The Red and the Black (82 page)

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Authors: Stendhal

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #France, #Classics, #Literary, #Europe, #Juvenile Fiction, #Psychological, #Young men, #Church and state, #People & Places, #Bildungsromane, #Ambition, #Young Men - France

BOOK: The Red and the Black
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240 pious associations: see n. to p. 25.
242
Saint-Philippe du Roule
: fashionable church situated (in presentday Paris) between the Boulevard Haussmann and the Avenue des Champs-Elysées.
243
Concordat
:
agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII ( 1801) setting out the
terms under which the Catholic Church would be given recognition by
the French State. The alienation of Church lands was made permanent,
but the State assumed responsibility for the payment of clerical
salaries.
244
Malmaison
:
château situated to the west of Paris; residence of Napoleon, and
then of the Empress Josephine after their divorce (1809).
244
walls . . . which break up the park
:
the Swedish banker Haguermann, who had purchased Malmaison, undertook
building work in 1830 to separate the original layout of the chateau
from the extensions built in the grounds by the Empress Josephine.
245
Spanish War
: France invaded Spain in 1823 to restore the Bourbon king.
246
Place de Grève
: square in Paris where public executions took place. Renamed Place de l'Hôtel de Ville in 1806.
246
Moreri
: 1643-80, author of a
Grand Dictionnaire historique
( 1674).
246
Adsum qui feci
: Virgil,
Aeneid
, IX. 427: 'I am here who was the cause of it.'
247
Philip II
: King of Spain, 1556-98. Henry VIII: King of England, 1509-47.
248
Cardinal Dubois
: 1656-1723, cardinal and politician. Tutor to the Duke of Orleans; prime minister in 1722.
249
Robespierre and his cart
: see n. to p. 60. The cart was that used to convey victims to the guillotine.
249
Faubourg Saint-Germain
: neighbourhood of Paris surrounding the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the south bank of the Seine.
249
Voltaire's death
: 1778.
250
Kant
: German philosopher, 1724-1804.
250
nil mirari: nil admirari
('do not marvel at anything'), Horace,
Epistles
, 1.6.
251
Henry III's friend
: Boniface de la Mole, 1530-74.
252
Père-Lchaise
: cemetery where many of the famous are buried:

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opened in 1804 at Ménilmontant (on the eastern outskirts of Paris) on
land that had formerly belonged to Louis XIV's confessor, the Père de
La Chaise.
252
Marshal Ney
:
1769-1815, renowned for his exploits in the revolutionary wars and
those of the Empire. Created a peer of France by Louis XVIII, he
deserted to Napoleon during the Hundred Days and was court-martialled
for treason at the Second Restoration.
253
posible
: in the original French, Julien writes
cela
('that') with a double ll:
cella
--a
common mistake among French native speakers unsure of their spelling.
Stendhal remembered committing it himself when first employed at the
ministry of war on his arrival in Paris at the age of 16.
254
St Charles's day
: 4 Nov.
256
Académie des Inscriptions
: founded by Colbert in 1663 for the pursuit of historical and archeological learning.
257
Chapelle
: 1626-86, French poet.
Molière
: 1622-73, French dramatist.
258
Reina
: Francesco Reina, 1772-1826: Italian lawyer, scholar and patriot much admired by Stendhal.
258
Voltaire's Princess of Babylon
:
1768; an oriental extravaganza depicting the tumultuous adventures of
a dazzlingly beautiful princess and her bold suitor.
259
Bois de Boulogne
: wood on the western edge of Paris where it was fashionable to go riding.
259
Rue du Bac
: long narrow street running from the Seine through the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Rue de Sèvres.
260
Place Louis XVI
: now Place de la Concorde. In 1828 a monument was erected on the spot where Louis XVI had been guillotined.
262
Ronsard
: 1524-85, French poet.
262
You can only lean
. . .: maxim attributed to Talleyrand (see n. to p. 267).
263
new colleagues
: 77 new peers were created in Nov. 1827--a move which displeased the extreme Ultras.
263
Béranger
:
1780-1857, writer of patriotic political songs. He had been condemned
in 1828 to 9 months' imprisonment and a fine of 10,000 francs for
three seditious songs. The liberal paper
Le Constitutionnel
tried to raise a public subscription to pay the fine.

