SOURCE: "The Eternal Tourist," in Stendhal; or, The Pursuit of Happiness, Doubleday and Co., 1946, pp. 401-17.

In the following excerpt, Josephson examines Stendhal's thematic approach to the Italian Chronicles.

One cherished literary project that Stendhal reserved for his leave of absence was that of adapting into French the collection of Italian memoirs which he had been gathering for many years. These genuine documents, he held, formed a veritable "introduction to the knowledge of the human heart." They teemed with conspiracies, robberies, rapes, and murders, often committed for the sake of ambition; they were for him penetrated still with "the fierce energy . . . the gigantic passions of the Middle Ages."

Modern Italian thinkers, like Benedetto Cróce, tend to smile a good deal at the habit of most Italophiles, including Stendhal, of seeing everywhere the Italy of pagan voluptuousness, Machiavellian perfidy, and Borgian crime. Stendhal doubtless exaggerated in picturing the...