Stendhal

Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri Beyle) was born in Grenoble in 1783 and became motherless at the age of seven. His father was a wealthy lawyer and landowner. In 1799, he left for Paris, mainly to escape paternal authority. He joined Napoleon's army in May 1800 and participated in the campaigns in Austria, Germany, and Russia. In 1815, after Napoleon's fall, he settled in Italy, from where he was expelled after seven years on suspicion of espionage. He returned to Paris and lived there until 1831, when he went back to Italy as a consul in Civitavecchia, near Rome. He died on March 23, 1842, on a street in Paris, where he had returned on medical leave. He had already composed his epitaph: "I lived, I wrote, I loved." His life was filled with wanderings and romantic passions. In his youth, he attempted to write plays. He learned to paint and decorated rooms in Paris. He wrote novels, a book on Italian painting, biographies of Haydn and Mozart, and travel impressions. In his masterpiece "The Red and the Black," history is intertwined with the personal stories of emblematic characters. It has been described as the greatest novel of the 19th century and is the first treatise on "success," the new social deity.