People should read more French novels

The Charterhouse of Parma

An amazing Modern Library cover for The Charterhouse of Parma. If you have three hundred dollars you can buy it here

A few years into my tech career I suffered a quarter-life crisis, burned out, and decided I wanted to study literature instead. I lived off my tech savings and spent a year taking English courses at the University of Toronto as a non-degree student. One of the courses focused on the Victorian novel, where we read all the books that function as the meat-and-potatoes of a bookish person’s education: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Dracula, Great Expectations, Lady Audley’s Secret, and so on. But it felt a bit like I was retreading the greatest hits. Many of the novels I had read before, and the lesser-known selections were starting to feel a bit B-tier. So at the end of the course I went to see the professor in her office hours, and asked her for recommendations. I think I told her I was tired of Dickens.

“You might really like Balzac,” she said.

And I did really like Balzac. I started with Cousin Bette, and it seemed like a novel designed to maximally engage me. It was identifiably a nineteenth-century novel, of which I’d read many before, but it felt like such a different experience from the British and American novels that had made up most of my experience of “the classics” from that period. I moved from there to Old Goriot and Lost Illusions, and then Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. One of the first things I noticed was that these novels were much franker about sex. If you will permit me some sweeping generalizations: while English novelists seemed to prefer their characters refrain from having sex entirely and let on that it has taken place only when absolutely necessary for the plot (i.e. if a baby is present), the characters in Balzac and Stendhal’s novels are constantly swept up in passionate, morally-dubious affairs. They also seemed to inhabit a different moral and sentimental universe, both more cynical and more vibrant. While the English novels tended to hew to the idea that good people are ultimately rewarded and bad people are punished, with the endings either happy or tragically sad in a way that gestures to an idea of universal justice, in the French novels the protagonists often behaved extravagantly badly in a way that suggested anything might happen. The books were stuffed with plot twists and often flirted with outright melodrama, but with sentimentality kept generally to a minimum and a heavy layer of aestheticized irony, plus a mordant sense of humor, that appealed to me enormously.

They also were much more frank about the machinations of class and social mobility among the elite and aspiring elite of Paris. English novels seemed to take the general order of things as a given, under threat from the slow-moving advances of industry and capitalism but so entrenched as to be taken mostly for granted. The French novels, likely due to the multiple dramatic social upheavals that marked the French Revolution and the decades that followed, are unafraid to dissect in cold and cynical detail the mechanics of class, fashion, etiquette, taste, friendships, love affairs, and the thousands of tiny signals and transactions that signal whether someone is rising in influence and power and whether they’re on the outs¹. This all culminates in the works of Proust, who wrote about these things with obsessive attention to detail, but the seeds of these elements in his work can be found in the many scenes in Balzac novels where someone fails to get what they want because they made the wrong joke or they’re wearing the wrong gloves. Their characters have to understand all these things, because they’re constantly in the process of trying to game the system; the typical protagonist is an ambitious young man with limited funds and a flexible sense of integrity. If it’s not clear, I love all this stuff.

My impression is that the greatest French novels are chronically under-read in the USA and Canada. They’re not assigned in school, which is where most readers first encounter “the classics” (one exception is Madame Bovary, which is short enough and with clear enough thematic currents to be assigned in high school). English majors generally don’t read them, because they’re not English, and they’re too dead-white-male to count as World Literature. If they get read, it’s either because they get recommended by fans (the way people on Reddit recommend The Count of Monte Cristo and the higher-brow denizens of Substack recommend Proust) or because they are attached to some more familiar cultural product (like Les Misérables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame). They’re also under-read by me, in particular: I’ve never read any Zola or Guy de Maupassant.

If you’re in the mood for a meaty 19th century novel but you’re bored of the moralizing of English and American novels or the austere seriousness of the Russians: might I suggest the French?

All this is to say: I just finished Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, and it was lots of fun.

The protagonist, Fabrizio², is a himbo with shades of both Siegfried and Barry Lyndon: young, handsome, impulsive, idealistic, and a little dumb. The narrator maintains some ironic reserve when writing about him: Fabrizio, along with all the characters in Charterhouse, is Italian, while the narrator is French writing for an assumed French audience. When a character does something particularly ill-advised, there’s often an aside on the part of the narrator, saying: we French are of course far too sophisticated and cynical to behave this way, but in Italy people still experience great passion.

