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 forever from their Duchy. Duke Robert died in 1907, the father of twenty children, one of whom, Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, showed in the late war some reflection 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 reestablished 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.
Endnotes
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By the local custom, borrowed from Germany, this title is given to every son of a Marchese; Contino to the son of a Conte, Contessina to the daughter of a Conte, etc. ↩
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The speaker is carried away by passion; he is rendering in prose some lines of the famous Monti. ↩
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Silvio Pellico has given this name a European notoriety: it is that of the street in Milan in which the police headquarters and prisons are situated. ↩
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See the curious Memoirs of M. Andryane, as entertaining as a novel, and as lasting as Tacitus. ↩
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In Italy, young men with influence or brains become Monsignori and prelati, which does not mean bishop; they then wear violet stockings. A man need not take any vows to become Monsignore; he can discard his violet stockings and marry. ↩
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Pier-Luigi, the first sovereign of the Farnese family, so renowned for his virtues, was, as is generally known, a natural son of His Holiness Pope Paul III. ↩
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For this translation of La Fontaine’s fable I am indebted to my friend Mr. Edward Marsh, who allows me to reprint the lines from his Forty-Two Fables of La Fontaine (William Heinemann, Ltd., 1924). —C. K. S. M. ↩
Colophon
The Charterhouse of Parma
was published in 1839 by
Stendhal.
It was translated from French in 1925 by
C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
Hans-Peter Schrei
sponsored the production of this ebook for
Standard Ebooks.
It was produced by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on transcriptions produced in 2021 by
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