SOURCE: "Tales of Action," in Stendhal Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 109-22.

In the following excerpt, Talbot examines characteristic themes in Stendhal's short fiction.

While Stendhal is better known as a novelist than as a writer of short stories, his interest in short fiction was considerable and can be traced to the earliest stages of his career. Practically all his nonfiction contains anecdotes that, though often only a few lines long, are embryonic short stories. His first published work, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, contains, for example, an anecdote about a seventeenth-century singer and his mistress that is then retold in a more developed fashion in The Life of Rossini. A few of these anecdotes are long enough to stand as short stories in their own right. An example would be the story of Ernestine, which Stendhal wrote for an anticipated second edition of On Love. Written...