Stendhal

Stendhal was the nom-de-plume of Marie-Henri Beyle, who was born in Grenoble in 1783. His first schoolteacher was a Jesuit priest. He served in the army under Napoleon, but on the restoration of the monarchy moved to Italy, where he started his career as a travel writer. His great love of the Arts, and his declared ecstatic dizziness at the overwhelming beauty and magnificence of Italian paintings, frescoes, statues and architecture, particularly in Florence, led to the recent coining of the expression: 'the Stendhal Syndrome'. On his return to Paris in 1821 he moved into Society, had several publicized affaires and published The Red and the Black in 1830. The Red and the Black is considered by many to be one of his two masterpieces, the other being The Charterhouse of Parma, also a romance in which the central hero treads a path between the military and the ecclesiastical. He took a diplomatic post in Italy, but in 1841 became ill and returned to Paris, where he died of a stroke in 1842. —Naxos Audiobooks