Henri Beyle, better known to us by his pseudonym, Stendhal, was called by the French un homme singulier, or what we might call, with an inevitable loss of nuance, a character. And he was, indeed, the most singular of all the great nineteenth-century French novelists, and also perhaps the most contradictory. Unlike Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, his peers in the pantheon of fiction, he had an amateur’s approach to literature, and except for some youthful dreams, never strove to be a professional writer. His detractors would say that it showed. Not a few of his readers would become fed up with his desultory style, lack of narrative drive, overindulgence in asides, and his affectation of unsentimental detachment from the fate of his characters. A pretty fair judge of the art, Henry James pronounced Le Rouge et le noir to be unreadable, yet he was enthralled by La Chartreuse de Parme, showing the strange mix of emotions that can be evoked even within the same reader by this great figure of French letters.

It marks some of his distinction that Stendhal should elicit wildly varying and even troubled reactions, as did Beyle in person, at the salons, as he expatiated on every subject under the sun, blithely ignoring his own ignorance. None of which is to say that his work was without craft, or to deny that he was, in fact, extraordinarily learned. But it is noteworthy that his singular spirit and idiosyncrasy animated both man and