So Henri Beyle recalls his introduction to Lord Byron in Milan in October 1816 in the theatre of La Scala, in the box of Beyle's friend, Monsieur Ludovic de Brême: “I entered M. de Brême's box on my return from an excursion on Lake Como. I found that the gathering had a sort of solemn and awkward air: everybody was silent. I was listening to the music when M. de Brême said to me, indicating my neighbour, 'Monsieur Beyle, this is Lord Byron'.” (Lovell 196) At this moment, Byron is freshly exiled and just arrived in Italy, trailing scandalous celebrity and the opening flourishes of “[t]he pageant of his bleeding heart” (Arnold, “Stanzas” ) that came with the separation from his wife, Annabella Milbanke, the ensuing public scandal, and the flight from England. After travelling via Switzerland, where he stayed with Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley at Lake Geneva, Byron has been just over a week in Italy, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Beyle, also in exile, has been mainly in Milan since 1813, when he took leave from Napoleon's army after the retreat from Moscow, and where he would spend the next seven years. When they meet, Monsieur Beyle is still just Beyle, not yet 'Stendhal,' as he will soon become when he adopts this pseudonym for the first time as the author of Rome, Naples and Florence in 1817 (1817), in which he will recount a different version of this first meeting with Byron—one of many, as it turns out, in private letters and published texts.

This essay examines the love plots and errantry that proliferate in Stendhal's recollections of his meeting with Byron. Stendhal's work and life (and the intermediating code of “beylisme”) is associated most famously with “la chasse au bonheur” (“the pursuit of happiness”). As I wish to suggest, Stendhal's recollections of Byron are marked by the happy over-investment of affect that has come to be identified with fan practices. A significant feature of Stendhal's account of the meeting is that his emotion is produced after the event, in the act of recollection. The recollections embody, then, a typically Stendhalian concern with the fraught interrelation between desire and memory. For the historical figure of Henri Beyle has offered the consummate allegory of the distortions of memory, and of the contradictions between reason and feeling that memory dramatizes. In W. G. Sebald's historical fiction, “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet” (included in Vertigo), Beyle is made to offer “eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection” (Sebald 5). Likewise, the fan Beyle who meets Byron embodies love as a madness most discreet: “if I had dared, I would have burst into tears and kissed Lord Byron's hand” ( Lovell 196).

The impulse is a very similar emotional creature to the sensation. Stendhal was a keen follower of the sensationalism of the idéologues — materialist philosophers and psychologists such as Condorect, Condillac, Tracy, and Stendhal's revered Cabanis, the physician and materialist philosopher from whom he borrowed his “woman's skin”: “I will borrow for an instant the language of Cabanis. I have too fine a skin, a woman's skin ...; I graze my fingers, which are very fine, for a trifle; in a word, the surface of my body is feminine” (Stendhal, Life 120). Revolutionaries and Republicans with a total system that conceived of personal happiness as an effect of political liberty, the idéologues disregarded the question of classical form when it came to literature and emphasized the effect of the literary work upon reason, sensibility and imagination —its status, in other words, as sensation.

As I will argue in this essay, Stendhal's emphasis on sensation is also legible in relation to the forms of celebrity culture. Stendhal's recollections of Byron offer a different way of approaching the classic Stendhalian affective repertoire of sensation; the pursuit of happiness; the mal du siècle; and the intrigued and intriguing engagement with memory and love. I read Stendhal's recollections as the revelatory staging of a close encounter between celebrity and fan, and I argue that Stendhal's recollections suggest how practices of sensation can be understood as part of the affective routines of the fan that are such a vital part of celebrity culture. This essay explores, then, this constellation of interests in memory, sensation and love, by examining Stendhal's recollections of Byron in relation to the productivity and affectivity of the fan. Hence, my emphasis is primarily on the fan, Stendhal, rather than on the celebrity, Byron. Focusing on the meeting between Stendhal and Byron as a particular form of ritualized sociable encounter in the box at La Scala, I examine how Stendhal's recounting of this meeting enacts celebrity culture's transformation of stranger to intimate, and how the fan-celebrity relation between Stendhal and Byron is mediated both by the social materiality of place and by a shared devotion to another contemporary idol, Napoleon Bonaparte.

