STENDHAL: THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA

(LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME, 1839)

BILL JONES
THE BOOK CLUB
1 DECEMBER 2017

“Entre ici, ami de mon coeur.”

Imagine yourself a person of liberal political tendencies—a moderate leftist with

an appreciation for civilized traditions, born in a small, provincial Southern city growing
up with a somewhat cosmopolitan outlook. In your time, you have witnessed a
transformative upsurge of idealism, an awakening of oppressed peoples, a series of
wearying wars, the disappearance of charismatic leaders, a growing cynicism about
government, and the ascent of a dull-witted authoritarian régime headed by a family
known for its stupidity and cupidity.

No immediate deliverance appears possible; the forces of reaction are too well
entrenched. This is your life, stretching into an uncertain future. How does one adapt?
How does one resist? Perhaps by adopting other names—in fact, hundreds of names—
and leaving your hometown for more congenial surroundings. The critic Irving Howe
concluded that our author adopted the strategy of “being both a rebel and a bon vivant…
His books … are really devil’s manuals for men in revolt at a time when there is no
possibility of revolt” (82).

“Arrigo Beyle, Milanese. Visse. Scrisse. Amo.” So reads the Italian inscription on
the headstone in the cemetery in Montmartre where the author best known as Stendhal
rests. “Henri Beyle, Milanese. He lived. He wrote. He loved.” In 1812, Beyle, on his way
to join Napoleon’s Russian expedition, declared: “If I can, on my return, [In English in
the original: I WILL SEE AGAIN MY DEAR ITALY. IT IS MY TRUE COUNTRY.] Not that I love
excessively this or that object; but this country agrees with my character.”

To understand Stendhal and his passion for Italy and the character with which his
“true country” agreed, it’s necessary to understand the author’s ambivalence toward his
birthplace, his adoration of his mother, and his hatred for his father and all that he
represented.

Marie-Henri Beyle was born on 23 January 1783 in the small southeastern French
city of Grenoble, in the region of the Dauphiné; today Grenoble is a bit smaller than
Little Rock, with a population of 162,780. Stendhal called it “the capital of pettiness.”
His biographer Jonathan Keates remarked that Grenoble “has never been noted either for
architectural beauty or for charm of situation,” despite sitting at the foot of Mont Rachais.
We know quite a bit about his childhood, thanks to a lightly fictionalized memoir
published after his death, The Life of Henry [English in the original] Brulard. HB=HB.

“My first memory,” he wrote, “is of having bit the cheek or the forehead of … my
cousin. I see her now, a woman of twenty-five and wearing a great deal of rouge.
Apparently it was the rouge which annoyed me. Seated in the midst of [a] meadow … it
so happened that her cheek was exactly on my level. ‘Kiss me, Henri,’ she said. I did not
want to. She grew angry. I bit her hard. I remember the incident, probably because I was
made instantly to feel guilty for it and the matter was endlessly referred to. My aunt
Séraphie, who had all the sharpness of a pious woman who hadn’t managed to find a
husband, declared that I was a monster and that I had an atrocious character.”

This passage, written by a middle-aged man who had never been able to let go of
childhood injuries, is illuminating. It reveals Henri Beyle’s capacity for celebrating (or at
least justifying) himself as the anti-hero of his narratives; his tendency to carry a grudge;
his readiness to attack with a satirical edge; and his recognition of the prominence of
women in his life.

The woman who mattered most, who prefigured all the subsequent women in his
life, was Henri’s mother, Henriette-Adélaïde-Charlotte Gagnon, who read Dante in the
original Italian and for whom Stendhal later invented Italian ancestry. The little boy was
in love with her and she with him: “She loved me passionately, kissed me often, and I
returned her embraces with such ardour that she was often obliged to leave the room.”
Her death in childbirth on 23 November 1790, when Henri was seven, affected the boy
deeply. “At this point,” he later wrote, “my moral life began.”

He and his two younger sisters were brought up by his detested, excessively
religious aunt Séraphie (Gagnon) and his father, Chérubin Beyle, a conservative lawyer
who had no sympathy for the unfolding French Revolution. As much as he loved his
mother, Stendhal hated his father for the rest of his life. “He was an excessively
dislikable man,” he wrote, “always concerned with the purchase and sale of property…”

In letters to his sister Pauline, Henri referred to their father as “the bastard.”
Elsewhere, he wrote: “My father loved me only as the bearer of his name, but never as a
son” (Henry Brulard). Because his father and aunt were royalists during the Revolution,
he became a ten-year-old Jacobin. When news came of the execution of Louis XVI in
January 1793, “I was seized,” Stendhal wrote, “with one of the most fervent impulses of
joy I ever knew in all my life.”

