Stendhal

Stendhal was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), a French novelist. Born in Grenoble, he escaped a hated provincial childhood to Paris and Napoleon's army, served in the commissariat through the Italian campaigns and the retreat from Moscow, and after 1814 lived chiefly in Milan, which he loved, and later as French consul at Civitavecchia. He wrote on music, painting and love before turning to fiction: The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) are the two novels on which his fame rests, with the unfinished Lucien Leuwen. Little read in his lifetime, he predicted he would be understood around 1880, and he was right.