The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  25 Marchesa San Felice: During the occupation of Naples by the French, the Marchesa de San Felice (1768–1800) was instrumental in disclosing an anti-Republican plot. When the Royalists regained control of Naples in 1799, the Marchesa was arrested and condemned to death, and executed in 1800.

  26 Polyeucte: Character in a tragedy by Corneille produced in 1643, in which Polyeucte, the governor of Armenia under the Emperor Decius, is baptized and suffers martyrdom. The story became the substance of many operas, notably by Donizetti.

  27 La Locandiera: In this play of 1753, regarded as Goldoni’s masterpiece, the mistress of an inn is betrothed to a young man called Fabrizio.

  28 Themistocles: In Napoleon’s letter of July 14, 1815, to the Prince Regent, he seeks protection under British law and compares himself to Themistocles, the Athenian general exiled from Athens and seeking asylum with his former enemy the king of Persia.

  29 Charterhouse of Velleja: Stendhal’s invention.

  30 Madonna of Cimabue: No Madonna by the thirteenth century Italian painter exists in the church at San Petronio.

  31 baiocchi: A copper coin of low value, comparable to a penny.

  32 Cascata del Reno: The falls on the river Reno, west of Bologna.

  33 Bouffes Parisiens: A theatre company, initially Italian, specializing in comedy.

  34 Tancred (Tancredi): A hero of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.

  35 Burati (1778–1832): A satirist and poet writing in Venetian dialect, whom Stendhal knew personally.

  36 Parmigianino (1503–1540): A Mannerist painter noted for his portraits and religious paintings.

  37 Intelligenti pauca!: [Latin] A word to the wise is sufficient!

  38 Judith: In the Apocrypha, a Hebrew maiden who saves her town of Bethulia by seducing the besieging general, Holofernes, and beheading him while he sleeps.

  39 Rasori: Giovanni Rasori (1766–1837), a physician of liberal sympathies whom Stendhal had known in Milan.

  40 Almaviva: Count Almaviva and his servant the barber Figaro, characters in Stendhal’s favorite operas, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, both based on plays by Beaumarchais (1732–1799).

  41 Armida: An enchantress in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.

  42 aquetta di Perugia: A poison consisting of arsenic, lead, and antimony.

  43 Vanvitelli (1700–1773): A famous Neapolitan architect.

  44 Alessandro Farnese (1545–1592): appointed Governer of the Netherlands by Philip II of Spain, and sent to assist the French Catholics in their struggle with Henri IV.

  45 Alfieri: Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), a leading Italian poet and dramatist of the Romantic period.

  46 Charlotte Corday: Charlotte Corday d’Armont (1768–1793) came to Paris and stabbed Marat, a Revolutionary leader, to death in his bath on July 13, 1793, and was guillotined four days later.

  47 Pallagi: Pallagio Pallagi (1775–1860), a Bolognese painter.

  48 The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund: Sigismund came to Parma in the fifteenth century, not the twelfth. Stendhal is probably confusing him with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122–1190).

  49 Reina: Francesco Reina (1770–1826) of Milan.

  50 Fokelberg, Tenerani, Marchesi, Hayez: Artists living in Italy at the time of the novel.

  51 Marie de Médicis: Mother of Louis XIII; she lost her influence to Cardinal Richelieu, the King’s principal minister after 1624.

  52 Saint Bartholemew’s Massacre: The massacre of Huguenots in the major cities of France on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve (August 23, 1572), said to have been instigated by Catherine de Médicis, mother of Charles IX.

  53 the Fontanas and the Duvoisins: Churchmen renowned for their learning during the Napoleonic era.

  54 Signora P——: Probably Giuditta Pasta (1798–1865), a great opera singer of her day who had sung this aria (“Those gentle eyes”) in Paris in 1823.

  55 Petrarch: Actually four lines by the poet Metastasio (1698–1782), also quoted in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761).

  56 Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!: An allusion to Molière’s comedy Georges Dandin: “You asked for it, Georges Dandin!” (and it serves you right).

