The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  I have nowhere portrayed Herr von Metternich, whom I have not seen since I saw him in 1810 at Saint-Cloud, when he wore a bracelet of the hair of Caroline Murat, who at that time was so beautiful. I never regret what was fated not to happen. I am a fatalist, and I hide it. I dream that perhaps I shall have some success about 1860 or ’80. By then there will be little talk of Herr von Metternich, and still less of the small prince. Who was Prime Minister in England at the time of Malherbe? Unless by any chance his name was Cromwell, I am at a loss for an answer.…

  I take a character well known to me, I leave him with the habits he has contracted in the art of going off every morning in pursuit of pleasure, and next I give him more wit.…

  Your amazing article, such as no writer has ever received from another, caused me—I now dare to confess it—to burst into laughter as I read it, whenever I came upon a somewhat excessive piece of praise, which I did at every step. I could imagine the faces my friends would pull as they read it.

  Extract from a letter to Honoré de Balzac, October 16, 1840, in To the Happy

  Few: Selected Letters of Stendhal, translated by Norman Cameron, 1952.

  Reprint by Hyperion Press, Inc., 1979.

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  What novel could be so essential that even the dead feel compelled to know what it’s about? At the beginning of Jean Giraudoux’s 1926 novel Bella, the narrator, attending a memorial service for schoolmates who fell in the trenches of World War I, begins to hear the voices of his dead comrades. For the most part, they talk about mundane, soldierly things: the discomforts of war, annoying commanding officers. But the last voice the narrator hears is different—it’s the voice of a young man tormented by the thought that he’d never had a chance to read a certain seventy-five-year-old novel. What the dead youth wants is for the narrator to summarize the book “in a word.” In a word, because “with the dead, there are no sentences.”

  The book in question is Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, an epic and yet intimate tale of political intrigue and erotic frustration, set in the (largely fictionalized) princely court of Parma during the author’s own time. Almost since the moment it appeared, in 1839, Stendhal’s last completed novel has been considered a masterpiece. Barely a year after the book was published, Balzac praised it in a lengthy review that immediately established the novel’s reputation. “One sees perfection in everything” was just one of the laurels Balzac heaped on Charterhouse, in what was surely one of the world’s great acts of literary generosity. Sixty years after Balzac, André Gide ranked Charterhouse as the greatest of all French novels, and one of only two French works that could be counted among the top ten of world literature. (The other was Les Liaisons Dangereuses.) The encomiums weren’t restricted to France—or, for that matter, to Europe. In an 1874 article for The Nation, Henry James found Charterhouse to be “among the dozen finest novels we possess.”

  At first glance, the bare bones of Stendhal’s story suggest not so much a literary masterpiece as a historical soap opera. The novel recounts the headstrong young Italian artistocrat Fabrice del Dongo’s attempt to make a coherent life for himself, first as a soldier in Napoleon’s army and then, more cynically, as a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church; the attempts of his beautiful aunt Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, the wily (and married) Prime Minister, Count Mosca, to help establish Fabrice at court, even as Gina tries to fend off the advances of the repellent (and repellently named) Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV; Fabrice’s imprisonment in the dreaded Farnese Tower for the murder of a girlfriend’s protector and his subsequent escape with the help of a very long rope; and his star-crossed but ultimately redemptive love affair with his jailer’s beautiful (and, it must be said, rather dull) daughter, Clélia.

  So what, exactly, makes all this so indispensable to Giraudoux’s soldier? Why in the words of one contemporary Stendhal scholar, does Charterhouse exhale “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die?”

  As it happens, we’re now almost exactly as far from Giraudoux’s novel as Giraudoux’s characters were from the publication of Stendhal’s; a good time, perhaps, to consider the question raised by that strange scene in Bella. More important, the superior new translation of Charterhouse by the distinguished American poet and translator Richard Howard, published by the Modern Library, makes it possible not only to breathe once again that incomparable air but, as good translations always do, to grasp fully its peculiar qualities, to understand why the experience of reading this work is so famously “rapturous,” and why the novel itself continues to be so fresh and sustaining.

  “Fresh” is the key word here. On November 4, 1839, Stendhal (the most famous of over two hundred pseudonyms used by Marie-Henri Beyle, a Grenoble-born career diplomat and lover of all things Italian) sat down at his desk at No. 8 Rue Caumartin in Paris, gave orders that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, and began dictating a novel. The manuscript of Charterhouse was finished seven weeks later, on the day after Christmas—an impressive feat, when you think that a typical French edition runs to five hundred pages. The swiftness of its composition is reflected in the narrative briskness for which it is so well known—the “gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache” of which Howard is rightly conscious in his translation—and, as even die-hard partisans of the novel would have to admit, in passages where compositional speed clearly took a toll in narrative coherence. (“We have forgotten to mention in its proper place the fact that the duchess had taken a house at Belgirate.”)

