On Love
Stendhal, 1822
Why do we see in the person we love perfections that nobody else notices? Stendhal, a former officer of Napoleon, gathered love stories in the salons of Milan and examined love the way a scientist examines an illness: by its stages, its symptoms and its outcomes. A book about crystallization, jealousy and vanity, and about why in love being natural matters more than anything else.
Who it is for
For those who want to understand what goes on in the head of a person in love, where doubt and jealousy come from, and how to tell passion from vanity.
Love is a delightful flower, but one needs the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a terrible precipice.
Pencil notes on a concert programme
Milan, 1820. After the carnival the whole city talks for a month about five or six utterly reckless love affairs. One evening at the house of Signora Pietra Gruà, thirty people argue about them: they sit down at the card table and get so caught up in the talk that they forget to play. Henri Beyle, a former officer of Napoleon's army, realises that in a year all these strange facts will be nothing but an unreliable memory. He takes a concert programme and jots a few words on it in pencil.
That is how he went on: he gathered details on scraps of paper right in the salons where he heard these stories, and looked for a general rule by which they could be compared. Two months later he had to leave for Paris: he feared he would be taken for a member of the secret society Carbonari. The scraps became a book, which he published under the name Stendhal and called without fuss: “On Love”.
The author promised not a novel but a precise description of a particular kind of madness, with stages, symptoms and an outcome, like an illness. He named his main discovery with a new word, “crystallization”: the mind of a person in love itself endows the beloved with perfections that outsiders do not see. At first this discovery found no readers. From 1822 to 1833, by the author's bitter count, there were seventeen of them.
The book is two hundred years old, and in places its age shows. A man of his time readily holds forth on what women are really like, though he admits he can say almost nothing sensible about their hearts. But the mechanism he described still works today. Here you will see how attraction is born, why doubt follows it, how passion differs from vanity, where jealousy comes from and what Stendhal advised those who want to be cured.
A twig thrown into a salt mine
In the salt mines near Salzburg, they throw a twig into a forgotten depth of the mine, a twig that winter has stripped of its last leaf. Two or three months later they pull it out, and it is covered in sparkling crystals. Even the finest twigs, no thicker than a sparrow's foot, are strewn with countless shining diamonds, and the former twig is impossible to recognise.
With this picture Stendhal explains the main point. The mind of someone in love deduces new perfections from everything in the one he loves. A traveller describes the coolness of orange groves in Genoa in the height of summer, and the lover thinks how happy it would be to enjoy that coolness together with his beloved. A friend breaks his arm while hunting, and the thought flies further: how sweet it would be to be looked after by the one you love. From a stranger's broken arm the lover arrives at complete certainty of her angelic kindness. The moment he thinks of some quality, it already shows in the beloved.
Stendhal tells a story that foolish people take as proof that love is meaningless. A girl is told that her relative Edward, returning from the army, is an extraordinary young man and already loves her by reputation. In church she notices a stranger, hears that his name is Edward, and thinks of no one else. Eight days later the real Edward arrives, and he is not the man from the church. The girl turns pale: if she is made to marry him, she will be unhappy all her life. The crystals have already formed on another twig.
Hence Stendhal's definition of beauty: it is the appearance of the capacity to give you pleasure. Pleasures differ from person to person, so beauty for one is ugliness for another. Even a small blemish on the face, a pockmark, moves the lover, because he has lived through a thousand tender feelings beside that pockmark. Stendhal describes a man who had lost a beloved who was thin and marked by smallpox, and who, three years later in Rome, among two new acquaintances, a beautiful woman and a plain woman with smallpox scars, within a week came to love the plain one.
What follows matters. Crystallization is neither foolishness nor deception: Stendhal considers it the source of the greatest pleasures available to a person. But, in his view, to credit yourself with the lovely qualities of the one you love is as wrong as taking pride in a lucky accident. A large part of what captivates you has grown in your own imagination.
About the author
Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), French writer, author of the novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. He served in Napoleon's army, survived the retreat from Moscow, and spent his happiest years in Milan.
All books by this author: Stendhal
Terms from the book
- Napoleon
- Shakespeare
- Edward
- Mozart
- Gruà: Pietra Gruà, a Milanese acquaintance of Stendhal. According to his account, it was in her house that he began to write down the stories from which this book grew.
- Carbonari: A secret society in Italy in the early nineteenth century that fought against Austrian rule. Stendhal left Milan, fearing he would be suspected of links with it.
- Crystallization: A word coined by Stendhal, not a scientific term: the work of the imagination that keeps attributing new perfections to the beloved person.
- Portuguese nun: Marianna Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun of the seventeenth century. Her passionate letters to a French officer were published in 1669.
- Heloise: A twelfth-century French abbess, the beloved of the philosopher Abelard. Their story and their correspondence became famous.
- Abelard: Pierre Abelard (1079-1142), French philosopher and theologian, the beloved of Heloise.
- Gallant love: One of the four kinds of love in Stendhal: an elegant courtship that follows the rules of good manners and reigned in Paris around 1760.
- Carracci: A family of Italian painters from Bologna, active at the end of the sixteenth century.
- Wounded self-love: The English rendering of Stendhal's word “pique”: the wish to get the upper hand over a rival, which is easy to take for love.
- Diana: Donna Diana, a young woman of Seville from the story that Stendhal tells in the chapter on wounded self-love.
- Salviati: A friend of the author, whose diary extracts Stendhal quotes in the book. According to the translators, the author himself is hidden behind this mask.
- Leonora: The beloved whom the author and Salviati speak of. According to the translators, Stendhal describes Métilde Dembowski under this name.
- Othello: Shakespeare's tragedy about a general who, believing false evidence, kills his wife out of jealousy.
- Romagna: A historical region in northern Italy.
- Dembowski: Métilde Dembowski (née Visconti), wife of General Dembowski, with whom Stendhal was close in Milan. In 1819 she broke off all contact with him.
- Don Juan: The legendary seducer. Stendhal means the hero of Mozart's opera “Don Giovanni”.
- Werther: The hero of Goethe's novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774), a young man who perishes from unrequited love.
- Thorn: A town on the Vistula, today the Polish city of Toruń.
All terms
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