Chassé de l’École polytechnique dans les années 1830, Lucien Leuwen, grâce aux relations de son père, riche banquier parisien, obtient de devenir sous-lieutenant et gagne Nancy. Tandis que son régiment de lanciers entre dans la ville, il aperçoit, derrière une persienne entrouverte, une jeune femme blonde, Mme de Chasteller. Lui qui se croyait insensible à l’amour va s’éprendre d’elle et, lorsqu’une nouvelle carrière fera suite à sa vie d’officier de province, il n’oubliera pas cette passion. Ce roman qui s’ouvre sur la délicate peinture des premiers sentiments de Lucien pour Bathilde, avant de faire place à cette comédie qu’est la politique et dont l’auteur s’amuse, Stendhal le commence en 1834, puis, après l’avoir quasiment achevé, l’abandonne sans le corriger.
About the author
Stendhal, whose real name is Marie-Henri Beyle, born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble and died on 23 March 1842 in Paris, is a French writer of the first half of the 19th century.
He joined the army in 1800 and held mainly military administrative positions, as he did during the Russian campaign in 1812. An art lover and passionate about Italy, where he spent many years, he first wrote aesthetic essays under his real name as L’Histoire de la peinture (early 1817), but it was under the pseudonym ‘M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie’ that he published Rome, Naples, Florence in September 1817. This pen name is inspired by a German town called ‘Stendal’, the birthplace of the renowned art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann at the time, but above all close to where Stendhal lived in 1807-1808 a moment of great passion with Wilhelmine de Grisheim. Having added an H to further Germanize the name, he wanted to pronounce it ‘Standhal’.
His training novels Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) and Lucien Leuwen (unfinished) made him, alongside Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert or Zola, one of the great representatives of 19th century French fiction. In his novels, characterized by a thrifty and tightened style, Stendhal searches for ‘Truth, the harsh truth’ in the psychological field, and mainly portrays young people with romantic aspirations for vitality, strength of feeling and dreams of glory.
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