Paysages du souvenir et du rêve dans la chasse au bonheur chez Stendhal

When his autobiography apparently fails to recapture former experiences of bliss linked primarily to natural landscapes, Stendhal turns to fiction to translate these intense emotions. Vie de Henry Brulard (1834-36) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) show that Stendhalian memory constitutes itself upon literary reminiscences which mediate human proximity to the natural world while they discourage social action by enhancing contemplation. Like the autobiographical narrator, the novel's characters Fabrice and Gina approach happiness as a perpetually deferred goal of desire, lying in an unrecoverable past or an imagined future, whereas for the writer happiness consists in attaining an effective, though elusive, linguistic formulation. (In French) (CP)