STENDHAL’S PREFACES

The four prefaces here were not published during Stendhal’s lifetime, but they
are evidence that he often thought about the possibility of a volume that would
collect his various Italian tales and chronicles.
The first preface given here was written by Stendhal on April 24, 1833, as the
opening to what he thought would become a collection of Italian stories. The
second preface was written on May 16, 1833, another attempt for the same
planned collection. The third preface was composed on July 31, 1838, as
Stendhal was working on “The Duchess of Palliano.” The fourth is undated, but
it was written in a notebook that includes a draft of “Too Much Favor Is Deadly,”
and thus was probably written in the spring of 1839.

Preface
I admit that I have never been particularly curious about how the inhabitants of
New Holland1 act and think, or those of the island of Ceylon. The traveler
Franklin reports that among the Riccaras,2 the husbands and brothers think it a
point of honor to offer their wives and sisters to foreigners. Reading these
truthful accounts by Captain Franklin, whom I have met at the home of
Monsieur Cuvier, can amuse me for a quarter of an hour, but very soon I find I
am thinking about something else: these Riccaras are simply too different from
the men who have been either my friends or my rivals. For the same reason,
the heroes of Homer or Racine, the Achilleses and the Agamemnons have
always made me yawn. True, many of my contemporary Frenchmen imagine
that they love them, because they think that admiring them reflects positively
upon themselves; but as for me, I am beginning to shed all the prejudices that
were rooted in my early youth.
I love seeing the heart of man depicted—but the heart of the man I know, not
that of the Riccaras.
Around the middle of the sixteenth century, vanity, the desire to “create an
effect,” as the Baron de Faeneste put it,3 threw a thick veil in France over the
actions of men, and even more so over their motives. Vanity has a different
character in Italy, and I give my word of honor on this to the reader: it is a
much weaker force there. In general, one thinks of one’s neighbor there only to
either hate him or despise him; the only exceptions occur during three or four
ceremonies per year, and at those a man throwing a fete can mathematically,
so to speak, count on the approval of his neighbor. There are none of those
little nuances and inferences that go on to make a man deathly uneasy and
worried every fifteen minutes of his life. You do not see those anxious, haggard
faces produced by an always-wounded, always-suffering vanity, the kind of
visages you see in Viennet (the deputy for Hérault in 1833).4
This Italian vanity, so different from, so much feebler than ours, is what
persuaded me to transcribe the anecdotes that follow. My preferences will
seem baroque enough to my French contemporaries, who are accustomed to
seeking their literary pleasures in the kind of depictions of the human heart
that appear in the works of Messieurs Villemain, Delavigne, and ******.5 I
imagine that my contemporaries of 1833 will not be very much moved by the
naive and energetic traits to be found in these tales told in the style of gossips.
But for me, the narratives of these trials and tortures provide some
unimpeachable information on the human heart, information that gives rise to
some enjoyable evening meditations now and then. I would much prefer to find
stories about love and marriage and shrewd schemes for getting hold of
inheritances (like those of the Duke of ****** of 1826), but even when I have
found such tales, the iron fist of the justice system not playing any part in
them, they have seemed less trustworthy to me. But some good people are
working, at this very moment, on further research for me.
What would be needed would be a people among whom the sensations of the
moment (as in Naples) or the power of meditated, ruminated passion (as in
Rome) would have chased out vanity and affectation. I don’t think that one
could find outside of Italy (and perhaps Spain, before the affectation of the
nineteenth century set in) an epoch that was, in the first place, equally civilized
so as to be more interesting than the Riccaras, and, in the second place,
equally free of vanity so that the human heart can be viewed almost naked.
The one thing I am sure of is that today England, Germany, and France are all
too rotten with affectations and vanities, in every area, to be able to cast a
light on the human heart in the way these stories can.
Rome, palazzo Cavalieri, twenty-fourth of April 1833.

