Volume 26, Number 14 · September 27, 1979
Playing Stendhal
By V.S. Pritchett
A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal
by Robert Alter, in collaboration with Carol Cosman
Basic Books, 320 pp., $13.95
'I would be rather taken for a chameleon than for an ox,' one of Stendhal's pungent remarks, uttered, no doubt, in some Paris salon where he was, as usual, posing, and where his scornful wit was making its random hits. Someone who heard the phrase noted that the stocky, rather overdressed and ugly, timid man had made a studied effort to pass as 'an ungraspable, conjectural figure.' In early portraits he looks bluff, even doggish. Silvestro Valeri's picture of him in consular uniform in 1835 gives him a bitter mouth.
Review, 2544 words
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