Henri found solace and sympathy with his uncle, Romain Ganon, who introduced
him to the beauty of nature, and in the home of his maternal grandfather, Dr. Henri
Gagnon, an embodiment of the French Enlightenment who continued to wear a powdered
wig and had known Voltaire, having visited him in Switzerland. The retired doctor’s
encouragement led Henri well beyond the approved list of books.

But Chérubin Beyle hired an exacting tutor, the Abbé Raillane—“scrupulous and
intolerant,” as Joseph Wood Krutch called him—who taught his pupil the Ptolemaic
system of astronomy because, although it’s false, “it explains everything and is approved
of by the Church.” Stendhal later declared that “I hated the Abbé, I hated my father,
source of the Abbé’s power, and I hated still more Religion, in whose name they
tyrannized over me.” While the author’s anticlericalism was enduring, it’s worth noting

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that the protagonists of both The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma,
Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo, were clergymen.

Deliverance came in 1796 in the form of the new École Central, a revolutionary
institution where Henri experienced independence, studied Shakespeare as well as French
classics, and excelled in mathematics, which he regarded as his ticket out of Grenoble.
He developed a teenage crush on a young actress, Virginie Kubly, but he never quite got
the nerve to speak directly to her. After winning first prize at school, Henri went to Paris
in 1799 to take the entrance examination for the prestigious École Polytechnique. His
uncle Romain, bidding him farewell, offered him advice that he took to heart: “No one
gets anywhere in the world without women.” Once settled in Paris—just after Napoléon’s
coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (9 November) 1799—Henri, whether from carelessness or
lack of interest, never got around to taking the entrance exam.

Instead, he attached himself to the family of Noël Daru, cousins of Chérubin

Beyle. Pierre, the oldest son would soon rise in Napoléon’s régime, becoming the
Secretary-General of War and thoroughly reorganizing the Grand Armée. Napoléon
created Pierre Daru a count, calling him “a regular workhorse, a man of rare capacities,
my best administrator.” Meanwhile, tired of Henri hanging around without taking his
Polytechnique examination, Pierre gave him a clerk’s job in the War Office.

In May 1800, he was given the rank of second lieutenant of dragoons and sent to
Italy. There, Henri learned some Italian, became a fan of opera (especially Cimarosa and
Mozart) and the social scene at La Scala in Milan, and fell in love with Angela (Gina)
Pietragrua, a young lady described by one writer as “not conspicuously chaste.”
Nevertheless, it took eleven years and a return visit to Milan for Stendhal to have the
courage to make his declaration and for Angela to make him happy—briefly.

At the end of 1801, Stendhal left the army and for the next few years lived in
Paris, where he studied philosophy and English, saw plays, and fell in love with a young
actress, Mélanie Guilbert. As F.W.J. Hemmings puts it: “He went to extraordinary and
unnecessary lengths to triumph over her virtue: she had to wait until he had followed her
down to Marseilles, where she had a professional engagement, before he consented to be
her lover.” Henri stayed with Mélanie for almost a year in Marseilles, but was bored with
his job with a firm of exporters and was happy when the Darus called him back to
government service. Martial Daru, Pierre’s younger and wilder brother, took Henri with
him to occupied Brunswick; along the way they passed by a German town called
“Stendal” (without the “h”), which the aspiring writer, forever making up pseudonyms,
kept in mind.

The next few years saw Beyle rising in the service and in the social sphere. In
1809, he was sent on a mission to Vienna. Around this time, he fell deeply in love with
his benefactor Pierre Daru’s wife, Countess Alexandrine-Thérèse Daru; it was a
complicated, ambiguous, probably unconsummated relationship, with something of a
quest for a maternal figure involved. In the end, as one commentator has drily noted,
Henri failed to convince the Countess that she was in love with him. The slightly older

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woman became one of the inspirations for the character of Fabrice’s aunt Gina in The
Charterhouse of Parma.

