The books mentioned by Stendhal are of two distinct kinds. There are those, from which he draws evidence and support for his own theories, and in which the connexion with love is only incidental (Shakespeare's Plays, for example, _Don Juan_ or the _Nouvelle Héloïse_), and others whose authors are really his forerunners, such as André le Chapelain.[9] Stendhal gives some account of this curious writer, who perhaps comes nearer his own analytical method than any later writer. In fact, we have called Stendhal unique perhaps too rashly--there are others he does not mention, who, in a less sustained and intentional way, have attempted an analytical, and still imaginative, study of love. Stendhal makes no mention of a short essay on Love by Pascal, which certainly falls in the same category as his own. It is less illuminating than one might expect, but to read it is to appreciate still more the restraint, which Stendhal has consciously forced upon himself. Others also since [Pg xiii] Stendhal--Baudelaire, for instance--have made casual and valuable investigations in the Stendhalian method. Baudelaire has here and there a maxim which, in brilliance and exactitude, equals almost anything in this volume.[10] And then--though this is no place for a bibliography of love--there is Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_. Stendhal would have loved that patient, impartial chronicle of love's ravages: instead of Parisian _salons_ and Duchesses it is all servant-girls and Bloomsbury lodging-houses; but the _Liber Amoris_ is no less pitiful and, if possible, more real than the diary of Salviati. There are certain books which, for the frequency of their mention in this work, demand especial attention of the reader--they are its commentary and furnish much of the material for its ideas. In number CLXV of "Scattered Fragments" (below, p. 328) Stendhal gives the list as follows:-- The _Autobiography_ of Benvenuto Cellini. The novels of Cervantes and Scarron. _Manon Lescaut_ and _Le Doyen de Killerine_, by the Abbé Prévôt. The Latin Letters of Héloïse to Abelard. _Tom Jones._ _Letters of a Portuguese Nun._ Two or three stories by Auguste La Fontaine. Pignotti's _History of Tuscany_. Werther. Brantôme. _Memoirs_ of Carlo Gozzi (Venice, 1760)--only the eighty pages on the history of his love affairs. The _Memoirs_ of Lauzun, Saint-Simon, d'Épinay, de Staël, Marmontel, Bezenval, Roland, Duclos, Horace Walpole, Evelyn, Hutchinson. Letters of Mademoiselle Lespinasse.