Stendhal’s ‘Chroniques Italiennes’

Guido Reni’s portrait of a woman believed to be Beatrice Cenci,
heroine of one of Stendhal’s Chronicles
(among many other works)

Stendhal’s Chroniques Italiennes (Italian Chronicles, 1836–39) — a collection primarily comprised of short stories based in historical fact, translated from Renaissance-era documents purchased in Italy by the author “at great expense” while he was French consul at Civitavecchia — is actually a good deal looser and more complex than that description would lead a reader to believe. For starters, editors disagree over precisely which stories to include in the collection, and what to call it. The edition I read opted to lump all the rest under the title of the longest story, “L’Abbesse de Castro,” which hardly strikes me as an ideal solution, since that piece is heavy slogging indeed and delayed my reading by several weeks: is this really the one the editors wanted to place ahead of all the rest?

There’s also the matter of how much Stendhal merely translated and how much of his own language and storytelling power he added to his work. What’s inarguable, and quite exciting to anyone, like me, who is in the blissful process of discovering Stendhal, is that the Chroniques open a window onto the author’s tastes and preoccupations. We see what kind of story appealed to him (not least because there were presumably a number of other stories among the manuscripts that he did not translate), and what prose style he aimed at (one with as little Romantic folderol as possible, as he acknowledges in the text).*

Naturally, then, there’s an abundance of the passions we like best in Stendhal’s fiction: rape, incest, vengeance, brigandage, revolt, unjust imprisonment, daring escapes, political machinations, and lots and lots of blood. Best of all, Stendhal suggests, it’s all true.

The twisty intrigues that dominate La Chartreuse de Parme (itself heavily indebted to Renaissance histories) can be seen taking root in the Chroniques, one of which, like Chartreuse, is set in post-Napoleonic Italy, nearly contemporary to Stendhal. We can likewise see the gestation of his favored heroic type: handsome, passionate, and unlucky. Curiously, however, all the Chroniques take female characters as their protagonists. While they’re not much different from their lovers in these stories, they don’t much resemble Clélia in Chartreuse or either of Julien Sorel’s lady loves.

Stendhal writes admiringly of anyone who displays the Italian attribute of virtù, a word he insisted was untranslatable: in these stories, it’s a kind of poised yet passionate derring-do in the pursuit of duty or destiny, right or wrong. And I underscore that this conduct need be neither wise nor moral in order to win the author’s approval: even Francesco Cenci displays virtù by sleeping with his daughter, Beatrice, who in turn displays it by murdering her father. While Stendhal insists that French people don’t know the meaning of the idea, much less the word, and declares that his countrymen are far more inclined to do something merely because it will impress the neighbors, he nevertheless depicts Le Rouge et le Noir’s Julien as a paragon of this kind of virtù.

Stendhal — whose De l’amour (On Love) must now rise to the top of my must-read list — kept both Rouge et le Noir and Chartreuse hopping with sexual shenanigans. Yet what struck me about the Chroniques was the unexpected ambiguity of so many of the relations depicted. The titular Abbess and her beloved bandito, for example, spend so much time not going to bed that ultimately one wonders whether either of them really wants to: they talk about passion without acting on it. When the Abbess finally loses her virginity,** she’s motivated as much out of curiosity and spite as anything else; it’s unclear whether her boyfriend ever does get laid. The contemporary heroine, Vanina Vanini, falls for her man, a fugitive rebel, when he’s disguised as a girl; later, in attempting to rescue him, she disguises herself as a man. (The Abbess also dons drag, at one point.) Again and again, the characters in the Chroniques are less easily defined, sexually, than the lusty denizens of Stendhal’s better-known novels.

For those who are looking to dip a toe into the waters of Stendhal’s works, the Chroniques may be a good start: even the longest, “L’Abbesse,” is just over 100 pages, and the other stories are quite short; most zip along entertainingly to their climaxes. And for those who have already caught the Stendhal bug, there’s plenty here to help you understand the master’s longer works.



*NOTE: Stendhal snipes at French authors of his own day, who made a fad of writing bodice-rippers set in Italy, and who, from sheer laziness, in his estimation, attempted to convey passionate character through the use of Italian names. Accordingly, Stendhal gives his characters the French equivalents of their Italian names — and we can understand better why the hero of Chartreuse is Fabrice, not Fabrizio.

**When the Abbess finally loses her virginity, it’s to a bishop, and like the heroine of a TV soap opera, she immediately gets pregnant. Stendhal’s attitude toward the clergy — Napoleonic at heart, skeptical at best — is evident throughout these Chronicles, not only in matters sexual but also in frequent allusions to corruption in the Papal courts — which during Stendhal’s tenure in Civitavecchia considered him highly suspicious.

