 "Arouet" would not have served the purpose, given that name's associations with "roué" and with an expression that meant "for thrashing".The 19th-century French author Marie-Henri Beyle used many pen names, most famously the mononym Stendhal, adapted from the name of the little Prussian town of Stendal, birthplace of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whom Stendhal admired.In the 20th century, a fourth French writer, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (author of "Gigi", 1945), used her actual surname as her mononym pen name, Colette.