  57 Gonzo: In Italian, a gonzo is a fool or clown.

  58 Registration Edict: A measure introduced to facilitate the raising of war taxes.

  59 the Charterhouse of Parma: This charterhouse actually existed, not in the forest of Sacca but northeast of Parma. The monks having been expelled from their monastery in the middle of the eighteenth century, the edifice was empty when the French armies were billeted there, along with a supply depot. It was subsequently utilized as a cigar factory, and today serves as a reformatory.

  60 To the Happy Few: Readers of Stendhal will recognize this phrase at the conclusion of at least three of his major works, including The Red and the Black. Its source is in part Shakespearean (Henry V, IV, iii: “We few, we happy few”), but more probably a recollection of a phrase in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, the first chapters of which Stendhal had learned by heart to familiarize himself with the English language.

  AFTERWORD

  by Richard Howard

  English-speaking readers invariably characterize Stendhal’s works, and especially The Charterhouse of Parma, by the words gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache. These are, of course, all foreign terms, never translated, though so necessary that they have been readily naturalized. It will be the translator’s aim, indeed the translator’s responsibility, so to characterize any future translation of Stendhal, who wrote his last completed novel in fifty-two days, a miracle of gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache.

  Like miracles generally, the novel is mysterious, beginning with its title: the Carthusian Monastery of Parma, the Charterhouse, appears only on the last page of the book, three paragraphs from the end. To this sequestration Fabrizio del Dongo retires, lives there a year, dies there (he is twenty-seven years old—the age of the oldest French generals in Napoleon’s army entering Milan in Chapter One). Stendhal had initially wanted to call his novel The Black Charterhouse, a clue: in the prison from which Fabrizio so spectacularly escapes, there is indeed a black chapel. Fabrizio’s nine months’ imprisonment in the Farnese Tower—more than one critic has observed—is analogous to the Carthusian monks’ discipline in their monastery: by this means he is reborn, he achieves freedom, happiness, and love.

  Throughout the novel, incidents and details recur, repeat themselves, recall some earlier instance. Certain verbal echoes may keep the reader conscious of the pattern: Fabrizio’s first imprisonment and his night with the jailer’s wife will “become” Fabrizio in the Farnese Tower, loving Clélia; the del Dongo castle at Grianta towering above Lake Como “becomes” the Citadel of Parma; the astronomy lessons on the platform of one of the castle’s gothic towers “become” Abbé Blanès’s observatory on top of the town bell tower, then the platform of the citadel on which the Farnese Tower is erected. Towers, platforms, windows; height, imprisonment, flight; divination, hiding, vision: these images and themes weave the novel together. The same words are used in widely separated situations: the translator must make sure they recur in his version.…

  Nothing fixed. “The man,” Nietzsche said, “was a human question-mark.” And he suggested the tone, the reason for it and the consequence of it: “Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”

  Consider Gina’s two husbands: Count Pietranera, who prefers living in poverty to political compromise, and Count Mosca, for whom politics is a game and any conviction a liability. All political life is marked by incoherence. As Professor Talbot puts it, conservatives become liberals when out of power, and liberals become conservatives when in power.

  Consider, again, Fabrizio’s roles; in the first third of the novel he claims to be a barometer merchant, a captain of the Fourth Regiment of hussars, a young bourgeois in love with that captain’s wife, Teulier, Boulot, Cavi, Ascanio Pietrane
ra, and an unnamed peasant. Further, he will assume a disguise to visit Marietta’s apartment, will use Giletti’s name and passport to go through customs, assume another disguise as a rich country bourgeois; then claim to be Ludovic’s brother, then Joseph Bossi, a theology student. With Fausta, he passes himself off as the valet of an English lord; in the duel with Count M—— he calls himself Bombace. And under all this, his conviction that he is a del Dongo. Nor is he even that—he is the son of a French lieutenant named Robert billeted in the del Dongo palace in Milan during the French occupation; therefore Gina is not his aunt, though on one occasion early in the novel she passes Fabrizio off as her son! … Evading the love of a woman he believes to be his aunt, Fabrizio ends in a prison originally built to house a crown prince guilty of incest.

