Le temps et l'espace mûs par la musique dans les romans de stendhal Le rouge et le noir, La chartreuse de Parme, Lucien Leuwen

Dilettante by his own choice, Stendhal stands out among other French romantic writers by his wide musical knowledge. This interest in music is reflected in his novels. Opéra bouffe, Stendhal's beloved literary genre, seems to be dominating in his literature from the very beginning of the literary work – the first outline of the new text. Therefore it is possible to speak of the musicality of literary text that relates back to the construction of musical work, temporal par excellence, and that is aimed at the formal interpretation of this work by literary means. On the other hand, Stendhal's passion for painting, purely visual art, permits to assume that the spatial sensations described in his novels are connected with the musical construction. We would like to propose the analysis of the relations, created by the music, between the spatial and temporal construction in Stendhal's novels. The analysis of some of the descriptions will be aimed at demonstrating how delicate musical sensitivity and reflection on the music influence, thanks to the writer's quill, the spatio-temporal relations in the novel. Following the thematic approach, we will study frequent motives trying at the same time to emphasize the aesthetic effects that music exerts on time and space both represented in the texts. The perception of these two categories shall allow us to observe the sympathy of the novelist for the idea of the convergence of different modes of expression and its result which is the synthesis of arts.