The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  This translation was commissioned by

  Ben Sonnenberg for the Grand Street Foundation.

  2000 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Biographical note copyright © 1995 by Random House, Inc.

  Translation copyright © 1999 by Richard Howard

  Illustrations copyright © 1999 by Robert Andrew Parker

  Maps copyright © 1999 by David Lindroth

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This translation was originally published in hardcover by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1999.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New York Times for permission to reprint “After Waterloo,” by Daniel Mendelsohn, which appeared in The New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by The New York Times Company.

  Reprinted by permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Stendhal, 1783–1842.

  [Chartreuse de Parme. English] The charterhouse of Parma/Stendhal; translated from the French by Richard

  Howard.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79143-6

  I. Howard, Richard, 1929–. II. Title.

  PQ2435.C4E5 2000

  843’.7—dc21 98-36417

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1_r1

  STENDHAL

  Marie Henri Beyle—later known as Stendhal—was born in Grenoble on January 23, 1783. His mother, whom he idolized, died when he was seven, and he was raised by three people he detested—his bourgeois father, a prosperous lawyer; a jealous maiden aunt; and a tyrannical Jesuit tutor who inspired in him lifelong feelings of anticlericalism. The only person he felt any closeness to was his maternal grandfather, a respected physician who embraced the culture of the Enlightenment. In 1799, at the age of sixteen, the young man left for Paris to study mathematics at the École Polytechnique, but became a dragoon in Napoleon’s army the following year. The invasion of Italy took him to Milan, the city he came to love above all others; over the next decade he served as an aide-de-camp in Bonaparte’s campaigns in Germany, Austria, and Russia. In between wars he flourished in Parisian drawing rooms and devoted himself (unsuccessfully) to writing plays, all the while keeping elaborate journals that chronicled his travels and love affairs.

  Following Napoleon’s fall in 1814, Beyle retired permanently from the army and settled in Milan, where he began to write in earnest. He soon produced Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio (1814), followed by the two-volume History of Painting in Italy (1817). His next book— a travel guide entitled Rome, Naples, and Florence in 1817 (1817)—was the first to bear the pen name Stendhal, the most famous of the more than two hundred pseudonyms he employed in his lifetime. During this period he fell in love with Matilde Dembowski (née Viscontini), who served as the basis for his heroines. Suspected of being a French secret agent and of involvement in left-wing plots, the writer was expelled from Italy in 1821 by the Austrian police.

  Upon returning to Paris, Stendhal immediately resumed la chasse au bonheur (the pursuit of happiness) and writing. He quickly finished the semi-autobiographical treatise On Love (1822), the critical study Racine and Shakespeare (1823), and Life of Rossini (1824). Armance, the author’s first novel, appeared in 1827. A Roman Journal, a guidebook that marked Stendhal’s first real success, came out in 1829. Then in October of that year he began a novel based on a case reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux: the trial of a young man charged with the attempted murder of an ex-mistress. Published in 1830, The Red and the Black shocked the public with its incisive portrait of Restoration France, along with its probing psychological study of the complex protagonist, Julien Sorel. (“A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sounds is the reader’s soul,” Stendhal liked to remind his audience.)

  Following the July Revolution of 1830, which brought Louis Philippe to the throne, Stendhal returned to government service. In 1831 he was appointed consul to the port of Civitavecchia, some forty miles from Rome, where he spent many of his final years. During the 1830s Stendhal began two novels, Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel, both of which remained unfinished and were not published until long after his death. He also undertook two autobiographical works, Memoirs of an Egotist and The Life of Henri Brulard, which likewise appeared posthumously. In 1835 Stendhal was awarded the Legion of Honor for services to literature; the following year he returned to Paris on an extended leave of absence. There he started a biography of Napoleon and completed Memoirs of a Tourist (1838), a popular travel guide to France. Then, between November 4 and December 26 of 1838, the author dictated his last great novel, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), a tale of political intrigue set in Italy. In failing health, he lived long enough to rejoice in Balzac’s generous praise of it. Stendhal died in Paris, following a series of strokes, on March 23, 1842, and was buried the next day in the cemetery of Montmartre.

  “I will be famous around 1880,” Stendhal once predicted. Indeed, at about this time he began to attract widespread attention, and many of his previously unpublished books appeared—including A Life of Napoleon (1876), Journal of Stendhal (1888), Lamiel (1889), The Life of Henri Brulard (1890), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892), and Lucien Leuwen (1894). In the twentieth century such writers as Paul Léautaud, André Gide, and Paul Valéry have acclaimed Stendhal’s work. “We should never be finished with Stendhal,” said Valéry. “I can think of no greater praise than that.”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  MAPS

  THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA

  NOTES

  AFTERWORD BY RICHARD HOWARD

  COMMENTARY

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  FOREWORD

  This tale was written in the winter of 1830 and three hundred leagues from Paris; hence no reference to the events of 1839.

  Many years before 1830, at the time when our armies were overrunning Europe, I happened to be billeted in the house of a Canon: this was at Padua, a charming town in Italy; my stay being prolonged, we became friends.