  Nothing fixed: Fabrizio is not a soldier, though he may have fought at Waterloo; not for a moment do we believe he is a cleric, though he is made archbishop of Parma; he is pure becoming, and the language he uses must show him to us in that form, that formlessness.…

  Translate this book to exorcise the fetishism of the Work conceived as an hermetic object, finished, absolute … (Beyle, the anti-Flaubert). Nothing in this novel, “complete” though it may be, is quite closed over itself, autonomous in its genesis, and its signification. Hence Balzac’s suggestion to erase Parma altogether and call the book something like “Adventures of a typical Italian youth.…” Remember that the novel opens as the story of the Duchess Sanseverina. And ends with the “throttled” disappearance (Beyle’s phrase, in protest against the publisher’s insistence that the book fit in two volumes) of everyone but Mosca, “immensely rich.” Such vacillation is never satisfied. More than Vanity Fair, this is a Novel Without a Hero, without a Heroine, a novel without …

  Realism, but no reality. The first text by him I ever translated, for Ben Sonnenberg’s Grand Street, was that extraordinary list of twenty-three articles headed Les Privilèges. That ought to have done it: God would exist and Beyle would believe in Him if he never had to suffer a serious illness, only three days’ indisposition a year.… If his penis would be allowed to grow erect at will, be two inches longer, and give him pleasure twice a week … If he could change into any animal he chose … If he would no longer be plagued by fleas, mosquitoes, and mice … etc., etc.

  Then I translated one of the dozens of unfinished books “by” one of dozens of pseudonyms (as many as Kierkegaard, as many as Pessoa!), texts abandoned after no more than a torso had been molded, the armature of inspiration forsworn once the rapture waned (The Pink and the Green).

  The invitation in both these texts, preposterous and unfinished alike, to enter (and for the translator, it is virtually a welcome) into the banausics of the affair … A kind of painful tension under the disguise of the driest, or the wettest, style. What Valéry calls the restlessness of a superior mind; in any case an ineloquent one. You could “place” Stendhal by saying he is utterly alien to eloquence (Hugo, who had no use for him, said he lacked “style”; Stendhal delighted in the compliment, as in this scribbled note: “A young woman murdered right next to me—she is lying in the middle of the street and beside her head a puddle of blood about a foot across. This is what M. Victor Hugo calls being bathed in one’s own blood”). An author who must be continually reread, for he never repeats, and as Alain observes, never develops.

  It’s not style he lacks, but rhythm: Stendhal never sweeps you away—he doesn’t want to sweep you away: that would be against his principles. He engages your complicity, and for that you must be all attention. Follow him down the page, in the sentence, across the synapses of the amazing clauses, and the sense, the wit, the literature occurs in the gaps between the statements, very abruptly juxtaposed:

  A man of parts, he had formerly shown courage in battle; now he was inveterately in a state of alarm, suspecting he lacked that presence of mind commonly deemed necessary to the role of ambassador—M. de Talleyrand has spoilt the profession—and imagining he might give evidence of wit by talking incessantly.

  Grasshopper prose, and there is no pleasure to be taken in it if it is not attended to by presence of mind. As the reference to Talleyrand suggests, we are being taken into the author’s confidence, entrusted with the supposition of intellect—what other author flatters us to this degree?

  A translator observes that the scansion of the Stendhal phrase is almost always dependent on that tendency of the French language to accent its abstract nouns on the final syllable: la logique, le bonheur, l’esprit (the Beylist trinity). This gives a certain determination to the run of the words, a certain frappe, as if the words were minted by a very sure mind. In a language so disposed, may the translator find means to afford evidences of an analogous mentality, a power which separates, which suspends, which excludes.

