Stendhal, Italy, and La Chartreuse de Parme
La Chartreuse de Parme by Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), better known as Stendhal, is a radical reconceptualization of the novel and a forerunner of realism, as well as a key entry point into the significance of Italy in Beyle’s work. We present it here in the rare first issue of the first edition, printed on papier velin.
Stendhal [pseud. of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842]. La chartreuse de Parme. Par l’autheur de Rouge et Noir. Paris, Ambroise Dupont, 1839.
Read the complete description of this copy here.
Beyle’s last completed work, La Chartreuse de Parme is a fast-paced tale of passion and political intrigue. The narrative conceit is that it concerns Italian people and is recounted by Italians to the French author who proceeded to publish it with great fidelity to its personages’ true natures. As such, the foreword already includes a hallmark of Stendhal’s work, a comparison between French and Italian temperaments.
A self-proclaimed Parisian who spent much of his career in Italy, Beyle was an ardent liberal who found a greater authenticity and passion in the Italians compared to the inhabitants of Post-Revolutionary France. Caught amidst the conflicts between monarchists and supporters of republican government, he found the French to be driven only by vanity and was repulsed at the overwhelming sense of bourgeois complacency. The deeper, more authentic Italian spirit was, for him, more susceptible to feeling and acting on strong emotion. He explores this tendency throughout the novel, simultaneously satirizing the rampant hypocrisy and cynicism of this period of upheaval and heightened class consciousness.
On the face of it, La Chartreuse de Parme is a romantic epic. Its hero is the young Fabrice del Dongo, a handsome aristocrat raised in a castle on Lake Como. Idealistic and impetuous, but also weak‐willed and superstitious, the naïve Fabrice rebels against his father and elder brother and goes off to join Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Waterloo. Following his rather inglorious participation there, he returns to Italy and attends seminary school in Naples before embarking on an ecclesiastical career in Parma. This is despite any particular “calling” for such service; rather, it is a development borne out of the consistent scheming of his brilliant, beautiful, and politically savvy aunt Gina del Dongo, now the Duchess Sanseverina, who works with her lover, the powerful minister Count Mosca to protect Fabrice and ensure his rehabilitation in society following his illegal engagement with Napoleon’s army.
Fabrice, however, makes this more difficult when he kills a man in a fight over one of his (many) lovers, a young actress, and is imprisoned in the Farnese Tower. The episode sets off a series of events in the political world to which Fabrice himself remains aloof. For it is in the prison that he finally finds happiness along with his “true” love, the jailer’s beautiful daughter Clélia Conti. Nevertheless, Gina coordinates Fabrice’s escape via a very long rope, and while Fabrice is concerned only with returning to Clélia, the latter’s guilt toward her father causes her to vow to never see her lover again.
Stendhal [pseud. of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842]. La chartreuse de Parme. Par l’autheur de Rouge et Noir. Paris, Ambroise Dupont, 1839.
Read the complete description of this copy here.
Finally acquitted after Gina agrees to sleep with the new prince (whose father’s murder she had successfully arranged somewhat earlier), Fabrice begins giving sermons as Vicar General of the Catholic Church. Unaffected by his status in the Church, he delivers the sermons only in the hopes that they will facilitate a reunion with Clélia, but they become very popular in their own right and Fabrice’s misery is mistaken for great (and unprecedented) piety. Eventually the two are reunited and meet nightly in darkness, and a year later they have an illegitimate child, Clélia having already been wed to another. Two years later, they devise a plan to allow them to care for the child together but this inadvertently leads to first the death of the child and then that of Clélia. The titular Carthusian monestary enters only at the end of the novel, when Fabrice retreats there to contemplate life. He dies only a year later, still very young. Gina follows him and dies soon after that, survived by Mosca.
