The Charterhouse of Parma

“‘Speak more respectfully,’ said the Countess, smiling through her tears, ‘of the sex which will make your fortune; for you will always displease the men—you have too much spirit for prosaic souls.’” 

In the first significant exchange between Gina and Fabrizio on the eve of his departure for Waterloo, Gina makes a prescient remark about Fabrizio’s attachment to women—herself chief among them—as those who will guide and determine his fate. Men such as Mosca will indeed consider Fabrizio’s soul too enthusiastic, and here readers are given to see the cause of that view in Mosca’s own prosaic nature—that is, a lack of imagination that will be ambiguously valued throughout the novel.

“In this dispute, Fabrizio’s first impulse was quite that of the sixteenth century […] In this moment of passion, Fabrizio had forgotten all he had learned concerning the rules of honor and returned to instinct or to put it better to the memories of earliest childhood.” 

Fabrizio has taken to heart the 16th-century mores of which he reads in the family genealogy. The narrator explicitly labels his hero as one from another time, though he also links these past times with Fabrizio’s own childhood, as though he is instinctually and authentically shaped by a very distant past.

“Who ever thought to protest the absurdity of the rules of whist? Yet once one has grown used to the rules, it is great fun to take your adversary’s tricks.” 

Gina’s comments to the Marchesa del Dongo during her first acquaintance with Mosca betray her infatuation with this new life lesson that she will have occasion to repeat to her nephew. It is an apology for a certain way of thinking—not a critical or “philosophical” engagement with the broad principles of society but rather a negotiation of the game as its already been set. In such a game, Gina makes clear, heroes and villains trade places easily, just as one or the other’s tactics become useful.

“Absolute power has the advantage that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people; now, what is an absurdity which no one perceives?” 

Mosca’s comments justifying the first scheme he shares with Gina to marry the Duke Sanseverina introduces the themes of Absolutism while building on Gina’s own insights about politics as a game. Realities are conjured by fiat, and consensus is all that matters. To Mosca, the “lie” of a certain image or scheme is non-existent in so far as no one recognizes it as such.

“This Prince was by no means a bad man, whatever the Italian Liberals might say of him. In truth, he had thrown into his prisons a considerable number of them, but this was out of fear, and he sometimes murmured as if to console himself for certain memories: ‘Better to kill the Devil than let the Devil kill us.’” 

The Prince’s consolation phrase comes from the French, readers are later told, and is repeated by Fabrizio, conveying the ubiquity of a politics of fear across the novel’s characters. The first sentence indicates a general move of the novel, which is to show the weakness of the powerful apart from their image. This humanization lends nuance to the nature of politics as such.

“In his instance […] Fabrizio happened to believe virtually everything we have heard him say; it is true that he never thought more than twice a month about such broad principles. He had lively tastes, he had a certain amount of wit, but he also had faith.” 

Fabrizio rattles off slogans of Absolutism in his first encounter with the Prince of Parma that are perhaps shocking to hear from this erstwhile Napoleonic soldier. Lest one mistake Fabrizio’s comments for tactics, the narrator is insistent that they are genuine, which forces readers once more to complicate clear distinctions between the Prince and Fabrizio, or Absolutism and revolution. Much as Gina does not reflect on the rules of the game, Fabrizio by nature does not consider “broad principles” and, when he does, the kind of faith that informs his belief in omens and his general passion makes him loyal to much of what is said around him.

“Really, he told himself, that countenance combines an extreme sweetness of expression with a certain tender and naive joy which makes it irresistible. It seems to say: there is nothing but love and the happiness it bestows which were serious matters in this world. And yet were we to stumble over some detail in which the mind might be necessary, its vigilance wakens and astonishes you, and you are left dumbfounded. […] Everything is simple in his eyes because everything is seen from such a height. Good God! How to oppose such a foe?” 

Mosca puts himself in the position of someone who might desire Fabrizio, and he understands him, especially in contrast to his own desirability. Whereas Fabrizio seems to exist above the world, Mosca is immersed within its very mechanisms; whereas Fabrizio is attached to ideals, Mosca claims the privilege of rational calculation, though Fabrizio can also be surprisingly reasonable when necessary. Fabrizio’s simplicity is associated with a high vantage point that he will ultimately occupy. Such distant views are distinct from Mosca’s emphatically close perspective.

“He was far from devoting time to patient consideration of the real particularities of things in order to divine their true causes. Reality still seemed to him flat and muddy; I can agree that one is not fond of considering it, but then one ought not to reason about it. Above all, one ought not to raise objections against it with the various fragments of one’s ignorance.” 

