Stendhal

Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a French writer born in Grenoble in 1783 and who died in Paris in 1842. His work stands between Romanticism and Realism. He is regarded as one of the first great novelists to analyse the psychology of his characters with precision, and he did so in a lean, ironic prose. Today he is chiefly remembered for The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, though during his lifetime his reputation rested on other kinds of writing.

He grew up in a middle-class family in Grenoble. His mother died when he was seven, a loss that shaped his childhood and his strained relationship with a father he never wanted to resemble. He spent time at the family house in Claix and kept up a close correspondence with his sister Pauline. In 1799 he moved to Paris, intending to enter the École polytechnique, but an illness kept him from sitting the entrance examinations. His real ambition was different: he wanted to become a successful playwright, a dream that never came to fruit.

Around 1800 he entered the orbit of Napoleon, first as a soldier and then as an administrator. He followed the army through Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia, and what he saw of a Europe at war left a mark on his writing. During the 1812 Russian campaign he witnessed the burning of Moscow and the winter retreat. According to a long-standing tradition, he crossed the Berezina River by finding a ford when the pontoon bridge had been overwhelmed, and this probably saved his life and those of his companions. After Napoleon's fall he settled in Milan, where he spent what he later called the happiest years of his life. He left the city in 1821, fearing he might be drawn into trouble with the Carbonari.

Back in France he published books on art, travel and music, and he gained a reputation as a witty and provocative figure in Parisian society. His most personal work, On Love, examines romantic passion with an almost analytical method and was little read at the time. In 1830 he was appointed French consul at Trieste and later at Civitavecchia, posts he held while continuing to write. He kept an ambiguous relationship with the politics of his age and treated social life with a sharp irony.

Balzac was one of the few contemporaries to recognise his talent as a novelist, but the wider public took much longer to appreciate him. His posthumous fame grew steadily from the late nineteenth century. He is now considered one of the great French masters of the novel, and readers still find in his characters a clear-eyed view of the passions that has not dated.