Plot
It concerns Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the École Polytechnique, who is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings. The novel describes how a series of misunderstandings kept the lovers Armance and Octave divided. Moreover, a series of clues suggest that Octave is impotent as a result of a severe accident. Octave is experiencing a deep inner turmoil; he himself illustrates the pain of the century's romantics. When the pair do eventually marry, the slanders of a rival convince Octave that Armance had married only out of selfishness. Octave leaves to fight in Greece, and dies there of sorrow.
Armance is based on the theme of Olivier, a novel by the Duchess Claire de Duras, whose scabrous nature forbade publication. But Stendhal has very quietly inserted the secret, without talking about it openly.
Read more about this topic: Armance (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)