On Love

Mortimer came back trembling from a long journey; he loved Jenny; she had not answered her letters. When he arrived in London, he rides a horse and picks her up from his country house. He arrives, she was walking in the park; he runs there, his heart racing; he meets her, she extends her hand to him, receives him with trouble: he sees that he is loved. As she walked through the park alleys with her, Jenny's dress embarrassed herself in a thorny acacia bush. Later on, Mortimer was happy, but Jenny was unfaithful. I maintain that Jenny never loved him; he cites as proof of his love the way she received him when she returned from the continent, but he could never give me the slightest detail. Only he flinches visibly as soon as he sees an acacia bush; it is really the only distinct memory he has kept of the happiest moment of his life.

Under the guise of a psychological and sociological analysis of love, he expresses his unfortunate passion for Matilde Viscontini Dembowski. It is in this book that he invents and describes the famous phenomenon of crystallization.

An essay on the feeling of love in which he tries to categorize and analyze the different types of emotions. The most famous idea is that of "crystallization": the lover sees the loved one under the prism of perfection and makes an idealized image of him.

Stendhal, whose real name is Marie-Henri Beyle, born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble and died on 23 March 1842 in Paris, is a French writer of the first half of the 19th century.

He joined the army in 1800 and held mainly military administrative positions, as he did during the Russian campaign in 1812. An art lover and passionate about Italy, where he spent many years, he first wrote aesthetic essays under his real name as L'Histoire de la peinture (early 1817), but it was under the pseudonym "M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie" that he published Rome, Naples, Florence in September 1817. This pen name is inspired by a German town called "Stendal", the birthplace of the renowned art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann at the time, but above all close to where Stendhal lived in 1807-1808 a moment of great passion with Wilhelmine de Grisheim. Having added an H to further Germanize the name, he wanted to pronounce it "Standhal".

His training novels Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) and Lucien Leuwen (unfinished) made him, alongside Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert or Zola, one of the great representatives of 19th century French fiction. In his novels, characterized by a thrifty and tightened style, Stendhal searches for "Truth, the harsh truth" in the psychological field, and mainly portrays young people with romantic aspirations for vitality, strength of feeling and dreams of glory.