The article is dedicated to Stendhal, the most mysterious and contradictory writer in the history of French literature of the first half of the 19th century. The axis of his world was the science of man, of human passions and morals, of morality as the art of behavior in the pursuit of happiness. Testimonies of his contemporaries, works of the writer himself, his correspondence with friends will help to understand the personality of Stendhal, in which various extremes were bizarrely connected.