The View from San Pietro

On a March morning in 1832, Henri Beyle—known to literature as Stendhal—stood on the terrace of San Pietro in Montorio, gazing over Rome. At forty-nine, he was the French consul in the Papal States, a minor diplomatic post that barely paid his debts. His novels had failed, his histories were ignored, his travel books sold modestly. In the salons of Paris, when his name arose at all, it was as that eccentric Beyle who had wasted his talent on bizarre theories about love and happiness.

Yet as he looked over the eternal city, Stendhal felt a strange confidence. In his pocket was a letter from Balzac, the literary lion of Paris, praising "The Red and the Black" as a masterpiece. Only two thousand copies had sold, but Balzac understood what others had missed: here was something entirely new, a novel that dissected passion with the precision of a surgeon and the insight of a lover.

"I write for the happy few," Stendhal murmured, a phrase he loved from Oliver Goldsmith. Not for the present, with its cant about virtue and its hypocritical prudery, but for readers fifty or a hundred years hence—readers who would understand that the heart has its own logic, that ambition and love intertwine in complex patterns, that sincerity itself could be a form of performance.

He thought of Julien Sorel, his dark hero, mounting the scaffold with a strange joy. He thought of the duchesses and chambermaid he had loved, each teaching him something about the human heart's mysteries. He thought of Napoleon, whose meteoric rise and fall had shaped his generation's dreams. All of it—war, love, ambition, defeat—had prepared him for his true calling: to map the human heart with the accuracy of a military engineer and the passion of a devoted lover.

"In 1880," he said aloud, startling a passing priest, "I shall be understood." It seemed like madness, this faith in posthumous glory. But Stendhal had learned to trust his own vision over contemporary opinion. He turned from the view and walked back to his modest lodgings, where the manuscript of "The Charterhouse of Parma" awaited him. He had work to do, books to write for those happy few who would one day understand that love and analysis, passion and precision, were not opposites but complementary ways of approaching the inexhaustible mystery of being human.