Julien’s hero is Bonaparte, an admiration that he must keep secret in the cold, gray years of the post-Napoleonic binge. He is sure that if he had been born a generation earlier, during a time when careers were open to talent and not just to influence and wealth, he would have risen quickly and might even have been one of the emperor’s marshals at the age of thirty. That opportunity is now closed to him; he cannot choose the red of a military career; but the black of a career in the church still beckons, and Julien adopts a mask of humility, scholarship, and virtue.
But he cannot hide the fire in his brilliant eyes, through which his genius shines. Most of the men he meets, and all of the churchmen, are suspicious of him, but at the same time he finds that he is greatly attractive to women. Two women in particular figure in his startling progress toward wealth and power, and they end up destroying him. Mme. de Rênal, the wife of his first employer, is a simple but beautiful woman, ten years older than he, and the mother of three boys whom he has been hired to tutor. Julien feels it his Napoleonic duty to seduce her, and he does so rather easily—much to his surprise. Their intrigue discovered, he is forced to flee to Paris, where he is offered an important post in the household of the Marquis de la Mole, a powerful political figure. Julien and Mathilde, the spirited daughter of la Mole, fall in love. They struggle for dominance in this love, for they are both proud. Mathilde becomes pregnant, and although for a short time it appears that all will turn out well, a letter from Mme. de Rênal, turns out to be disastrous, and Julien fails utterly. The ending of this remarkable book is shocking. Reading it is an overwhelming experience.
Neither Julien nor Mathilde fits into the dry bourgeois world into which they were born. Mathilde, in her imagination, harks back to the sixteenth century, to the great age, as she conceives it, of her family’s history. Julien’s time is not yet; he should have been born in 1910, not 1810, and in America, not France. Their tragedy is that, despite their energy, imagination, and courage, they cannot change their world.
The Charterhouse of Parma was written in a period of fifty-two days at the end of 1838, only a couple of years before Stendhal’s death. The book reads as swiftly as it was written; I do not know of any novel that is more rapid in its style, that rushes with such impetuous speed to its conclusion. (In a sense, it was not concluded; Stendhal wanted to write three hundred more pages, but his publisher resisted. Nevertheless, the ending is right and satisfying.)
The three main characters of The Charterhouse of Parma are a fascinating modification of those of The Red and the Black. Fabrizio del Dongo corresponds to Julien Sorel, but he is no son of a peasant. Instead, he is the illegitimate son of the wife of the Marchese del Dongo, one of the richest men in Italy and also one of the most cowardly and cruel. Fabrizio’s real father was a French officer stationed in Parma during the French occupation. He is thus an aristocrat as well as a rebel; he is also, like Julien, a genius struggling to adapt his time to him, instead of himself to his time. He is one of the most attractive heroes in fiction: brave, impetuous, charming, and irresistible to women.
Mathilde, in The Red and the Black, the proud aristocrat who represents all that is good in the French upper classes, is a paragon of dignity and hauteur; but she is only nineteen. In Charterhouse, her qualities are transferred by Stendhal to Fabrizio’s aunt, the Duchessa Sanseverina; equally beautiful, she is older than Mathilde and thus even more alluring. I confess that Gina di Sanseverina is one of my favorite heroines; perhaps only Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Tolstoy’s Natasha can compare to her. As intelligent as she is proud, she demands nothing from her lovers except that they set their goals by the same high stars that direct and rule her life.
Fabrizio has many adventures; among them, he witnesses (this is the mot juste) the Battle of Waterloo, although he is only fifteen. The description of the battle is masterly; Tolstoy said he had learned about war from Stendhal. Fabrizio naturally comes in conflict with the austere, conservative authorities of post-Napoleonic Italy. He is imprisoned and falls in love with the daughter of his jailer. Clelia is a younger Mme. de Rênal and plays somewhat the same role; that is, while being attractive and beautiful, she is also motherly.
Stendhal set the action of the book in Parma perhaps because Parma was longer under French influence than any other northern Italian city; in other words, like Fabrizio, it was a French-Italian hybrid, enjoying the advantages of both national characters as well as suffering both sets of faults. At any rate, the government of Parma is despotic, and all of the characters must struggle to find their own freedom in the midst of tyranny. This is only one of the extraordinary modern touches of this book, and of Stendhal’s work in general. He once said that he had bought a ticket in a lottery, the first prize in which was to be read in 1935—that is, a century hence. He was a good prophet. His books, especially The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, are more read and admired in our century than in his own. Together, they are not only great stories but also a vivid commentary on our time, as well as his.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
1757–1804
JAMES MADISON
1751–1836
JOHN JAY
1745–1829
The Federalist Papers
With the winning of the War of Independence, America became a nation—but still a fragile one, a loose confederation of sovereign states that might break apart, or so it seemed, at any moment. At the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787 a new Constitution was written and adopted, but it required that two-thirds of the thirteen state legislatures ratify it. Everyone knew this would not be easy, for there was opposition to the new basic law from many quarters.
The proposed new Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights. This troubled many persons, especially in Virginia. It also established a unity of individual citizens rather than of sovereign states and this fact—which limited the powers of the states—troubled many others, especially in New York. But New York and Virginia were the two richest and most powerful of the thirteen states. If they did not ratify the new Constitution, it mattered little if nine other small states like Rhode Island and Delaware and Connecticut should do so.
Probably the greatest difficulties were faced by the New York Federalists. Out of the relatively large delegation from that state, only one delegate—Alexander Hamilton—had signed the Constitution when it was presented to the nation by the convention. Governor DeWitt Clinton and, very likely, a majority of the state’s legislators were opposed to the document. It would take a major effort by the Constitution’s backers to turn the situation around.
The effort was made, and the situation was turned around, by means of a series of essays that began to be published in all the newspapers in New York State and were gathered together in book form even before the series was completed. The papers were all signed “Publius,” but in fact they were written by three men: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.