Byron, Mme de Stael, Schlegel, and the religious motif in Armance

The Man [Schlegel] was also my personal acquaintance--and though I refused to flatter him grossly (as Mme de Broglie requested me to do) yet I uniformly treated him with respect--with much more indeed than any one else--for his peculiarities are such that they one and all laughed at him and especially the Abbe Chevalier di Breme--who did nothing but make me laugh at him so much behind his back--that nothing but the politeness on which I pride myself in society--could have prevented me from doing so to his face. (Letters 8:172-73)

If Breme and Byron told their acquaintances at Milan anything at all about their mutual encounters with Schlegel at Coppet, they scarcely could avoid describing scenes such as these; this would greatly have amused Stendhal, who himself had imagined a skeptic's farcical dialogue with Schlegel in the Histoire de la peinture en Italie:

Voulez-vous savoir si vous avez le sens interieur? M. Schlegel vous le dira; il en a une si grande part. qu'en cinq minutes de conversation il se fait fort de connaitre si vous etes du nombre des bienheureux.

Le difficile en cette affaire, c'est qu'il ne faut pas rire....OEuvres 27:54n1)

In Armance Stendhal best evoked the image of a mystical missionary preaching to an unregenerate freethinker, contriving only to elicit a polite smile of suppressed hilarity.

Octave's comical initiation into Schlegelianism gains deeper historical resonance from the link it forges between the early and the late years of the French Restoration. As we have seen, Stendhal thought of Mme de Stal as the first of a long line of fashionable women who harbored the ambition of establishing a new religion, and he numbered among her modern spiritual descendents in particular the Duchesse de Broglie. The Duchesse traditionally has been characterized as the principal model for Mme de Bonnivet, largely on the authority of Stendhal's close friend, Romain Colomb.(32) Critics have endorsed Colomb's identification of Mme de Broglie with Mme de Bonnivet for two reasons: first, because Mme de Broglie was greatly influenced by the ideas of Schlegel, who had served as her private tutor (see Michel 3:404); and second, because Mme de Broglie was well known to Stendhal for her support in the middle 1820s of fashionabie Parisian religious coteries (see Chroniques 2:216, 4:226, 292). Yet Mme de Bonnivet's kinship with Mme de Broglie, far from dispelling or diluting the evocation of Mme de Statl in Armance, actually intensifies it, as the Duchesse de Broglie was in a very real sense a latterday copy of Mme de Stael: she was Mme de Stael's daughter.

The relevance to Armance of this familial connection has been consistently overlooked, despite Stendhal's assertion in the New Monthly Magazine of July 1824 that Mme de Broglie was worthy of note above all "for being the daughter of the celebrated Madame de Stael" (Chroniques 2:216), and despite Mme de Stael's responsibility for employing Schlegel as her daughter's tutor. The daughter's Schlegelian upbringing must have been common knowledge in 1816 in Breme's circle, where Stendhal presumably also had occasion to learn of Mme de Broglie's relations with Byron. The poet mentioned in his letter to Murray of August 7, 1821, cited above, that "Mme de Broglie requested me" "to flatter [Schlegel] grossly" at Coppet, and had explained more fully in an earlier letter that "he [Schlegel] took a dislike to me--because I refused to flatter him in Switzerland--though Madame de Broglie begged me to do so--'because he is so fond of it'" (Letters 8:172, 16). Whether or not Stendhal was aware of this anecdote, he must surely have learned--or at least inferred--at Milan that Mme de Broglie hadjoined forces with her mother at Coppet in encouraging their guests to pay homage to Schlegel.(33)