The French, for some reason  but why not?  love writing about love. Think of Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux, or a great deal of Lacan's oeuvre. One should be careful here. I know someone who was dumped not long after giving his girlfriend the former, and as for the latter, bear in mind that our most prominent contemporary Lacanian, Slavoj iek, glossed one of his mentor's remarks on the subject thus: "Love is giving something you don't have  to someone who doesn't want it." This, though, is rather older, and is more likely to be appreciated when given, prettily wrapped, to the object of your devotion, perhaps with suitable passages highlighted, on Valentine's day.

And the beauty of it is that either gender can appreciate it. Audaciously but sensitively, a great deal of time is spent on the woman's perspective rather than the man's. "In mannered love, and perhaps in the first five minutes of passionate love, a woman taking a lover pays more attention to the way other women see him than to how she herself sees him." I tried this out on a woman, though, and she doubted it was the case  but then do remember this was written nearly 200 years ago, and they did things differently then. (Note that word "mannered".) On Love is set in a world in which it's hard enough to get to hold hands with your lover, let alone a bit of the Other.

But they didn't feel things differently. Love doesn't change over the years, and not even the differing conventions through the ages alienate us as we might think. Boys at single-sex schools never have a problem grasping courtly love, because loving unattainable women at a distance is all they can do, unless they are unusually fortunate. And Stendhal was an expert not only on love, but also on unattainable love, especially having mooned about for three years after Matilde Dembowski, despite her already being married to a Polish officer (rash, don't you think, to fall in love with a military man's wife? The husband will be armed). It was this non-affair that inspired the book; we can perhaps fruitfully speculate whether he would have written it if she had been more biddable. "I am making all possible efforts to be dry," Stendhal writes early on. "I want to impose silence on my heart, which thinks it has much to say. I constantly fear having written nothing but a sigh, when I believe I have set down a truth."

It being hard to order one's thoughts about love, then, it is natural that this book is fragmentary. Henry James called it "unreadable", apparently, which is a bit rich coming from him; but AC Grayling is more in line with our own tastes, which aren't so held down by linearity, when he calls it "strangely engrossing" in his foreword. And it is because it is anecdotal, discursive and always running up against the idea of the inarticulacy and dumbfounded silence of love, that we can trust Stendhal's insights and realise at times that this is, even when being light, a work of great psychological worth and acuity.

There are times when the work of 1822 seems more usefully worldly-wise than that of 1977. Barthes: "Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned". Stendhal: "We ought to move on from this hackneyed expression; nevertheless, it does happen." The French expression, at least in Stendhal, is "coup de foudre"; sad, but understandable, that Sophie Lewis had to switch to English for that. But on the whole her translation is spot on, using just the right language to carry not only Stendhal's pithiness, but a flavour of the age in which he was writing. I think "having made an ass of himself" is just right for "ayant fait le nigaud". (Stendhal always translates well into English; something to do with the directness of his style, and his sense of humour.)

Anyway, I have given you plenty of time to buy and read this, and to mark up the most winning phrase and compose a note on the flyleaf. Remember: "Half  the most beautiful half  of life is hidden from him who has not loved passionately."