Stendhal

“Stendhal's two polemical pamphlets on the theatre, a manifesto of French Romanticism. Should tragedies written for the public of 1823 follow Racine or Shakespeare? Against the unities of time and place and the alexandrine, Stendhal argues for national tragedies in prose, defines laughter, and defines Romanticism as the art of giving each people the works that give it the most pleasure now — and, two years later, answers the Académie française's solemn condemnation of the Romantics.”

“Stendhal's first novel, subtitled 'Some Scenes from a Paris Salon in 1827.' Octave de Malivert, a brilliant, melancholy young nobleman with a secret he cannot tell, loves his proud, poor cousin Armance de Zohiloff — and she him — but pride, misunderstanding and the malice of others keep them apart, until it is too late.”

“Julien Sorel, the clever, proud son of a provincial carpenter, who worships Napoleon in a France where the age of glory is over, decides that the Church — the black — is now the only road to power. As tutor in the house of the mayor of Verrières, seminarian in Besançon and secretary to a great Paris nobleman, he climbs by hypocrisy and will, loving and loved by two very different women — until a single act destroys everything.”

“Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian nobleman who runs away at sixteen to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, returns to a Lombardy ruled by Austria and a little court at Parma ruled by fear. Protected by his beautiful aunt, the Duchess Sanseverina, and her lover, the minister Count Mosca, he kills a man, is imprisoned in the Farnese Tower, and there falls in love with the governor's daughter, Clélia — in a story of passion, intrigue, escape and loss.”

“Stendhal's unfinished novel of the July Monarchy. Lucien Leuwen, the idle, idealistic son of a witty Paris banker, is expelled from the École Polytechnique for republican sympathies and sent as a lancer to the provincial garrison of Nancy, where he falls in love with a reserved young royalist widow, Madame de Chasteller. Tricked into leaving her, he returns to Paris to learn the corruption of government from inside a ministry.”

“Stendhal's last, unfinished novel: Lamiel, a foundling brought up by a pious beadle and his wife in a Norman village, is taken up by a great lady and educated in cynicism by a clever, embittered hunchbacked doctor. Bored by the petty world around her and determined to know life for herself, she runs away to Paris in search of something worth loving — and finds it, at last, in a criminal.”