A Swim in the Mud

LUCIEN LEUWEN (Book Two: THE TELEGRAPH--415 pp.)--Stendhal--New Directions ($3.50).

"I will be a rogue!" cried Lucien Leuwen. No one was alarmed. It was a commonplace among French liberals in the 1830s, and especially among very young liberals, for disappointments in love to take this form. Lucien's heart had in fact been thoroughly shattered in Book One of a Stendhal novel, and now in Book Two the young man was determined to live without a heart. His father, a banker, was delighted, and chevied the boy into politics.

The story of Lucien in politics is told in The Telegraph, part two of Lucien Leuwen, the unfinished "third masterpiece" of French Novelist Stendhal. With last spring's publication of part one, The Green Huntsman (TIME, June 26), Stendhal's story is now available in English for the first time.

Matter of Direction. Taken together, the two volumes show a purpose as relentless as a ledger's--the ledger of a society in the red. Taken singly, the books show little of their social arithmetic. It is as though they had been kept by a brilliant clerk who, in the first volume, scribbled a love story over his accounts, and in the second, glimpsing the significance of the figures he was adding, covered the pages with invective. The Telegraph is one of the most savagely witty books ever written.

The object of Stendhal's satire is the cheap-jack kingery of Louis Philippe--that "crowned calculating machine"--and the belowstairs thimblerigging of the corrupt, bureaucrazed regime through which he misgoverned France.

Lucien has no sooner plunged into politics than he has "a sensation of swimming in mud." His father had forewarned him: "You only direct the dirty work, you never do it yourself. The principle is this: every government, even that of the United States, lies always and about everything; when it can't lie on the main issue, it lies about the details. There are good lies and bad. Good ones are those that the [middle class] believes; excellent ones catch some of the carriage public; execrable ones are those nobody believes, and that only the most shameless ministries dare repeat. Everybody knows this. It is one of the first maxims of state, and must never escape your memory--or your lips."

Matter of Ideals. Lucien, like most young wrigglers, quickly learns to navigate the muck. With great credit to his reputation, he manages to hush a scandal that might have brought the cabinet down. Soon after, he is in the thick of a provincial election, passing out bribes as easily as breathing. In all this stock jobbery, the newly invented telegraph serves the political and financial turn of the men in power so often that Stendhal sees the instrument as a symbol of corruption.

At last the young careerist finds himself involved with a beautiful woman--only to realize that she is making love to him solely because she wants her husband to become a minister, and that his own father, who thinks it would be rather good for Lucien's career to have a socially prominent mistress, has been encouraging the whole scheme. To this depth Lucien's ideals cannot let him sink.

Lucien quits politics and goes back to the girl he left in Book One, but since Stendhal did not finish the novel, Lucien does not quite reach her.

Unfinished as it is, Lucien Leuwen is a true coin of Stendhal's genius; only the edges want milling. It ranks almost with The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, the great novels which Stendhal wrote before & after it; and it marks the mid-point in his development from a powerful psychologist who couldn't help laughing at the people he created, to a deadly satirist who couldn't stop creating the people he laughed at.

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