III.

Stendhal's celebrity sighting of Byron is a moment of high emotion. Most significantly, this is a moment of emotion shared between two men, one of whom presents himself with the intensity of a lover. This moment encapsulates a particular intensity of emotion that informs the proverbial devotion of fan to idol, and which mimics the gestures and emotional intensities of Romantic love. Stendhal's episodic narratives mimic, too, the narrative that Roland Barthes has analysed in A Lover's Discourse as the “scene” of “love at first sight”: the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very scene of its suddenness (what makes me irresponsible, subject to fatality, swept away, ravished): and of all the arrangements of objects, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts: what had not yet ever been seen is discovered in its entirety, and then devoured by the eyes: what is immediate stands for what is fulfilled: I am initiated: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. (Barthes 192)
In Stendhal's love-at-first-sighting of Byron, the scene is set at La Scala, Milan, where the curtains part, and what takes place off-stage —more precisely in the box of M. de Brême —is moved to centre-stage. (“I entered M. de Brême's box on my return from an excursion on Lake Como. I found that the gathering had a sort of solemn and awkward air: everybody was silent. I was listening to the music when M. de Brême said to me, indicating my neighbour, 'Monsieur Beyle, this is Lord Byron'.”)

As Michael Moon notes of Barthes' scene of ravishment, the scene of love-at-first-sight requires not so much the “beloved-at-first-sight” as “the scene itself” (Moon 6). For Stendhal, as he writes in Rome, Naples and Florence, it was love at first sight for the scene itself a few weeks earlier, when he returned to La Scala after a brief absence from Milan, but presents it as though for the very first time, devouring it with his eyes: I was limp with exhaustion; but I dragged myself straight off to La Scala ... and there, at one stroke, lay the justification of my journey. My senses were so weary that they were beyond the furthest reaches of pleasure. Yet all the fantasy that the most exotic intricacy of an oriental imagination may evolve, all that is most baroque and most bizarre, all that is most sumptuous in architectural devising, all that can be made to live and breathe through the soft brilliance of draperies, all that can be coaxed into reality through the symbolism of characters who have not merely the costume, but the very faces and gestures of their make-belief and alien lands ... all this and more have I seen tonight.
Not only as a stage, but as a whole social world La Scala dazzles:

La Scala is the focal point of the entire city; it is the universal salon, the hub of society, which is here, and here only; ... Rendez-vous at La Scala —such is the accepted convention for all business. The first experience is literally intoxicating. I am in a feverish daze as I write this.

(25 September 1816; Rome 6-7)
Byron is also impressed by the multiple uses to which La Scala generously put itself for Milan society:

All society in Milan is carried on at the opera: they have private boxes, where they play cards, or talk, or any thing else; but (except at the Cassino) there are no open houses, or balls, &c., &c. *************************************************************

(BLJ 5: 125)
The privately owned boxes (palchi) where elite Milanese like M. de Brême would Rendez-vous to conduct business and pleasure were lavishly decorated affairs that functioned as multi-purpose sociable spaces within the theatre. As Robert Alter elaborates, “a box at La Scala was more like a small parlor than the little overhanging pockets jammed with fixed seats of modern theatres. A party of eight or ten could comfortably deploy themselves where they chose, around a pedestal table convenient for reading and card playing, in movable chairs by the railing, or on the cushions of the divan set against one wall of the box. This meant that a party at La Scala was very much a social group whose activities were limited neither in nature nor duration by the performance on the stage below” (134).