The narrator’s philosophy emerges in these comments on Fabrizio’s attempts to criticize the world of court life and religious rankings. It is a broader comment on the 19th-century social dynamics of Stendhal’s day, suggesting that reality can be truly critiqued only by including oneself in the critique, as shown by Fabrizio’s lack of awareness of his own religious hypocrisy. This is also an important statement on “reality” in a novel known for its contributions to the literary style known as realism, here designated in contrast to the romantic flights of fancy expressed in Fabrizio’s imagination. It is suggested that reality ought not to be seen merely in terms of this contrast, but as a complex picture in its own right.

“All the memories of his childhood laid siege to his mind, and this day spent shut up in a belfry was perhaps one of the happiest of his life. Happiness carried him to a zenith of thoughts quite alien to his character; he considered the events of his young life as if he had already reached its ultimate limits.” 

Fabrizio’s symbolic return to childhood in his visit to the Abbé prefigures his happiness in the Farnese Tower. But here, Fabrizio is also near to his origin as well as his end. In a departure from his character as the novel’s acting hero, Fabrizio relates to himself as if he is his own narrator, seeing his life as an already-completed story.

“‘Ah, now if I were to reason like Mosca,’ Fabrizio said to himself, ‘when he keeps telling me that the dangers a man runs are always the measure of his rights over his neighbor, I would blow this footman’s brains out, and no sooner mounted on the thin horse, I would defy all the police in the world. No sooner back in Parma, I would send money to this man, or to his widow…. But it would be the act of a monster!’” 

In a time of crisis Fabrizio appeals to Mosca’s political reasoning, summarized as the dependence of one person’s safety on their power over another. In other words, a person can and should save oneself by demanding things from the person who is nearest. These demands are seen as rightfully owed to the person in trouble, whether by rank or by need. Fabrizio takes that logic to its conclusion in his current situation and rejects it on moral grounds, though he will at other times argue on its behalf.

“Your story’s a good one, but the opportunity of performing such entertaining feats occurs only once in a decade. Any fellow with half a brain who’s aware of what he’s doing and keeps his eyes open often enjoys the pleasure of getting the better of men of imagination. […] In every age, a base Sancho Panza triumphs over a sublime Don Quixote.” 

Mosca makes an important distinction between himself and Fabrizio, who represent reason and imagination, respectively. They are like two famous characters from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote—a novel that famously mocks court romance in much the same way that The Charterhouse of Parma comments on Renaissance tales. Quixote is the quintessential romantic, and Panza is the realist.

“‘I haven’t changed one bit,’ he said to himself; ‘all those fine resolutions I made at our lake shore when I was looking at life so philosophically have evaporated. My soul was wandering at the time; it was all a dream and dissolves at the touch of real life.’” 

As another comment on the romantic view of reality as disappointment, Fabrizio’s self-reflection points to the tensions in his changeless character prior to the transformation of prison. Change will not happen by means of romantic self-inquiry. Rather, it happens externally, through epiphany, circumstance, or other people.

“[H]e did not appear the least surprised by this incident, but took the matter like a true grand seigneur who quite naturally believed he was invariably entitled to such extraordinary advancements, to these strokes of fortune which would unhinge any bourgeois person; he referred to this gratitude, but in moderate terms…” 

Fabrizio’s sense of self-worth is contrasted with the unhinged bourgeois person on matters of promotion. Throughout the novel, the good fortunes that befall Fabrizio are no more surprising than the ill, which gives him an enviably coherent character despite all the changes of fortune that surround him.

“The presence of danger bestows genius upon the man of reason; it raises him, so to speak, above himself; in the man of imagination it inspires romantic notions, bold it is true, but frequently absurd.” 

The narrator echoes a distinction between reason and imagination central to the novel. The allure of romantic heroes the novel draws upon in the image of Fabrizio has its own degree of absurdity. This is a moment in which the novel calls into question its own romantic attachments.

“Many further protestations were required to convince Ludovic to speak, and when he finally determined to do so, he began with a preface lasting a good five minutes. Fabrizio grew impatient, then reasoned with himself: ‘Who’s at fault here? It’s all due to our vanity, which this man has seen quite clearly from his seat on the box.’ At last Ludovic’s devotion persuaded him to risk speaking plainly.” 

A key moment in the book’s reflections on class, Fabrizio’s insights into Ludovic’s hesitancy in speaking to him directly further underscores the class-based nature of such character traits as confidence, coherence of speech, and self-presentation. Linking the theme of vanity so evident in the court of Parma to such issues, Fabrizio gives credence to the point of view of the servants, from which that vanity is hardly concealed. No wonder one would seek to avoid perturbing those who are so easily and unpredictably perturbed—and no wonder that those without power would need to do so for their own survival.

