Pauline Beyle

Naturalists, and as the product of what George Sand in 1831 described as ‘the vision of nature and humanity observed through the prism of genius’. Her observation is amply confirmed in the work of the two major novelists of the period. Stendhal Henri Beyle (1783–1842) was far too sceptical to be taken in by the ideologies, utopias and religiosities of his overheated times. A part of him remained anchored in the eighteenth century and he accepted its view that thought is the product of sense-impressions