2/29/24
It’s good to see Stendhal back to writing something instead of just despairing as he did in the last chapter. But what he’s come up with here doesn’t inspire much in me.
The opening anecdote about a case of mistaken identity — where a woman thought someone else was in love with her and was therefore disappointed when she learned the truth — has some amusing reality to it. But he follows this up with a lot of assertions with no stories to illustrate or explain how he reached the conclusions.
For example, of a man has a shabby hat and doesn’t ride well, a woman will tell herself she could never marry him. How does that apply in an age where we don’t tend to wear hats and ride horses? His point is that, in the first phase of love, man needs to be blandly perfect, otherwise a woman will never idealize him. He says:
No matter whether it be in the forest of Arden or at a Coulon ball, you can only enjoy idealizing your beloved if she appears perfect in the first place. Absolute perfection is not essential, but every perceived quality must be perfect.
This doesn’t seem right to me, and Stendhal gives plenty of other examples in this book of men who fall in love with women with pock marks and then will seek out that look if he loses his love. But he adds another comment that seems more astute:
In mannered love, and perhaps in the first five minutes of passionate love, a woman taking a lover will be more concerned with the way other women see him than with the way she sees him herself.
I think we’re in an age of mannered love, made more acute by dating apps and showing off partners on social media. Women tend to care what other women think about things quite a bit about most things, actually.
But that’s all I take away from this slight chapter. He goes on this way over the next four chapters, testing my resolve to keep writing about each of them one by one, day by day.
If only I had any readers, I’d be worried about them sticking around.