Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle was born in 1783 in Grenoble, into a provincial bourgeois household he disliked thoroughly enough to spend the rest of his life writing against. His mother died when he was seven; his father, a lawyer and royalist, he treated in his memoirs with a cold contempt that has rarely been improved upon. He used dozens of pseudonyms across his career — by one count more than a hundred — but the one that stuck, and that he attached to his two great novels, was Stendhal, borrowed from a small Prussian town for reasons he never satisfactorily explained.

He came of age with the Napoleonic empire and tied his fortunes to it. He served as a junior officer in Italy in 1800, as a commissary in the imperial administration in Germany and Austria, and crossed into Russia with the Grande Armée in 1812. He was at the burning of Moscow and on the retreat across the Berezina, which he survived, having had the foresight to bring along a copy of Voltaire and to keep shaving in the mornings even as the army disintegrated around him. The fall of Napoleon in 1814 ended his career and his prospects together, and he spent much of the next two decades in Italy — Milan, mostly, then Rome — half tourist, half exile, writing books on Italian painting and Italian music and the lives of Haydn and Mozart that were often less his own work than he pretended.

The two novels are The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). The Red and the Black follows Julien Sorel, the son of a provincial carpenter, who reads Rousseau and the memoirs of Napoleon in secret and tries to climb the social hierarchy of Restoration France through a combination of seminary discipline, sexual conquest, and pure ambition, and is destroyed for it. The Charterhouse of Parma, written in fifty-two days, is set in a small Italian court after Waterloo and follows the young Fabrice del Dongo from his confused presence at the battle (one of the great set pieces in European fiction — Fabrice cannot tell what is happening or who is winning) through love affairs, imprisonments, and ecclesiastical advancement. Both novels treat romantic obsession with a clinical attention that Stendhal had previously catalogued in De l'Amour (1822), a treatise in which he attempted to classify the species of love the way a botanist classifies plants, drawing partly on his own protracted and largely unsuccessful pursuits.

He took a consular post in 1830 at Civitavecchia, the dreary port serving Rome, where he was bored, underemployed, and free to write. He died in Paris in 1842 of a stroke, having predicted with considerable accuracy that his readers would not arrive until around 1880 — the date at which, in fact, Taine and Zola began to claim him as a precursor. The autobiographies The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist, unpublished in his lifetime, are among the strangest and most candid in French literature.