In view of the current doxa, according to which all life, and a fortiori the good life, requires narrative, Montaigne, Stendhal and Proust are exceptions. Their life stories are not organic, dialectical or composed, but rather a series of episodes that are often fragmentary, embedded or even interrupted.
The Essays, for example, offer a series of self-portraits, while Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and Souvenirs d'égotisme are a collection of aborted autobiographical sketches, and Proust's Recherche du temps perdu is composed from snatches of involuntary memories. And yet, the self is neither elusive nor ephemeral: despite the lack of adhesion between narrative and life, despite the universal mobility and generalized relativity of object and subject, a few very strong points of attachment suffice to link writing and life, and give coherence to identity. The image of two surfaces that are mobile in relation to each other, but linked together by what Lacan called "points de capiton" (points of padding), according to a textile metaphor whose accuracy we've already been able to experience, enables us to envisage the text as a network of striking episodes that attest to the permanence of the self and suffice to weave a sketch of narrativity : breton's manifestations of "subjective chance", Proust's involuntary memories and intermittences of the heart, Rousseau's, Stendhal's, Proust's and Montaigne's moments of shame, anticipation of death and encounter with desire.
Stendhal's life story is made up of small episodes that forge an episodic being into a character, a temperament identical over the fifty years he recounts; recalling the women he loved, Stendhal notes a certain constancy, between 1788 and 1836, in his "way of going on the hunt for happiness", according to a formula taken from an aphorism by Helvétius: "Every being thrown onto this earth sets off every morning on the hunt for happiness". The "hunt for happiness": this is the character shared by Brulard, Beyle and Stendhal, echoing the Proustian moral in Albertine disparue that it is "natural and human" for everyone to seek pleasure wherever they can find it. That the force of desire is constitutive of the being who always loves in the same way is also perfectly illustrated by the story of Manon Lescaut in Prévost's novel, whose cyclical composition, reminiscent of the lais and cycles of chansons de geste, is based on the repetition of the same love plot, with only the male protagonist changing. In The Life of Henry Brulard, the narrator's first love affair with an actress, Mlle Kubly, gives rise to a narrative conceived as a fable, followed by a concluding moral defining a constant of Stendhalian behavior: "I have a melancholy temperament". The anecdote illustrates the lover's flight from happiness, following a hunt in which he misses his prey.