During the next few years, Henri’s duties kept him in Paris or on assignment in
Milan. Among his responsibilities was checking the inventory for the new Louvre
museum. His social life was thriving, yet there was always an impulse to retreat from the
world. On 9 September 1810, he made an entry in his journal under the title “My Tower.”
He set forth a plan for a tower, with a drawing of the structure in the margin. It was to be
eighteen feet in diameter, sixty feet high, with a study surrounded by a circular balcony
and reached by 120 steps. This retreat would later be reimagined as Julien Sorel’s
condemned-man’s cell in The Red and the Black and Fabrice del Dongo’s Tour Farnèse
in Charterhouse.

In 1812, Beyle was sent to Russia with dispatches for Napoléon. He witnessed the
burning of Moscow and the disastrous retreat of the French Army, for which he was
placed in charge of provisioning. His disillusioning experiences with the troops made
their way into the Waterloo chapters of Charterhouse. After the fall of Paris in 1814,
Henri took up residence in Milan, where he remained until 1821 and first tried out the
pseudonym “Stendhal” in print.

During that time and fell passionately in love with the wife of a Polish officer,
Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski. He called her “Métilde,” and she was the great
unrequited love of his life and the inspiration for his 1822 book De l’amour (On Love),
which sold seventeen copies in the three years after it was published. Like Yeats’s Maud
Gonne, Métilde was a revolutionary, a part of the anti-Austrian carbonaro movement.
Henri stumbled over his excess of emotion, reacting in ways that invariably offended
her—tongue-tied or saying too much, tactlessly forward or inadequately direct, disguising
himself to meet her and then pretending not to see her. Something of Métilde appears in
the character of Clélia in Charterhouse.

By 1821, Beyle had managed to convince his liberal Italian friends that he was an
Austrian spy, while the Austrian authorities believed he was a radical carbonaro. He
returned to Paris and spent the rest of the decade as a relatively unsuccessful author and
an increasingly popular man of ideas who was welcome in various literary salons. Henri
enjoyed a two-year affair with the Countess Clémentine Curial; a shorter liaison with
Alberthe de Rubempré, a mistress of Delacroix; and a longer relationship with Giulia di
Rinieri, a young Italian woman living in Paris, who surprised him by declaring her love
for him. Stendhal actually proposed to Giulia, but her guardian turned him down.

In 1830, when the July Revolution was underway, Stendhal was correcting proofs
for The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir). It was as if all of his life had been a
apprenticeship for the making of that book, in his forty-seventh year. The novel and the
change of government improved his fortunes. He was appointed French consul at Trieste,
but the Austrian authorities had long memories, and Prince Metternich himself advised
the French government that the Court at Vienna would prefer some other representative
than this irreligious liberal.

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 So Beyle was transferred to the less-well-paid post at Civita-Vecchia, the busy but
provincial seaport for Rome, thirty miles from the Eternal City. In 1836, he was given
three months’ leave in Paris, which he extended to three years. On 4 November 1838,
Stendhal began dictating The Charterhouse of Parma; he completed it fifty-three days
later, on 26 December. The novel was published in two volumes in April 1839.

Balzac praised it as a “masterpiece of the literature of ideas,” “the novel that

Machiavelli would have written had he lived banished from Italy in the 19th century.” In
a letter of reply to Balzac’s praise of Chartreuse in La Revue Pariesienne, Stendhal stated
that many of the passages in the work were the original, unaltered dictations, and that the
style he preferred was underwritten rather than overwritten (he undoubtedly had
Chateaubriand and Hugo in mind).

Stendhal resumed his consular duties in August 1839, but his health began to
decline. He returned to Paris on medical leave and suffered a stroke while walking down
a street on 22 March 1842 and died the next day. He was fifty-nine years old.

***

Stendhal based The Charterhouse of Parma on a brief narrative he had brought

back from Italy, the Origin of the Greatness of the Farnese Family. The scrambled
historical account centered on Alessandro Farnese, who in 1834 became Pope Paul III. In
his wild youth, he was arrested for having abducted a noblewoman but escaped prison by
climbing down a rope provided for him through the help of Cardinal Roderigo Borgia,
the lover of Alessandro’s beautiful aunt Vandozza, who subsequently arranged for her
nephew to be appointed cardinal at the age of twenty-four. For much of his life,
Alessandro lived with an aristocratic woman named Cleria, which did not prevent him
from being elected to the papacy at the age of sixty-seven.

