producing in 1814 The Lives of Haydn and Mozart, and in 1817 a series of travel sketches, Rome, Naples, Florence, which was published in London.
It was in Milan also than Stendhal first nursed the abstract thrills of his grand passion for Mètilde Countess Dunbowska, whose angelic sweetness would seem to have served at any rate to some extent as a prototype to the character of Mme. de Rênal. In 1821 the novelist was expelled from Milan on the apparently unfounded accusation of being a French spy. It is typical of that mixture of brutal sensuality and rarefied sentimentalism which is one of the most fascinating features of Stendhal's character, that even though he had never loved more than the lady's heart, he should have remained for three years faithful to this mistress of his ideal.
In 1822 Stendhal published his treatise, De l'Amour, a practical scientific treatise on the erotic emotion by an author who possessed the unusual advantage of being at the same time an acute psychologist and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by concrete practice and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself and observe in others into broad general principles.
In 1825 Stendhal plunging vigorously into the controversy between the Classicists and the Romanticists, published his celebrated pamphlet, Racine and Shakespeare, in which he vindicated with successful crispness the claims of live verse against sterotyped couplets and of modern analysis against historical tradition. His next work was the Life of Rossini, whom he had known personally in Milan, while in 1827 he published his first novel Armance, which, while not equal to the author's greatest work, give none the less good promise of that
