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.