A a n e c d o t e A Taste of Bitter Almonds a stendhal capsule When the rotund Henri Beyle (Stendhal) dropped dead in a Paris street in 1842—‘of apoplexy’—only three mourners accompanied the coffin to its resting place in the Cimetière de Montmartre: one of them was the younger writer Prosper Mérimée. Incensed by the fact that no words had been spoken at this ‘pagan funeral’, Mérimée wrote a short memoir of their friendship. Fact is he didn’t know much about his friend other than that he had served in the Napoleonic campaigns and been a mostly indifferent diplomat in Italy, and that he was known in Paris as an occasional wit (‘homme d’esprit’) and writer with a mania for disguises; what he had read of his books didn’t inspire him terribly. Perhaps because he didn’t know so much about the social figure, the sketchy portrait he left, with the bare title HB, is a captivating one. For a son of the post-revolutionary years like Mérimée, Beyle (born 1783) bore all the contradictory traits of a man of the previous century: ‘All his life he was dominated by his imagina- A | anecdote  3