The fame of our tyrant, however, had long been diffused throughout the whole of the Milanese provinces. Everywhere his life was a subject for popular tales, and his name bore with it the idea of something compelling, strange, and fabulous. The suspicion that he had his agents and hired assassins everywhere also contributed to keeping his memory alive everywhere. These were only suspicions—for who would openly avow such a dependence? —but every petty tyrant might be his colleague, every little malefactor one of his men. And this very uncertainty made the conception of it vaster, and the fear of it deeper. Whenever a set of unknown and unusually savage-looking bravoes put in an appearance anywhere, whenever some appalling crime was committed whose author could not be pointed out or guessed at once, people muttered the name of the man whom, thanks to that blessed circumspection of our authorities, we shall be constrained to call the Unnamed.
Any plot summary of The Betrothed can sound quite silly, since the melodramatic elements can make one wince a bit. Still, menace and the horror of the plague work to redeem the Perils of Pauline aspects of the novel. Poor Lucia suffers intensely mental and moral anguish, to the point where she promises the Virgin Mary that she will renounce marriage to Renzo or anyone else if the divine powers rescue her from the well-known fate worse than death, rape by Don Rodrigo. It will take Fra Cristoforo to persuade her that God and the Virgin Mother want her to marry Renzo.
Rereading The Betrothed, I enjoy myself greatly despite my lack of interest in Catholic piety. Manzoni is able to touch the universal because of the primordial strength of his character and personality, and his considerable ability to play with an assortment of narrative voices throughout his masterwork. Though everything ends as it should, with Lucia and Renzo happily married with many children, Don Rodrigo miserably dead from the plague, the Unnamed a patron of the poor, Fra Cristoforo a living martyr to the victims of the plague, and Manzoni a voice that comforts and elevates the reader, something is still lacking. Perhaps the Italian original, a language experiment in the Tuscan vernacular, loses too much even in the eloquent translation of Archibald Colquhoun, who also wrote a very useful study, Manzoni and His Times (1954).
I find that my reservations sadden me, since Manzoni has given me so much pleasure. One cannot ask every novel to be Don Quixote or Clarissa or In Search of Lost Time. The Betrothed finds its place in a group that includes the best of Sir Walter Scott, such as The Heart of Midlothian, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, and Fielding’s Tom Jones. That is an illustrious galaxy but not quite Les Misérables or War and Peace.
CHAPTER 8
The Red and the Black (1830)
STENDHAL
STENDHAL, a pseudonym for Marie-Henri Beyle, died in Paris in 1842 at the age of fifty-nine. His death was caused by the absurd treatments for syphilis, a disease he had suffered for some time. Few major novelists have had a personality so winsome as Stendhal’s. His vision of life is rather like a masked ball or a carnival performance. His torrent of letters are playful, wistful, and frequently a study in erotic nostalgia.
Paul Valéry, the major French poet and person-of-letters of the twentieth century, praised Stendhal for his gift of liveliness. That seems to me the first accomplishment of Stendhal, whose wit was endless and infectious, a gift given to “the happy few,” as he characterized his ideal readers.
I love Valéry’s observation that Stendhal makes the reader proud to be his reader. The heart of Stendhal is in Valéry’s reflection that his favorite novelist felt the spur of literary vanity but more deeply an absolute pride that knew it had to depend on nothing but itself.
Valéry’s final judgment is that Stendhal was so radically himself that he could not be reduced to a writer.
Still, I know Stendhal primarily as a novelist. His strongest work to me is the unfinished Lucien Leuwen, yet it is too fragmentary for the common reader. The perpetual popularity of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma is more than deserved. I myself vacillate between the two, since Julien Sorel is a richer character than anyone in The Charterhouse yet the liveliness of Stendhal’s Italy is a relief after his occluded France.
