This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.

The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 17 is a compendium of articles and notes pertaining to the Museum's permanent collections of antiquities, decorative arts, drawings, and photographs. This volume includes a supplement introduced by John Walsh with a fully illustrated checklist of the Getty’s recent acquisitions. Volume 17 includes articles written by Elisabeth Doumeyrou, Gerhard Gruitrooy, Lee Hendrix, Clark Hulse, David Jaffé, Jean-Nérée Ronfort, and Belinda Rathbone.