Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by one of his hundreds of pen names, Stendhal, was a French writer and practitioner of realism. He was born in Grenoble on the 23rd of January 1783, and lived a bad childhood with his lawyer father (his mother died when he was very young). His closest friend was his sister Pauline. His aunt toke care of his education along with a Jesuit priest. He hated his hometown and family, except for his sister.
In 1800, he joined the French army, under the command of Napoleon. He served as a lieutenant of dragoons, and fought in Italy, Germany, and Russia. When the French empire fell in 1814, Stendhal couldn’t even get a job as an under-paid librarian, so he left France and settled in Milan, Italy. He turned into quite a womanizer, and had many love affairs. He was friends with patriotic Italians, and because of that, he was exiled from Milan by the Austrian police, and he returned to Paris. He lived the rest of his life there, writing many novels, autobiographies, and non-fiction books. He fell from seisures on the streets of Paris and died three hours later on the 22nd of March 1842.

At first, Stendhal’s work wasn’t appreciated during the Romantic Era. He wrote many things, most of which were not very popular while he was alive and some where never finished. A couple of his books were only published after his death. Here is a list of some of his best known written texts:
Novels:
Armance (1827)
Le Rouge et le Noir (translated as The Red and the Black, 1830)
Lucien Leuwen (unfinished, published 1894)
La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) (The Charterhouse of Parma)
Lamiel (unfinished, published 1889)
Novellas:
The Pink and the Green (1837, unfinished)
The Cenci (Les Cenci)
The Duchess of Palliano (La Duchesse de Palliano)
The Abbess of Castro (L’Abbesse de Castro, 1832)
Biographies:
A Life of Napoleon (1929)
A Life of Rossini (1824)
Autobiographies:
Souvenirs d’Égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist, 1892)
The Life of Henry Brulard (1890)
Journal (The Private Diaries of Stendhal)
Non-fiction:
De L’Amour (1822) (On Love)
He also wrote several short stories, did some journalism, and also used his experience to write travel books for Rome, Naples and Florence.

A psychosomatic illness was named after him. Stendhal Syndrome, also known as Florence Syndrome, is used to describe someone who feels dizzy, confused, has a rapid heartbeat, feels faint, and sometimes even having hallucinations because of being exposed to art. The art is to be either excessively beautiful, or there is a lot of art in one single place. Many people experience this when exposed to Florentine art, or even FLorence itself, whence the given name. It is, however, more commonly known as a Stendhal Syndrome, because he described himself, in one of his travel books, feeling it while visiting Florence. The syndrome was named in 1979.

Reference: http://historicalbiographies.suite101.com/article.cfm/mariehenribeyle_17831842, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/stendhal.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal, Portrait by Johan Olaf Sodemark, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome

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Tags: french realistic writer, le rouge et le noir, Marie-Henri Beyle, Stendhal