As far-fetched as Stendhal’s plot may seem, it was inspired by real life. For one, Fabrice del Dongo’s adventures and generally relaxed stance toward morality were modeled on the supposedly debauched youth of Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III. Indeed, numerous parallels can be found between Fabrice and the early pope, particularly as revealed in an anonymous early seventeenth-century manuscript titled L'origine delle grandezze della famiglia Farnese.
Titian, Portrait of Pope Paul III Farnese, 1543. National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.
Before becoming pope in 1534, Alessandro Farnese, like Fabrice, was aided by his beautiful and clever aunt, Vandozza Farnese, and her cunning lover Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI from 1492-1503); he had also been imprisoned (in the Castel Sant'Angelo) for the murder of a young woman’s attendant and had, just like Fabrice, escaped via a long rope; and he, too, had a mistress by the name of Cleria, with whom he had several children. Beyle read the chronicle in the 1830s, by which time he was well-steeped in such stories of historical drama and intrigue. Already in the 1820s he had been journaling about the complicated histories of Italian Renaissance nobility. His personal experience with Italy was initiated still earlier, with his own involvement in Napoleon’s campaigns.
Silvestro Valeri (1814-1902), Stendhal en uniforme de consul, c. 1835-1836. Musée Stendhal, Grenoble, France.
Born in Grenoble in 1783 to a bourgeois family attached to the Ancien Régime, Beyle had, like his hero Fabrice, gone off to join the Napoleonic army. When Napoleon invaded Italy, Beyle discovered Milan; he fell in love with the city and settled there for a while after Napoleon’s fall in 1814. Retiring from the army, he turned more seriously to writing and soon published his first work, Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Metastase (1814), followed by Histoire de la peinture en Italie in 1817 and, that same year, the travel guide Rome, Naples et Florence, which includes the first use of his most famous pseudonym (of the over 200 he is known to have used), Stendhal. It was another guidebook, Promenades dans Rome, published in 1829, that first brought him notable success. By then he had written several other works, including the semi-autobiographical, pseudo-psychological De l’amour (1822), Racine et Shakespeare (1823), the two-volume Vie de Rossini (1824), and his first novel, Armance, ou Quelques scènes d'un salon de Paris en 1827 (1827). The publication of his second novel, the masterpiece Le Rouge et le Noir, cronique du XIXe siècle was published at the end of 1830, inspired by the true story of a young seminarian sentenced to death for murder.
While much of the 1820s were spent in Paris, Beyle was appointed French Consul at Trieste in 1830 and at Civitavecchia the following year. During this time he visited Rome frequently and set to work on the majority of his Chroniques italiennes, nine tales (many published only posthumously) that meld historical fact with melodramatic fiction. By 1834 he had read the Farnese manuscript and by 1838 had determined to write a “romanzetto” of it.
That year he also published Mémoires d'un touriste, but the Parma portrayed in La Chartreuse de Parme offers little of the documentary eye suggested by the author’s significant experience with travel literature. Instead, it is the product of Beyle’s fabrication, with the foreboding citadel replacing the city’s most celebrated monument, the pink-marbled San Giovanni Battista Baptistery built between 1059 and 1128. Indeed, there is a blurring of fact and fiction in this work that, perhaps paradoxically, is instrumental to its lauded status as a forerunner of literary realism.
Beyle was not after perfect mimesis with hard, clean outlines. His favourite painter was Correggio, Parma’s most famous artist, and in his travel diary of 1816, he wrote that it was a desire to see that master’s “sublime frescoes” in Parma that brought him to that city in the first place. Correggio’s “art”, Beyle wrote in his history of Italian painting, “was to paint even the figures in the foreground as though they were at a distance…It is music, and it is not sculpture.” This atmospheric blurring and play of aerial perspective was powerfully evocative for him, and in a letter to Balzac he explained how “The entire character of the Duchess Sanseverina is copied from Correggio (that is, produces on my soul the same effect as Correggio).” Even the fine-looking Fabrice is said in the novel to have a “Correggio countenance”.
Antonio da Correggio, Assumption of the Virgin, 1526-1530. Cathedral of Parma, Parma, Italy.
