To the Happy Few
Classics revisited: The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
Stendhal’s reputation rests on two novels: The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. It is the second one that I recently reread, in the original, to see whether it was as perennially fresh as a great classic ought to be. The Charterhouse of Parma has always mesmerized readers. When it was published in 1839, Balzac immediately wrote a lengthy review praising the work to the skies. Henry James referred to it as one of the finest novels humanity possessed. André Gide considered it the greatest French novel ever written. Tolstoy supposedly availed himself of its battle scenes to describe the Battle of Borodino while writing War and Peace. In our own times, Harold Bloom did not mince words, calling The Charterhouse of Parma a masterpiece. And so it is — but, having just finished it myself, I am sad to say the masterpiece is flawed and dated.
Set in the post-Napoleonic north of Italy, the story follows the trials and tribulations of several aristocrats. The young and plucky Fabrice is a shambolic idealist entirely unfamiliar with Montaigne’s maxim that to make the world a better place, people should leave their homes less often. Fabrice runs away from the ancestral nest on a fake passport to fight for Napoleon and ends up in the thick of the Battle of Waterloo, where his own performance is undistinguished. He gets out alive and makes it back to Italy, but trouble always has his address. When Fabrice kills the protector of an inamorata in self-defense, he is thrust into complicated court intrigues and political machinations at the fictionalized court of Parma. Fortunately — or not — Fabrice has a protector in high places. Gina — later Duchess Sanseverina and the real hero of the novel — is old enough to be his mother, and though not actually his mother, she comes close, being Fabrice’s aunt by marriage. This keeps her infatuation with Fabrice safe from incestuous overtones. Gina is married to Count Mosca, who completes this bizarre triangle. Parma’s prime minister and its second most powerful man, the count is jealous of Fabrice, but his devotion to Gina and her love for her woebegone protégé trumps his own feelings. The count and Gina pull out all the stops to save Fabrice from the odious Prince of Parma, but in vain; Fabrice is captured and imprisoned in Parma’s dreaded fortress. There he immediately falls in love with Clélia Conti, the pious and chaste daughter of the prison commandant. Clélia requites his feelings and, despite her monastic virtue and timorousness, helps him escape from prison. Fabrice is rehabilitated and quickly becomes one of Parma’s top ecclesiastical dignitaries. But he can’t save himself from himself. Though Clélia has been married off to another man, Fabrice (spoiler alert!) eventually has his way with her. A child is born but soon dies; Clélia, Fabrice, and Gina all follow in quick succession.
It is easy to see why The Charterhouse of Parma has been loved by so many. The novel has a dynamic narrative and a gripping plot; there is a brio to the story that makes this book a page-turner. The portrayal of battle scenes is magnificent; the descriptions of north Italian landscapes, with their lakes and Alpine scenery in the background, are superb. Though the protagonists suffer from mannerisms and affectations typical of Romantic characters (they easily burst into tears; they swoon and faint; they love or hate — there is simply no middle ground), they are a lot more nuanced than the plot. The reader is expected to sympathize with Fabrice and his aunt Gina, but neither is especially pleasant. The picaresque Fabrice is foolhardy and egocentric. His treatment of women leaves much to be desired, and his love is noxious even when it is passionate and genuine — consider the results. Gina is formidable but utterly immoral. She will stop at nothing to save Fabrice, and that means nothing — among other things, she arranges the murder of one prince and gives herself to another. In one amusing scene, she boasts to her husband that in the five years of their marriage she has never been unfaithful to him. Count Mosca himself is affable but has all the reflexes of a courtier, and a man who for years has been the right hand of a toxic despot is unlikely to be a nice guy. Especially striking, for the modern reader, is the contempt that these aristocrats have for mere mortals. Parma’s high society faults Fabrice not for killing a man, but for debasing himself by not hiring a bravo to do it for him. When Fabrice pursues the singer Fausta, Gina and Count Mosca have the poor girl dispatched to Parma’s fortress to prevent her from blabbing, and they find the deed amusing. The duchess is generous to the poet-cum-revolutionary Ferrante Palla, a Robin Hood type willing to assassinate the Prince of Parma out of love for Gina, but once his mission is accomplished, the reader suspects Gina gives him no further thought; and indeed, Palla fades away into obscurity. Clélia, who acts as a foil to Gina, is the only virtuous character, but her piousness is cloying, and the reader does not mourn her demise. Nor are Clélia’s notions of piety entirely unblemished. She vows to the Holy Virgin she will never dare to look at Fabrice but, at the crucial hour, circumvents the vow by making love to him in the dark. Who is kidding whom? In the end, none of these characters are particularly likable. But most people are not in general. If that is the point Stendhal wants to make, well done.
