![]() ![]() Within a couple of years, though, he was back in Paris determined to become a writer, and a playwright in particular. ![]() ![]() He left at 16 for Paris where, in 1800, through the influence of a relative, he travelled to Italy and signed up with Napoleon’s army, and took part in the Italian Campaign. Marie-Henri Beyle was born in Grenoble in 1783 but his mother died when he was only seven, and he disliked his father and his home life. According to Robert Sage, the editor and translator of his journals, Stendhal was an egotist with ‘a positive mania’ for recording his life and thoughts, for ‘putting black on white’. ‘My faith, it it’s coquetry, I’m caught, if you can call it being caught to experience keen pleasure.’ This is the great womaniser and early French realist writer Stendhal confiding to his diary exactly 200 years ago today. ![]()
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