With Stendhal is a delightful composite portrait of one of the world’s great novelists.
Simon Leys introduces and translates into English for the first time three linked pieces- the recollections of Stendhal’s famous friend Prosper Merimee, the impressions of novelist George Sand, and a recently discovered piece by Stendhal himself, a whimsical list of the supernatural powers he wished he possessed.
Together they illuminate the life and mind of a colourful hyper-romantic, given to duelling, bantering and falling in love, for whom boredom was a sin and hypocracy a crime.