“The Life of Henry Brulard” by Stendhal (post 4): First-person narrator mentions close friend, Louis Crozet, who said Stendhal had many personalities.

It is not until Chapter 30 that there is any further mention of the title name, Brulard, which the narrator says is his name, but which now seems to be a joke. However, as noted in a previous post, it is a joke with its own birthday.

It is also in this chapter that the first-person narrator, whoever he may be, talks of his close friend, Louis Crozet:

“Memories throng as I write. I’ve just noticed that I have left out one of my most intimate friends, Louis Crozet, now Chief Engineer, and a very good Chief Engineer, at Grenoble…

“Louis Crozet was cut out to be one of the most brilliant of men in Paris, and in any salon he would have beaten Koreff [a physician known in the French literary world as an expert on hypnosis (1)]…and myself as well, if one may mention oneself…he was the most intelligent and sagacious of all the Dauphinois I have known…” (2, pp. 220-221).

According to Josephson’s biography of Stendhal, Louis Crozet was “the scholarly engineer and sometime mayor of Grenoble, who had really been Stendhal’s most intimate friend” (3, p. 457).

“Crozet, who (according to Stendhal himself) ‘knew him inside out’ ” said of Stendhal: “He had not one personality but many,” each of which had its own characteristic facial expression, so that he “had at different times quite different physiognomies” (3, p. 458).

1. Wikipedia. “David Ferdinand Koreff.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ferdinand_Koreff

2. Stendhal. The Life of Henry Brulard [1835-36]. Translated by Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight. New York, Noonday Press, 1958.

3. Matthew Josephson. Stendhal: A Biography. New York, Doubleday, 1946.