The Charterhouse of Parma tells the story of the young Italian nobleman Fabrice del Dongo and his adventures from his birth in 1798 to his death in 1829 (?).
Stendhal: The Background to the Novels
imagine that the name Brulard had been replaced by Bernard: the result, he explains, would be "a novel written in the first person singular.” The comment is made as a form of apology to justify the self-centered nature of the book.
For very good semantic reasons, the verb is grammatically defective: one cannot, in the first person, use it retrospectively. We encounter again, even here at the end, Stendhal's typical prospectivity, his predilection for the future ...
In part one he provides generous samples of the most important nineteenth-century responses to the novels, almost all of them translated into English for the first time.
Stendhal
Professor Haig locates the novel in the context of Stendhal's own experiences as a Commissariat officer in the Napoleonic army, journalist, opera-lover, salon dandy and traveller in Italy and Restoration France, and highlights the constant ...
... V, to whom she sacrifices her virtue in exchange for Fabrizio's freedom ... Parma. Count Mosca, a middle-aged courtier with cheerful manners and a knack for sparing the Prince from embarrassment, enters the ... The Charterhouse of Parma.
... Chroniques du crime, Cour d'assises, and Palais de justice. It is not the trial and the punishment that interests Stendhal, but the passionate commitment implicit in the criminal deed, the élan that translates that crime into an ...
Stendhal: A Biography