In Charterhouse, Alessandro, graced with freshness and naiveté, becomes Fabrice

del Dongo; Cleria assumes the folkloric archetype of the Compassionate Jailer’s
Daughter and becomes Clélia; while Roderigo Borgia and Aunt Vandozza become the
worldly lovers, Count Mosca and the Duchess Sanseverina. In the novel, these characters
continually engage in a complex dance of attraction and repulsion, distance and
commitment.

I’m setting aside for our discussion the nature of the relationships among the
principal characters. However, what strikes me most about them—what makes the novel
live for me—is how much of an interior life each exhibits (with the qualified exception of
Clélia). There is frequent self-questioning in the form of internal monologues,
particularly with Gina and Mosca, who second-guess themselves at critical moments.

Even the apparently unreflective Fabrice is forever weighing abstract concepts,

such as attempting to determine the meaning of heroism, as at Waterloo, and the reality
of love. As he asks in Chapter 13, “What they call love, … can that be just another lie?”

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Fabrice, as F.W.J. Hemmings has said, “has no ideal image of himself which he is
striving to realize.” Meanwhile, Clélia’s interior monologues seem often to lead her to
misreadings of her situation and those of Fabrice and the Duchess. She falls back,
ultimately, on her loyalty to her father and her vow to the Madonna never to see her
beloved, which, of course, doesn’t prevent sexual communion in the dark: “Entre ici, ami
de mon coeur.” [“Enter here, friend of my heart.” –Clelia to Fabrice, Chap. 28]

The tone, pace, and style of The Charterhouse of Parma has intrigued readers
since its publication. From the beginning, there was a sense that this was a new kind of
novel. Written in the Romantic Era, it offers few passages of descriptions of nature. The
decision was a conscious one on the part of Stendhal, who disliked the effusive, over-
emotional style of Chateaubriand or the poetically descriptive passages of Victor Hugo.

Instead, what Stendhal offers is a conversational voice, given to ironic comments,

that sounds like a bridge back to the witty, worldly salons of pre-Revolutionary Paris.
Although he styled him a Jacobin, Stendhal appreciated the aristocratic sense of humor
that he believed was one of the great losses in French cultural life after 1789. His satirical
eye was a product of his immersion in the plays of Molière, whose theatrical successor he
had once hoped to become.

Some critics have viewed Charterhouse as a proto-Realist novel because of the

precise, non-sentimental visual description and the probing of the major characters’
thoughts. If a category for Stendhal’s fiction is absolutely necessary, I’d like to suggest
the term “poetical realism,” which has used for the films of Marcel Carné and Jacques
Prévert—particularly Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), a 1945 masterpiece
of the so-called “Golden Age of French Cinéma” that involves tangled love interests set
against a vibrant recreation of 1820s and 1830s Parisian theatrical and criminal life.
There’s something Stendhalian about the detachment in that movie, and “poetical
realism” covers a lot of ground.

Stendhal issued a teaser of sorts for Charterhouse: the Waterloo scenes were
published in a newspaper before the novel appeared in print. The Waterloo material is
striking for its wealth of detail, its focus on an untested young man’s experience of the
sights and sounds of battle—a young man with no military bearing seeking glory, who
speaks suspiciously Italian-accented French and winds up arrested and sent to jail, who
cluelessly rides with Marshal Ney, who misses seeing Napoléon as he passes, and who,
of course, unknowingly follows his own father, “Comte d’A____, the Lieutenant Robert
of the 15th of May, 1796” (Chap. III, p. 53, Scott-Moncrieff).

Fabrice’s intensely personal, narrowly focused experience of Waterloo as

presented by Stendhal greatly influenced Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace: “At that
moment a shot struck the line of willows, through which it passed obliquely, and Fabrice
had the curious spectacle of all those little branches flying this way and that as though
mown down by a stroke of the scythe” (Chap. III, p. 46, (Scott-Moncrieff) “What seemed
to him horrible was a horse streaming with blood that was struggling on the ploughed
land, its hooves caught in its own entrails; … its blood ran down into the mire. ‘Ah! So

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now I am under fire at last!’ he said to himself. … Now I am a real soldier!” (Chap. III, p.
49, Scott-Moncrieff)

Fabrice is the product of a minimal education that leaves him under the sway of
omens and predictions for his future. Before his departure for Waterloo, for instance, he
sees an eagle, Napoléon’s bird, flying majestically north toward Switzerland and then
Paris. At the same time, the chestnut tree planted by his mother, has sprouted leaves in
the late winter. He visits the tree again later. Having escaped from jail in borrowed
clothes and identity as he approaches Waterloo, Fabrice concludes that “The omen is
clear, I shall suffer have much to suffer from prisons.” Of course, prison will become in a
sense his salvation.