Despite all ironies, I find it difficult not to see Julien Sorel as Stendhal’s surrogate. Julien’s imagination is Stendhal’s, which is to say that it is Napoleonic and Byronic. Whether Stendhal is a Shakespearean writer is open to dispute. Julien is hardly a Shakespearean protagonist, yet the narrator is. Stendhal gives Julien the uncanny ability to turn his erotic preferences on or off by acts of will. At the novel’s close, a transfigured Julien is again fiercely in love with Madame De Rênal and all but indifferent to Mathilde de La Mole, except insofar as she carries what he trusts will be their son. We never will find out the gender of the baby or whether Mathilde will or will not marry again. What we confront at the end is a suicidal Julien. You can regard his attitude as resignation, but there is a troubling element of pathology. Even an attractive craziness remains madness, a sad fate for the energetic, vital, and ambitious Julien Sorel.
Like Cervantes, Stendhal is most himself as Homo Ludens, to cite the great book of 1938 by Johan Huizinga, a profound study of the play element in the arts and in history. Reading Huizinga, I arrive at the formula: all is play except in games. How much of the quixotic element remains in Julien Sorel?
Stendhal’s own erotic career was rather vexed. His mother died when he was seven. His relations with his father were hostile. At twenty-one, he lived in Marseilles with the actress Mélanie Guilbert, but by 1806 he had taken up a post as a Napoleonic intendant in Brunswick. When in the army in 1800 in Milan, he had fallen in love with Angelina Pietragrua, who became his mistress eleven years later, on his return to Milan. Yet the major attachment of his life began in 1818, when he fell in love with Matilde Viscontini Dembowska, who totally rejected him. He never married, and went from debacle to debacle. In 1824, there was a love affair with Comtesse Clémentine Curial, but she broke with him three years later. In 1829, he tried again, this time with Alberthe de Rubempre, but it proved ephemeral. Finally, he proposed marriage to Giulia Rinieri. Though he was refused by her guardian, eight years later he became involved with her, but the relationship waned. By 1841, he was sustained mostly by his two dogs and perhaps had another failed affair. Weakened by syphilis and the peculiar remedies then used for it, he died in 1842.
As a theorist of Eros, Stendhal was a master, though clearly not very pragmatic in his quest for it. His transcendent wit and sense of delight kept him going in life as in art. I have been rereading The Red and the Black, first in the original and also in the useful translation by Roger Gard, for some weeks now and cannot seem to get weary of it. Sometimes I put it down and come back to it a few days later. I find myself wondering why I am so held by it.
The novel began as a tale called “Julien,” based on one Antoine Berthet, who shot a Madame Michoud de la Tour and was guillotined. I recall reprinting a strong essay by Carol A. Mossman in a volume I edited on The Red and the Black in 1988. Ms. Mossman articulates the various strands that come together in what could be called Julien’s novel and also Mathilde’s novel. When he triumphs over Mathilde, Julien prematurely says that his novel is completed. Mathilde models herself upon Marguerite de Valois, heroine of a Dumas novel, and historically the daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, who ruled France through her sons until the line came to an end. Henry of Navarre, first of the Bourbon kings as Henry IV, married Marguerite de Valois, a political match marked by friendship but little passion. Queen Marguerite had many lovers, among them Joseph Boniface Hyacinth, Lord La Mole. A Huguenot, the audacious La Mole was beheaded after he joined in a plot to free Henry of Navarre. The legend is that Marguerite caused La Mole’s head to be embalmed and kept afterward in a casket bedecked by jewels. Mathilde’s novel, and Stendhal’s, concludes:
—I want to see him, she said.
Fouqué had the resolution neither to speak nor to rise. He pointed with his finger at a la
rge blue cloak on the floorboards; in that was wrapped what remained of Julien.
She threw herself on her knees. The memory of Boniface de La Mole and Marguerite de Navarre inspired her, no doubt, with superhuman resolve. Her trembling hands opened the cloak. Fouqué turned away his eyes.
He heard Mathilde walking about rapidly in the room. She lit a large number of candles. When Fouqué summoned up the strength to look at her, she had placed Julien’s head on a little marble table in front of her, and was kissing its brow…
Mathilde followed her lover to the tomb he had chosen. A large band of priests escorted the bier and, unknown to all, alone in her veiled carriage, she carried on her knees the head of the man she had so dearly loved.