For all its ravishing social sublimity, the celebrity sighting delivers nevertheless an emphatically different kind of ravishment to the love-at-first-sighting. The celebrity sighting is very much a second sight, a “second-order intimacy” ( Turner 92-3), the deliriously misprisioning sight of what Stendhal refers to as the “second glance.” The celebrity is always already known, and so a certain belatedness is at play. Such belatedness also marks the post-Napoleonic social, affective and psychic armature of the mal du siècle, that constitutive feature of French Romanticism, with its nostalgic but inhibited desire for the great gesture, compromised by suspicion of gallantry (see Brookner, Romanticism, 41ff).

In any case, as we already know, Beyle was on his knees inside the box of M. de Brême, if only in the form of the repressed impulse expressed in the letter to his cousin, Romain Colomb: “I was filled with timidity and affection: if I had dared, I would have burst into tears and kissed Lord Byron's hand” (Lovell 196). This is love at first sight —or, at least, “second glance” — and he is rendered speechless by the coup de foudre of this first sighting. But this speechlessness too is an active structuring impulse, just as his “timidity” reflects the impulse acting on him as a “wave of excitation in the nerve.” Whilst this restraint holds Beyle back from outwardly going on his knees for Byron, the withheld emotion is later displayed in the autobiographical disclosure: not-daring-to is purely rhetorical, for Stendhal does dare, if only in the disclosure. In this way, Stendhal's disclosure produces one of the ironies of the affect of the fan: that a moment of the display of intense emotion can also be a moment of withholding. Stendhal's disclosure thereby dramatizes a certain complication of the distinction between private feeling and public display that is central to the workings both of celebrity affect and the poetry of Byron as it is read. Byron's life and work habitually inspired such displays of emotion, such reworkings of the boundaries between public and private, and the spectacularly rhetorical disclosures of the heart that he referred to in Don Juan as “The truth in masquerade” (XI, 37, 290, Byron 1986: 476). A feature of that rhetorical sophistication is that Byron's poetry, to borrow Jerome McGann's memorable formulation, “is always, at whatever register, elaborating reciprocities with its audiences” (McGann 85-6).

The affect of the fan is proverbially like that of the lover, but also unlike, perversely freighted as it is with all kinds of mobile identifications, impulses and intensities of emotion and desire that exceed the boundaries of traditional masculine homosociality and subjectivity yet which are not to be overdetermined by sexuality. The affective and discursive practices of Romantic fandom are vitally significant because they usher this impulsiveness into sociability, into a world where impulse is legible, meaningful and valuable, for all its contradictions. Byron's scandalous celebrity licenses such perversity and inspires a re-imagining of author-reader relations, endowing them with new pleasures and sensations. The fandom it generates is a productive affective and social economy that spectacularizes the transformative agency of the reader. Far from entailing an exclusively passive position (in docile thrall to the sovereignty of author and text), fandom can be seen to transform a traditional textual economy of active and passive, thereby enabling reception as a mode of delirious productivity —proliferating often disobedient and indiscreet disclosures —as Stendhal's fan practices demonstrate in abundance.

IV.

The moment in the box is a moment of high emotion, but it is also constrained —and enabled —by social ritual. As we have seen, Stendhal's response to Byron is informed by a withholding of emotion: “if I had dared I would have.” However, this not-daring “timidity” is also an active structuring impulse, in play with “affection,” for Stendhal is “filled” with both. To conceive of fandom as a form of social ritual is to understand it as something more than a debased, excessive, inauthentic mode of emotion. Rather, it is to see it as a complex form of social modernity, aligned with new modes of social performance and presentation, affect and publicity, and to see it as an exemplary form of intimate publicity. For what marks the particular encounter between Stendhal and Byron is both the intensity of emotion and also the restraint with which it is controlled and produced: the ritualization of that emotion. As the social theorist Erving Goffman has suggested, “When in the idol's immediate presence we act with ritual care” (quoted in Smith 28).

V.