“[O]ddly enough, this ex-coachman had passions and visions that were lively and picturesque; they turned cold and commonplace as soon as he wrote them down. ‘It’s just the opposite of what we see in society,’ mused Fabrizio; ‘nowadays we can express anything and everything gracefully enough, but our hearts have nothing to say.’” 

Ludovic’s poetic talents are confined to oral speech and do not translate into the printed word. On the contrary, nobles can render anything “printed” by giving it an articulate turn-of-phrase even as they are at a loss to come up with a notion or a feeling spontaneously—one that is truly their own. The differences in poetic ability speak to the artificiality of society under a monarchy. They also draw Fabrizio close to a view of the lower classes in his own characteristic spontaneity.

“Such is the triumph of a Jesuitical education: to form the habit of not paying attention to matters more obvious than the nose on one’s face. A Frenchman, brought up among features of personal interest and of Parisian irony, might I good faith have accused Fabrizio of hypocrisy at the very moment when our hero was opening his heart to God with the deepest sincerity and the profoundest emotional transport.” 

One of several interjections from the narrator on the nature of Italians and that of the French, these comments are intended to cultivate readers’ understanding for mores of a different time and a different nationality. Irony and criticism are the more broadly 19th-century values that Fabrizio so oddly opposes. Readers are also asked to apply their own ironic touch—if lightly—to the novel’s characters, as does the narrator.

“‘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?’”

Alluding to major characters of Shakespearean tragedy, Fabrizio’s complaint over his own lack of love lays the blame at the feet of literature. Literature cultivates impossible ideals—especially romantic literature—and sets standards which, in an age where the needs of the body are seen, unromantically, to outweigh those of the spirit, cannot be met. It is important to remember that, for all of Fabrizio’s romantic aspects, he feels lust but not love and worries that he is ruled by little more than the pleasures of the flesh.

“[A]t last this proud beauty will be humbled! She was all too unendurable with her little airs of independence! Those expressive eyes always seemed to be telling me, whenever the slightest thing annoyed her, Naples and Milan would provide a sojourn much more agreeable than your little town of Parma.” 

The Prince’s vengeance upon Gina derives from a sense of superiority, which in turn derives from his own sense of inferiority. Gina threatened his inferiority complex from her first appearance in Parma in Chapter 7. This inner speech gives readers insight into a monarch riddled with insecurity as the other side of vanity. The Prince gives speech to expressions based on his own black fantasies.

“It must be admitted that the Count is neither self-important nor pedantic; he never tempts me to deceive him; in my presence he always seems to be ashamed of his own powers… What a figure he cut in the presence of his lord and master; if he were here I would throw my arms around him… But for nothing in the world would I take it upon myself to console a Minister who has lost his portfolio…”

Gina’s clear-eyed assessment of Mosca in the wake of her fateful audience with the Prince illuminates the basic division in his character. He diminishes his own powers in front of Gina and rightfully sees them as a threat to her attachment to him. This self-diminishment is what initially drew Gina to Mosca, but it competes with the side of him that is merely or at least primarily a minister. What Gina disdains to see is not Mosca in a position of power, but rather in his groveling before the Prince. That groveling is the nature and the source of his power.

“As much as the Duchess appeared brilliant, sparkling with wit and malice, passionately attaching herself, so to speak, to every subject the course of conversation brought before the eyes of her soul, just so much Clelia showed herself to be calm and slow to catch fire, whether out of disdain for what surrounded her, or out of regret for some absent chimera.” 

Clelia is contrasted with the trait of the del Dongo family that Gina and Fabrizio share—namely, a passionate attachment to the things that pass before their eyes. Her sense of remove from the world is what Fabrizio will begin to acquire as well. The reasons for that remove in Clelia waver between class-based or religious superiority, on the one hand, and romantic longing, on the other.

“Courtiers, who have nothing to examine in their souls, notice everything.” 

A comment on the rumors surrounding Clelia’s transformation after Fabrizio’s imprisonment, this witticism draws upon the novel’s themes of image and looking. Also at stake is the ambiguous value of self-reflection, which at times seems to be warranted and at times—when it is half-baked—rejected by the narrator’s implicit or overt judgments. It accounts for Mosca’s perceptiveness and interest in others, as well as Fabrizio’s ignorance and abiding self-concern.

“The evening of that day when he had not seen his lovely neighbor, a great idea occurred to him: with the iron cross of the rosary given to each prisoner upon entering prison, he began, and successfully, to bore a hole in the blind.” 

Fabrizio’s choice of tools in creating the opening in his window transforms his clerical profession into an instrument for a more earthly love. As the symbol of that profession, the iron cross is also a symbol of crime and repentance: it is issued to all prisoners equally. Rather than counting his prayers on the rosary, Fabrizio makes his amends by seeking meaningful communication, perhaps for the first time.