Coming in this way almost to the summit of one of the highest mountains in the Jura, in the depths of the night, and in that little cave now magnificently lit up by innumerable tapers, twenty priests celebrated the service for the dead. All the inhabitants of the little mountain villages that the convoy had crossed followed it, attracted by the singularity of this strange rite.
Mathilde appeared in the midst of them in long mourning robes and, at the end of the service, had many thousand five-franc pieces scattered in the crowd.
Left alone with Fouqué, she insisted on burying her lover’s head with her own hands. Fouqué narrowly avoided losing his mind with grief.
By Mathilde’s agency this wild cavern was decorated with marble carvings sculpted in Italy at great expense.
Mme de Rênal was faithful to her promise. In no way did she seek to take her own life; but three days after Julien, she died, her children in her arms.
The End
To The Happy Few
Stendhal takes a throwaway attitude toward endings. Madame de Rênal is too pious for suicide. We are not told what kills her after three days. Unless she had expected a resurrected Julien, it is rather difficult to see anyone dying of grief alone. Mathilde, crazier even than Julien, perhaps finds comfort in acting the part of Queen Marguerite of Navarre. Carol Mossman shrewdly retraces Stendhal’s web that weaves together the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, Saint John the Baptist, Napoleon, and the dancer Salome, who kisses and lustfully caresses the severed head of John after it has been brought to her on a silver platter.
And what of Julien Sorel? How is he when Stendhal takes him away from us? He is and he is not admirable. Toward Mathilde he is dreadful. Having gone through so much for him, she is made to feel like an intruder. He scarcely bothers to pretend any love for her. But toward Madame de Rênal, whose murder he has attempted, he mounts to an ecstasy of love beyond anything he has ever known, and in which she fully shares. Except for dramatic irony, Stendhal’s stance eschews sardonicism.
Why does Julien choose death? He passes judgment on himself, on society, on Christianity, and on Stendhal’s novel that denies him any other exit. A book that has been comedy cannot accommodate a tragic conclusion. It is impossible not to like Stendhal. It is very difficult to have any affection for Julien, or indeed for anyone else in the novel. Perhaps it is simply that the myth of Napoleon, still so potent for Stendhal, Balzac, Victor Hugo, has worn itself out. Without Napoleon, no Julien Sorel.
Surmise is rather baffled by Stendhal’s aversion to completion. I am persuaded that he loves Julien Sorel almost as much as Cervantes loved Don Quixote. The Sorrowful Knight graciously ends because he accepts defeat. I do not think that Julien Sorel has been defeated, though he chooses to end graciously anyway. Consider how far Julien has come in the course of the novel. He has achieved the love of two remarkable women, whatever their limitations or his. He has come within a notch of triumphing over his origins, in a society that despises peasants who seek to rise into the world of aristocrats.
Stendhal endows Julien with almost all that nature can give. He is very handsome, courageous, capable of intellectual brilliance, a leader, not a follower, yet motherless, pragmatically unfathered. Even at the close he has only sporadic moments of dark inertia. He eddies between lucidity and passion, as does his creator, Stendhal.
Julien is saved (in a purely secular way) by his capacity for deep feeling. Despite all the hypocrisies forced upon him by his situation, his quest is for love and for the spirit’s freedom.
CHAPTER 9
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
STENDHAL
THOUGH STENDHAL CALLED this a short novel, it is quite substantial, in length as in design. And yet he wrote it in less than two months, in late 1838. It is set in the north of Italy, his favorite region, in the aftermath of Napoleon, his sometime hero. Stendhal had a fantasy that he was half Italian and hints that Fabrizio del Dongo, the delightful male protagonist and nephew-by-marriage of the marvelous Duchess Gina Sanseverina, who is in love with him, was the illegitimate son of Lieutenant Robert, who turns up later in the novel on the battlefield of Waterloo. When he reappears, he is General Count d’A*** Robert, whom Fabrizio has no way of recognizing, yet, as Stendhal remarks, “How happy he would have been to find Fabrizio del Dongo!” With Stendhalian irony, the father steals the son’s horse.
