Stendhal’s Privileges

Rome, April 10, 1840

May God grant me the following licence¹:

Article 1. — Never any serious pain until ripe old age: and then no pain, but death by apoplexy, in bed while asleep without any physical or mental suffering.

Every year, no more than three days of illness. The body and what comes out of it odourless.

Article 2. — The following miracles will be neither seen nor suspected by anyone.

Article 3. — The mentula², like the index finger for hardness and mobility; this whenever desired. Shape two inches longer than the big toe, same girth. But pleasure from the mentula only twice a week.

Twenty times a year the privilege-bearer will be able to change himself into any person he wishes, provided this person exists. A hundred times a year he will be able to speak for twenty-four hours any language he wishes.

Article 4. — The privilege-bearer having a ring on his finger and clasping that ring when looking at a woman will make her fall passionately in love with him as we are told Heloise was with Abelard. If the ring is moistened with a little saliva, the woman he is looking at will merely become a tender and devoted friend. Looking at a woman and removing a ring from the finger, the feelings inspired by dint of the previous privileges will cease. Dislike turns into benevolence on looking at the detested person and rubbing a ring on the finger.

These miracles may not happen more than four times a year for an amorous passion, eight times a year for friendship, twenty times for putting an end to dislike, and fifty times for simple benevolence.

Article 5. — Lustrous hair, excellent teeth, fine skin without razorburn. Light and appealing body odour. On 1 February and 1 June of each year the privilege-bearer’s clothes will become as they were on the third time he wore them.

Article 6. — Miracles in the eyes of all those who do not know me, the privilege-bearer will have the appearance of General Debelle³ who died in Saint-Domingue, but with no imperfection. He will play whist, écarté, billiards and chess faultlessly, but may never win more than a hundred francs; he will shoot with a pistol, ride a horse and wield a sword to perfection.

Article 7. — Four times a year he will be able to turn into whichever animal he wishes, and then turn back into a man.

Four times a year he will be able to turn into the man he wants to be; and also to gather together his life into that of an animal which, in the event of the death or hindrance of man No. 1 into whom he has turned, will be able to restore him to the natural form of the privileged person. Thus the privilege-bearer will be able four times a year and for an unlimited period on each occasion to occupy two bodies at once.

Article 8. — When the privileged person is wearing about him or on his finger for two minutes a ring which has been placed for few seconds in his mouth, he will become invulnerable for the time he has stipulated. Ten times a year he will have the sight of an eagle and will be able to cover five leagues in one hour.

Article 9. — Every day at two o’clock in the morning the privilege-bearer will find in his pocket a gold napoleon, plus to the value of forty francs the coin of the realm in which he happens to find himself. Money that has been stolen from him will be found the following night, at two o’clock in the morning, on a table in front of him. Ruffians on the point of striking him or serving him poison will come down with an acute attack of cholera lasting a week. The privilege-bearer may cut short this torment by saying: “I ask that the sufferings of so-and-so cease, or be transformed into some lesser affliction.”

Thieves will be struck down with an acute attack of cholera lasting two days when on the point of committing the theft.

Article 10. — When out hunting, eight times a year, a small flag will indicate to the privilege-bearer, one league away, such game as exists and its exact position. One second before the fowl or game startles, the small flag will glow; this small flag will naturally be invisible to all except the privilege-bearer.

Article 11. — A similar flag will indicate to the privilege-bearer statues hidden underground, in streams and by walls; what these statues are, when and by whom they were made, and the price they might fetch once they have been discovered. The privilege-bearer will be able to change these statues into a lead ball weighing a quarter of an ounce. This miracle of the flag and the successive changing into a ball and into a statue can take place only eight times a year.

Article 12. — The animal on which the privilege-bearer is mounted, or pulling the vehicle transporting him, will never become sick or stumble. The privilege-bearer will be able to unite with this animal so as to inspire it with his wishes and to share its sensations. Thus the privilege-bearer when riding a horse will form a single creature with it and rouse it with his wishes. The animal, thus united with the privilege-bearer, will have a strength and vigour three times those it possesses ordinarily. The privilege-bearer having become a fly, for example, and riding an eagle, will be one with this eagle.

Article 13. — The privilege-bearer will not be able to flinch; should he try to do so his organs will refuse to follow this course of action. He will be able to kill ten human beings a year; but nobody to whom he has spoken. In the first year, he will be able to kill one human being provided he has not spoken to him on more than two different occasions.

Article 14. — If it occurred to the privilege-bearer to recount or to divulge one of the articles of his privilege, his mouth would not be able to make a sound and he would have toothache for twenty-four hours.

Article 15. — The privilege-bearer putting a ring on his finger and pronouncing the words “I ask that all harmful insects be destroyed”, all insects within a radius of six metres of his ring, in every direction, will be struck dead. These insects are fleas, bedbugs, lice of all kinds, nits, gnats, flies, rats, etc.