This is not to say that detail is omitted, but the impression and experience of it is novelly foregrounded. The vivid, unheroic description of Waterloo included in the novel is particularly impactful in this way. Fabrice, faced with the realities of war, experiences a series of misadventures, and in a hungover daze of confusion amplified by the general chaos of the battlefield comes to wonder if he even experienced the battle. It is a strikingly realistic portrayal of war as opposed to the glorified, bombastic descriptions that came before, and was a significant influence on many subsequent literary works, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
In addition to this highly modern, almost impressionistic style, the psychological and social complexity of Beyle’s characters and events mark a distinct contrast from the Romantic novel popular at the time. This is especially felt in Fabrice’s constant searching for, and delusion from, any one “true” course or destiny. Though idealism is certainly a trope of Romanticism, Beyle’s book shows such a search for one’s path to be not only far more complex than presupposed, but possibly unfulfilling, even misguided. With complex, even contradictory characters that experience real emotions and real-life difficulties, La Chartreuse de parme is both epic and intimate, with a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of human nature, psychology and politics.
Further contributing to this sense of intimacy is the rapid rhythm of the novel, a consequence of the speed of its composition. With much musing and research in the intervening years between his reading of the Farnese manuscript and his composition of the novel, the story finally gushed out of Beyle in an astonishing 52 days, between 4 November and 26 December 1838. This great haste helped cultivate a more informal style, and while there are a few plot issues that could have been tidied with another draft, the fiery author was more interested in retaining this improvisational, realistic, even conversational tone. He wanted to create a work that was, as compared with the predictability of the Romantic novel, “more natural and worthier to find favour in 1880”.
Dedicated at the end to the “Happy Few”, the novel was, indeed, not immediately a popular success, but it was enthusiastically received by Beyle’s literary contemporaries. Of especial note is the opinion expressed by Honoré de Balzac, who didn’t hesitate to proclaim it the most significant novel of his time. In a letter written to Beyle on 6 April 1839, Balzac wrote “Il ne faut jamais retarder de faire plaisir a ceux qui nous ont donné du plaisir. La chartreuse est un grand et beau Livre, je vous le dis sans flatterie, sans envie, car je serai incapable de le faire [...]”. Balzac went on to write a review of the novel, printed in the Revue parisienne on 25 September 1840, extolling Beyle’s achievement: “Never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this... one sees perfection in everything.”
Olof Johan Södermark (1790–1848), Portrait of Stendhal, 1840. Palace of Versailles, France.
Beyle died in 1842, and though he did not live to see it, his prophecy proved correct. The reputation of his masterpiece only continued to grow, but swelled only later in the century, when many of his previously unpublished works also came to light. In 1874, Henry James wrote that it “will always be numbered among the dozen finest novels we possess” (H. James, Literary Reviews and Essays, p. 155). André Gide described it as the greatest of all French novels, and Jean Giraudoux expressed how it produces “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die” (quoted in D. Mendelsohn, “After Waterloo (Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma),” p. 214).
This delayed reception is perhaps the greatest testament to Beyle’s radical achievement. Considering him to be “France's last great psychologist,” Friedrich Nietzsche described Beyle as a “remarkable anticipatory and precursory human being who ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as an explorer and discoverer of this soul: it required two generations to catch up with him in any way” (F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 2000, p. 384).
Carteret Romantique II, 358; Clouzot 151; Lhermitte 567; Vicaire I, 458. 202; L. Tenenbaum, “Stendhal and Rome,” Italica 33 (1956), pp. 26-39; M. Crouzet, Nature et société chez Stendhal: la révolte romantique, Lille, 1985; Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, Trans. R. Howard, New York 2000; D. Mendelsohn, “After Waterloo (Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma)” in Waiting for the Barbarians, New York (2012), pp. 213-222.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac, "Stendhal, Italy, and La Chartreuse de Parme," 26 January 2022, www.prphbooks.com/blog/stendhal. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.