  Reading aloud the chapters of The Chartreuse to Ben Sonnenberg as I translated them, week by week (fifty-two days to write, twenty-eight weeks to translate), I reveled with him in Beyle’s strange elevation of bastardy, the rejection of the Father, the return, with Italy always, to the Mothers. Silly often, goofy even, but always on. Adored by Proust, envied by Gide (“He is the cuttlebone on which I sharpen my beak—what I envy in him is that he doesn’t have to put on his track shoes before he starts running”), Stendhal withstands translation yet again, a stage in his continued life.

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  Maya Angelou

  •

  Daniel J. Boorstin

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  A. S. Byatt

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  Caleb Carr

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  Christopher Cerf

  •

  Ron Chernow

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  Shelby Foote

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  Stephen Jay Gould

  •

  Vartan Gregorian

  •

  Charles Johnson

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  Jon Krakauer

  •

  Edmund Morris

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  Elaine Pagels

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  John Richardson

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  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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  Carolyn See

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  William Styron

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  Gore Vidal

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The principal text of this Modern Library edition was set in a digitized version of Janson, a typeface that dates from about 1690 and was cut by Nicholas Kis, a Hungarian working in Amsterdam. The original matrices have survived and are held by the Stempel foundry in Germany. Hermann Zapf redesigned some of the weights and sizes for Stempel, basing his revisions on the original design.

  Commentary

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  STENDHAL

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  If I have so long delayed, in spite of its importance, in speaking of [La Chartreuse de Parme], you must understand that it was difficult for me to acquire a sort of impartiality. Even now I am not certain that I can retain it, so extraordinary, after a third, leisurely and thoughtful reading, do I find this work.

  I can imagine all the mockery which my admiration for it will provoke. There will be an outcry, of course, at my infatuation, when I am simply still filled with enthusiasm after the point at which enthusiasm should have died. Men of imagination, it will be said, conceive as promptly as they forget their affection for certain works of which the common herd arrogantly and ironically protest that they can understand nothing. Simple-minded, or even intelligent persons who with their proud gaze sweep the surface of things, will say that I amuse myself with paradox, that I have, like M. Sainte-Beuve, my chers inconnus. I am incapable of compromise with the truth, that is all.

  M. Beyle has written a book in which sublimity glows from chapter after chapter. He has produced, at an age when men rarely find monumental subjects and after having written a score of extremely intelligent volumes, a work which can be appreciated only by minds and men th
at are truly superior. In short, he has written The Prince up to date, the novel that Machiavelli would write if he were living banished from Italy in the nineteenth century.

  And so the chief obstacle to the renown which M. Beyle deserves lies in the fact that La Chartreuse de Parme can find readers fitted to enjoy it only among diplomats, ministers, observers, the leaders of society, the most distinguished artists; in a word, among the twelve or fifteen hundred persons who are at the head of things in Europe. Do not be surprised, therefore, if, in the ten months since this surprising work was published, there has not been a single journalist who has either read, or understood, or studied it, who has announced, analysed and praised it, who has even alluded to it. I, who, I think, have some understanding of the matter, I have read it for the third time in the last few days: I have found the book finer even than before, and have felt in my heart the kind of happiness that comes from the opportunity of doing a good action.

  Is it not doing a good action to try to do justice to a man of immense talent, who will appear to have genius only in the eyes of a few privileged beings and whom the transcendency of his ideas deprives of that immediate but fleeting popularity which the courtiers of the public seek and which great souls despise? If the mediocre knew that they had a chance of raising themselves to the level of the sublime by understanding them, La Chartreuse de Parme would have as many readers as Clarissa Harlowe had on its first appearance.

  There are in admiration that is made legitimate by conscience ineffable delights. Therefore all that I am going to say here I address to the pure and noble hearts which, in spite of certain pessimistic declamations, exist in every country, like undiscovered pleiads, among the families of minds devoted to the worship of art. Has not humanity, from generation to generation, has it not here below its constellations of souls, its heaven, its angels, to use the favourite expression of the great Swedish prophet, Swedenborg, a chosen people for whom true artists work and whose judgments make them ready to accept privation, the insolence of upstarts and the indifference of governments?…