Maurice Barrès relates that at the age of twenty he was in Rome, where he met in the Villa Medici its director, M. Hébert, the painter (died 1908), who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do you admire Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain that the writer of La Chartreuse de Parme was his cousin, and once consul at Cività Vecchia, although he spent most of his time in Rome. Stendhal's Promenades had offended the Pope, so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to death in the stuffy little town where he represented the French Government, Stendhal had been reproved more than once for the dilatory performance of his duties. Hébert, after warning Barrès not to study him too deeply, described him as an old gentleman of exceeding but capricious _esprit_. He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaiming joyously before some old Greek marble or knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might have been expected from one who went wild over the ballets Viganò. Another anecdote is one that reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of Beyle-Stendhal. An English lady, a traveller bent on taking notes for a book about Paris, was shown around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous amount of misinformation, misnaming public buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and nicknaming well-known personages. All this with the hope that she would reproduce it in print. Not very _spirituel_, this performance of M. Beyle. He was an admirer of English folk and their literature, and corresponded in a grotesque sort of English with several prominent men and women in London. We find him writing a congratulatory letter to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, complacently remarking that the ingrained Hebraism of English character and literature made the production of such an exotic poem all the more wonderful. Though he could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.