  The idea for the book had actually been rattling around in Stendhal’s head for some time. His Roman diaries of the late 1820s are crammed with lengthy references to the convoluted histories of the Italian Renaissance nobility, and the lineaments of Charterhouse owe a great deal to a seventeenth-century chronicle of the life of Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III, that Stendhal came across during the course of his Italian travels. (Farnese, who became Pope in 1534, had a beautiful aunt, Vandozza Farnese, the mistress of the cunning Rodrigo Borgia; murdered a young woman’s servant; was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; escaped by means of a very long rope; and maintained as his mistress a well-born woman called Cleria.) So while the extraordinary speed of the novel’s composition can be attributed to an almost supernatural flash of inspiration, it can also be seen as the more natural outcome of a long and deliberate process that had finally achieved fruition.

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  Like the circumstances of its creation, the finished novel seems at once spontaneous and premeditated. The quick pace of the narrative and the vividness of the characters are balanced throughout by a coolly sardonic assessment of human nature and, in particular, of politics. Stendhal, a lifelong liberal who as an idealistic young man had followed Napoleon into Italy, Austria and Russia, found himself living at a time of almost unprecedented political cynicism in post-Restoration France; disgust with the bourgeois complacency of his countrymen played no little part in his admiration for the Italians, whom he considered to be more authentic—“more profound and more susceptible to violent emotions,” as he wrote in his diary. To Howard’s credit, both the Italian passion and the French worldliness are evident here; but it is the novel’s distinctive impetuousness and forward momentum, the qualities that so famously make it such a good read, that are fully captured here, perhaps for the first time, in English. (Howard himself finished the translation in twenty-eight weeks—one week per chapter—a feat only slightly less miraculous than Stendhal’s.)

  But the appeal of Charterhouse is more than just a matter of its urgent, even impatient style (“Here we shall ask permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over an interval of three years”); it lies, too, in its vibrant characters, who are prey to unruly emotions that will be familiar to contemporary readers. There is, to begin with, the novel’s ostensible hero, the impetuous young Fabrice, who as a teen-ager, when the action begins, disobeys his right-wing father an
d sneaks off to fight for Napoleon. What is most resonant for contemporary readers isn’t Fabrice’s starry-eyed idealism—which is, after all, endemic among protagonists of Romantic novels, and which, in any case, is constantly belied by the hard and occasionally farcical realities of lived life (an exhausted and slightly hung over Fabrice sleeps through much of Waterloo)—but the decidedly more modern, and even postmodern, way in which a sense of authenticity keeps eluding him.

  Like so many of us, Fabrice is always measuring his life against the poems and novels he has read. With a self-consciousness more typical of the late twentieth than the early nineteenth century, he keeps checking up on himself, as if trying to conform to some hidden master plan for being, or for loving—a plan that, as the novel tragically demonstrates, he is never quite able to follow. No wonder he so often expresses himself in the interrogative: “Had what he’d seen been a battle?… Had this battle been Waterloo?” “Am I such a hypocrite?” “What about a minor affair here in Parma?” One ironic measure of Fabrice’s inability to master the art of living as a free man is that he finds true happiness only in the womblike security of his prison cell in the Farnese Tower (as many critics have noted, he’s jailed for exactly nine months), from which he is loath to escape after he falls in love with Clélia.

  Fabrice is hardly the only vivid and oddly contemporary character here; you could easily argue—many have—that the real heroes are his aunt and her lover. Master political and social puppeteers, they are far more complicated and interesting than the young man they spend so much time trying, in vain, to establish in an adult life—even as, with Laclos-like sang-froid, they try to stage-manage some contentment of their own. (Mosca to Gina: “We might find a new and not unaccommodating husband. But first of all, he would have to be extremely advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of eventually replacing him?”) Gina, in particular, is one of the great creations of the nineteenth-century novelistic imagination: brilliant, flirtatious, cunning, vulnerable, passionate, extraordinarily self-aware and yet helplessly the prey of a forbidden passion for her beautiful nephew. We first meet her at the age of thirteen, trying to stifle a giggle at the ragged appearance of a Napoleonic officer who’s been billeted in her brother’s opulent palace (the Frenchman, Stendhal hints, is Fabrice’s natural father), and from that moment we’re never quite able to take our eyes off this woman who, despite her exalted social position and the Racinian dilemma she finds herself in, is never less than fully, sometimes comically, human. Mosca, too, who in the perfect, inevitable geometry of unrequited love hopelessly adores Gina in a way he knows will never be reciprocated, is an intricate creation, complex and conflicted in his public as well as his private life (we’re told that this leader of the ultraconservative party started out, like his creator, as a Bonapartist) and the victim of erotic passions that grip him, in Stendhal’s vivid locution, “like a cramp.”

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  The novel’s headlong narrative momentum, and the refreshingly real emotions of its acutely self-conscious characters, are clearly the work of a man who, like his young hero, rebelled in his youth against his stultifyingly conventional family, a man who wanted to be known as an artist and lover of women. (Stendhal’s epitaph, in Italian, which he composed while still in his thirties, reads: “He lived. He wrote. He loved.”) But Charterhouse is just as much the work of a seasoned diplomat only too familiar with the compromises that adult life imposes. The author’s older voice comes through in the fate he chooses for his characters: by the end of the book Fabrice, solitary in the religious retreat to which the book’s title refers, has died, still very young, having inadvertently caused the deaths of both Clélia (by now married off to another man) and their illegitimate child, the victims of a harebrained kidnapping plot gone horribly wrong; Gina follows him to the grave not long after. Only Mosca, the sole character who governs his passions successfully, survives.