Snakes, vipers, lions, tigers, wolves and all poisonous animals will take flight, smitten with fear, and remove themselves one league away.

Article 16. — Wherever he finds himself, the privilege-bearer having pronounced the words “I ask for my food” will find: two pounds of bread, a medium rare steak, a leg of lamb idem, a plate of spinach idem, a bottle of Saint-Julien, a carafe of water, fruit, ice-cream and a demi-tasse of coffee. This request will be granted twice in twenty-four hours.

Article 17. — Ten times a year, on request, the privilege-bearer will not miss the target he wishes to hit with a shot from a rifle or from a pistol, or a blow with any other weapon.

Ten times a year, he will wield his weapon with a force twice that of the man he is fighting or pitting his strength against; but he will not be able to inflict a wound causing death, pain or discomfort for more than a hundred hours.

Article 18. — Ten times a year, on request, the privilege-bearer will be able to reduce by three-quarters the pain of someone whom he sees; or, if this person is about to die he will be able to prolong his life by ten days, by lessening such pain as he is in by three-quarters. He will, on request, be able to obtain for this suffering person an immediate and painless death.

Article 19. — The privilege-bearer will be able to change a dog into a beautiful or ugly woman; this woman will give him her arm, and will have the subtle wit of Mme Ancilla⁴ and the heart of Mélanie⁵. This miracle may be renewed twenty times each year.

The privilege-bearer will be able to change a dog into a man who will have the appearance of Pépin de Bellisle⁶, and the intelligence of M. Koreff⁷, the Jewish doctor.

Article 20. — The privilege-bearer will never be more unhappy than he was from 1 August 1839 to 1 April 1840⁸.

Two hundred times a year, the privilege-bearer will be able to reduce his sleep to two hours, which will produce the physical effects of eight hours. He will have the eyesight of a lynx and the agility of Deburau⁹.

Article 21. — Twenty times a year, the privilege-bearer will be able to guess the thoughts of all the people around him, to a distance of twenty paces. One hundred and twenty times a year, he will be able to see what the person he has selected is doing at that time, with the total exclusion of the woman he loves the most.

Also excluded are dirty and disgusting actions.

Article 22. — The privilege-bearer will be unable to make any money, other than his sixty francs a day, by means of the privileges set out above. One hundred and fifty times a year, he will be able to arrange, on request, that a particular person entirely forgets him, the privilege-bearer.

Article 23. — Ten times a year, the privilege-bearer will be transported to the location of his choice at the speed of one hundred leagues an hour; during the journey he will sleep.

(Translated from the French by Iain Bamforth)

Notes

1. The original privileges are addressed to an English deity: “God me donne le brevet suivant.”

2. The mentula is of course the Latin term for the male sexual organ.

3. Jean-François-Joseph Debelle, the military commander was reputedly the best-looking man in France: he died aged thirty-five at Santo Domingo in 1802.

4. Mme Ancelot held a salon at which Henri Beyle was frequently in attendance; she tried unsuccessfully to arrange a position for him at the Academie Française.

5. Mélanie Guilbert was one of Stendhal’s old flames, “a very beautiful young woman of severely Grecian stature”.

6. Pépin de Bellisle, Beyle’s colleague at the Conseil d’Etat—“excellent et beau garcon”—went on to become a prefect. He also died aged thirty-five.

7. David-Ferdinand Koreff, son of a Breslau doctor, was the leading authority on animal magnetism in the Paris of his time. A witty man, his patients included many of the most famous artistic figures in Paris, including Stendhal. He died in poverty in 1851 after a scandal over excessive fees (and dwindling interest in magnetism) led to the loss of his fashionable clientele.

8. “More unhappy”: Stendhal is referring to his fraught liaison with Giulia Ranieri.

9. Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the celebrated Bohemian mime whose pantomime creation Pierrot entered French culture and was immortalised in Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945).

Afterword: Inside the Mirror

God proved Himself for once to be a gentleman, and duly obliged Stendhal, as requested in the principal article of the famous testament which was scribbled down on three pieces of paper on April 10, 1840: the nominated “privilege bearer” was felled, not in bed but as he walked down a Paris street two years later. Henri Beyle was taken to his apartment at 78, rue Neuve des Capucines, where he expired shortly thereafter. Cause of death: apoplexy.

Stendhal never sought to divulge his secret lines—“the following miracles will be neither seen nor suspected by anyone”. And why would he? “Privileges” were what the lawyers of the Revolution had said they wanted to abolish. Rationalism meant impartiality. Nobility, once forced to be self-conscious about itself as a caste enjoying favours, had only one option in the new society (if it wished to remain noble): extinction. The new democracy, on the other hand, as Stendhal clearly saw in Memoirs of a Tourist, would ape nobility for ignoble reasons: it would be the theatre of those quintessentially modern feelings of “envy, jealousy and impotent hatred”. After the Revolution, it was impossible to be privileged without knowing it.

