia Conti; in recognition of her parents' excellent taste, naturally she will get an A.

So, let us start with a quote I have actually put up on this blog several times, and which could serve quite well as the motto of, I don't know, one of our human rights organizations:

Julien fell asleep, dreaming of honors for himself, and liberties for everyone else.

Julien Sorel - an appreciation of Maurice Leiter's poem on Brian Leiter's blog

By happenstance, I ran across the following poem by Maurice Leiter, Julian Sorel, posted as the Friday poem on Brian Leiter's blog, here. The last bit of the poem is this:

It's a good story and if I told it
Then I'm glad I told it
Let someone more detached
Provide a fitting commentary

I felt too close to Julian
To judge him
Certainly not in public

Well, it's rare that anyone captures part of my feeling for The Red and the Black so well. I've never told the story to a class. But for several years, when on vacation and hiking in the Eastern Sierras, part of my obligation while hiking was to tell a story that would keep kid Renee's mind of her feet. Rules were simple - as long as we kept moving, I had to keep telling the story; if we stopped, I stopped. This tended to slow me down and speed Renee up.

One year I told Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, which she eventually read and has largely memorized. Another year I told a story from a book I only vaguely recollected from my childhood, Trouble at Timpetil (which my wife eventually found and got for Renee and me). And one year I told the Red and the Black. We hiked about ten miles that day, and spent about seven or eight hours on the trail - out of South Lake, up Bishop Pass trail, detour to the Chocolate Lakes, nestled below The Inconsolable Mountains. Renee was entranced by the story of Julien and Mathilde. Curiously, though, she has never read the novel itself. I still read the novel - I was even reading it last night, because I thought I might take a quote from the chapter called, Another Danton? But then I got distracted by the lovely chapter wherein Mathilde says (you see, it's sitting right here on my desk),

"Whatever are you dreaming of, Sir?" There was a note of intimacy in her question, and she had come back running and was quite out of breath in her eagerness to be with him. Julien was tired of self suppression. In a moment of pride, he told her frankly what he was thinking.

So as you can tell, I am entirely with Maurice Leiter in saying "I felt too close to judge Julian/ Certainly not in public." Quite.