Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. Stendhal proclaimed himself an egotist; the neologism for the same characteristic in his characters was "Beylism".