  So, like its creator, the novel is part Fabrice and part Mosca. Or, to put it another way, it contains the best qualities of its contemporary French rivals: it has the headlong plottiness of Balzac, complete with assassinations, forged papers, disguises and politically motivated self-prostitutions, and also the elaborate, almost glacial self-consciousness of Flaubert. In other words, it’s got something for everyone.

  None of the English versions of Charterhouse currently available is inadequate—least of all that of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the great translator of Proust, whose 1925 version was the Modern Library’s predecessor to the new edition and which is still remarkably readable. But because language itself changes, even the best renderings of any work stop sounding modern after a while, and precisely because of its narrative momentum and the contemporary-seeming predicaments of its characters, Charterhouse needs to sound modern. This Howard’s translation does. First and most important, it moves with admirable rapidity, fully conveying what James called the “restlessness” of Stendhal’s “superior mind” by means of a number of subtle but quite concrete choices on Howard’s part, not least of which is his rendering of French verbs more crisply and colloquially than has been done before. (In the great Waterloo scene, for instance, Stendhal’s “sabrer” becomes “cut down,” which is better and faster than Margaret Mauldon’s long-winded “killed by a saber-cut” in the 1997 Oxford Classics version and yet more natural than Scott-Moncrieff’s “sabred.”)

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  Accuracy, however, is never sacrificed; this Charterhouse is filled with small and ingenious grace notes that are just right, and that you suspect Howard had a lot of fun working out. When Marshal Ney reprimands a subordinate at Waterloo, he “chews him out”—a rendering that, for once, gives the sense of the French verb “gourmander,” which can mean, as it does here, “to reprimand,” while wittily capitalizing, with just the right masticatory note, on its resemblance to “gourmand.” (In other renderings this is either under- or over-translated, from the blah “telling off” in Mauldon to the nonsensically literal “chewing up” in Moncrieff to the rather overbearingly Julia Childesque “making mincemeat out of” in Margaret Shaw’s 1958 Penguin Classics version.) My one minor reservation concerns Howard’s decision to give the Italian versions of the names instead of the French—Fabrizio instead of the text’s Fabrice, for instance—which obscures the important narrative conceit that this whole tale is one we’re hearing from a Frenchman who has, in turn, heard it from Italians who knew the principals. It is a book about Italians, but one seen through French eyes.

  Howard’s briskness and wit serve just as well in conveying the other side of Charterhouse: the very French manner that Proust referred to as Stendhal’s “Voltairean,” “eighteenth-century style of irony.” At the novel’s opening, Stendhal makes a passing but pointed reference to the fate of a group of 150 liberals illegally imprisoned by the conservative faction to which Fabrice’s father belongs: “Soon they were deported to the bocche di Cattaro, where, flung into underground caves, humidity and especially lack of bread rendered a summary justice.” Earlier translations show how easy it is to flub the small but pointed wit here. Mary Loyd’s 1901 version—“where damp and, especially, starvation wreaked prompt and thorough justice”—misses the joke altogether, steamrolling Stendhal’s deliciously dry and oblique “lack of bread” and indignantly overtranslating the word that Howard more properly and dryly gives as “rendered.”

  Howard understands that Stendhal’s style is inextricable from his substance—the speed from the passion, the irony from the worldliness—and so he gives you Stendhal’s style whole, with no touching up. Reread Howard’s translation of the line about the murdered liberals; at first glance you’d think it was the humidity and lack of bread that were flung into the bocche di Cattaro. Rightly, Howard reproduces the feel of Stendhal’s French, even at the price of the occasional syntactical clunker. Balzac, hardly the most polished of stylists, complained about Stendhal’s sloppy grammar, a fault about which the latter was deliciously unapologetic, preferring as he did a conversational natura
lness and ease to the geometric perfections of le siècle classique. In the very first entry in his journals, dated April 18, 1801, when the author was eighteen, he makes a mistake, but displays a nonchalance on the subject of grammar that will provide retroactive vindication to anyone who struggled through the pluperfect subjunctive in eleventh grade: “There will be a lot more, because I’m making it a rule not to stand on ceremony and never to erase.”

  Public ceremonies alternating with private mistakes; battles with banquets; stateliness with speed, epic scope with journalistic detail; loves unrequited and passions disastrously indulged; idealism and cynicism; the giddy heedlessness of self-satisfied youth and the sad wisdoms of old age; the minutes you remember in detail and the three-year chunks you completely forget. The grandeur and the messiness, the magnificence and the mistakes. No wonder Giraudoux’s young infantryman felt he had to know Charterhouse. What else would the dead want but what you find so much of in this novel—and in this new translation more than ever before—which is, in a word, life?

  The New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1999.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. This novel has often been praised for its effect upon readers. The French writer Jean Giraudoux famously remarked that it produces “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die.” Discuss the overall effect of Richard Howard’s new translation of Charterhouse on you as a reader.