Then there are the women. As his aunt the Countess Pietranera remarks when he
departs for war, “You should speak more respectfully of the sex that will make your
fortune.” A partial list of the women who figure in Fabrice’s life includes his mother, his
aunt Gina, the jailer’s wife, Anika and her sisters, the canteen-woman, Clélia Conti,
Marietta the actress, Fausta, and Annetta Marini.

Another theme that resonates in The Charterhouse of Parma and Stendhal’s life is
fathers and sons. Henri Beyle turned his back on his own father and eventually came to a
parting with his maternal grandfather. He revered—for a time—Napoléon and accepted
the career advancement in the Empire offered by his cousin Pierre Daru (even as he
courted his wife). Beyle was even seeking mentors in younger writers, such as Lord
Byron and Balzac.

In the world of La Chartreuse de Parme, Fabrice is a perpetual disappointment to

his conservative, powdered father-in-name and his arrogant older half-brother. He goes to
war seeking vainly glory with the Emperor but his true father-figure, Abbé Blanès,
remains a constant, if at times mistaken, prophetic voice. At Parma, Fabrice finds an
ambivalent substitute father in Count Mosca, who is at once his protector and bitter rival
who, in a fit of jealousy concerning Gina’s obvious love for her half-nephew,
contemplates stabbing the young man to death in her presence.

The principal setting of the novel is the northern Italian city of Parma, in the
Emilia-Romagna, then a minor princedom under Austrian domination. Its current
population is 192,836, about the size of Little Rock. But Stendhal’s Parma is and is not
the historical city. It actually bears some resemblance to Modena, also in the Emilia-
Romagna and in the modern era home to Ferrari and other sports car makers. The
reactionary prince, Ranuce-Ernest IV, who fears Jacobins under his bed and requires
nightly inspections, is Stendhal’s creation. Like Fabrice’s father, he requires men at his
court to signal their ancien-régime loyalty with powdered hair.

Political intrigue fills each day at the Court of Parma. Parties are meaningless, as
evidenced by the practical yet liberal-minded conservative minister Count Mosca (fly),
the petty social face of liberalism, La Raversi, and the authoritarian liberal, Count Conti,
governor of the prison of the citadel. Stendhal treats the political world of Parma, and by

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extension the political world of post-Congress of Vienna Europe, as an elaborate game,
best illustrated in Chapter 14, in which Count Mosca, playing his own game, omits the
crucial phrase “these unjust proceedings shall have no consequences in the future”
(242)—in a document the Duchess Sanseverina demands that Prince Ernest IV sign. “The
Prince thanked him,” the narrator notes, “with a quick glance as he signed.”

Above this Lilliputian princedom looms the Farnese Tower, a stand-in for the
dreaded Austrian prison the Spielberg, where notable Italian patriots were incarcerated.
But the Farnese Tower is a much a symbol of freedom and love as it is of imprisonment.
It is there, after all, where Fabrice and Clélia fall in love and communicate by their own
secret code, a repetition of the signals exchanged earlier between Fabrice and Aniken and
her sisters and a presage of the messages sent by Aunt Gina. Stendhal, who delighted in
disguises and changed identities, created his own coded language.

Marcel Proust was among the first to point out the sense of height, of altitude as a
spiritual quality in Stendhal’s works. In Charterhouse, Fabrice’s cell rests on top of the
Farnese Tower, which rests on top of the citadel, which dominates the city of Parma. At
the top of the tower, Fabrice finds both happiness and love. He had dreaded the tower
because it had appeared in an ominous vision of Abbé Blanès. But in the citadel, the
confinement, the concentration, and the immobility of prison life are intensified.
Strangely, this brings Fabrice and Clélia closer together than even the physical love they
experience near the end in the darkness. Both find completion in each other in their
confinement.

