Who woulda thunk that a "himbo" could be the faux hero of a classic French novel? Or that Fabrizio would be an early member of the 27 Club's literary equivalent? But that's what makes Stendahl's 1839 masterpiece--450 pages dictated in a mere 52 days--so entertaining, even today.
Sure, the convoluted politics can be a little difficult to parse for readers without advanced degrees in European history. The Charterhouse of Parma mostly takes place shortly after the Napoleonic wars in what is now northern Italy but during the author's lifetime was ruled off and on by the French and Austrians (guess which conquerors the locals, for the most part, preferred?). Stendahl pretends to be telling an authentic Italian story from the perspective of a Frenchman, a conceit that affords him the opportunity for plenty of fond stereotyping.
Italian hearts are, far more than ours in France, tormented by the suspicions and wild ideas which a burning imagination presents to them, but on the other hand their joys are far more intense and more lasting.
* * * *
Once her vengeance was determined, she felt her strength; each step her mind had taken gave her a certain happiness. I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people of other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget.
We meet the noble Fabrizio, the apple of his aunt Gina's eye, just as he leaves home to join Napoleon's army, alienating his father and older brother, both conservative sticks-in-the-mud who prefer to hole up in their castle near Lake Cuomo and enjoy the status quo. It takes only a farcical chapter or two to realize that the rebellious teenager is a blithering, well-meaning idiot who has to rely on the kindness of women for tips about how to survive, including where to point his saber (heh, heh) if not how to mount his steed.
Nonetheless, he persists although his "service" at the Battle of Waterloo limits his career prospects upon his return to Parma. Thanks to Count Mosca, a powerful patron enamored of his aunt Gina, Fabrizio is groomed for the "violet stockings" worn by archbishops. This does not prevent him from skirt chasing, however, which results in a peculiar crisis of conscience for a man who presumably will take a vow of chastity. Balzac's silence about this hypocrisy reflects a deep understanding of human nature as well as his own rejection of religious dogma in favor of the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
“But how odd it is,” [Fabrizio] would occasionally tell himself, “that I’m not susceptible to that exclusive and impassioned preoccupation known as love? Among all the relationships chance has bestowed upon me at Novara or in Naples, have I ever met a woman whose presence, even in the first days, I preferred to a ride on a fine new horse? Is what they call love,” he added, “only one more lie? Doubtless I love the way I have a good appetite at six o’clock! And could it be this rather vulgar propensity which our liars have made into Othello’s jealousy and Tancred’s passion? Or must I assume I am constituted differently from other men? Why should it be that my soul lacks this one passion? What a singular fate is mine!”
Singular indeed. The further machinations of his aunt (now the wealthy Duchess of Sanseverina in a sham marriage arranged by Count Mosca) in the wake of a roadside altercation, propel an often breathless plot of page-turning intrigue and incident. While Fabrizio intuitively understands the need to keep on Gina's good side, her flirtatiousness gives him serious pause because he believes they are related by blood. Convention keeps the Duchess from hooking up with the hottie she loves but not from ruthlessly protecting him in a small but hostile court that recalls Peyton Place if all its residents had studied The Prince.
But the Frenchly amoral Duchess shares the same insecurities that plague women in Hollywood nearly two centuries later. Here's how she reacts when she realizes that Fabrizio has finally fallen in love with Clélia, a much younger member of the court, in highly unusual circumstances.
A woman of forty is no longer something for the men who have loved her in her youth! Now I shall find no more than the pleasures of vanity; and do they make life worth living?
After nine months of being locked away in a tower like a fairy princess, Fabrizio finally becomes a man, courting Clélia with sign language as she tends to her aviary. Unfortunately, the piety of his beloved--who promises the Madonna never to see Fabrizio again if he ever gets out of jail--and Gina's obsession with her nephew complicates the young couple's future.
Desperate to keep him alive by any means necessary, she enlists Clélia to prevent Fabrizio from being poisoned by his jailers, who include her clueless father. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice Gina also finally clarifies the nature of her relationship with Fabrizio to Count Mosca so that her protector will continue scheming on his behalf .
People will have told you that I loved Fabrizio, for I know that such rumors have run through this wicked court.” Her eyes shone for the first time in this conversation, when she uttered the word wicked. “I swear to you before God, and on Fabrizio’s life, that there has passed between him and myself not the smallest thing which the eye of a third person might not have tolerated. Nor shall I tell you that I love him altogether like a sister; I love him by instinct, if I may put it that way. I love in him his courage, so simple and so perfect that one might say that he is not even aware of it himself; I recall that this sort of admiration began upon his return from Waterloo. He was still a child, despite his seventeen years; his great anxiety was to know if he had truly participated in the battle, and in case he had, if he could say he had fought, since he had marched to the attack of no enemy battery or column. It was during the serious discussions we had together on this important subject that I began to discern a perfect grace in my nephew. His great soul revealed itself to me; how many knowing lies would a well brought up young man have proffered in his place! In short, if he is not happy I cannot be happy. There, that is the phrase which perfectly describes the state of my heart; if it is not the truth, at least it is all the truth I can perceive.”
Stendahl, who died in 1842, just three years after the publication of The Charterhouse of Parma, filled his final novel to the brim with a lifetime of mostly 19th-century experience that somehow remains relentlessly contemporary, even for gay men (AIDS poet Thom Gunn called the book his favorite at one point). He juggles the consciousnesses of his fully drawn characters as dexterously as he scatters aperçus.
The presence of danger gives a touch of genius to the reasoning man, places him, so to speak, above his own level: in the imaginative man it inspires romances, bold, it is true, but frequently absurd.
* * * *
In despotic courts, the first skillful intriguer controls the Truth, as the fashion controls it in Paris.
* * * *
But you will learn, my Prince, that to have received power from Providence no longer suffices in this day and age—it requires a great deal of intelligence and a strong character to succeed in being a tyrant.”
But most memorably of all, the sly, proto-feminist author has turned what first appears to be a picaresque novel about a callow young man into a story of unrequited love that gives pride of place to one of the literature's most beguiling women who also happens to be more action-oriented than most. If I were directing the limited series--and Charterhouse literally screams for a tart and leisurely adaptation--I would license a Rolling Stones classic for the Duchess's final scene:
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you'll find
You get what you need
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