Reading Order
Charterhouse of ParmaThe Charterhouse of Parma Reading Order
The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839) by Stendhal is a novel of extraordinary lightness and speed — one of the most pleasurable long novels ever written. Fabrice del Dongo is a young Italian nobleman of illegitimate birth who goes to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo (experiencing the battle from ground level, in mud and confusion, in a way that directly influenced Tolstoy's battle scenes), returns to Italy, falls in love with several women, kills a man in a duel, is imprisoned in a tower and falls in love with the jailor's daughter Clelia, escapes, becomes a celebrated preacher, and eventually retires to the charterhouse of the title. The novel has none of The Red and the Black's darkness and psychological intensity — it has instead a romantic, almost fairy-tale quality, organized around charm and pleasure and the idea that the politics of the small Duchy of Parma are absurd by definition. Balzac called it 'the greatest novel of the century' in a famous review written immediately after its publication.
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The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
Complete Charterhouse of Parma Book List
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The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal·1839
Charterhouse of Parma — Frequently Asked Questions
Should I read The Red and the Black before The Charterhouse of Parma?
No — the two novels are completely independent and share no characters or settings. The Red and the Black (1830) is set in provincial France and Paris and is psychologically intense and somewhat dark; The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is set in Italy and has a lighter, more romantic, almost picaresque quality. Many readers prefer one to the other: those who like psychological intensity tend to prefer The Red and the Black; those who like pleasure and charm tend to prefer The Charterhouse. Reading either one first is fine, though The Red and the Black is more widely assigned and may be a better starting point if you are new to Stendhal.
Why did Balzac call The Charterhouse the greatest novel of the century?
Balzac's famous review, published in September 1840, was an act of critical generosity remarkable in literary history — a rival praising a contemporary with this degree of enthusiasm was almost unheard of. Balzac praised specifically Stendhal's psychological acuity, the speed and elegance of his prose, and the originality of his portrait of Italian political life. The review is also somewhat self-interested (Balzac was a social climber who needed the kind of Italian connections Stendhal had), but the praise was genuine. Balzac identified what he called the 'drama of the heart' as Stendhal's achievement — the ability to make emotional states as vivid as external events.
What is the Battle of Waterloo sequence in The Charterhouse of Parma?
The first major section of the novel follows Fabrice's adventure at Waterloo — a young man who has gone to join Napoleon's army and finds himself in the middle of a battle he cannot understand, surrounded by soldiers who don't know where the battle is, under fire from forces he cannot identify, uncertain whether he has even seen Napoleon. Stendhal's innovation is to refuse the panoramic view: the reader sees the battle from Fabrice's ground-level, confused, frightened perspective, and cannot reconstruct from that perspective what is happening strategically. Tolstoy read this section carefully and it directly shaped the Borodino chapters of War and Peace, where the same techniques are applied on a larger scale. Stephen Crane also acknowledged Stendhal's influence on his account of battle in The Red Badge of Courage.
What is the charterhouse of the title?
The charterhouse (Certosa or Chartreuse — a Carthusian monastery) appears only at the very end of the novel. After the death of Clelia and their son, Fabrice retires to the charterhouse of Parma, where he dies not long after. The title is characteristic of Stendhal's ironic relationship to his material: the thing the title names is barely present in the novel, which is dominated by action, passion, and politics rather than by religious retirement. The charterhouse is the destination that the novel's pleasures and disappointments lead to — the quiet after the noise.
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