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263 . . .
freely on any subject
: this long sentence is an echo of Figaro's monologue in Beaumarchais
Marriage of Figaro
( V.3).
264
La Quotidienne . . . La Gazette de France
: the latter was an Ultraroyalist newspaper, engaged in 1830 in a major campaign against
La Quotidienne
, the other extreme right-wing paper, which supported Charles X's current minister Polignac.
La Gazette de France
advocated the inclusion of the ex-minister Villèle in the Cabinet.
264
rode in the king's carriages
:
this was a highly exclusive privilege granted to certain members of
the nobility under the Ancien Régime, but it had lost some of its
distinction by 1830.
267
Abbé de Pradt
:
1759-1837, churchman, diplomat and political writer. He opposed the
Revolution and emigrated, but later rallied to Napoleon, becoming his
chaplain and his ambassador to Warsaw. He returned to the royalist
fold with the Restoration of Louis XVIII.
Talleyrand
:
1754-1838, prelate and diplomat; minister of foreign affairs under
Napoleon. He was responsible for forming a provisional government in
1814 and summoning Louis XVIII to the throne; he played a major part
in negotiating the treaty of Vienna in 1815.
Pozzo di Borgo
: 1764-1842, Corsican diplomat who became privy councillor to Alexander I of Russia, and worked for the defeat of Napoleon.
267
great poet
: the name
Sainclair
echoes the Saint-Clair who is the hero of a tale published by Mérimée
( 1803-70) in January 1830. Commentators have noted characteristics
of both Mérimée and Lamartine ( 1790-1869) in Stendhal's 'great poet'.
Lamartine had abandoned his earlier Ultra stance in favour of more
liberal views by 1829; he was officially admitted to the
Académie Françraise
in April 1830.
268
Baron Bâton
:
bâton
is the French word for 'stick, rod'.
268
Duc de Bouillon
: 1555-1623, Protestant supporter of Henri IV.
Bouillon
is the French word for 'broth'.
268
most subtle man of this century
: Talleyrand (see n. to p. 267) has been suggested as the model for this portrait.
269
Tartuffe
:
the main character of Molière play Tartuffe ( 1669) is a consummate
hypocrite who attempts to marry his protector's daughter and seduce
his wife by pretending to be deeply devout. The play was immensely
popular between 1815 and 1830, and was used by liberals as an
anticlerical weapon.
269
like Bazilio
: it is in fact Bartholo (in Beaumarchais
Marriage ofFigaro

-544-

Figaro, 1784) who comments that a certain lodging place must be a thieves' den if Basilio lives there.
270
electoral colleges
: see n. to p. 100 above.
270
decisive manœuvre
: reference to the 1827 elections, in which a number of instances of high-level fraud had come to light.
270
Comte
: famous conjurer of the period.
271
greatest poet of the age
: reference to Béranger (see n. to p. 263 above).
271
M. de Nerval
: see n. to p. 398.
271
Lord Holland
:
1773-1840. Whig peer associated with a number of political reforms.
He sympathized with the French Revolution and protested at the Allies'
imprisonment of Napoleon.
272
new king of England
: William IV acceded to the throne in June 1830.
272
Duc de Castries
:
1727-1800, minister for the navy from 1780 to 1787. d'Alembert:
1717-83, French Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician and writer.
272
Maréchale
: the title designates the wife of a marshal.
272
lending money to kings
:
Baron James de Rothschild, nicknamed 'kings' moneylender', raised
large sums in 1823 to support the Spanish War, in which the rebel
general Riego was hanged by Ferdinand VII.
275
Faublas
:
The Amorous Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas
is a novel by the politician and writer Louvet de Coudray, 1760-97.
280
Staub's
: the most fashionable Parisian tailor of the time.
282
son of an archbishop
: Catholic clergy are celibate.
283
Count Ory
: opera by Rossini, first performed in 1828 and put on again with great splendour at the Tuileries in the spring of 1830.
284
Opera days
: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
285
Bertolotti
: editor of the Piedmontese literary journal
Lo Spettatore
to which Stendhal had contributed in 1816.
285
Hyères
: port on the Mediterranean coast.
285
new paper
: plausibly
Le National
, founded in 1829, and hostile to the Ultra-right.
286
Rivarol
: 1753-1801, literary figure with a reputation for wit. He is remembered chiefly for his
Discourse on the Universality of theFrench Language

