His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of Paris. He preferred, however, a box at la Scala, listening to Rossini or watching a Viganò ballet, near his beloved Angela. But after seven years Milan was closed to him, and as he was known in a restricted circle at Paris as a writer of power, originality, and as an authority on music and painting, he returned there in 1821. He frequented the salon of Destutt de Tracy, whose ideology and philosophic writings he admired. There he saw General Lafayette and wrote maliciously of this hero, who, though seventy-five, was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. The same desire to startle that animated Baudelaire kept Beyle in hot water. He was a visitor at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, of Madame Ancelot, Baron Gérard, and Castellane, and on Sundays, at the salon of Etienne Délacluze, the art critic of the _Débats_, and a daily visitor at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his emphatic style, Victor Cousin, Thiers, and his host Délacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, and he usually did so with a brace of bon-mots that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his enemies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were said of him, though none quite so sharp as the remark made by a certain Madame Céline: "Ah! I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame Pasta must have had a benefit." This witticism was believed, because of the long friendship between the Italian _cantatrice_ and the young Frenchman. He occupied a small apartment in the same building, though it is said the attachment was platonic. In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela Pietragrua. He loved her. Eleven years later, when he returned to Italy, this love was revived. He burst into tears when he saw her again. _Quello è il chinese!_ explained the massive Angela to her father. Even that lovetap did not disconcert the furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made him miserable by her coquetries. The feminine characters in his novels and tales are drawn from life. His essay on Love is a _centaine_ of experiences crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man of too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation in the presence of a woman he loved, displayed surprising delicacy. Where he could not respect, he could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; he abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for him a mixture of moonshine, _esprit_, and physical beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though he never viewed woman exactly from the same angle as did Dante; or, perhaps, his many Beatrices proved geese.