As a man whose ears and eyes were very close to the whirring of contemporary events, his descriptions of Napoleon and Byron are peculiarly interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi-god, then he was reviled because with the Corsican's downfall he lost his chances for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie Française; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion, thus: _Spiritous sanctous_. As the Emperor passed by on horseback, cheered by the mobs, "he smiled his smile of the theatre, in which one shows the teeth, but with eyes that smile not." Stendhal tells us that the Emperor had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a common trait in certain parts of France, he adds.
He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, at Milan. It was in a box of the Scala. He was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by his graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer a soldier or a cynic, but a man of sensibility, almost a hero-worshipper. Byron was agreeable. They met often. When Byron's physician and secretary, Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon, declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take a carriage, as after midnight walking was dangerous in Milan. Coldly though politely Byron asked for some indication of his route and then, during a painful silence, he left poor Stendhal staring after him as he hobbled away in the darkness. Such human touches are worth more than the letters in which the literature of the day is discussed.
Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron wrote Stendhal, whom he apparently liked, thanking him for a notice he had read of himself in the latter's book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme master of the anecdote, these letters may serve as an introduction to Stendhal's works, though we wish for more of the tender epistles. However, in The Diary, the Journal and the Life of Henri Brulard, one may find copious and frank confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence --and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble archives!--fittingly closes his brief introduction with a quotation from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the parabolic Barbey d'Aurevilly, who, after calling the correspondence "adorable," adds that it possesses the unheard-of charm of Stendhal's other books, a charm which is inexhaustible. Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer the old edition compiled by Mérimée. There is such a thing as too much Stendhal, although every scrap of his writing may be sacred to his disciples.