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A Fan’s Notes, or Stendhal’s ‘Life of Rossini’

Barry Banks and Joyce DiDonato in Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Tomorrow, March 6, Joyce makes her Carnegie Hall recital debut — and yep, she’s singing some Rossini.

Lest my readers think I am a freakish prodigy who breezes through masterworks of French literature like so many bonbons, I now confess that, in recent months, I have left off reading Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini (The Life of Gioacchino Rossini). And yet what follows is less an admission of defeat than a progress report, because I suspect that I have stopped reading now simply for the pleasure of returning to the book again later and discovering fresh chapters. After all, pleasure is one of Stendhal’s principal themes here, and he makes the case that it’s Rossini’s main purpose, too.

The great composer was still young and actively producing, with some of his best work ahead of him, when Stendhal set about writing this biography, which mixes in detailed descriptions of most of Rossini’s operas and many individual performers and performances. This is all the more impressive since Stendhal didn’t read music or play an instrument, and didn’t have access to recordings that might have helped him to remember more accurately a singer he heard years earlier. He must have been a phenomenal note-taker.*

Rossini the Rock Star:
At last, a Stendhal hero whom Gérard Philipe did not portray.

The book doesn’t much resemble a standard scholarly work, and it’s crammed with titillating gossip, tall-tale exaggerations, factual errors, and passionate enthusiasms. I was tempted to compile the more brilliant critical analyses, such as this one, worthy of Anna Russell: when attending an Italian opera, Stendhal advises us, it’s best to pay no attention to the lyrics and to make up one’s own libretto instead.

Or, elsewhere, “Even in music, in order to be happy, one must not break down and study a thing too closely: here is what the French don’t want to understand; their way of enjoying the arts is to criticize them.” (Boy, is that true today.) And perhaps my favorite: “Fortunate Italie! It’s only there that they know what love is.”

Marilyn Horne in Il Turco in Italia at the Met.
Luckily, one of her performances is preserved on DVD, and it’s beyond brilliant.

Stendhal’s eye for comedy is as sharp here as it is in his novels, then, and he makes of the composer a Romantic hero, something on the lines of his Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo (albeit far less ineffectual than either one). Writing like a true fan, he’s often so carried away that he can’t find any better description for a piece of music than to say that it is “the freshest, most delightful work ever heard,” even though he says that about half a dozen other arias, only pages before.

Lawrence Brownlee and Joyce DiDonato in Cenerentola,
Houston Grand Opera.
This is probably my favorite moment in the production.

You know you’re reading nobody but Stendhal as he grinds certain of his other usual axes, including swipes at Italian politics and at French mores (and critics and audiences). Modern readers will find his taste for Cimarosa and Paisiello puzzling, like his equally quaint-seeming resistance to the dominant trend of early-19th-century music: Rossini’s great failing, he says, is in becoming too “German,” or too interested in orchestral effects, as his career progresses. Stendhal prefers “mélodie” (the vocal line) over “harmonie” (the orchestral part), and he blames Beethoven, and what he sees as a near-universal misunderstanding of Mozart’s work, for the shifting balance.**

Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce DiDonato in La Donna del Lago
Ask Joyce sometime about stage directors who ignore the lyrics
and make up their own libretto.

Yet even when Stendhal is cranky, he’s entertaining company. I sensed in him a spirit kindred to my own, immersing himself in music for the sheer pleasure of it, eager to explore every corner. I began to imagine myself writing a “Vie de Mark Adamo” or “Vie de Jorge Martín,” dropping into my narrative such useful and attractive phrases as “Many times have I heard the composer say” and “The dear maestro told me,” just as Stendhal writes, until he and Rossini seem a sort of transplanted Boswell and Dr. Johnson.

Stendhal in his consular uniform.

And therein lies the most glorious joke of the whole book. Writing for an audience of Englishmen, but lacking any musical expertise whatsoever, Stendhal seems to have felt the need to beef up his credentials, and perhaps he figured the odds were against his being found out. He gives a reader every indication that he and the composer are intimate friends. Yet Rossini — living in Paris by the time the book was published there (to his chagrin) — claimed never to have met Stendhal, and even the author’s defenders can point to only a few occasions when the two men may have crossed paths.

Rossini retired to Paris, where he ate very, very well.
(Also, that’s not his real hair.)

In short, Rossini was a 19th-century rock star, and Stendhal was his stalker. The Vie is the journal-cum-scrapbook of an obsessive fan.

As dear James Franco was saying just the other day — and as I have indeed heard him say many times — “Why would you want to write a ‘Vie de William Bolcom’ when you could write about me?”

