Here is what Peter Brooks says about Stendhalian narrators:
The narrator constantly judges Julien in relation to his chosen models, measuring his distance from them, noting his failures to understand them, his false attributions of success to them, and the fictionality of the constructions he builds from them. As Victor Brombert has so well pointed out, the Stendhalian narrator typically uses hypothetical grammatical forms, asserting that if only Julien had understood such and such, he would have done so and so, with results different from those to which he condemns himself.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984)
The narrator's pedagogic desire aimed both at Julien and the readers?
