[Pg xiv] All these are more or less famous works, with which, at least by name, the general reader is familiar. Brantôme's witty and entertaining writings, the _Letters of a Portuguese Nun_ and those of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, perhaps the sublimest letters that have ever been written, are far less read than they deserve. The rest--excepting perhaps Scarron, Carlo Gozzi, Auguste La Fontaine, and one or two of the less-known Memoirs--are the common reading of a very large public. This list of books is mentioned as the select library of Lisio Visconti, who "was anything but a great reader." Lisio Visconti is one of the many imaginary figures, behind which hides Stendhal himself; we have already suggested one reason for this curious trait. Besides Lisio Visconti and Salviati, we meet Del Rosso, Scotti, Delfante, Pignatelli, Zilietti, Baron de Bottmer, etc. etc. Often these phantom people are mentioned side by side with a character from a book or a play or with someone Stendhal had actually met in life. General Teulié[11] is a real person--Stendhal's superior officer on his first expedition in Italy: Schiassetti is a fiction. In the same way the dates, which the reader will often find appended to a story or a note, sometimes give the date of a real event in Stendhal's life, while at other times it can be proved that, at the particular time given, the event mentioned could not have taken place. This falsification of names and dates was a mania with Stendhal. To most of his friends he gave a name completely different from their real one, and adopted with each of them a special pseudonym for himself. The list of Stendhal's pseudonyms is extensive and amusing.[12] But he was not always thorough in his system of disguise: he is even known to have written from Italy a letter in cypher, enclosing at the same time the key to the cypher!