'Wilde's love of French culture was intensified and perhaps even prompted by his reading. Three novels, which were written at the beginning of the nineteenth century by two acknowledged masters of imaginative realism, impressed him particularly - Balzac's "Lost Illusions" and "A Harlot High and Low" (whose hero is Lucien de Rubempre), and Stendhal's "Scarlet and Black", which featured Julien Sorel. Wilde would nominate the pair as the "two favourite characters" of his boyhood.'