This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the
'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between
these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an
eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator,
the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator
of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean
enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his
eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen
name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to
writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works
include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red
and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published
posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and
Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest
and foremost practitioners of literary realism.