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Stendhal (1783-1842), the pen name of Henri Marie Beyle, was born into a prosperous family in Grenoble. At sixteen he set out for Paris, intending to pursue a career as an engineer, but instead enlisted in Napoleon's Army. Stendhal took part in campaigns in Italy, Germany, Russia, and Austria, and then, after Napoleon's fall from power, settled in Milan,where he wrote books on art and music. Expelled from Italy for political reasons in 1821, he returned to Paris; following the 1830 revolution, he secured the position, which he was to hold for the rest of his life, of French Consul to Civitavecchia. Stendhal's great novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) were largely ignored during his lifetime, and many of his works remained unfinished and were published only posthumously. Among his most important books are On Love, Lucien Leuwen, The Memoirs of an Egotist, and The Life of Henry Brulard.
What a surprising autobiography this is! First, the great 19th-century French novelist Stendhal has used the pseudonym of Henry Brulard instead of his more familiar name, which is itself a pseudonym. The work purports to deal only with his first 17 years, though he refers to much that happened after that, up to the time of writing when he was 53. The story jumps about, is filled with digressions, and burns with passion, venom and great frankess. The book seems to have been written to expunge the horror of his early life rather than for publication. 'Henry Brulard' was the victim of 'the most unwaveringly aristocratic and religious education', which he vehemently rejected. His mother died when he was seven, and thereafter his life was one of constant unhappiness, persecuted by his vicious aunt Seraphie and his totally antipathetic father. He was never allowed to talk to a child of his own age. Only his grandfather loved him and inculcated in him the great love of books and ideas which was his one light in the gloom. However, he remained nauseated for the rest of his life by 'bourgeois baseness, jesuits and hypocrites of every sort'. Obsessed by impotent hatred, his fervent wish was to get away from the ghastliness of Grenoble and his snobbish family. Raised 'under a belljar' and under the 'frightful tyranny' of the abbe Raillane he realized that his passion for mathematics was the only means he had of escaping that abhorrent town. Finally permitted to go the Ecole Centrale, he wasn't a great success with his classmates; far from his imagined noble companions, he found them selfish brats. The few he could share some friendship with were just those of whom his family would disapprove. Finally, at 16, he achieved his dream of going to Paris for further study, but was shocked to find the city a bitter disapointment. Mathematics no longer charmed him. Now he longed to write comedies, and even more to meet a woman with a loving heart. From his earliest childhood he had always had an underlying loyalty to the most ferocious of principles of the 1789 Revolution, and there are many references to the conflicting and dangerous allegiances of those turbulent times, and to French literature. The immediacy and clarity of Stendhal's passions leave one in no doubt that this is the man who wrote two masterpieces, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. (Kirkus UK)
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