-545-

French Language, awarded a prize by the Berlin Academy in 1786.
286
Emigration
: see n. to p. 215.
288
M. Poisson's accounts
:
reference to a scene in L'Ecole des bourgeois by d'Allainval (
1700-53). First performed in 1728, this comedy of manners, depicting
nobles and parvenus at loggerheads, was given 162 performances between
1801 and 1837.
289
Lowe . . . Bathurst
:
Bathurst was minister for the colonies from 1815 to 1825, and was
responsible for appointing Lowe to the governorship of St Helena in
April 1816.
289
Vane
:
fictitious. Critics have suggested that Stendhal modelled this
character on Richard Carlile, a follower of Jeremy Bentham. Carlile
was in prison in 1817 when Stendhal first visited London.
291
standing for the liberals
:
in the 1827 elections a royalist faction joined forces with the
liberal opposition, and became known as the right-wing defection.
293
Pellico
:
Silvio Pellico, 1788-1854, Italian writer imprisoned in the Spielberg
in Brünn for Carbonarism. Stendhal had made his acquaintance in Milan
in 1816.
297
Coulon's
: the Coulons were a family of ballroom dancers famous at the time.
298
accompanying a M. Coindet
: reference to a passage in Rousseau
Confessions
(Book X).
298
King Feretrius
:
the liberal press in the 1820s was merciless in its mockery of M.
Laurentie, editor of the Ultra newspaper La Quotidienne, for a howler
he had committed in a scholarly treatise on the Roman historians:
ignorant of the expression
Jupiter Feretrius
(
Feretrius
is a conventional epithet of disputed meaning), he had conjured a
King Feretrius out of the Latin sentence he was attempting to
translate.
301
Mirabeau
: see n. to p. 240.
301
Conradin
:
Conrad V ( 1252-68), last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, was King of
Sicily from 1254, and was beheaded on the orders of the King of
Naples.
301
galope
: this dance was all the rage in the late 1820s.
301
25 July 1830
:
it was on this day that Charles X and his minister Polignac published
a set of repressive measures which triggered off the July Revolution,
bringing France a greater measure of liberty under Louis-Philippe.

-546-

M
me
de Staël
:
1766-1817, French writer. She had an influential salon in Paris at
the beginning of the Revolution, but was later forced into exile by
Napoleon. She held progressive views on politics and on the position
of women in society.
Danton
: see n. to p. 3.
extradition
:
plausibly an allusion to the Galotti affair, which received
widespread coverage in the press in 1830. The Prince of Castelcicala,
Neapolitan chargé d'affaires in Paris, had requested the extradition
of a conspirator named Galotti who had sought political asylum in
Corsica
grab me
: the slang term
empoigner
was the cause of a topical scandal in 1823: it was used in public by
the chief gendarme when he expelled a deputy from the Chamber.
Ney
: see n. to p. 252.
Henri IV
:
1553-1610, King of Navarre ( Henri III) from 1562, and of France (
Henri IV from 1589. Married Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henri
II.
Girondin
:
member of a political group formed in 1791 around the deputies from
the Gironde. The Girondins represented moderation in the Convention, and
opposed the massacres of the Terror.
Courier
:
Paul-Louis Courier, 1772-1825, author of pamphlets against the
Restoration. He was sentenced to two months' imprisonment in 1821, and
accused of 'cynicism' by the crown prosecutor at his trial.
Béranger
: see n. to p. 263.
Murat
: 1767-1815, marshal in Napoleon's armies; married Napoleon's sister Caroline; King of Naples from 1808.
Delavigne
:
1793-1843, French poet and dramatist. Marino Faliero was first
performed in May 1829 and widely discussed in the press for its
political overtones. The plot centres on the character of Israel
Bertuccio, a 'man of the people' who hatches a plot against the
Venetian nobility in 1335.
Pichegru
:
1761-1804, commander of the Rhine army under Napoleon. He later
betrayed the Revolution by establishing contact with the émigré
forces.
La Fayette
: 1757-1834, French general and politician.
He took part in the American War of Independence, and supported the
French revolutions of 1789 and 1830 as a liberal royalist.
liberal Spaniards
: reference to an uprising in 1829 by a group of

-547-

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