We act with ritual care, but also with a sense of strategy. For once the introduction between Stendhal and Byron has been made, strategic skirmishes ensue on the subject of the recent Anglo-French hostilities. As Stendhal writes: I idolized Napoleon, and replied to his Lordship [Byron] as I should have done to a member of the legislative assembly who had exiled the ex-emperor to St. Helena. I subsequently discovered that Lord Byron was at once enthusiastic in favour of Napoleon, and jealous of his fame. He used to say, “Napoleon and myself are the only individuals who sign our names with the initials N.B.” (Noel Byron.) My determination to be cold offers some explanation for the marked kindness with which, at the end of a few days, Lord Byron did me the favour to regard me. One evening, however, he spoke to me without cause of the immorality of the French character. I replied firmly and mentioned the hulks where the English had tortured French prisoners of war, of the deaths of Russian emperors, happening always at such a convenient time for English interests, of infernal machines, etc. etc. Our friends in the box imagined that the discussion which had taken place, and which, though polite and respectful on my part, had been rather warm, would prevent any further intimacy between us. They were mistaken. The next evening his Lordship took me by the arm, and walked me for an hour in the saloon of the Theatre de la Scala. ( “Lord Byron en Italie,” 1830, quoted in Lovell 1954: 200)
This passage elaborates a gradual transformation from stranger to intimate, as each man is required to negotiate the often oblique social signs that the other puts into circulation. It is about the tactical manoeuvres of social affect and social intimacy, which involve emotional withholding: giving out coldness when one feels warmth. But it is also about the expectation that this paradoxical coldness will be read, and worked through, as indeed it is, when Stendhal discovers that Byron is not the typical “member of the legislative assembly who had exiled the ex-emperor to St Helena. I subsequently discovered that Lord Byron was at once enthusiastic in favour of Napoleon, and jealous of his fame.” This mutual love for Napoleon explains in retrospect that intriguing paradox of social emotion: “My determination to be cold offers some explanation for the marked kindness with which at the end of a few days, Lord Byron did me the favour to regard me.” Stendhal is determined to be cold, and this results in kindness from Byron. Why? The discovery of a shared Napoleon-love not only rescues and redeems an awkward social moment, but also reconfigures the co-ordinates of a map of first impressions shared by the two men that assumes national identity to determine political identification. After the discovery, Byron rewards Stendhal with kindness for his loyalty to Napoleon, even when that loyalty has entailed coldness toward himself. The exchange is about the enigma of making a connection through being cold. Stendhal's friends think they won't be friends but they are wrong, for Byron has taken his arm.

These meetings occur in a relatively circumscribed social space, the theatre box of M. de Brême, an intriguing figure who as a consecrated priest, almoner of the ex-king and leader of the Italian Romantics, mixed exotic forms of Italian social and cultural capital. Clearly charmed, Hobhouse gives a detailed account of his first impression of Monsignore Lodovico de Brême, one of Napoleon's almoners for the Kingdom of Italy, whence his title. The son of a noble Piedmontese family, destined for the Church, who has been offered two bishoprics by Napoleon and one by the people, but wishes rather to unfrock himself than to put on the mitre. He is a young man about thirty, wears his dark hair combed upright, which gives him a wildness of expression not unlike that of Alfieri [the Italian Romantic poet]. He is, on the whole, one of the most attractive men I ever saw. He gave Lord Byron a most warm reception, and as Madame de Stäel had introduced me to him in her letter in favourable terms, was pointedly civil to me. He spoke with a certain degree of point on every subject, delivering his apothegems and ironies in the gravest tone, which made him quite irresistible. (Hobhouse I: 40-41)
Unable to resist, we might say smitten, Hobhouse has his own moment of love-at-first-sight. Heady fan-love is in the air, and the scene takes on the aspects of a mid-summer Shakespearean romance of mistaken identities, multiple love objects and deliriously mobile desires, all predicated upon what René Girard refers to as the “idolatrous worship of otherness” (197). A sucker for grave ironies, Hobhouse sees in Brême the same combination of social, cultural and physical power associated with the Byronic aura. Brême’s “wildness of expression not unlike that of Alfieri” also mediates the Byronic aura (as Alfieri's likeness to Byron was noted by contemporaries [see BLJ 9: 11]). It is as though Hobhouse here displaces his own desire for Byron via Alfieri onto Brême, who is himself drifting in the homosocially shared trancelike obsession with Byron that he sponsors in his box. In this series of displacements, the cycle of mimetic desire is routed first through Byron and now through Brême, to produce two couples of admirer and admiree: Beyle and Byron, Hobhouse and Brême, with Napoleon and to a lesser extent Alfieri mediating idols in between.

