Stendhal mother Henriette Gagnon
Life
Marie-Henri Baille was born in Grenoble, Isère, on January 23, 1783, in the family of the advocate and landowner Chérubin Beyle and his wife Henriette Gagnon. He was an unhappy child, disliking his "unimaginative" father and mourning his mother, whom he loved fervently, and who died in childbirth in 1790, when he was seven. He spent "the happiest years of his life" at the Beyle country house in Claix near Grenoble. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th century. His family was part of the bourgeois class and was attached to the Ancien Regime, which explains his ambiguous attitude toward Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and the monarchy later on.
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