I had no plan to write a novel of any kind when I retired, let alone a historical biofiction, and it was sheer accident that started me on this path. I was reading the private diaries of the 19th century French novelist Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pen-name Stendhal. I’d read and reread his novels over the years but knew nothing about his diaries or his autobiographical writing and when I discovered them I was struck by their frankness and a tone that seemed very modern. They were also a window onto a dramatic period in French history — provincial boyhood in the Revolution with his father under house-arrest during the Terror, departure as a sixteen-year-old for Paris in the very month that brought young General Bonaparte to power, late adolescence and twenties in the Napoleonic administration — a minor official but close enough to the centre of power under his cousin (the Emperor’s most trusted administrator, Count Pierre Daru) to observe something of its workings.
My reading might have led no further had I not come across a tiny detail in Beyle’s diary that linked up, most unexpectedly, with another of my long-term interests—the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley). In September 1811 en route from Paris to Milan, Beyle found a book by Maria Wollstonecraft Godwin (her married name) in the stage-coach, evidently mislaid by some other passenger. It surprised him to find such a book there, as it did me. Who could be reading this controversial English feminist in the depths of the French countryside, with France and England at war?[1]
It must be a woman, I felt, and obviously French, since there were no English travellers in France during the Napoleonic wars. But who was she? And where was she going? One morning I woke with words in my head and knew I had the start of a novel — the story of a woman inspired by Wollstonecraft’s travels to set off in quest of a new life in Italy.
I pictured a young woman from the minor provincial nobility whose family had fled the Revolution and found refuge in London where she might have met Wollstonecraft. I named her Marie-Félicité-Honorine de Vernet — a name which, in her desire to pass unnoticed, she shortens to Marie Vernet. But as I started to imagine her Italian journey I saw that including Henri’s story too would create a interesting contrast between male and female experience of travel and, more importantly, allow me to present opposing views of the Napoleonic empire — the insider’s support for its modernising reforms, the outsider’s horror at the endless wars. Here was the potential for a sketch of the era and its political divisions through the attitudes of my two travellers and the many people from every level of society they would encounter on their journeys. Telling Henri Beyle’s story in tandem with Marie Vernet’s was vital to this project, though had I been more experienced I would have recognised that two protagonists and a double narrative was an ambitious structure for any novel, let alone a first.
I started with the intention of keeping the two stories separate since I didn’t want to invent anything for Henri Beyle. I would stick faithfully to his diary, recounting his experiences in his own words without embroidery. But my first drafts read awkwardly. There was a risk that her story would be so much more fully developed than his that readers would skip the pages in between.
So my first departure from my rules was to create scenes and dialogue that showed Henri interacting with the other travellers described in his diary. But that showed only the outer man and in order to convey the complexity of the individual I’d discovered in his autobiographical writing, I needed to evoke his inner world. It meant, however, that I needed to go beyond the August-December diary of his Italian trip that provided my original framework and draw on his other personal writings, in particular the autobiography of his early years that he started at fifty.
What interested me most about the Henri Beyle of 1811 was that though he was committed to the pursuit of self-understanding, there was still much in himself that he was blind to (a common enough state that many of us can identify with, looking back at our late twenties). I wanted to show that the contradictory desires that made for such an unhappy love-life can be understood through two opposing influences: the loss of his adored mother when he was seven and the libertine atmosphere into which he was thrown as a naïve and vulnerable seventeen-year-old following Napoleon’s conquering army. The first left him with a deep and unassuaged longing for tenderness; the second turned him into a would-be Don Juan. This was to be the basis of my portrayal.
A biographer would analyze but a novelist must show, which meant evoking an inner world of memory and desire, my own creation though always anchored in some passage in Beyle’s private writings. The furthest I went was to imagine a dream as a way of suggesting what underlay his emotional response to a particular painting. But even that dream was based on the memory in his autobiography of his pretty mother leaning over his bed to kiss him goodnight. Stendhal’s account of a small boy’s feelings for his mother predates Freud by some sixty years and has a directness that convinces, though no doubt it shocked some of his more conservative editors.