Vivica Genaux as Rosina in Barbiere.
Personally, I think she ought to wear this outfit around town.

*NOTE: Marcel Proust wrote beautifully about music, of course, without having any particular musical ability himself. It’s said that he used to wake friends in the middle of the night, so that they could play him a piece of music about which he wanted to write. I’d like to think that Stendhal did something similar, but I have no evidence of it.

**Somewhat more broad-mindedly, Stendhal writes, “No matter the state of perfection to which we have carried all the arts, we must expect that posterity will have the impertinence to invent something, too.”

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Stendhal’s ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’

Stendhal: The face is familiar,
but the name doesn’t ring a Beyle.

Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) is a very long novel that, somehow, manages to reach its titular destina­tion only in the closing paragraph, and never does quite get around to explaining exactly what a Charterhouse is. His contempo­raries were presumed to know already; the dictionary tells me that it’s a monastic retreat connected to the austere Carthusian order. For the modern reader, the title is above all a sort of shaggy dog, an indication that the telling of this story will be as important as anything in the story itself. I suspect that’s one reason the novel is a favorite of other novelists.

In the Citadel: A scene from the 1948 film

And for a long central portion, in which the hero, Fabrice del Dongo, is imprisoned in a tower, language becomes a central concern. He communicates with the two women he loves by signs, and often in code. With Clélia Conti, the daughter of the prison’s governor, he uses alphabet flashcards, he at his window and she at hers. They also sing to each other. Gina, his mentor and aunt, is forbidden to come near the prison, so she stands on a hilltop and flashes a light at him — all night. I could understand why semioticians would be drawn to these scenes. While Fabrice is imprisoned, written messages are conveyed in a basket of food, in a hollow metal ball, and like a gloss in the margins of a prayer book; when he’s in the Parmesan court, communications are even subtler. No gesture is insignificant, and Fabrice is lucky to know Count Mosca, his aunt’s lover, a brilliant tactician and analyst.

Fabrice doesn’t have the benefit of Mosca’s advice when it comes to Clélia, however, and Stendhal gives us to understand that interpreting the meaning of the words of a beautiful but pious girl is an especially difficult undertaking. But Fabrice is pretty clueless most of the time: the novel opens with his sneaking off to France to join Napoleon’s army, but when he gets to Waterloo, he can’t even be sure he’s taking part in the battle. So much for our hero’s heroism.

Clélia (Renée Faure) and Fabrice (Gérard Philipe)

Fabrice’s admiration of Napoleon — and the troubles that admiration engenders — draws a parallel to Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and very often the reader gets the impression that the author is reworking certain ideas. In both books, the hero joins the Roman Catholic clergy with a view to social advancement; neither fellow sees any reason to abstain from feminine charms. Both are imprisoned on charges pertaining to murder, and both sentences are unduly harsh for political reasons. It’s in prison that each man discovers true love, to the point that neither wants to leave captivity. That the same actor, Gérard Philipe, played both characters in classic film adaptations seems only just.

Yet La Chartreuse lacks many of the qualities that made Le Rouge et le Noir so entertaining to read. Julien is as clever as Fabrice is clueless, and much of the pleasure of Le Rouge et le Noir comes from seeing Julien develop and act on his schemes. Thanks to Gina and Mosca, La Chartreuse does afford us similar pleasures, but fewer of them, and court intrigues are seldom as much fun as boudoir conquests anyway.

Habit-forming: Philipe as Fabrice,
looking very much like Philipe as Julien.

Indeed, much of Stendhal’s goal here is to show just how unpleasant a despotic court can be, and the brilliant social and sexual satire the author unleashed in Le Rouge et le Noir is more narrowly channeled in La Chartreuse because, I think, he wanted French readers to be spooked, not amused. After the fall of Napoleon, France did restore the monarchy, clumsily but under a constitution. Writing during the reign of France’s Louis Philippe, Stendhal depicts an unconstitutional monarchy, in a foreign but nearby land, where destinies are dictated by petty whims. There, if the ruler feels horny, or slighted in some way, then prison is your reward. Even the very wealthy and titled aren’t free, as Fabrice learns: whether he’s in or out of prison, his actions are always constrained by politics. That Stendhal went back to medieval and Renaissance sources (including Benvenuto Cellini’s auto­biog­ra­phy) for details of politics and plot only suggests that, over the course of several centuries, nothing has changed for the better.

From time to time, Stendhal addresses the reader, as if he’s explaining particularly obscure Italian customs: “As a reasonable Frenchman, you probably don’t understand this,” he’ll say, then go on to describe behavior that is by no means exclusive to Italy. Stendhal’s message may be coded, yet it’s clear: This could happen in France, too. (It had happened, often, for centuries.) The desire to sound a similar warning may have impelled the filmmakers to adapt this story so soon after the fall of Nazi Germany, when France was yet again deeply divided as to what sort of government it needed.

