The Charterhouse of Parma (75 page)

M. de Chateaubriand said, in a preface to the eleventh edition of
Atala
, that his book in no way resembled the previous editions, so thoroughly had he revised it. M. le Comte de Maistre admits having rewritten
Le Lépreux de la vallée d’Aoste
seventeen times. I hope that M. Beyle also will set to work going over, polishing
La Chartreuse de Parme
, and will stamp it with the imprint of perfection, the emblem of irreproachable beauty which MM. de Chateaubriand and de Maistre have given to their precious books.

Yesterday evening, monsieur, I had a great surprise. I do not think that anybody has ever been so treated in a review, and by the best judge of the matter. You have taken pity on an orphan abandoned in the middle of the street. I have responded worthily to such kindness: I received
the review yesterday evening, and this morning I reduced the first fifty-four pages of the work whose worldly success you are so greatly fostering, to four or five pages.

The laborious kitchen of literature might well have given me a distaste for the pleasure of writing: I have postponed my hope of the satisfactions of authorship to twenty or thirty years hence. A literary botcher might then discover the works whose merit you so strangely exaggerate.…

Since you have taken the trouble to read this novel three times, I shall have a deal of questions to ask you at our first encounter on the boulevard:

I abhor the involved style, and I must confess to you that many pages of the
Chartreuse
are published as originally dictated. I shall say, like a child: “I won’t do it again.” I believe, however, that since the destruction of the Court in 1792, form has daily played a more meagre part. If M. Villemain, whom I mention as the most distinguished of the academicians, were to translate the
Chartreuse
into French, he would take three volumes to express what has been presented in two. Since most rascals are given to over-emphasis and eloquence, the declamatory tone will come to be detested. At the age of seventeen I almost fought a duel over M. de Chateaubriand’s “the indeterminate crest of the forests,” which numbered many admirers amongst the 6th Dragoons. I have never read
La Chaumière indienne
, I cannot endure M. de Maistre.

My Homer is the
Mémoires
of Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Montesquieu
and Fénelon’s
Dialogues
seem to me well written. Except for Madame de Mortsauf and her fellows, I have read nothing published in the last thirty years. I read Ariosto, whose stories I love. The Duchess is copied from Correggio. I see the future history of French letters in the history of painting. We have reached the stage of the pupils of Pietro de Cortone, who worked fast and indulged in violently exaggerated expression, like Mme. Cottin when she causes the ashlars of the Borromaean isles to “walk.” After this novel, I did not.… Whilst writing the
Chartreuse
, in order to acquire the correct tone I read every morning two or three pages of the Civil Code.

Permit me to employ an obscenity. I do not wish to f——g the reader’s soul. The poor reader lets pass such ambitious expressions as “the wind uprooting the waves,” but they come back to him when the moment of emotion has gone by. For my part, I hope that if the reader thinks of Count Mosca, he will find nothing to reject.

(4) I shall have Rassi and Riscara appear in the foyer of the Opera, having been sent to Paris as spies after Waterloo by Ernest IV. Fabrice, returning from Amiens, will notice their Italian look and their “thick” Milanese, which these observers suppose nobody can understand. Everybody tells me that one must introduce one’s characters. I shall devote much less space to the good Abbé Blanès. I thought it was necessary to have characters who took no part in the action but simply touched the reader’s soul and removed the sense of romanticism.

I shall seem to you a monster of conceit. Our great academicians would have had the public raving about their writings, if they had been born in 1780. Their hopes of greatness depended upon the ancien régime.

As half-fools become more and more numerous, the part played by
form
diminishes. If the
Chartreuse
had been translated into French by Mme. Sand, she would have had some success, but to express what is told in the two present volumes she would have needed three or four. Carefully weigh this excuse.

The half-fool cleaves especially to the verse of Racine, for he can tell when a line is not finished; but Racine’s versification daily becomes
a smaller part of his merit. The public, as it grows more numerous and less sheep-like, calls for a greater number of “little true touches” concerning a passion, a situation taken from life, etc. We know to how great an extent Voltaire, Racine, etc.—indeed, all except Corneille—are compelled to write lines “padded” for the sake of rhyme. Well, these lines occupy the place that was legitimately owed to such little true touches.

In fifty years M. Bignon, and the Bignons of prose, will have bored everyone so much with productions devoid of any merit except elegance that the half-fools will be in a quandary. Since their vanity will insist that they continue to talk about literature and make a show of being able to think, what will become of them when they can no longer cling to form? They will end by making a god of Voltaire. Wit endures only two hundred years: in 1978 Voltaire will be Voiture; but
Le Père Goriot
will always be
Le Père Goriot
. Perhaps the half-fools will be so upset at no longer having their beloved rules to admire that they will conceive a distaste for literature and turn religious. Since all the rogues of politics have the declamatory and eloquent tone, people in 1880 will be disgusted with it. Then perhaps they will read the
Chartreuse
.

The part played by
“form
” becomes daily more meagre. Think of Hume: imagine a history of France, from 1780 to 1840, written with Hume’s good sense. People would read it even if it were written in patois: in fact, it would be written like the Civil Code. I shall correct the style of the
Chartreuse
, since it offends you, but I shall have great difficulty. I do not admire the style now in fashion, I am out of patience with it. I am confronted with Claudians, Senecas, Ausoniuses. I have been told for the past year that I must sometimes give the reader a rest by describing landscape, clothes, etc. Such descriptions have bored me so much when written by others! But I shall try.

As for contemporary success, of which I should never have dreamed but for the
Revue Parisienne
, I told myself at least fifteen years ago that. I would become a candidate for the Académie if I won the hand of Mlle Bertin, who would have had my praises sung thrice a week. When society is no longer “spotted” with vulgar newly-rich, who value nobility above all else, precisely because they themselves are ignoble, it will no longer be on its knees before the journal of the aristocracy. Before
1793, good society was the true judge of books; now it is dreaming of the return of ’93, it is afraid, it is no longer a judge. Take a look at the catalogue of a little bookshop near Saint-Thomas d’Aquin (rue du Bac, about no. 110), a catalogue which it lends to the neighbouring nobility. It is the most convincing argument I know of the impossibility of finding favour with these poltroons numbed by idleness.

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.

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.”)