The Charterhouse of Parma

In Chapter 6, the character of Count Mosca affects the shift in the novel: from the adventures of a young man in his first flush of action to a story about politics in a small provincial court. Fabrizio is still restless by the end of Chapter 5, when he paces around the carriage outside Milan and looks for an escape; he meets Clélia but does not yet know what he is looking for. By contrast, when Mosca meets Gina in Milan, he has already outlived his youth, which was also spent in Napoleon’s army years earlier in Spain. A world-weary Mosca cuts a comic figure in his pursuit of a still-spry Gina. Mosca laughs at his own return to youthful bashfulness in the opera, where he pursues Gina. Age is less important than outlook in differentiating Mosca’s character: he is “old” because he is pragmatic; for him, the political world is not about revolution versus stasis but is merely a game of power.

Chapters 6-7 introduce the motif of political game and political theater. The players of the Parmean court are introduced like figures on a chessboard. Because readers learn of these figures through Milanese gossip and summaries of letters exchanged between Mosca and Gina, the book conveys how even Mosca’s pragmatic outlook makes room for imaginative storytelling; the game of politics is a mentally stimulating diversion which, like theater, becomes enjoyable with detachment. Except when it comes to Gina, Mosca reasons as if playing chess. He is imaginative in his ability to foresee consequences but untroubled by the need to shift his tactics accordingly. He appreciates poetry, and so while he condemns a poet to death, he does not hope to capture that poet so that he may live. This separation between personal proclivities, perceived gestures, and actual actions captures the complexity of Mosca’s politics.

From Mosca’s perspective, Fabrizio’s characteristic “enthusiasm” amounts to a relative lack of his own form of flexibility, which is why Mosca doubts Fabrizio will be happy with a military life. Fabrizio is seeking spontaneous action, not the careful planning required of military careerists. Mosca has the foresight to see that Napoleonic soldiering and monkish renunciation answer to the same essential need in Fabrizio’s nature, and that Fabrizio is quite unlike Mosca himself, whose talent is to live in the world as it is.

The prison of Parma makes its first appearance in Chapter 7, giving physical embodiment to Fabrizio’s fears which developed in the first section of the book. It is telling that the first character present in the prison is nevertheless Gina, whose relationship with the Prince is beginning to take shape. The Prince is a provincial and monarchical figure, whose nearness to his subjects only increases the volatility of his vanity and barely-concealed sense of inferiority—particularly in front of Gina and to some extent Fabrizio. The Prince is especially fearful in the climate of an impending constitutional monarchy and with the barely repressed memory of the revolution; Absolutism is not secure, and the Prince’s character embodies this insecurity. Hints of the Prince’s provincial tyranny come in the scenes of Fabrizio’s Napoleonic adventures, in which he expects to meet with ruling royalty and be challenged over his passport. By Chapter 8, such nearness to power is stripped of its romantic allure and likened to Mosca’s unenviable intimacy with the Prince’s bedroom in his farcical “search for Liberals.”

An ironic narrative tone lightens the abuses of Parmean power to the extent that they can be easy to miss; these abuses include Rassi’s efforts to keep the jail full; Mosca’s sentencing to death of an absent poet; and the Prince’s hanging of two Liberals. Stendhal’s intent is not to dismiss the severity of historical realities; rather, he wishes to underscore the emptiness of political image and the arbitrariness of power. Fabrizio’s internal search for love and knowledge invites a different tone in Chapter 9, when he reflects on his life in the surroundings of the childhood home from which he is still exiled. Serving as the only extended insight into Fabrizio’s inner thoughts, these scenes offer a moment of poetic reflection through the object of the sublime lake, in which Fabrizio sees himself as if mirrored. The narrator’s intrusion reflects Gina’s warnings about clerical education that social criticism can lead to further ignorance when incomplete, or when one fails to see the object as a game. Like Fabrizio, the narrator’s willingness to penetrate into the depths of an issue or a character is limited, albeit willfully and consciously. Losing oneself—or the book—in reflection risks failing to see human life as it actually is: a game that means much less than what some might attach to it.

The reflective section of Chapter 9 is an important prefiguration in Fabrizio’s journey, if not toward greater knowledge than toward peace. He spends “the best day of his life” locked in the Abbé ’s tower, just as he will find happiness in jail in the second half of the book. Fabrizio’s state when fleeing Grianta is a symbol for the polarities of his character. Always on the lam and at the center of events, Fabrizio is nevertheless dreamy. What comes to intrude on Fabrizio’s resolve to live more meaningfully is a moral conundrum—namely, the theft of a horse that strikes him as an omen but is reasoned as necessary. When put to the test, Fabrizio reasons as Mosca does, so that his horse theft affects a transition from the sublime lake to the mental exercise of court intrigue. It also places Fabrizio back in the restless motion of border-crossing and escape that characterizes him until his final imprisonment.