This translation of _La Chartreuse de Parme_ has been made from the
reprint in two volumes of the first edition (Paris, Les éditions G.
Grès et Cie. MCMXXII), with reference also to the stereotyped edition
published by MM. Calmann Lévy and to the reprint issued by M.
Flammarion in his series, _Les meilleurs auteurs classiques_ (1921). I
am also indebted to the extremely literal version by Signora Maria Ortiz
(Biblioteca Sansoniana Straniera--_La Certosa di Parma_--G. C. Sansoni,
Firenze, 1922), which has thrown a ray of light on several dark
passages.
The _Chartreuse_ was written in (and not a distance of three hundred
leagues from) Paris, and in the short interval between November 4, 1838,
and December 26 of that year. So much the author reveals in a note,
which I do not translate: "The Char, made 4 novembre 1838--26 décembre
id. The 3 septembre 1838, I had the idea of the Char. I begined it after
a tour in Britanny, I suppose, or to the Havre. I begined the 4 nov.
till the 26 décembre. The 26 dec. I send the 6 énormes cahiers to Kol.
for les faire voir to the bookseller." His object in pretending to have
written the book in 1830 may have been to establish a prescriptive
immunity from any charge of traducing the government of Louis-Philippe;
if so, it is by a characteristic slip that he speaks of having written
it _towards the end of_ 1830.
Kol., otherwise Romain Colomb, Beyle's executor, relates in the _Notice
Biographique_ prefixed to _Armance_ that in January, 1839, while the
_Chartreuse_ was going through the press, a _cahier_ of sixty pages of the
manuscript was mislaid. Unable to find it among the mass of papers that
littered his room, Beyle rewrote the sixty pages, and the new version
was already in type when he told Colomb of his loss. Colomb at once
searched for and found the missing _cahier_, whereupon Beyle, "stupefied
by the ease of my discovery, dreading, in a sense, the sight of this
manuscript, would not even glance over it, much less compare it with the
pages that had taken its place."
It was published in March, 1839. In the same year, Beyle began to
correct, reduce and amplify the whole work, before he was moved by
Balzac's criticism to condense the first fifty-four pages into four or
five. Three copies thus annotated are in existence, one of which has
been reproduced in facsimile in an extremely limited edition: (Paris,
Edouard Champion, 3 vols. 1921--100 copies only.) In 1904 M. Casimir
Stryienski reprinted in the first volume of _Les Soirées du Stendhal
Club_ (Mercure de France) the two fragments of which a translation
follows. The first is intended for inclusion in Chapter V, in the brief
account of Fabrizio's convalescence at Amiens. Colonel Le Baron, the
wounded officer whom he met and left at the White Horse Inn at the end
of Chapter IV, is now re-introduced as returning to his family at
Amiens, and a story is told them which supersedes the account of General
Pietranera's death in Chapter II. The second fragment is a small
expansion of the already over-long Chapter VI.
Visitors to Parma will look in vain for most of the architectural
monuments which met the gaze of Fabrizio. The Torre Farnese has never
existed, though it may have been suggested, as to mass, by the huge
fragment of the Palazzo Farnese at Piacenza, as well as by the Castel
Sant'Angelo in Rome, and as to origin, by the story of Parisina and Ugo
d'Este, told in English by Gibbon and Byron. In appearance, it would
have been not unlike the tower, also damaged by an earthquake, which
stands in the background of Mantegna's fresco of the _Martyrdom of Saint
James_, in the Church of the Eremitani at Padua. The problem of how a
road running out of Parma to the south could lead directly to Sacca and
the Po is as insoluble as that of the guarded permission given to
Fabrizio in 1815 to read the novels of Walter Scott.
The Steccata of course exists, and the Church of San Giovanni, but the
latter is singularly bare of monumental tombs. There is even a
Charterhouse, at San Lazzaro Parmense, though it has escaped the
attention of Baedeker. There were Farnese, but the last of them died, of
the pleasures of the table, in 1731; a portrait of him in his corpulence
may be seen by the curious in the Reale Galleria in the Piletta--another
large Farnese Palace also unfinished. There is indeed a Cathedral, but
there is no Archbishop, and the Bishop's Palace is an untidy piece of
patched-up antiquity.
It is probable that Beyle was led to place the scene of his story at
Parma, which, in _Rome, Naples et Florence_, he had dismissed, not
unjustly, as _ville d'ailleurs assez plate_, precisely because there was
not, in 1838, any reigning _dynasty_ in that State. The Duchy of Parma was
held and admirably governed by Marie-Louise, the wife and widow of
Napoleon, from 1815 until after Beyle's death in 1843, when she was
still in the prime of life, being by some years his junior. Suddenly, in
1847, she died. The Bourbon dynasty, which had been transplanted to the
brief Kingdom of Etruria, and in 1814 had been placated with the
Republic of Lucca as a temporary Duchy (which Charles II had finally
sold, a few months earlier, to its legal heir, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany), returned, and rapidly converted Stendhal's fiction into
historical fact. Charles II was almost at once obliged to abdicate. His
son, Charles III, proceeded to emulate the career of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV
until, in 1854, he met a similar fate. His widow, a daughter of the Duc
de Berri, then acted as Regent for her son Robert I, until in 1859 the
Risorgimento swept them for ever from their Duchy. Duke Robert died in
1907, the father of twenty children, one of whom, Prince Sixte de
Bourbon-Parme, shewed in the late war some reflexion of the spirit of
Fabrizio del Dongo, as the curious English reader may find in my
translation of his _L'Autriche et la paix séparée_ (_Austria's Peace
Offer_, London, Constable and Co., Ltd., 1921). Another is the Empress
Zita, while a third has re-established the Bourbon dynasty in Northern
Europe by becoming the father of the Hereditary Grand Duke of
Luxembourg.
Francesco Hayez, the Milanese painter immortalised by his decoration of
the _palazzo_ Crescenzi and by his portrait of Fabrizio del Dongo, died
at a great age in 1882, having outlived the date appointed by Beyle for
his own immortality.