Yet if The Privileges (meaningfully) resembles a legal title, it can only be one written in an access of euphoria, even delirium. All his writing life, Stendhal oscillated between his admiration for the spontaneity of the heroic soul (which he thought might still just be possible south of the Alps) and his realisation that a new sensibility was being forged through the mutation of images. If the panorama was an invention of the century of Stendhal’s birth, the eighteenth, Daguerre and Bouton had developed in 1822 the diorama, a form of theatre in which a captive, stationary audience viewed a spectacle of painted panels illuminated by various kinds of lighting, the effects of which were so subtle spectators thought they were looking at a natural scene. One of Stendhal’s most famous lines—the famous “travelling” of The Red and the Black—is a testimony to his visual sensitivity: “Ah, sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road.”

The mirror might reflect the azure of the sky; equally it might reflect what the author is just about to put his foot into: the dirty puddle right in the middle of the road.

Knowing his life to be a masquerade—a kind of social ballet—had allowed Stendhal to be candid about it. He didn’t like talking about himself, he wrote in Memoirs of an Egoist, yet asserted that men were machines “impelled, in France, by vanity”. They thought themselves models when they were mere copies. Was he any different? Many years before, he had noted down in his diary an aphrodisiac recipe of crushed tarantella and olive oil given him by a voluble Italian. The fifty-year-old writer knew the flesh was sagging: “you cannot love” he told his diary the same year. Article 3 is a dream of sildenafil acetate (Viagra). But sexual potency could hardly reveal the significance—the metaphysical significance—of social desire: “for what exists solely in the imagination is imperishable” was the epigraph to his account of his travels in Rome, Naples and Florence. The dream of a life more congenial to him than the one he was living, a dream which had first visited him as a sixteen-year-old in Grenoble, was still haunting him.

Some of the privileges are recounted in an idiom of magical thinking—the yearning to be somebody else, to change shape in the manner of Ovid, to be charismatic and seductive, to have a plentiful supply of primary goods and to be able, on occasion, to alleviate another’s suffering—upon request. They are the intimate fantasies of Stendhal, wit about field and town, outlines of his most daring, altruistic, murderous wants. God is asked to give him a little bit of exclusive godliness in the spatial-temporal realm. Stendhal’s licence (“brevet” is also the term for a patent) is a set of early Mind Lab precepts in self-determination theory, secular miracles that anticipate video games and air travel: Articles 10 and 11 look suspiciously like computer cheat-codes and Article 23 lets the privilege-bearer go from A to B without the usual physical inconveniences. Most of us are familiar with the great air-breathing engines that convey us at speeds in excess of a hundred leagues an hour asleep above the continents, so much global flotsam. Article 4 recuperates Diderot’s 1748 fable “Les Bijoux Indiscrets” about a genie who tries to pander to the sultan’s whim by giving him a magic ring: when the sultan turns the stone and points it at the woman of his choice it compels her to relate in detail all her sexual adventures. It is not through her mouth she will speak (or even her sex, as suggested by a mainstream pornographic French film of the 1970s, “Le Sexe Qui Parle”), but her jewels—“through that part in them which is most frank, and the most knowledgeable about what you wish to know”. Human relations have always been the great mystery, the one that torments even potentates—potentates most of all perhaps.

Mimicry and voyeurism are germane to the privileges, yet Article 14 insists on applying the kind of gagging-order asserted at the beginning of the testament—much like the fabled Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which revokes, in its second clause, what it asserts in its first—“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence” except where the state adjudges that it has a right to interfere “in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”. Utopia has to have its rules: the privilege-bearer may enjoy carnal pleasures but only twice a week; the most excellent traiteur-prepared food and a bottle of the finest claret but only twice in twenty-four hours; impressive money-raising skills but to never more than the tune of sixty francs a day; pest-eradicating powers but only within a radius of six metres of his magic ring; telepathic powers but only for twenty paces in any direction. The privileges will allow the author to be powerful, but not all-powerful. Indeed, the need for a codification of the world under licence is suggested by the numbering of the articles themselves. Numbers are needed to calm the impending sense of vertigo, even if they generate it too. The future, it would seem, is poised to float free of the weight of the body, sanitised for the greater pleasure of the viewing eye: “The body and what comes out of it odourless” (Article 1).

For Stendhal, the future was a form of retinal persistence. Losing a life, computer game designers tell us, can be an exhilarating experience—provided it comes with lots of entertaining animation. That is a derisory account of agency. Stendhal could barely have realised that the world for which he was drafting the articles supra would be one in which amazement and reality are no longer contradictory: the great antinomies that shaped our history have been defanged, satellites and drones survey our every move “with the sight of an eagle”, and the very possibility of recognising the true world from its phantasmagorical and fictive versions has been elided. These are the miracles seen and suspected by everyone.