Letters to Pauline

Determined to take his deeply loved younger sister Pauline’s education in hand, Henri Beyle—better known by the most famous of his scores of noms de plume, Stendhal—was obliged to continue her tuition in epistolary fashion on leaving Grenoble. In his letters to her he instructs her in what she should read (Plutarch, Molière, and Shakespeare); what to study (philosophy, logic, mathematics, and music); whether or not to get married (and to what kind of man); and generally how to enliven the tedium of a French provincial town. At the same time, he encourages her to think for herself—a process that, inevitably, reveals what he thought when thinking for himself.