The Charterhouse of Parma

When Napoleon’s army invades Italy in 1796, a French lieutenant is billeted in the quarters of Milanese noblewomen, the Marchesa del Dongo and her husband’s sister, Gina. Despite the finery that separates the women from the soldiers, the Marchesa and her sister-in-law sympathize with the gaiety of the French in contrast to the “wary despotism” of the Austrian Empire (15). It is this absolutist spirit which the Marchese del Dongo fervently supports, so that while his sister marries a zealous supporter of Napoleon and his wife consorts with the lieutenant, he retreats to his countryside castle, Grianta. During this time, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, is born as the official son of the Marchese, although he was likely fathered by the French lieutenant.

Two years after the French invasion, recent rumors of Napoleon’s hanging are dispelled, and the Marchese retreats once more to Grianta, where Fabrizio spends the next ten years playing with peasant boys and visiting Gina’s fashionable salon in Milan. Under Gina’s influence, Fabrizio is awarded prizes at the Jesuit College where he studies. Torn between Milanese society and the staid castle of his father, Fabrizio takes to heart both his religious lessons and the ideas of the Napoleonic era. Fabrizio’s Latin tutor, Abbé Blanès, imports to him a fascination with omens that accompanies his adventurous spirit.

Having plotted the return of Austrian rule for years, the Marchese celebrates the entry into Italy of the Austrian army following Napoleon’s defeats of 1813. Despite this triumph, however, the Marchese is unable to perform his new role in government for lack of talent. When Gina’s husband comes under threat, she shows her contrast to her brother in her “firm character” (33). Forced to sever ties with a financial source in Milan and having lost her husband in a duel, Gina retreats to Grianta, where she deepens her relationship with the 16-year-old Fabrizio.

In 1815, when Napoleon escapes exile and enters France with thousands of troops, Fabrizio is determined to join him. To the joy and trepidation of his aunt, Fabrizio borrows the passport of a lower-class friend and journeys to Paris. In the first instance of Fabrizio’s direct speech, he tells Gina what the narrator calls his “slightly absurd” reasons for joining Napoleon: the flight of an eagle, which Fabrizio reads as an omen for his own flight to Paris, and a tree’s blossoming, in which he sees his emergence from “the torpor […] of this cold and melancholy castle” (41).

Fabrizio enters Paris expecting to meet Napoleon since, in his own provincial life, brushing shoulders with princes is commonplace. His naiveté results in disappointment and the loss of most of his money, but he manages to purchase a horse on which he rides to join the army, where he is imprisoned as a spy. For the month that Fabrizio spends in jail, he “understand[s] absolutely nothing of what was happening to him” (46). Impatient to join the fighting, Fabrizio escapes with the help of the jailer’s wife, who supplies him with a former prisoner’s passport. Fabrizio interprets this as an omen of his own future imprisonment.

Fabrizio is guided to the fighting at the Battle of Waterloo by a canteen woman, his now third benefactress after Gina and the jailer’s wife. She mistakes Fabrizio for a “civilian in love […] with some captain’s wife” and escorts him to a group of hussars (50). Under the battle’s cannonade, Fabrizio is so fearful that he is “anything but a hero,” but he is also overjoyed (58). He buys a bottle of brandy for his fellow soldiers in an effort to establish camaraderie but drinks too much and dozes off just as Napoleon appears. Fabrizio’s imagination is undeterred as he compares his group to those found in Renaissance stories. His company falls under the command of his mother’s erstwhile companion, the French Lieutenant, but neither character knows the identity of the other. The lieutenant’s company steals Fabrizio’s horse and leaves him despairing over the bonds he thought he had created.

Nearly starved, Fabrizio reunites with the canteen woman, who leads him to a corporal’s small regiment. His ignorance as a solider is clear, but he manages to fell an enemy attacker. The canteen woman reappears and, together with the corporal, asks Fabrizio about his true identity. The inquiry is familiar to Fabrizio, whose childhood was spent in a divided Italy policed by passports. He answers readily with only some elements of truth, including his imprisonment as a spy. Still indignant over the accusation, Fabrizio is finally disabused of his ideals when the corporal responds indifferently that, “in this war, everyone betrays everyone else” (78). Fabrizio continues to worry over the fact that he is hiding under the identity of a former prisoner, as if tempting fate.

The sudden appearance of enemy Cossacks separates Fabrizio from his protectors. He steals a horse from a soldier and reaches an inn, where he encounters cavalrymen who ask that he stand guard. At his watch, Fabrizio is determined to prove his mettle against a band of hussars, who wound him in a scuffle. Fabrizio recovers in the inn’s stable. Faint from blood loss, he flees a fire at the inn and is “freed […] from the whole romantic side of his character” (91). His romantic nature nevertheless reemerges as Fabrizio recalls the canteen woman with tears in his eyes, and the memory seems to summon yet another protector, a family of farmers who shelter him for two weeks. When soldiers appear to arrest him, Fabrizio escapes and writes tender farewell letters to the youngest sister.

Upon his return to Paris, Fabrizio receives a letter from Gina imploring him to retreat to Switzerland. Evading arrest twice more in his journey to Geneva, Fabrizio arrives to learn that he has been denounced by his elder brother as an informant to Napoleon. He receives the news with “the last part of him that remained a child”—namely, his enthusiasm to be inscribed into history: “I am supposed to have had the honor of speaking to a great man!” (96). Fabrizio sees his place taking shape within the book of family genealogy which he studied in his childhood and, as if returning to the 16th-century mores of his ancestors, does not leave Geneva without a tavern fight. In the fight, he acts on instinct by thrusting a dagger toward his foe rather than dueling.

Crossing the Italian border in the disguise of a hunter, Fabrizio reunites with his aunt and mother, with whom he shares “transports of tenderness” so difficult to conceal that the threesome embarks for Milan in order to hide from the Marchese (98). Just outside the city, police mistake Fabrizio for a man named Fabio Conti, who had failed to show his passport but is, like the others, ultimately released. A minister in nearby Parma, Conti arrives on foot in the company of his 12-year-old daughter, Clélia. Conti’s boastfulness is taken by Gina as a sign of commonness, but she and Fabrizio are both struck by his daughter, with whom Fabrizio exchanges glances and thinks, “she would know how to love” (102). During the ride to Milan, Clélia notices Gina’s interest in Fabrizio and receives from him a parting request that she remember his true name.

In Milan, Fabrizio is investigated by the honest but “cruelly reasonable” Baron Binder, who hints that, were Fabrizio not to flee the city, he would be imprisoned (106). Heeding the warning, Fabrizio disguises himself as a peasant and crosses the border into Romagnano while Gina works to gain the favor of the Baron by asking an acquaintance to intercede. This acquaintance is jealous of Fabrizio, a youth of “voluptuous charm” who has claimed Gina’s affection. Nevertheless, the acquaintance secures instructions for Fabrizio’s safe return to Milan (111). Fabrizio is ordered to spend a temporary exile attending mass, avoiding French papers and paying court to noblewomen. He agrees, having no need to protest the order “as would a bourgeois” (113). He spends his time in an isolation that does not trouble him, since there is “no room in his [naive and resolute] nature for the imitation of others” (113).