Marie henri beyle biography of george

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The following week he has been snubbed into despair, and the week afterwards he has gone mad.”

“The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”

“I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.”

“An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”

“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road.

In later life he would portray his childhood as stifled and depressing, and a great deal of his early career was shaped by his ardent desire to escape his father and the provinces. The great movement of Russian realism in the second half of the nineteenth century owes an immense debt to Stendhal, as do the French realist novelists Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola, who would emerge in Stendhal's wake.

During this period he also authored a travel book, for the first time using the penname "Stendhal," supposedly chosen as an anagram of "Shetland" (although Georges Perec may have invented this explanation).

In his most famous novel, The Red and the Black, Stendhal would not only create a new literary technique, moving the narrative inside the character's mind, but also created a new kind of protagonist, the urban social-climber.

Much of the content is plagiarized. Lonely and bored, Stendhal turned to writing autobiographical works, two memoirs entitled Souvenirs d'Egotisme and Vie de Henri Brulard ("Memoirs of an Egoist" and "The Life of Henri Brulard") and an autobiographical novel, Lucien Leuwen, none of which he would finish, but which, when published nearly 60 years after his death in their incomplete form, were heralded as some of his finest writings.

Also published was a more extended autobiographical work, thinly disguised as the Life of Henry Brulard.

The Life of Henry Brulard (1835–1836, published 1890)

Souvenirs d’égotisme (written in 1832 and published in 1892)

Journal (1801–1817) (The Private Diaries of Stendhal)

Non-fiction

Rome, Naples et Florence (1817)

De L’Amour (1822) (On Love)

Racine et Shakespéare (1823–1825) (Racine and Shakespeare)

Voyage dans le midi de la France (1838; though first published posthumously in 1930) (Travels in the South of France)

His other works include short stories, journalism, travel books (A Roman Journal), a famous collection of essays on Italian painting, and biographies of several prominent figures of his time, including Napoleon, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini and Metastasio.

Crystallization

In Stendhal’s 1822 classic On Love he describes or compares the “birth of love”, in which the love object is ‘crystallized’ in the mind, as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome.

Through the influence of Daru he obtained a place in the commissariat, which he filled with some distinction from 1806 to 1814. He was then sent to the newly established Ecole Centrale at Grenoble (nowadays Lycée Stendhal). While in Milan he becomes the lover of Angela Pietragua, who he met for the first time in 1800 on the Italian Campaign.

Many writers have acknowledged his influence on their work and used his technique of detailed psychological description in their own stories.

Book II chronicles Julien’s time in Paris with the family of M. de la Mole. In 1814 he published, under the pseudonym of Alexandre Cesar Bombet, his Lettres ecrites de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur, Joseph Haydn, suivies d'une vie de Mozart, et de considerations sur Metastase et Vital present de la musique en Italie.

Connaître à fond les hommes, juger sainement des événements, est donc un grand pas vers le bonheur."

“Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.”

Personality

An elusive personality, the end product of a process of disillusionment, Stendhal showed a mocking exterior, ironic and skeptical, that masked his sensitive and wounded heart.

Julien ends up becoming an acolyte for the local Catholic Abbé, who later secures him a post as tutor for the children of the Mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity.

The metaphor of the realistic novel as a mirror of contemporary reality, accessible to the narrator, has certain limitations, which the artist is aware of. 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.

It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself. In Italy, Stendhal discovered Lombardy, Milan, and the culture of the Italian people with whom he fell in love.

In 1821 the Austrians, who controlled northern Italy at that time, began to put pressure on Stendhal because of his past connections with the French Empire, and ultimately he was forced to flee to Paris to escape persecution.