Perduto è tutto il tempo

Che in amar non si spende

Stendhal's worlds

Henri Beyle, whom the world knows under the most celebrated of his multiple pseudonyms, Stendhal, is the author of a landmark of European literary realism, The Red and the Black. Yet even had Stendhal not published this novel, today seen as a monument in a mode or school he himself never heard of (for, if ‘realism’ is a coinage of the 1820s, it only gained currency well after his death), he could claim our attention as the author of one of the world's most subtle and unusual treatises on love, De l'Amour. Moreover, he is the author of an autobiography that can fairly be said to rival Augustine's or Rousseau's Confessions for its candour and its consciousness of the problems the genre poses the writer who would be simultaneously subject, object, and writing agent. This is The Life of Henry Brulard. Finally, Stendhal would certainly be remembered for his second great novel, The Charterhouse of Parma. And this is to leave unmentioned other novels, finished and unfinished, his travel writings (he is said to have virtually invented the concept of modern tourism), biographies of composers and studies of painters, journals, reflections, and polemical writings such as his Racine and Shakespeare, an important document in the history not of realism, but of romanticism.