Girard writes about the love triangle using fan-love —the “idolatrous worship of otherness” —as his model for all desire. Likewise, what Bersani says about sexual desire also holds true of fan-love in this giddy scene of homosocial desire: “Displacement is endemic to sexuality” and “sexual desire initiates, indeed can be recognized by, an agitated fantasmatic activity in which original (but from the start, unlocatable) objects of desire get lost in the images they generate” (221). The confusion is such that objects of hero worship become confused with appropriate objects of desire. Napoleon was particularly vulnerable to such confusions and displacements, and offers the exemplary case in point here. The case is dramatized with spectacular force and piquancy in the bedroom farces of Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830), where a portrait of Napoleon hidden under the bed of Julien Sorel in the home of his Ultra-Royalist employer is mistakenly thought to be a portrait of an unidentified secret lover, and Hazlitt's “Liber Amoris” (1823), where H. is simultaneously the rival of a bust of Napoleon for the affections of S., “She is my heart's idol,”, and the rival of S. herself for that precious little bust of Napoleon, “the god of my idolatry” (Hazlitt 45, 28). Struggling in the box at La Scala to maintain the line between homosocial and homoerotic desire, it is perhaps just as well that, as Stendhal writes, “The company there assembled consists entirely of men of letters. No woman ever passes the threshold” (Stendhal, Rome 64). And sure enough, Stendhal presents Byron “declin[ing] the honour” of introductions to the “assemblage of lovely women as that which chance had collected in Milan” (Lovell 202).

For all his later attacks on Stendhal, Hobhouse —also a lover of Napoleon —entered a highly appreciative account in his diaries of the anecdotes that Stendhal gave them of Napoleon. Stendhal, who had been in charge of dispatches, tells of the Emperor Francis carefully cutting the seal off dispatches from Napoleon for his Minister, and then “rubbing it against his clothes, smelling it, and giving it its due praise. The eagle was well done, the sword perfect” (Hobhouse I: 52-3). He tells of how Napoleon “never would pronounce the word Kaluga” (a key site in the retreat from Moscow), “but called it sometimes Caligula, sometimes Salamanca,” and how “[h]is attendants, who knew what he meant, went on writing or listening without making any remark” (53). And he tells of how he was there during the retreat from Moscow (“as the reader of any given five pages of his writing will not fail to discover” [James 188]), and of how during the retreat “the soldiers burst into tears” (54).

In this encounter in the box at La Scala, the stranger who is being introduced is well-known at a distance but can still be introduced into a relatively closed circle, according to traditional social protocols. As such, the encounter dramatizes a transitional moment in the history of celebrity, which is the transition between the domain of the social and what Chris Rojek refers to as the “para-social”, interactions that occur at a social distance with people we don't know (Rojek 52). This is not strictly an interface between the poet and the anonymous public, for the box of M. de Brême is a kind of liminal space between the traditional, known audience of social equals, and the wider, anonymous public that literature is moving towards. It is an extremely privileged social space, too, that mixes old social class and old money. As Stendhal observed, “A box at La Scala is treated as freehold property, like a house, and may change hands for as much as twenty-five thousand francs” (Stendhal, Rome 24-5). Indeed, after the original theatre of Milan (the Teatro Regio Ducale) had burned down in 1776, it was the owners of the boxes who lobbied Archduke Ferdinand to build a new one, and it was the sale of new boxes that financed the building of La Scala to replace it. The box at La Scala emblematises the particular conjunction of social, economic and cultural power that M. de Brême embodied.