Preface
The reader will find not carefully composed landscapes here but rather sights
taken directly from nature, as if with the English instrument. The truth ought to
take precedence over every other kind of merit, but in our time truth is not
enough, is not piquant enough. I would advise every person who finds him- or
herself partaking of that frame of mind to read one of these stories every week.
I love the style of these stories; it is the style of the people, full of
redundancies, and always determined to make the reader know that, when
something horrible is named, it truly is horrible. But it is by such means that
the narrator, whether intending to do so or not, depicts his century and its
ways of thinking.
Most of these stories were written shortly after the death of the poor devils who
are their subjects.
I have made a few editorial changes to make the style a little less obscure and
to keep the reader from becoming impatient.
Obscurity is the great weakness of the Italian language. The fact is, there are
eight or ten Italian languages, and none has succeeded in killing off the others;
in France, the language of Paris killed off the language of Montaigne. In Rome,
they say, “Vi vedrò domain all giorno .”6 No one in Florence would understand
this. I would much rather read a story in English than in Italian; it would be
much clearer to me.
The story that has the most piquancy is that of the Massimi, page 16.7
I would like to exclude the siege of Genoa, which has no interest beyond
ensuring that the entire manuscript given to me has been copied out; I am
afraid of being accused of having neglected a ******.
About a third of these stories are scarcely worth the trouble of copying out,
being of the 1600 kind of bad, though this is to my eyes less annoying than the
1833 kind, with quite different kinds of ideas. For example, a Roman prince
(Santacroce) comes to believe that his aged mother has a lover, because he
has seen her waistline expanding; he believes his honor has been insulted, and
he stabs the poor hydropic woman to death. Spanish pride grafted onto Italian
creates a son who believes his mother has a lover.
Even in the least interesting of these stories, one can find some reflection of
the mores of the time.
In 1833, in France and even more in England, people kill in order to get hold of
money. Two poor devils were executed the other day here, one twenty-three
and the other twenty-seven: one named Vivaldi had killed his wife, because he
had fallen in love with another woman, and the second one had shot and killed
an ultra doctor,8 a man who had probably betrayed his country—and in both
cases, there was no trace of a money motive.
Crimes based on money are boring, and one will find very little of that kind of
thing here.

Preface
People often speak about Italian passion, that unbridled passion which sprang
up in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but has died out today
under the influence of French mores and the desire to imitate the fashionable
life of Paris.

Preface
Around the year 1350, Petrarch made ancient manuscripts fashionable in Italy,
and that resulted in people’s conserving even contemporary manuscripts—and
this in a century when knowing how to read and write would have been
considered shameful for a fashionable Frenchman. And so it is that in 1839
there are so many treasures in the libraries of Italy. And to make our good
fortune even greater, Italy having been divided up into a great many small
states, each of which was headed by wise leaders, the Venetian ambassador to
Florence couldn’t care less about what was going on in Florence, while the
Medici’s ambassador to Venice couldn’t care less about what the doge was up
to.
But a strange thing happened once the two voting chambers were established
(just as well and just as badly as they are established in France), following
Napoleon’s victories, which had inspired Italians with an enthusiasm at having
been given a real country for several years;9 and above all, given that all Italy
has been studying Monsieur Thiers’s history of the Revolution,10 the legitimate
sovereigns in Italy have concluded that they have a considerable advantage in
staying out of the archives. Political thinking in 1500 was completely ridiculous;
back then, they had not even invented representatives who would vote for
greater taxes on the people who had elected them, and moreover they thought
that all good political thinking could be found in the pages of Plato, though
badly translated for so long. But the men of those times, and consequently the
writers—who were by no means members of the Academy with their eyes on a
Monthion prize11—were filled with a fierce energy, and they knew what it was
to live in a small town under the watchful eye of a tyrant who had recently
succeeded in suppressing the Republic.
So, one goes into the protected archives of Italy not to find passable arguments
but instead for the occasional sublime poems in the style of Michelangelo, the
kind of thing that can cast a unique light into the depths of the human heart.
For even the most baroque and hideous government has one good thing about
it, that it can tell us something about the human heart—something we would
search for in vain in young America, where all passions are subordinated to the
cult of the dollar.
Among the archives, the ones I was most anxious to get entrée to, where I
presented myself as a civilized and inoffensive scholar who was interested only
in Greek manuscripts—these were the archives of the bishops’ tribunals, the
authority of which has weakened only in our own time, following the shooting
star that was Napoleon.