The Life of Henry Brulard

Stendhal draws an unforgettable picture of his boyhood in Grenoble, with the mother whom he adored and the father whose bourgeois meanness and cowardice he despised, Grandfather Gagnon, that delightful eighteenth century rationalist, and of Abbe Raillanne who was for him the archetype of all tyrants and hypocrites; of his youthful enthusiasm and loves, his hates and ambitions, culminating in his determination to study mathematics because that alone was free from hypocrisy; and lastly of his escape from Grenoble as a mathematics student, and his entry into Italy as a young lieutenant in the army of Napolean.