Henri Marie Beyle, author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, the man we know as Stendhal, ranks with Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Baudelaire as a nineteenth-century French immortal. Yet on the night of 22 March, 1842, no one noticed his untimely death in Paris.

Jonathan Keates's contagiously readable new biography of this great romantic takes us through his career in Napoleon's armies (he watched Moscow burn in 1812), his many love affairs, his diplomatic postings, and his multiple personas: as a would-be dandy, as a man of the world, as the polemicist extraordinaire, as the theorist of love.