Egoists

rmous. How enormous may be seen in the three volumes published at Paris by Charles Bosse, the pages of which number 1,386.

The earliest edition of the Stendhal letters appeared in 1855, edited by Prosper Mérimée, with an introduction by the author of Carmen. The present edition is edited by two devoted Stendhalians, Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises all the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in the Souvenirs d'Egotisme (1892), some letters never before publi

nd a mystifier in this respect. His own signature was seldom twice alike. A list is given and reaches the number of one hundred and seventy-nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barrès has written a gentle preface rather in the air, which he entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour. One p

moral reading for a lass-and he never wearies of praising Shakespeare. "I am a Romantic," he says elsewhere; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to Racine, Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth must have bored his sister. She understood him, however, and as her life at home with a disagreeable and avaricious father was not happy, her correspondence with brother Henry must have been a consolation. He does not scruple to call his father hard names, and recommend

-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen and men of affairs. He had friends in London, Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the rest; and he visited England several times. Baron Mareste and Romain Colomb were confidants. Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, wrote obituary no

ances for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie Fran?aise; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion, thus: Spiritous sanctous. As the Emperor passed by

and secretary, Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon, declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take a carriage, as after mid

s of Stendhal's love-life. So little of the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence -and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble archives!-fittingly closes his brief introduction

Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedication is enigmatic; it might have meant Napoleon, or Louis XVIII., or the Czar Alexander of Russia. M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so poor that he hoped for a position as preceptor in Russia and thought by the ambiguity of his dedication to catch the favourable eye of the Czar. Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king was on the throne of France. Let all three be duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal. That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new edition of the history appeared, it was headed by a touching, almost tearful dedication to the exile at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain Colomb, had found it among the papers of the dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he published it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, and for politic reasons had selected the misleading one of the