Regarding the heroine’s commitment to her promise to the Madonna, critic Judd
D. Hubert has argued that “Clélia, in consciously keeping her vow, actually succeeds in
preserving the absolute character of their mutual love. In refusing to see Fabrice in broad
daylight, that is without any separating partitions or obstacles, she is apparently striving
to return to that state of precarious innocence where her duty to save a young man as
innocent as herself somehow justified her love” (99).

The Charterhouse of Parma is infused with the spirit of Stendhal’s homemade

philosophy, Le Beylisme, which might be summed up in the phrase La Chasse de
Bonheur, or the pursuit of happiness. This quest is at the center of Stendhal’s numerous
affairs and his adoption of Italy as his spiritual home. It certainly describes Fabrice’s
moral journey and those of the other principal characters, only one of whom, Count
Mosca, survives.

I would suggest that La Chasse de Bonheur could also serve as the novel’s title
except for the fact that it would be too obvious. La Chartreuse de Parme is almost a
Hitchcockian McGuffin; it’s as mysterious as the title of Hilary Mantel’s novel of the
French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, and both mean about the same thing. The
physical Charterhouse, the monastery, appears only at the end of the novel—the place
where Fabrice, having lost his son and his beloved Clélia, retreats for one year and dies at
the age of twenty-nine. The pursuit of happiness leads to that place of greater safety, the
grave, or perhaps less dramatically to what Wallace Fowlie terms “a spirit of

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resignation.” Or, yet again, is it true freedom?

At the end of the novel, the narrator remarks: “The prisons of Parma were empty,
the Count immensely rich, and Ernest V was adored by his subjects, who compared his
government to that of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.” This sounds like a fairytale ending;
indeed, the critic Victor Brombert called the novel “a fairyland for adults only.” But is it
a happy ending? Have all the prisoners been freed—or hanged? Is Ernest V truly
adored—or loved because his subjects have no choice? And weren’t the Grand Dukes of
Tuscany arbitrary and absolute rulers?

The novel closes with a dedication, in English in the original: “TO THE HAPPY
FEW.” This phrase comes, not from Shakespeare’s Henry V (or at least not directly), but
from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, where the narrator refers to some
theological tracts he had published, saying that “as they never sold, I have the consolation
of thinking are read only by the happy Few.”

This was the audience Stendhal imagined himself addressing, those select readers
who could truly understand the meaning of Le Beylisme—those Léon Blum described a
century ago as “those who dare to be themselves, who neither bow down nor conform,
who … preserve the impulsive vigor of their original instincts” (103). The “Happy Few”
grasp the principle that the pursuit of happiness is not a goal to be gained at some point
along the way, but instead is a lifelong process. Roger Pearson suggests that “To the
Happy Few” stands as an invitation to revisit the novel and reanimate the characters. As
André Gide wrote: “Whenever we return, it’s a new book we read.”

***

WORKS RELIED ON

PRIMARY SOURCES

Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche,

2000).
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff (New York:
New American Library, 1962 [orig. 1925]).
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Modern Library, 1999).
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Roger Sturrock (London: Penguin
Books, 2006).

Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, trans. Roger Sturrock (New York: New
York Review Books, 2002).
Stendhal, The Private Diaries of Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), ed. & trans.
Robert Sage (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954).

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BIOGRAPHIES

Robert Alter, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1986).
Jonathan Keates, Stendhal (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997).

CRITICISM

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1952).
R.P. Blackmur, “Stendhal” in Selected Essays of R.P. Blackmur, ed. Denis
Donoghue (New York: Ecco Press, 1986).
Léon Blum, “A Theoretical Outline of ‘Beylism’” [1914], trans. Richard L.
Greeman, in Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. Brombert (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962).
Victor Brombert, “Introduction” in Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.
V. Brombert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962).
Wallace Fowlie, Stendhal (London: Macmillan Company, 1969).
Stephen Gilman, “The Tower as Emblem in The Charterhouse of Parma” in
Stendhal: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988).
F.W.J. Hemmings, Stendhal: A Study of His Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1964).
Judd Herbert, “The Devaluation of Reality in The Charterhouse of Parma” in
Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. Brombert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1962).
Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957).
Joseph Wood Krutch, Five Masters: A Study in the Mutations of the Novel (New
York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930).
Jean Starobinski, “Truth in Masquerade” in Stendhal: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. V. Brombert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962).
Michael Wood, Stendhal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1971.

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