The Private Diaries of Stendhal by Stendhal

The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. Ī plaque on a house in Vilnius where Stendhal stayed in December 1812 during Napoleon's retreat from Russia. His family was part of the bourgeois class and was attached to the Ancien Regime, which explains his ambiguous attitude toward Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and the monarchy later on. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th century. He spent 'the happiest years of his life' at the Beyle country house in Claix near Grenoble. He was an unhappy child, disliking his 'unimaginative' father and mourning his mother, whom he loved fervently, and who died in childbirth in 1790, when he was seven. Marie-Henri Baille was born in Grenoble, Isère, on January 23, 1783, in the family of the advocate and landowner Chérubin Beyle and his wife Henriette Gagnon.

A self-proclaimed egotist, he coined the same characteristic in his characters' 'Beylism'. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir ( The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme ( The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839), he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. Marie-Henri Beyle ( French: 23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal ( UK: / ˈ s t ɒ̃ d ɑː l/, US: / s t ɛ n ˈ d ɑː l, s t æ n ˈ-/ French: ), was a 19th-century French writer.

The Private Diaries of Stendhal by Stendhal