Stendhal - The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford Worlds Classics)

STENDHAL (Henri Beyle) was born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble, where his father was a lawyer and his maternal grandfather a doctor. He lost his mother at the age of 7. After distinguishing himself in mathematics at the Ecole Centrale in Grenoble, he moved to Paris in 1799 intending to study for admission to the Ecole Polytechnique, but preferred to make his dbut in the world of art and literature. He was employed at the Ministry of War, and took part in the Napoleonic campaigns in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia from 1800 to 1814. At the fall of the Empire he settled in Milan, where he began to write on painting and music. Returning to Paris in 1821, he lived as a dandy in high society, publishing a treatise on love in 1822, his first novel Armance in 1827, followed by Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830.

The last phase of his career was spent as a diplomat in Italy, with postings as Consul in Trieste and then Civitavecchia. He was awarded the Lgion d'honneur in 1835. The Chartreuse de Parme, a novel of military and romantic adventure set in Italy, appeared in 1839. Stendhal died of a stroke in 1842 during a period of leave in Paris. His remaining fictional and autobiographical works were published posthumously. His literary achievement went largely unrecognized during his lifetime, and it was left to later generations to appreciate his penetrating psychological and social insights and his ironical humour.

CATHERINE SLATER was Fellow and Tutor in French Language and Linguistics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1971 to 1987, and is now an Honorary Research Fellow. She works in Bristol at HewlettPackard's European research laboratories.

ROGER PEARSON is a Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen's College, Oxford, and the author of Stendhal's Violin: a Novelist and his Reader ( Clarendon Press, 1988). He has also edited Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma for Oxford World's Classics.

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