‘notoirement suspect’ of disaffection to the Republic, and confined to his house.  At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris, just after the coup d’etat of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the organisation of Napoleon’s greatest armies, and whose leisure moments—­for apparently he had leisure moments—­were devoted to the composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day.  It was as a subordinate to this remarkable personage that Beyle spent nearly the whole of the next fifteen years of his life—­in Paris, in Italy, in Germany, in Russia—­wherever the whirling tempest of the Napoleonic policy might happen to carry him.  His actual military experience was considerably slighter than what, in after years, he liked to give his friends to understand it had been.  For hardly more than a year, during the Italian campaign, he was in the army as a lieutenant of dragoons:  the rest of his public service was spent in the commissariat department.  The descriptions which he afterwards delighted to give of his adventures at Marengo, at Jena, at Wagram, or at the crossing of the Niemen have been shown by M. Chuquet’s unkind researches to have been imaginary.  Beyle was present at only one great battle—­Bautzen.  ’Nous voyons fort bien,’ he wrote in his journal on the following day, ’de midi a trois heures, tout ce qu’on peut voir d’une bataille, c’est a dire rien.’  He was, however, at Moscow in 1812, and he accompanied the army through the horrors of the retreat.  When the conflagration had broken out in the city he had abstracted from one of the deserted palaces a finely bound copy of the Faceties of Voltaire; the book helped to divert his mind as he lay crouched by the campfire through the terrible nights that followed; but, as his companions showed their disapproval of anyone who could smile over Akakia and Pompignan in such a situation, one day he left the red-morocco volume behind him in the snow.

The fall of Napoleon threw Beyle out of employment, and the period of his literary activity began.  His books were not successful; his fortune gradually dwindled; and he drifted in Paris and Italy, and even in England, more and more disconsolately, with thoughts of suicide sometimes in his head.  But in 1830 the tide of his fortunes turned.  The revolution of July, by putting his friends into power, brought him a competence in the shape of an Italian consulate; and in the same year he gained for the first time some celebrity by the publication of Le Rouge et Le Noir.  The rest of his life was spent in the easy discharge of his official duties at Civita Vecchia, alternating with periods of leave—­one of them lasted for three years—­spent in Paris among his friends, of whom the most distinguished was Prosper Merimee.  In 1839 appeared his last published work—­La Chartreuse de Parme; and three years later he died suddenly in Paris.  His epitaph, composed by himself with the utmost care, was as follows: