A Study of Stendhal's "Armance"

Abstract

In 1827, at the age of forty-four, Stendhal published his first novel. At the time, it seemed an enigmatic disconcerting story. The principal theme in the book was so delicately, so chastely developed, that it was not apparent to most of the first readers. And yet this theme had been treated in a novel published a year earlier by Hyacinthe Latouche, Olivier, which had caused some degree of scandal on two counts. First, the subject was sexual impotency, and secondly, it was surmised that Latouche was not the real author of the work. The duchesse de Duras, who had published in 1824 and 1825 two successful short novels, Ourika and Edouard, had written, but not published, a third story, Olivier ou le secret. The rumor spread rapidly in Paris that the secret which had forced the hero Olivier to leave the woman he loved was his sexual infirmity. The duchesse had written the work in defiance of the belief-those years of the Restoration were prudish-that such a subject could be treated in a novel. Latouche finally acknowledged publicly that he was not the author of Olivier, published under his name, but that its real author was not the duchesse de Duras. The mystery of Olivier's paternity has never been cleared up. Stendhal, in 1826, wrote at some length about Olivier, in an article published in The New Monthly Magazine (18 January), where he praised the work for its originality and attributed its authorship to the duchesse de Duras. He decided at that time to write an Olivier himself, but wisely changed the hero's name to Octave, and gave to the book's title the heroine's name, Armance. He was obviously not attracted by the medical aspect of the subject, because his novel avoids any indulgence in the scabrous. From Olivier he retains no details, and only at the most a vague general plan. The Stendhal work became essentially a description of Paris society, an intention underscored by the subtitle: Quelques scenes d'un salon de Paris en 1827. Stimulated by his reading of Olivier, Stendhal began writing Armance on January 31, 1826, when he worked on it for nine days, until February 8. There is no reliable reason to explain his interruption of the writing at that time. It may have been the difficulty of the subject, or it may have been personal reasons, the gradual ending of his love affair with la comtesse Curial. In any case, he was in England, for the third time, between June and September. On his return in the middle of September, la comtesse Curial broke definitively with him, and it is known that Beyle was so desperate over the collapse of this love that he considered suicide. He resumed work on Armance September 19 and continued until October 10. These two periods of work, totalling thirty-one days, saw the completion of the novel. He spent very little time revising the work for style; indeed he surprised