Fabrizio’s experience of Waterloo is a famous set-piece. He fights on the side of the French, sees and hears cannon fire and gunfire and even, at a distance, the Emperor Napoleon, though by then the young Italian nobleman is so high on brandy he cannot be sure what he sees. The French army breaks up, and the victorious Prussian cavalry causes such hysteria in the ranks that poor Fabrizio, obeying orders, is severely wounded by French deserters. The noble scamp finds his way back home eventually, and Stendhal charges on.
Stendhal, a lover of Shakespeare, composes his own version of Romeo and Juliet in The Charterhouse of Parma. Fabrizio is an improvement upon Romeo, but no one could improve upon Juliet, who is one of Shakespeare’s triumphs. The Juliet of Fabrizio is the pious Clelia, whom I find rather colorless and hardly worthy of the Stendhalian gusto. However, like all readers, I am fascinated by the magnificent Gina del Dongo, who is a young widow, fifteen years older than Fabrizio, and is known under the name of Gina Pietranera, the Duchess Sanseverina. Gina is totally in love with her nephew by marriage, and so there is no incest barrier, but Fabrizio, who will become a high dignitary of the Church, is very wary of any actual consummation with his aunt, though they come close. He is not in love with her, though he regards her more highly than anyone else alive.
Count Mosca, who is in his later middle age, is fiercely in love with Gina, but her motto is: If Fabrizio is not happy, then I cannot be happy. An amiable Machiavel, Mosca shuttles in and out as first minister to the Princes of Parma, initially to the despotic father and then to the twenty-two-year-old son, when he comes into power. The older Prince of Parma lusts after Gina, to no effect, and the younger one lusts even more fiercely and at last, to the great detriment of his court, which is lifeless without the Sanseverina, enjoys her very briefly. Chagrined, the high-minded Duchess sacrifices herself to save Fabrizio’s life, and then departs Parma for good.
The plot of The Charterhouse of Parma is a labyrinth of escapades, intrigues, sudden outbursts of violence, unexpected kindnesses, above all the passionate sprezzatura, the art of throwaway high-mindedness exemplified by the Sanseverina, Fabrizio, and the outlaw poet Ferrante Palla. If The Charterhouse has a fault, aside from Stendhal’s slapdash weakness at endings, it would be the profusion of plot. Fabrizio is so impulsive that he cannot stop moving from place to place, woman to woman, duel to duel, scrape to scrape, wound to wound. Stendhal being Stendhal, Fabrizio will end as the pious, revered, and eloquent Archbishop of Parma.
The model for Fabrizio is the sixteenth-century Alessandro Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul III and himself a cardinal and famous collector of the arts. His aunt Gina also seems to be more sixteenth than nineteenth century in her recklessness, lavish generosity, and high sense of love and life. The sixteenth-century throwbacks include the poet, bandit, and self-styled tribune
of the people Ferrante Palla, who is a medical doctor but has been outlawed and forbidden to practice his profession since he is a radical rebel against the regime that governs Parma, and is under sentence of death. Like almost every other male in the novel, he is passionately in love with Gina, though he has five children by a woman he has reft away from her husband:
‘But how do you survive?’ asked the duchess, much moved.
‘The children’s mother spins. The oldest girl gets her board at the farm of some liberal or other, where she watches over the sheep. As for me, I hold people up along the road from Piacenza to Genoa.’
‘How do you reconcile robbery with your liberal principles?’
‘I keep a note of the people I rob, and if ever I have anything, I shall give them back the sums I’ve stolen. I adjudge that a tribune of the people such as myself is performing a task which, on account of the danger, is worth a good hundred francs a month. So I’m very careful not to take more than twelve hundred francs a year. Actually, that’s wrong, I steal a small amount over and above that, because that way I can meet the costs of getting my works printed.’
‘What works?’
‘…will she ever have a room and a budget?’
‘What,’ said the duchess, in astonishment, ‘that’s you, signore, one of the greatest poets of the century, the famous Ferrante Palla?’
‘Famous perhaps, but very unfortunate, that’s for sure.’
‘And a man with your talent, signore, is obliged to steal in order to live!’
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 9