By any standard we might accept, Stendhal's last and usually described as his second-best novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, which first appeared in 1839, is a classic. In 1999, the Modern Library published a new translation from the French by Richard Howard, which received glowing reviews. Having read his universally admired masterpiece, The Red and the Black, I always wanted to tackle this one, if only to find out what the title referred to.
Stendhal, one of Marie Henri Beyle's many pseudonyms, is not well-known today. He knew some celebrity in mid-19th century France, where he cavorted with Chopin and George Sand. He even figured his work would not be celebrated until long after he passed on. At the start of The Red and the Black, he dedicated that novel "to the happy few" who presumably would enjoy it then. He also predicted, "I will be famous around 1880" and was correct, although over the years since then, his fame has gradually faded, along, apparently, with reading itself.
Based on the positive response to the 1999 translation, I purchased the novel but never quite got around to opening the cover, until a month or so ago, when our local bookstore, Politics & Prose, scheduled among the many classes it offers, a course on this novel, heralded in the blurb as perhaps the best Italian novel, even if it was written by a Frenchman in French.
The book was worth the wait. We first meet the leading but far from the only compelling character, Fabrizio, who as a second son of a nobleman, has a title but little else, primogeniture having reserved everything for his older brother who merits little further attention in the novel but persists as a minor villain. Fabrizio sets out to gratify his teenage goal of joining up with the great man of the day, Napoleon, who in 1815 has just landed from Elba for the fabled Hundred Days.
Right at the start of the novel, Stendhal famously imagined Fabrizio happening upon his hero, or rather, some mostly lower-level officers--he does get a glimpse of the famed Field Marshal Ney--at of all places, fields which it turns out form the setting for the Battle of Waterloo. Fabrizio must conceal any glory he may have won from his both brave and ridiculous behavior at the battle.
Stendhal actually had served as an aide-de-camp on some of Napoleon's European campaigns, so he comes honestly by his knowledge of how battlefields in those times often resembled madhouses. Fabrizio does return to Italy--for the rest of the novel--and after getting in and out of challenging situations occasioned by his bravado, stirs the spirits of his aunt, only a few years older than him, Gina, the Duchess of Sanseverina, and Count Mosca, her lover, who also is the prime minister of the Principality of Parma.
He finds Gina in a grand box at La Scala, the glorious Milan opera house, and while there are sojourns to other places in Northern Italy and as far as Switzerland, most of the story occurs in and around Parma. The principality, which existed as independent at that time in a disunited Italy prior to Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi combined the many states in the early 1870s. Stendhal expertly presents the complicated politics of this small hothouse of conspiring and conniving.
Fabrizio even manages to win the heart--and cooperation--of the gorgeous daughter of the jail captain. I thought of a similar plot element in Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. The lecturer of the Zoom class I attended on this novel also referred to Verdi's marvelous aria in Rigoletto that leads into a duet, "Cortigiani, vil razza dannata" ("You vile race of courtiers").
This is "...the novel Machiavelli would write if he were banished from Italy in the nineteenth century," Balzac wrote in enthusiastically endorsing Stendhal's novel. Fabrizio undergoes challenge after challenge: being beset by brigands, condemned to a prison tower, fleeing the city several times. Beneath all the activity, the Duchess's support for him perseveres, and one concludes that she somehow kept herself from ever becoming intimate with this handsome cavalier.
As in The Red and the Black, Stendhal was ahead of his time through the skill with which he penetrated the insides of his characters through psychology. Both of these two best novels challenge the mind of the reader with the view we are given of the way these characters think as well as act, even if they, especially Fabrizio, may often act without thinking.
In one fascinating scene, Gina aims to convince the Prince, who is the absolute monarch of the principality, to spare Fabrizio's life--it matters little that he's being framed by political enemies of Mosca and the Duchess for committing what was clearly self-defense and justifiable homicide. She seems to succeed, certainly in saving his life through her advocacy, but she isn't focused enough to get all that she wants. And besides, if she had, the novel would have ended midstream.
All in all, it's surely a tour de force and great reading for about 500 pages in total. "We should never be finished with Stendhal," the French poet Paul Valéry remarked in awe. Nor should we.