Fabrizio’s first heroic adventure: the battle of Waterloo. The Waterloo sequence is deservedly famous. In its dark humor, it goes against every cliché of how great historical events should be depicted. Fabrizio simply shows up at the battle without any plan; he has no uniform and doesn’t know how to fire a gun, making the actual soldiers suspicious that he’s a spy. His main concern is not staying alive, but making sure he can tell himself he’s fought in a real battle. There’s a great Nicola Chiaromonte essay, “Fabrizio at Waterloo” (I wrote about it in this earlier piece) describing its tragic ridiculousness:

When Fabrizio awakes, the battle of Waterloo has already taken place. The Napoleonic drama has ended before he has even understood what it was all about. “I absolutely have to fight…At last I’m really going to fight and kill one of the enemy,” Fabrizio resolves. He manages to fire a shot, and a cavalryman in blue falls from his horse. Perhaps he has killed one of the enemy. What is actually taking place around him is the total rout of the glorious Napoleonic army. “It’s like a flock of sheep running away,” Fabrizio says naively. Mutiny follows collapse and retreat. The only battle in which Fabrizio takes part is a scuffle with seven French hussars who try to cross a bridge guarded by the least martial but most ardent soldier ever created by a novelist’s imagination.

Fabrizio’s participation in the battle of Waterloo becomes problematic once he returns home to Italy, which is once again under Austrian control. Parma is governed by a petty, corrupt prince and a regime eager to squash all traces of liberalism that Napoleon’s brief reign over the region may have inspired. He has an aristocratic family name (“del Dongo,” which to my modern ears is impossible to take seriously) which offers him some protection, but despite many warnings from the sober minds around him, plus various schemes by his relatives designed to keep him out of trouble, he’s incapable of lying low. He can’t help himself: he’s constantly doing the equivalent of showing up at the battle without a gun, over and over again. To make matters worse, he’s easily manipulated and prone to throwing money around. His mentor, an amateur astrologer, warns him that he’s fated to end up in prison if he’s not careful. “What if the real prison is a quiet life?” he muses, before throwing himself absurdly into danger yet again.

The engine of the plot: Fabrizio gets into trouble, and, thanks to the baroque scheming of the various intelligent women who are in love with him (the author frequently emphasizes: he’s very, very handsome) he manages to wriggle out of it again and again. One of the novel’s funniest moments is when one of the aforementioned women realizes that her scheme to get Fabrizio out of a jam has succeeded only because of the efforts of a second woman, who would certainly not have helped if she were not also in love with him. She’s furious that another woman has saved Fabrizio’s life.

There are twists and turns so outlandish they become comical: betrayals, covert letters delivered inside food, secret messages sent by semaphore, forged documents, a poet-highwayman, hidden diamonds, scheming courtiers, sham marriages, multiple escapes from prison, multiple poisoning plots, stage plays intended to provoke outbursts of emotion, blackmail, archeological digs, murders, disguises, and so on. But there’s a political undertone to all of it. Under a corrupt, autocratic regime like the Prince of Parma’s, true justice is so out of reach — and the aristocrats are so bored — that schemes and intrigues, it’s heavily implied, are the only way to get by. Fabrizio’s survival has nothing to do with his merits and everything to do with the maneuvering of his powerful advocates. Fabrizio, naive and idealistic, stays alive only because he’s beloved by those who are subtle and cunning.

One of the funniest passages lays out, sardonically, the difficulties of aristocracies vs. democracies:

The Conte discussed the merits of each judge, and offered to change the names. But the reader is perhaps a little tired of all these details of procedure, no less than of all these court intrigues. From the whole business one can derive this moral, that the man who mingles with a court compromises his happiness, if he is happy, and, in any event, makes his future dependent on the intrigues of a chambermaid.

On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera.

Placing Fabrizio at the battle of Waterloo so early in the story sets him up as a kind of parody of Napoleonic ideals: he’s shaped like a great man, he acts like a Man of Action, he’s passionate and idealistic, but mostly succeeds in making a mess for the people around him. A battered aristocracy and a degraded meritocracy combine to create a social world so uninhabitable that prison becomes the only true refuge. The yearning for a grand ideal, and the simultaneous weary distrust of said ideal, makes for literature that can be grand without being sentimental, insightful but not didactic. The Charterhouse of Parma, for all its sprawling silliness, is a glorious read.

1. A lot of American writers are good at this stuff as well, especially Edith Wharton, but I don’t think they master it quite like the French.

2. Stendhal’s original name for the protagonist is Fabrice, but most English translators use the Italianized version of his name.