Courier is often praised by Stendhal. Courier, ten years his junior, had lived through the wars with the same dilettantism, and detested the moral order and temporal power of the clergy as much as he did. In his Chroniques, Stendhal sometimes portrays him as the nineteenth-century Voltaire opposing the "constituted authorities", sometimes as the originator of the new Provinciales, who died before becoming a second Pascal. The author of La Chartreuse de Parme was a great admirer of his Pétition pour des villageois que l'on empêche de danser (1822), and of the Simple Discourse sur la souscription de Chambord (1821); but it was the Pièce diplomatique of 1823 that he preferred, a text that Courier attributed to Louis XVIII, writing to his brother Ferdinand of Spain. In it, the king unexpectedly praises the representative system, diverted into a "recreational government" in which he amuses himself by appointing the people's deputies. Stendhal began writing pamphlets in Courier's wake. In 1936, Thibaudet perceived the novelistic vein of Courier's anticlerical pamphlets and suggested that the characters in Le Rouge et le Noir, and even Balzac's curés, inherited much from the clergy of Luynes, on whom Courier focused his satire.
Courier, whose life was short, owes his fame to an ink blot. During the Italian campaign, he discovered a manuscript of Longus' Daphnis et Chloé in a Florence library, which contained a passage missing from all known versions, including Amyot's Renaissance translation. In 1809, Courier returned to Florence to transcribe the six or seven capital pages describing the birth of amorous feelings; as he was transcribing, he made "a pâté on the Longus" which, obscuring the precious passage, became an affair of state. He was accused of having acted deliberately to guarantee the exclusivity of his discovery.
His murder on April 10, 1825, in the Larçay woods he owned, further established his myth. For a long time, rumors circulated of a political crime orchestrated by the Jesuit party, although the hypothesis of a family score-settling was put forward very early on. In 1829, it emerged that Courier's death had been orchestrated by two of his former servants, with whom his wife had been unfaithful. Courier's death perfected his image as a misanthropic pamphleteer, but above all as a dilettante, a recluse, entirely cut off from literary camaraderie.
In his 1824 Pamphlet des pamphlets, he depicts himself taking the road to Sainte-Pélagie, and meeting one of the jurors at his trial, who teaches him the meaning of the word "pamphlétaire" (pamphleteer). The whole issue is one of semantic slippage: pamphlet is initially used neutrally to refer to a short leaflet. This brevity aroused suspicion, as it ensured that Courier was more widely read than historians with heavy works. The danger of the short format explains the increasingly metaphorical use of the term pamphlet. In his defense, Courier reminds his fictitious interlocutor that the Provinciales are nothing more than very short letters, which nonetheless figure in the canon of classical works.
