China and the West

[Stendhal über Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat].
Knud Lundbaek : Stendahl was a great admirer of Abel Rémusat's scholarship. They both attended the weekly soirées of professor Cuvier, but we do not know what kind of personal relationship—if any—there was between them. However, Stendahl speaks about Abel Rémusat more than once in the anonymous letters about politics, literature and theatre he had published in various English magazines in the 1820s. In a letter of October 18th, 1825, he gives a general characteristic of that remarkable man:
"He is famous for his perfect knowledge of the Chinese empire and the neighboring countries. You know how difficult the Chinese language is, but Mr. Rémusat has changed all that. Now, using his Chinese grammar, a boy of sixteen with a normal intelligence can learn the syntax of this language in six months, and after two years of study he will be able to translate from Chinese as easily as we translate from Italian.... Actually he teaches Chinese to a number of students (in the College de France) and in a few years this language will be as well known as Greek.... Among the members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres there are only three persons who know what they pretend to know, —two elderly scholars, Sylvestre de Sacy, the historian P.C.F. Danou, and young Abel Remusat. Sacy, however, is completely absorbed in Jansenism and he is not a brilliant personality. Rémusat really works, he publishes, thus disclosing the weakness of the other members... he is the most learned man in France... At the moment he is engaged in having a four volume work printed, dealing with all that has been learned about China during the last thirty years. If only the government would give him six secretaries at 4.000 francs a year, he would be able to publish fifteen volumes of translation from Chinese each year. Then we would know the literature of that country better than that of Germany."
Stendahl adds to this rather overwhelming presentation of the young academician that he has his information from ten or twelve persons who know what they are talking about and whom he met at a recent public meeting in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Personally Stendahl must have been most interested in Remusat's translation of a Chinese novel called Les Deux Cousines which was published late in 1826. He discusses the possibility that Rémusat might have made it up from various bits of his enormous knowledge of Chinese manners and customs, but rejects the idea—he is not that kind of man. Stendahl only says that the novel deals with two young women, educated together, who come to love each so tenderly that they accept when the father of one of them suggests that they should both marry one and the same man at the same time. He does not give a summary of the plot as he usually did in his reviews.
It is perhaps interesting that Stendahl published his first novel, entitled Armance, the following year (Paris, 1827). This little book deals with another interesting erotic subject, the protagonist being a young lover who suffers from sexual impotency.