Both my characters were coming to life now that I had given Henri a past and an inner world. But there was a problem with the two unrelated narratives. What I’d created was two stories awkwardly stuck together for no apparent reason beyond the coincidence of the book in the diligence. My professional reader, Anna South of The Literary Consultancy in London, summed up the problem, asking me what my purpose was in telling these two journeys together. Find the connection between them, she insisted.
I saw at once what was needed, even though it meant a complete departure from the rules I’d set myself. My two travellers must meet in a way that would be life-changing for both. Not a sexual encounter or a romance — I wanted to avoid that cliché. Besides, Henri would definitely have recorded a ‘conquest’ in his diary and faking his diary was against my rules, whatever else I invented.
Even more importantly, what I needed was a meeting that would show another side to Henri. At the time of his 1811 Italian trip, he was a brash, irresponsible, self-absorbed young man, and a somewhat inept womanizer who would not be attractive to many readers. I needed to show the man he could become, the one who, fifteen years later, in his book on Italy, would write these words that I use as an epigraph to Part Four of the novel:
The admission of women to complete equality would be the surest mark of civilisation; it would double the intellectual capacity of the human race and its potential for happiness.
Such a strong feminist statement by a man at that time is rare. But here I had the future Stendhal travelling alongside a reader of Wollstonecraft. Could their meeting be a catalyst for his change of attitude towards women? The possibilities were exciting.
But bringing them together would mean adding a completely fictional element to Henri’s journey. Could I justify it? It’s two hundred years since the events I describe took place — surely safe enough to indulge in a little fictionalising — but I lay awake many nights worrying about it. When I stuck closely to Henri’s diary I’d feared being accused of plagiarism, but now that I was moving outside its framework I feared that Stendhal specialists would attack me for inventing things that had never happened. As an Englishwoman writing about an iconic French novelist, wasn’t I already sticking my neck out far enough? Fortunately, around this point I discovered that four French novelists had turned Stendhal into a character in their fiction, so at least I wasn’t the first or only writer to do so.
There were practical problems, however, with linking the two stories. Henri recorded most days on his Italian journey, often at length. So how could I fit in unrecorded meetings with a woman? Fortunately, there are gaps in the diary — nights when he was too tired or preoccupied to record the day’s events, or long gaps because he mislaid one particular notebook on the journey and never recovered it. Most usefully, his account of the Paris to Milan journey contains one passage that could be interpreted in such a way as to permit the all-important first meeting. On Monday 2 September 1811, he wrote:
I watched for a long time before going to bed the room of a woman I’d sat opposite at supper who seemed ‘haveable’. The door was ajar and I had some hope of a glimpse of thigh or bosom. [my translation]
Nothing had come of it, but in that somewhat shocking passage I found my pretext for introducing my two protagonists, first at the supper table in the inn where Marie Vernet would join her fellow passengers, and later when Henri Beyle spies on her — obtaining no titillating glimpses, for
‘she had her back turned, so absorbed in her writing that she hadn’t sensed his gaze, and he’d seen nothing more than a patch of bare nape between her dress and the plait of fair hair that encircled her head.’ [A Promise on the Horizon, 22]
Nonetheless, ‘it was a rare glimpse into a secret feminine existence’ that intrigues him, and here I wanted my readers to sense the future novelist who (fifteen to twenty years later) would create such vivid and sympathetic portraits of women in his fiction.[2]
Once I’d created that first encounter on the diligence, it was easy enough to picture them crossing paths again in Milan, which was then a walled town where the whole population promenaded every evening along a particular street, so the chances of running into an acquaintance were quite high. What this allowed me as well was to offer an external perspective on both characters, as each records their impressions of the other in their diaries.
When it came to the two all-important later meetings, the life-altering conversations, it was easier to fit them in. There’s a large gap in Henri Beyle’s diary towards the end of his Italian trip. His last diary entry was November 7 but he didn’t actually leave Milan till November 13. That gave me six unrecorded days in which anything could happen and I had a very satisfying time filling them. I’d like to think that Henri Beyle would be amused and perhaps even flattered by my account.
