The French Revolution and Romantic historiography sought to draw a line between past and present. Running counter to such gestures, Stendhal’s characters are living anachronisms. History is alive and palpable, in and through them. It is shaped by their representations while at the same time orienting their behavior; it is both imaginary and virtual: history resists the passage of time. The Napoleonic epic and the early nineteenth century are the privileged setting for this subjectification. Thus Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme confirm W. Benjamin’s hypothesis according to which “the past is not prior to the present, it is simultaneous yet not contiguous with it”. It is then impossible to be the contemporary of any era at all: those who wish for a pure, complete present need to extract themselves from actuality and invent themselves a life. All that remains to be considered, as a kind of ideal, is the invention of novelistic instants, whether these are experienced together or alone, far away, in necessarily distant lands. This liberating yet primarily fantasmagoric “phase shift” displays the constitutive tensions of Stendhalian fiction.