Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen-name Stendhal, wrote this novel at a pointless period in his life, during fifty-three days late in 1838. He was serving at the time as a minor French official in Italy – the Consul at Civitavecchia. Beyle was a veteran of several Napoleonic campaigns and was one of the survivors of the retreat from Russia in 1812.
In the novel Fabrizio del Dongo is the second son of a family ennobled since the fifteenth century. His childhood is passed in the family castle on Lake Como where he comes to hate his prideful father and avaricious elder brother Ascanio. Instead he falls under the spell of Napoleon and heads off, in 1815, to join the French army in The Hundred Days Campaign (Hundred Days – Wikipedia).
Full of heroic ideals Fabrizio soon discovers that the reality of war is mud, blood, savagery and excrement. Adventures follow in which he is befriended by an army whore, taken for a spy, and escapes the firing squad in a dead hussar’s uniform. By the time he is wounded in the thigh and loses a quantity of blood, he has been cured of all idealistic notions concerning the glory of war.
Returning to the North Italian town of Parma Fabrizio discovers a totalitarian state. Assisted by the widowed patroness Countess Pietranera he goes into the Church. The service of God doesn’t quench Fabrizio’s lusts though. He has love affairs and murders a rival. It is only by the intervention of The Countess that he escapes to do penance in the Church, rising eventually to becoming an Archbishop.
Fabrizio comes to understand that his existence has been pointless, that he has been swept along by currents that are much larger and epochal than he could ever comprehend or control.
The great achievement of The Charterhouse of Parma is to conjure up the excitement and romance of youth while never losing sight of the harsh realities which beset the pursuit of happiness, nor the humour and patient irony with which these must be viewed. Honoré de Balzac wrote the following: “Never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this. Stendhal’s tableau has the dimensions of a fresco but the precision of the Dutch masters.”
To see if you agree check whether this classic is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
First published 1839
412 pages in Moncreiffe Press
ISBN-13 : 979-8393443061