Writers often talk about their characters taking over and shaping the plot. It’s become a cliché that nonetheless conveys something of the feeling of being possessed by these entities of one’s own creation. In the case of a real individual, that sense of being possessed might lead one to believe one was channeling the dead as a medium claims to do (though the cynical would say it’s more akin to the ventriloquist with a dummy). Perhaps it’s closer to the actor’s experience — becoming another while still exercising the professional’s long-rehearsed control over accent, intonation, movement — everything that constitutes individuality. What I experienced writing ‘as’ Henri Beyle did feel like giving a voice to the dead, not in any pseudo-mystical way, but rather as in certain circumstances one tries to speak for someone who cannot speak for themselves, attempting to give an honest but sympathetic account of their feelings and motives that will create understanding and empathy in the hearer.
Many biographical novelists add an Afterword, to give their sources and admit to their changes, omissions, or inventions. I begin my own note ‘To the Reader’ by addressing the man himself:
If the ghost of Henri Beyle has been reading over my shoulder, I owe him an apology for the liberties I have taken with his life and character. I hope he would not feel misrepresented by my fictionalised portrayal of his youthful self, or the role I have made him play in the life of Marie-Honorine de Vernet. Being himself a shameless plagiariser of other writers’ work, he could hardly reproach me for my use of his diary. A Promise on the Horizon, 307.
Discouraged by his lack of success as a writer, Beyle/Stendhal liked to predict that he would not be understood before the year 2000 and then only by ‘the Happy Few’. Little did he foresee the horde of biographers and Stendhal specialists, even less the novelists who would reincarnate him in their fictions. A recent essay on Stendhal studies, noting that he figures as a character in several novels, suggests that ‘the novelist would have been far more delighted to to learn that twenty-first-century novelists would seek inspiration in his work than to hear that he was going to be a hit in twenty-first-century universities.’ (Francesco Marini and Maria Scott. “Stendhal in the 21st Century.” Dix-Neuf. Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Volume 19, 2015-Issue 1. Published on-line 31 Mar 2015. https://doi.org/10.1179/1478731815Z.00000000069
As for the question of what’s true and what’s imagined in my book, I could well have quoted Hilary Mantel’s ‘Note to the Reader’ from A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution: “The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”
After all my anxieties about what I’d done, I was thrilled when Jonathan Keates, Stendhal’s British biographer, wrote the following kind words in his blurb:
‘Refashioning the past in the form of episodes which ought to have happened, or almost did, is clearly Pearson’s special skill, one which Monsieur Beyle himself would admire.’
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POSTSCRIPT
It was W.G.Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. transl. Vertigo 1999 (a fictionalised retelling of the Italian journeys of Stendhal, Kafka, and a nameless narrator or authorial alter-ego) which first sent me to Stendhal’s diaries and his unfinished autobiography La Vie de Henry Brulard and started me on the path towards my own novel. But there are other novels dealing with Stendhal’s life, some I haven’t read yet but look forward to.
Vitoux, Frédéric. La Comédie de Terracina (1994)
Rambaud, Patrick. La Bataille (1997)
Sollers, Philippe. Trésor d’Amour (2011)
Brooks, Peter. The Emperor’s Body (2011)
Guégan, Gérard. Appelle-moi Stendhal (2013)
Robinson, Jack. An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. (2017)
[1] It was, in fact, less surprising than we might imagine. While we think of Wollstonecraft as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the first feminist manifestos to reach a wide audience — she was also notorious as an early supporter of the French Revolution through her 1790 book A Vindication of the Rights of Man. In 1792 she’d travelled alone to Paris to witness the Revolution at first hand and lived there for two years, writing a history of its origins and development. So it’s natural that, as a defender of the Revolution and a radical thinker, Wollstonecraft’s books were translated and found sympathetic readers in France.
[2] Without condoning voyeurism, perhaps there’s a parallel here with our own curiosity as readers? We too seek that ‘rare glimpse into a secret existence’ which biographical fiction and films offer us.