Not only Byron, but Byron's poetry itself charms the box of M. de Brême, as their host M. de Brême points out: “So keenly are his works relished by those of his friends who know English that, without ever mentioning it, we are endlessly showing him our private admiration” ( Lovell 206). This reserve about Byron's poetry is maintained apparently even despite the fact that they have an Italian poet in their midst, “the celebrated Monti,” who “graciously recited [his poetry] for us,” and who puts “Lord Byron ... in raptures.” So relished, so precious is Byron's poetry that it has the power to become an object of the unspoken in this circle of socially elite men who count a poet among their number. They negotiate this desire, and Byron's charm, through feats of “private admiration.” Again, like Stendhal not daring to kiss Byron's hand, we see another form of restraint in this meeting with Byron. As we've seen, celebrity culture works not always or only in terms of the spectacular displays of outrageous affection. It is marked, too, with the protocols of an elite social culture of discretion. And Stendhal's discretion is rewarded. For, after the poetry recitation: “From that day, I passed almost every evening with Lord Byron” (Lovell 197).

VI.

In Stendhal's 1829 letter to Colomb, Byron and Stendhal make their farewells at the end of a delightful evening. The recollection is marked by one last moment of self-deprecation, as Stendhal responds to Byron's request for street directions: Lord Byron asked me, as the only one who knew English, to tell him the names of the streets that he would have to pass through on the way back to his inn. It was at the other end of town, near the fortress. I saw that he would go astray: in that part of Milan, at midnight, all the shops were closed. He would wander amidst empty and ill-lit streets, and without knowing a word of the language! In my devoted affection I was so foolish as to advise him to take a carriage. At once a shade of haughtiness passed over his face: he gave me to understand, with all necessary politeness, that what he wanted of me was the names of the streets, and not advice as to how to use them. He left the box, and I understood why he had reduced it to silence. (Lovell 196)
In this brilliant moment, when Stendhal advises Byron to take a carriage, Stendhal fantasizes being Byron's chaperone, and Byron a stranger in need of protection. Byron declines his advice, and the anecdote ends as it opened with Byron reducing the box to silence. Another masterful Stendhalian ending that eludes closure: returning to the anecdote's beginning —to that “sort of solemn and awkward air” and that fraught form of silence that opens the encounter —the ending transforms this awkwardness by turning it into a moment of comedy.

But the story does not end there, for there are other versions of that evening that end more optimistically and keep the electrified company there despite Byron's departure. Later that very same evening, as the 1824 letter to Louise S. Belloc recounts, Byron strolls with Stendhal around the “immense and solitary foyer of La Scala.” This time, Byron is successfully transformed from stranger into intimate. Again, memories of Napoleon are the currency of this transformation, which is aided by the social lubricant of their mutual devotion: I had the good fortune to excite his curiosity, in giving him some personal details concerning Napoleon and the retreat from Moscow, which in 1816 were not yet commonplace. This species of merit procured for me many strolls tête-à-tête, in the immense and solitary foyer of Scala. (Lovell, 197-8)
Once again, the curtain parts, and the scene of the fan's love at second glance is consecrated. The supreme transformation of the stranger to intimate occurs as Stendhal and Byron share “strolls tête-à-tête.” What we also note, as the curtains part, is the particular kind of social space that stages—and houses—this transformation from stranger to intimate: “the immense and solitary foyer of Scala.” This paradoxical figure encapsulates marvellously the transformative effect of celebrity as a mode of publicity, a mode of intimacy, a mode of public intimacy. That this immense public social space should also be nonetheless so “solitary” enables it to host and to hold and to bear witness to all the paradoxes of intimate strangeness that attend the meeting between Byron and his enraptured fan of “a hundred irresistible impulses.”