[Stendhal] was small, ugly and obsessed by physical beauty in others, and he spent most of his time in salons and opera houses, pursuing aristocratic hostesses and singers. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Italy, adopted his pseudonym and began to write. He was a sexual freebooter who “found a notion of obtaining happiness from a virtuous woman wholly inconceivableâ€. At 59, unmarried, syphilitic and obscure, he dropped dead in a Paris street.
Anthony Burgess