Fernandez highlights the distinctive character of Stendhal’s diaries, the thing that differentiates them from other examples of this usually melancholic genre: their essential optimism.
Dominique Fernandez’s engaging preface makes a case for understanding Stendhal’s Journal as an exercise in extreme sincerity that is valuable in and of itself rather than as a lens through which to view the author’s later work or his historical period. More modest in its chronological sweep than Victor Del Litto’s later Pléiade Journal, this version is accompanied now by a new preface, a chronology of Stendhal’s life by Mariella Di Maio, a note on the text by Xavier Bourdenet, a previously unpublished draft letter of 1808 (found in one of the Berès notebooks) to the author’s friend and cousin Martial Daru, a useful bibliography, as well as revised notes and an index of names cited. The relevant sections of Henri Martineau’s Pléiade version of the Journal have been revised in the light of a rereading of the newly acquired manuscripts. This is the first paperback edition of Stendhal’s Journal, and the first in nearly seven decades to have been able to draw directly on six notebooks - dramatically acquired in 2006 from the private collection of Pierre Berès for the Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble - which cover a combined period of over three years between July 1805 and October 1814.
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