Word: henry
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...With his usual devastating honesty, Stendhal recorded in his autobiography (The Life of Henri Brulard) that he had loved his mother "with a mad passion"-"as criminal as possible" and indistinguishable from the love he felt for his mistresses in later years. His hatred of his chief rival was so violent that even in middle age he generally referred to his unfortunate father as "the bastard...
...When his mother died, her place in the gloomy Beyle home at Grenoble was filled by insipid maiden aunts and didactic priests and governesses. Young Henri's life was soon charged with the ideas and feelings that persisted until the day he died-a horror of the established order in family, church and state, and an insatiable appetite for romantic passion...
...Henri welcomed the French Revolution, and loved the period that followed-when the ladies promenaded "in flowing 'Roman' garments that exposed their arms and shoulders and nearly all of their bosoms," and the dandies courted them "gotten up like peacocks, in embroidered coats, with ruffles . . . immense green cravats, and rare knotted walking sticks...
...time he returned with Napoleon's army from the invasion of Italy, Henri was, and remained, says Author Josephson, "the eternal strategist in the game of life and sex, always armed with . . . systems, prescriptions, stratagems, and nearly always, comically enough, fated to lose his weapons, and his plans, midway in the contest." He needed stratagems. By his own admission, he was as fat and homely as an "Italian butcher boy"; and despite his talkative, romantic arrogance and fashionable dress, he was terrified of ridicule and feminine rebuffs...
...Sparkling Crystals. When Napoleon fell, Henri Beyle, who had participated in the disastrous invasion of Russia, fell with him. Disgraced, penniless, the young, atheistic republican stood on a Paris sidewalk and stared at the "hideous apparition" of "fat King Louis XVIII." Henri fled to Italy...