The sublime Maria Casarès as Gina,
with (I presume) Tullio Carminati as Mosca

“From all of this, one may draw this moral, that the man who comes near the court compromises his happiness, if he is happy, and in any case, stakes his future on the intrigues of a chamber maid,” Stendhal writes. But non-European readers aren’t let off the hook. The author continues: “On another hand, in America, in the republic, one is required to bore oneself all the day long by paying court seriously to shopkeepers, and becoming as stupid as they are; and over there, there’s no Opera.”

How’s that for transition? My own, I mean. Because for this reader, the musical references were another pleasure. Stendhal was a tremendous opera fan and music critic, and friend of Rossini. A few scenes in the novel take place at La Scala, and toward the end, there’s even a cameo appearance by Giuditta Pasta, the original bel canto diva. Having enjoyed Stendhal’s novels, I’m eager now to tackle the Vie de Rossini. Imagine spending time in both these guys' company! If I can find a copy under 8 million Euros, I’ll post an update.

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Characters in Search of a Reader, or ‘Le Rouge et le Noir’

In the 1954 film adaptation of Le Rouge et le Noir,
Gérard Philipe and Antonella Lualdi as Julien and Mathilde

Seldom have I encountered a novel so entertaining as Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. Seizing upon Denise Boutrit’s paperback copy, I galloped through the chapters, and each time I set down the book, I did so reluctantly, so eager was I to see what would happen next. The question is why it took me so long to finish, for the intervals between my multi-chapter gulps were long indeed.

When we’re kids, most of us have the Toy Story fantasy, that when we leave the playroom, our toys get up and play without us, in adventures of their own devising. With Le Rouge et le Noir, I imagined something different, particularly during the long pause I took, just when Stendhal’s hero, Julien Sorel, had stolen into the bedroom of his employer’s daughter, Mathilde de La Mole, for the first time. I pictured them waiting for me.

JULIEN: He said he’d be right back.

MATHILDE (stifling a yawn): I know.

JULIEN: Do you want to play cards, or something?

MATHILDE: We could always make out.

JULIEN: No, that might advance the plot.

MATHILDE (sighing): I guess we’d better wait, then.

At long last, I returned to them, and they enjoyed their first tryst. Oh, yes, they did.

Ciel! Mon mari!
Danielle Darrieux as Mme de Rênal, with Philipe.
Though older at the time of filming than Julien’s 19 years, Philipe was so much the right physical type for the rôle that it’s hard to believe Stendhal never saw him.

Indeed, as with so many great French novels, Le Rouge et le Noir is very, very sexy, especially by the British and American standards of the time — 1830. Julien is low-born and scrawny, but he dreams of Napoleonic glory for himself. This puts him in conflict with both his wealthy employers — first, the provincial Monsieur de Rênal and, later, the Parisian Marquis de La Mole — as well as with the priests at the seminary where he studies for a time. Julien judges that, without a noble title, he has no options but the military (the Red) or the church (the Black). Yet most of the time, his conquests are limited to the bedroom.

Stendhal picks apart his characters’ social and sexual politics with undisguised glee. The shifting emotions of Madame de Rênal, especially, touch on high satirical comedy, and as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Stendhal has spent most of his life observing the peccadilloes of men and women, while enjoying himself thoroughly.

Of course, literature professors are unlikely to tell you that one of the great monuments of French fiction is a laugh-aloud sexcapade that frequently borders on farce; they will not tell you this about Zola’s Nana and Pot-Bouille, either, or about the huge chunk of Proust’s account of Charlus’ misadventures that is in fact quite funny.

This is why we must read these books for ourselves: because the experts are keeping all the good bits a secret.

Being French, and being based on a real-life character besides, Julien Sorel must give over to philosophy at the end of the book; I suppose it’s for that reason that Le Rouge et le Noir is required reading in French high schools. Honestly, I don’t think it would be possible to fail to comprehend Julien’s gist as it plays out in the narrative, but his final monologues are very beautiful. I do know that the version we were given to read in Texas high schools was so heavily expurgated that it bore no relation whatever to the full-length novel, apart from a couple of characters’ names.*

Now of course I intend to check out La Chartreuse de Parme and — holy of holies — Stendhal’s life of Rossini, preferably while listening to Joyce DiDonato’s new recording of arias for Isabella Colbran.




*NOTE: There’s some satisfaction in the realization that I finished reading Stendhal’s novel on a day when I met for lunch with my high-school French teacher, Carlene Klein Ginsburg. At long last, I have fulfilled the assignment from 1978.

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