  Passing through Padua again toward the end of 1830, I hastened to the good Canon’s house: he was no longer alive, I knew, but I wanted another glimpse of the salon where we had spent so many pleasant evenings, so often regretted since. I found the Canon’s nephew and this nephew’s wife, who received me like old friends. Several people came in, and we made a long night of it; the nephew ordered an excellent zabaione from the Caffè Pedrocchi. What especially entertained us was the story of the Duchess Sanseverina, to which someone alluded, and which the nephew kindly told from beginning to end, in my honor.

  “Where I am going,” I told my friends, “there will be no parties like this one, and to while away the long evenings. I shall make a novel out of your story.”

  “In that case,” said the nephew, “I shall give you my uncle’s journal, which under the heading Parma mentions several court intrigues from the days when the Duchess enjoyed absolute power there; but beware! the tale is anything but moral, and now that the French pride themselves on gospel purity, it may win you the reputation of an assassin.”

  I publish this tale without altering the 1830 manuscript, hence two possible drawbacks:

  The first for the reader: the characters, being Italian, may interest him less, since hearts in that country differ altogether from those in France: Italians are sincere, hones
t people, and if not intimidated will say what they think; only intermittently are they subject to vanity, which then becomes a passion and goes by the name of puntiglio. Furthermore, they do not hold poverty up to ridicule.

  The second drawback concerns the author: though I have ventured to leave untouched all my characters’ irregularities of nature, I acknowledge having poured the deepest moral censure on many of their actions. Why ascribe to them the lofty morality and the graces of the French, who love money above all things and never sin out of love or hate? The Italians in this tale are virtually the opposite. Moreover, it seems to me that each time we venture two hundred leagues from South to North, we confront a new novel as well as a new landscape. The Canon’s charming niece had known and even been devoted to the Duchess Sanseverina, and begs me to alter nothing in her affairs, blameworthy as they are.

  January 23, 1839

  THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA

  CHAPTER ONE

  Milan in 1796

  On May 15, 1796, General Bonaparte entered Milan at the head of that young army which had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valor and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation: just eight days before the French arrived, the Milanese still regarded them as no more than a band of brigands who habitually fled before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty: at least so they were told three times a week by a little news-sheet the size of a man’s hand, printed on dirty paper.

  In the Middle Ages, republican Lombards had displayed a valor equal to that of the French, and were entitled to see their city utterly razed by the German emperors. Since they had become loyal subjects, their chief concern was to print sonnets on tiny pink taffeta handkerchiefs for the weddings of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, the same young lady would take a cavaliere servente: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband’s family occupied an honorable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from such effeminate manners to the deep emotions produced by the French army’s unexpected arrival. Soon new and impassioned standards of behavior were observed. On May 15, 1796, a whole nation realized that whatever it had hitherto respected was sovereignly absurd and on occasion odious. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the fall of the old ideas: risking one’s life became fashionable; happiness depended, after centuries of insipidity, upon loving one’s country with a passion, upon seeking out heroic actions to perform. People had been plunged into darkness by the persistence of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they pulled down their statues and were forthwith flooded with light. For the last fifty years, even as the Encyclopédie and Voltaire were exploding in France, the monks had adjured the good people of Milan that learning to read, or learning anything at all, was a worthless effort, and that by promptly paying one’s tithe to the curé and by offering him a faithful account of all one’s petty sins, a fine place in paradise was virtually assured. To complete the enfeeblement of this people once so argumentative and so bold, Austria had sold them cheap the privilege of not supplying recruits to her army.

  In 1796 the Milanese army consisted of twenty-four wretches in red uniforms who guarded the city with the help of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian grenadiers. Moral freedom was extreme, but passion extremely rare; moreover, aside from the nuisance of having to tell one’s curé everything (or be ruined even in this world), the good people of Milan were still subject to certain minor monarchical restrictions which continued to vex them. For instance the Archduke, who resided in Milan and governed in the name of his cousin the Emperor, had conceived the lucrative notion of speculating in wheat. Consequently, no peasant could sell his crop until His Highness’s granaries were full.

  In May 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young miniaturist named Gros, slightly mad and subsequently famous, arrived with the army and overheard talk in the great Caffè dei Servi (fashionable at the time) of the exploits of the Archduke, who happened to be extremely fat. Snatching up the list of ices stamped on a sheet of coarse yellow paper, he drew on the back a French soldier thrusting his bayonet into the obese Archduke’s belly: instead of blood out poured an incredible quantity of grain. The idea of caricature or cartoon was unknown in this nation of wary despotism. The sketch Gros had left on the table of the Caffé dei Servi seemed a miracle from Heaven; it was printed overnight, and twenty thousand copies were sold the next day.

  That same day, notices were posted of a war-tax of six million levied for the needs of the French army, which, having just won six battles and conquered twenty provinces, lacked only shoes, jackets, caps, and trousers.

