Romanticism

The Charter House of Parma

By: Stendhal

Synopsis

The book begins with the French army sweeping into Milan and stirring up the sleepy region of Lombardy, allied with Austria. Fabrice grows up in the context of the intrigues and alliances for and against the French—his father the Marchese comically fancies himself a spy for the Viennese. The novel's early section describes Fabrice's rather quixotic effort to join Napoleon when the latter returns to France in March 1815 (the Hundred Days). Fabrice at seventeen is idealistic, rather naive, and speaks poor French. However he won't be stopped, and he leaves his home on Lake Como and travels north under false papers. He wanders through France, losing money and horses at a fast rate. He is imprisoned as a spy, he escapes, dons the uniform of a dead French hussar, and in his excitement to play the role of a French soldier, wanders onto the field of battle at the Battle of Waterloo.

Fabrice having returned to Lake Como, the novel now divides its attention between him and his aunt (his father's sister), Gina. Gina meets and befriends the Prime Minister of Parma, Count Mosca. Count Mosca proposes that Gina marry a wealthy old man, who will be out of the country for many years as an ambassador, so she and Count Mosca can be lovers while living under the social rules of the time. Gina's response is: "But you realize that what you are suggesting is utterly immoral?" She agrees, and so a few months later, Gina is the new social eminence in Parma's rather small aristocratic elite.

After several years in Naples, during which he has many affairs with local women, Fabrice returns to Parma and shortly gets involved with a young actress whose manager/lover takes offense and tries to kill Fabrice. In the resulting fight Fabrice kills the man and then flees Parma, fearing, rightly, that he will not be treated justly by the courts. However, his efforts to avoid capture are unsuccessful, and he is brought back to Parma and imprisoned in the Farnese Tower, the tallest tower in the city. His aunt, Gina, in great distress at what she feels will lead to Fabrice's certain death, goes to plead the Prince for his life. The Prince is alienated by Gina's dignity and refusal to yield. He seems to agree to free Fabrice - signing a written note from which Mosca, in an effort to be diplomatic, has omitted the possibly crucial phrase unjust procedure. The following morning, he arranges for Fabrice to be condemned to a very long prison term.

For the next nine months Gina schemes to have Fabrice freed and manages to get secret messages relayed to him in the tower, in part by means of an improvised semaphore line. The Prince keeps hinting that Fabrice is going to be executed (or poisoned) as a way to put pressure on Gina. Meanwhile, Fabrice is oblivious to his danger and is living happily because he has fallen in love with the commandant's daughter, Clélia Conti, who he can see from his prison window as she tends her caged birds. They fall in love, and after some time he persuades her to communicate with him by means of letters of the alphabet printed on sheets ripped from a book.

Gina finally helps Fabrice escape from the Tower by having Clélia smuggle three long ropes to him. The only thing that concerns Fabrice is whether he will be able to meet Clélia after he escapes. But Clélia - who has feelings of guilt because the plot involved laudanum to her father, which she perceived as poison - promises the Virgin that she shall never see Fabrice again and will do anything her father says.

Gina leaves Parma and puts in motion a plan to have the Prince of Parma assassinated. Count Mosca stays in Parma, and when the Prince does die (poisoned, it is strongly implied, by Gina's poet/bandit/assassin) he puts down an attempted revolt by some local revolutionaries and gets the son of the Prince installed on the throne. Fabrice voluntarily returns to the Farnese Tower to see Clélia and is almost poisoned there. To save him, Gina promises to give herself to the new Prince. She keeps her promise but immediately leaves Parma afterwards. Gina never returns to Parma, but she marries Count Mosca. Clélia, to help her father who was disgraced by Fabrice's escape, marries the wealthy man her father has chosen for her, and so she and Fabrice live unhappily because of the promise she made to never see him again.

Once he is acquitted of murdering the actress's manager/lover, Fabrice assumes his duties as a powerful man of the Catholic Church and a preacher whose sermons become the talk of the town. The only reason he gives these sermons, Fabrice says, is in the hope that Clélia will come to one and he can see her and speak to her. After 14 months of suffering for both, she agrees to meet with him every night, but only on the condition that it is in darkness, lest she break her vow to the Madonna to never see him again and they both be punished for her sin. A year later she bears Fabrice's child. When the boy is two years old, Fabrice insists that he should take care of him in the future, because he is feeling lonely and suffers that his own child won't love him. The plan he and Clélia devise is to fake the child's illness and death and then establish him secretly in a large house nearby, where Fabrice and Clélia can come to see him each day. As it turns out, after several months the child actually does die, and Clélia dies a few months after that. After her death, Fabrice retires to the Charterhouse of Parma, which gives the book its title, where he spends less than a year before he also dies. Gina, the Countess Mosca, who had always loved Fabrice, dies a short time after that.

Criticism

This novel of Stendhal expressed a great emotion from the beginning until the end. Most especially the strong feelings of the protagonists, Fabrice del Dongo which prevails in the entire novel, it also explicitly shows the struggles as well as the tragic fate of the major characters wherein death is the conclusion. Fabrice experienced such intolerable precadiments along his life based on the story, from the time that he started to dream of joining Napoleon in a battle and the struggles that he had been through like travelling with illegal papers, imprisoned for being a spy and his difficulties in French language. All of the sudden fragments of his life were characterized with highest emotional impact that can set up the mood of the readers and caught their interest. The falling action and the resolution of the story shows the aesthetic value of the text when  he met his lover, Clélia the one who helped her escaped from imprisonment, she was later on pressured by the case filed against her father for her involvement in Fabrice's escape. She was later on married to a wealthy man and promised not to see Fabrice again yet, they met again only in dim when they can't see each other. They begot a son which eventually died and after a few months, followed by Clélia until time came also for Fabrice to pass away.