Armance is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restoration by French writer Stendhal, published anonymously in 1827.
Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the École Polytechnique, is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings.
[1] Armance is based on the theme of Olivier, a novel by the Duchess Claire de Duras.
Although the secret is never explicitly revealed in the novel, it is generally understood to be impotence,[2] or more subtly, homosexuality.
In Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery, the protagonist Simone Simonini pleads with another character, Yuliana Glinka, that he suffers the same fate as Stendhal's Octave de Malivert—whose readers had long speculated about—and thus can't pursue the offer she had made him.