  So much pleasure and happiness poured into Lombardy with these Frenchmen, however ill-dressed, that only the priests and certain noblemen remarked this burden of six million, soon followed by many others. These French soldiers laughed and sang all day long; most were not yet twenty-five, and at twenty-eight their commanding general was accounted the oldest man in his army. Such youth, such gaiety, such free and easy ways offered a fine answer to the furious imprecations of the monks who for six months had preached that the French were monsters under orders, on pain of death, to burn down everything and cut off everyone’s head; to which end, each regiment marched with a guillotine in its front ranks.

  Throughout the countryside French soldiers could be seen dandling babies at farmhouse doors, and almost every evening some drummer scraping his fiddle would improvise a ball. Since French contredanses were far too intricate for the soldiers, who scarcely knew them themselves, to teach the local girls, it was the latter who showed the young Frenchmen the monferrina, the saltarello, and other Italian dances.

  The officers had been billeted on the rich as often as possible; they were in great need of recuperation. For instance, a certain Lieutenant Robert was assigned to the Marchesa del Dongo’s palace, which this unscrupulous young conscript entered with one scudo (worth six francs) as his sole wealth, having just received his pay at Piacenza. After crossing the Lodi bridge, he had stripped a handsome Austrian officer killed by a cannonball of a magnificent pair of brand-new nankeen trousers, and never had a garment been so timely. His officer’s epaulettes were of wool, and the ragged fabric of his jacket was patched with the lining from its sleeves to hold the pieces together; sadder still, the soles of his shoes consisted of scraps of visors, similarly gleaned from the battlefield the other side of Lodi bridge. These extempore soles were quite visibly tied to the uppers of his shoes with bits of string, so that when the major-domo appeared in Lieutenant Robert’s bedroom to invite him to dine with the Signora Marchesa, the officer was mortally embarrassed. He and his orderly spent the two hours until this fatal dinner attempting to patch the jacket and to conceal the lamentable pieces of string with black ink. At last the dreadful moment arrived. “I never felt so uncomfortable in all my life,” Lieutenant Robert told me; “the ladies expected me to terrify them, and I was trembling much more than they. I glanced at my shoes and could not imagine how to walk gracefully. The Marchesa del Dongo,” he added, “was then in the prime of her beauty: you have seen her yourself—those fine eyes of an angelic sweetness, that lovely dark-blond hair which so perfectly framed the oval of her charming face. In my bedroom hung a Salomé after da Vinci which seemed her portrait. Thank God I was so overcome by this divine beauty that I forgot how I was dressed. For two years I had seen nothing but ugliness and misery in the mountains around Genoa: I ventured to mention my rapture to her.

  “But I had too much sense to waste my time on compliments. Even as I was turning my phrases, I noticed that the marble dining-hall was filled with lackeys and footmen dressed in what then seemed to me the height of magnificence. You realize, these wretches wore not only fine shoes, but silver buckles! Out of the corner of my eye I saw them all staring stupidly at my jacket, and perhaps at my shoes as well, which stabbed me to the
heart. I might have terrorized every one of them with a word, but how to put them in their place without running the risk of alarming the ladies? For the Marchesa, to bolster her own courage (as she has told me a hundred times since), had summoned from the convent, where she was still at boarding-school, her husband’s sister Gina del Dongo, who was later to become the charming Countess of Pietranera: in good times no one surpassed her in gaiety and sweetness of temper, just as no one surpassed her in courage and serenity of soul in adversity.

  “Gina, who might have then been thirteen though she looked eighteen, vivacious and frank as you know her to be, was so afraid of bursting into laughter at the sight of my outfit that she dared not eat; the Marchesa, on the contrary, overwhelmed me with reserved attentions, having recognized hints of impatience in my expression. In a word, I cut a foolish figure as I swallowed my ration of scorn, a thing said to be impossible for a Frenchman. At last I was inspired by a Heaven-sent idea; I began describing my wretchedness to these ladies, and all we had suffered the last two years in the mountains around Genoa where we had been stationed by imbecilic old generals. There, I remarked, we were paid by promissory notes which had no currency in the region, and three ounces of bread a day. I had not spoken two minutes before the Marchesa had tears in her eyes, and Gina had become serious.

  “ ‘What, Signor Lieutenant,’ she exclaimed, ‘three ounces of bread!’

  “ ‘Yes, Signorina; but even so the supply failed three times a week, and since the peasants we were billeted on were even poorer than ourselves, we gave some of our bread to them.’

  “Leaving the table, I offered the Marchesa my arm as far as the dining-hall door, then, swiftly retracing my steps, I gave the lackey who had served me that single scudo on whose expenditure I had built so many castles in Spain.

  “Eight days later,” Lieutenant Robert continued, “when it was widely acknowledged that the French were guillotining no one, the Marchese del Dongo returned from Grianta, his castle on Lake Como, where he had valiantly taken refuge at the French army’s approach, abandoning his sister and his lovely young wife to the chances of war. The Marchese’s hatred of us was equal to his fear, which is to say, incommensurable: it was amusing to see his pale and pious countenance as he uttered his polite formulas. The day following his return to Milan, I received three ells of cloth and two hundred francs out of the levy of six million: I feathered myself anew and became the cavalier of these ladies, for the ball-season had begun.”