Stendhal’s use of ellipsis gives various scenes great poignancy. Here is how Gina honors — perhaps not the best word, given the context — her side of the bargain and goes to bed with the new Prince of Parma: “Sent away by the indignant duchess, he dared to reappear, all trembling and miserable, at three minutes to ten. At ten-thirty, the duchess got into the carriage and left for Bologna.” No other description of Gina’s sacrifice can improve on this; in matters of the flesh, what is concealed is more erotically charged than what is revealed, and Stendhal’s treatment of eroticism is masterful. There are also flashes of wit and humor, though they are not easy to render into English. In French a space is inserted before exclamation and question marks, which gives statements and declarations a comic effect that cannot be replicated. When, at the Battle of Waterloo, Fabrice asks a soldier if he’s going to fight, the soldier’s sarcastic response — “Non, je vais mettre mes escarpins pour aller à la danse !” — is very funny in French, but a lot less funny in English. That is not Stendhal’s fault. On the other hand, his habit of gallicizing terms and names, perhaps to make the text more accessible for French readers, undermines authenticity. Thus it is “Fabrice” and not “Fabrizio,” “monsieur/mademoiselle” and not “signor/signorina,” “écus” and not “scudi.” It has devolved upon English translators to make a story that takes place in Italy feel like it actually takes place in Italy.
But if the plot of The Charterhouse of Parma is its greatest strength, it is also its greatest weakness. Stendhal is held by some to have been one of the first realist writers; he was a lot closer to Romanticism. Stretching credulity, the storyline is contrived and overwrought. The text was dictated in a mere fifty-two days — a prodigious feat for a work of its length, but it shows, and the narrator occasionally remembers things that he acknowledges ought to have been mentioned earlier. References to Napoleon and the tremors produced by the French Revolution notwithstanding, the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of the novel is more reminiscent of the 16th or 17th century than of the early 19th, which, after all, was one of the Industrial Revolution. The weakest part of the text is the ending; after hundreds of pages detailing Fabrice’s peregrinations and Gina’s scheming, the conclusion is rushed, flat, and unsatisfactory, as if the author was tired or had to meet a deadline. Nor does it clarify the meaning of the title — the charterhouse where Fabrice ends his days plays too insignificant a role to grace the cover.
The biggest problem, though, is that The Charterhouse of Parma is a product of a defunct age. The novel came out a few years after de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but you’d never be able to tell by reading it. Stendhal’s is a novel about a world that, as de Tocqueville realized, was on its way out, and Napoleon, who is mentioned in the text, doesn’t really change anything (and, anyway, what can one say of a republican who makes himself emperor?). The society Stendhal depicts is charming and beguiling, but the reader of the democratic age will struggle to relate to its rigid class-based hierarchy, its absence of social mobility, and the obsessions of its upper classes, who, metaphorically speaking, dig moats and build drawbridges to keep the rabble out. An old text can continue to fascinate modern readers only if it has a claim to transcendence; The Charterhouse of Parma does not. It is a novel best read at an adolescent age, as part of one’s éducation sentimentale, but the appeal to more mature readers will be limited. The Charterhouse of Parma ends with a dedication to “The Happy Few” — the refined souls capable of appreciating Stendhal’s novel. Two hundred years on, the happy few would be even fewer.
