MLR, I0I.4, 2oo6 I127 modern and, therefore, a realist): Auerbach and Lukacs were the first to read Stendhal as he would have wished. For Ansel, Le Rouge and the first part of Lucien Leuwen are the texts where Stendhal most successfully unites realism with 'une intrigue heroique' (p. lxiv), where he achieves a balance between 'cr&me' and 'vinaigre' (Armance is an example of the latter extreme, La Chartreuse of the former). In Berthier's preface and notices (he is responsable forA rmance and all the shorter texts), the emphasis is rather different. He looks kindly on texts for which his fellow editor has less sympathy: for example, Ernestine, described (elsewhere) by Ansel as 'recit didactique et un peu sec' (Stendhal, le temps et l'histoire (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires duMirail, 2000), p. 23), and indeed Armance itself. Berthier equally, in his notice toArmance, underlines the importance of the subtitle: A rmance is the study of aprecise moment and aparticu lar social group, and the choice of the loi des indemnites as point of departure is a 'trait de genie' (p. 862). But the final stress is laid not somuch on the 'greffier des mzeurs', as on the 'rousseauiste impenitent' (p. xix), theman forwhom, as is claimed inBrulard, music and painting were as important as literature, and love was 'laplus grande des affaires, ou plutot la seule' (quoted p. xxv). Berthier's masterly preface explores these and other paradoxes characteristic of Stendhal as novelist, aswriter ('romancier entre autres' (p. xxiv)), and asman, and despite the difficulties ('Toute une part de Stendhal, laplus secrete certainement et peut-etre la plus essentielle, nous echappe' (p. xxiv)), brings us triumphantly close to this most seductive and yet most elusive of writers. UNIVERSITYOFKENT SHEILABELL L'Harmonie selon Lamartine: utopie d'un lieu commun. By AURELIE LOISELEUR. (Ro mantisme etModernites, 92) Paris: Champion. 2005. 753 pp. EI I0. ISBN 2 7453-II97-2. Aurelie Loiseleur explores what she claims is an outmoded aspect of literary writing but one which was once of central importance, not least for Lamartine. That is the notion of 'harmonie'. It is a sense of the innate order of things, a contemplation of which has the power tomove, to transport us. It depends on order, beauty, and good taste. Harmony is the beauty of the common ground, growing out of an awareness of what binds us one to another and, ultimately, to God. Nowadays, we prefer the unique, the picturesque, the unusual, the misshapen, the grotesque. Baudelaire is much more in tune with the tastes of our times. The grotesques and outsiders who inhabit his poetic world of shards and fragments, his broken urban landscapes, seem closer to us than do the fields and lakes of Lamartine. Yet without Lamartine, succeeding poets would arguably not have achieved what they did. He was their precursor, theman who breathed new life into French poetry with the publication of his Meditations poetiques in i820. Lamartine was an unlikely revolutionary. A confirmed royalist, he was more likely to be a conservative. Indeed, therein lies the secret of his success. As Loiseleur shows, theMeditationspoetiques did not spring spontaneously from his pen but were the work of aman who had mastered the prevailing conventions during a long apprenticeship. What he did was to breathe new life into them. His landscapes are no longer precious cliche-ridden descriptions but are rather a resonance, an echo of the landscape that lies within, the soul. This is the key to the contemporary success of Lamartine. He is not overthrowing what is familiar. He is renewing it. Thereby he is laying the groundwork for much of what is to follow. Baudelaire's earliest work is frequently dependent on Lamartine in its evocation of a landscape that depicts the soul. His next collection is a series of hymns to the glory of God. He seeks to reconnect humanity to the ultimate source of harmony, the Divinity. Nature isgood and its song II28 Reviews displaces that of humanity. In this respect, Loiseleur has perhaps identified the key reason why Lamartine fails to connect with future generations. Whereas Baudelaire looks long and hard at the ugliness and misery that confronts all of us, Lamartine is singing...