Stendhal at Hand in Vilnius

Stendhal might have spent the night in a building near where I live.

There is a plaque on the wall of the building — a bookstore now, specializing in French literature — memorializing the night that Stendhal is said to have stayed there.

With its bilingual inscription and bas relief portrait of the artist, the plaque brings some kind of life to that corner, projecting a line clear to a far side of Europe.

Something of French culture once comforted itself here, if you can imagine.

You’ll have to imagine.

The plaque does not cite its sources. It does not quote from the writer. It does not paint a picture of an event, a time, or a place.

ŠIAME NAME … BUVO APSISTOJES … STENDALIS

DANS CETTE MAISON STENDHAL … FIT ETAPE

Where would one look if one were inclined to dig up the truth of what may or may not have happened in this or another place at this or that time so many decades, centuries since?

But then, who would care to doubt these chiseled records?

All told, the plaque is less a statement of fact than one of values.

“Draw this place closer, in your mind, to what you might already know well,” it says.

“Comfort yourself, that you are not so far away, so disconnected, as you thought—as you might have feared.”

In some letters Stendhal notes his passing, while marching with Napoleon’s army, through various cities and towns in the region. His remarks are spare, revealing an experience of dismal early winter and little else.¹