LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME, Li zhietriiz de parm'. 'La Chartreuse de Parme,' esteemed the best of the novels of Stendhal (Henri Beyle), was written in 1830, though not published till 1839. In time it belongs to the first flush of the Romantic movement, and it has highly romantic passages, but there are others which seem clearly to foreshadow the naturalistic and the psychological schools' of fiction. Some descriptive passages are of rare brilliancy. The story, opening in 1796, passes rapidly to the decade following Waterloo. The scene is chiefly in Milan or Parma; the plot, ingenious but over-tortuous, deals with the in trigues of a petty Italian court; the interest, whether for author or reader, is almost wholly in character. Though crude in coloring and melodramatic in treatment the novel seems the first serious attempt in French fiction to exhibit not merely foreign scenes but foreign ideals and psychic life. Fabrice, the hero, his mili tary career closed by the fall of Napoleon, turns his ambition, though not his heart, to the Church, and after adventures that show him, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, °like an animal given over to his appetites or like a wanton child who follows his caprices? not, indeed, without shrewdness, dies an archbishop in a Carthusian monastery, whence the story's title. The hero
ine, Duchess Sanseverina, beautiful, witty and loving Fabrice, her nephew, with the despera tion of a last passion, murders, marries and forgets her marriage vows in his behalf, rein carnating the intense passions of some familiar female figures of the Italian renaissance. Count Mosca, to Balzac a glorified Metternich, is for us a diplomatic courtier, ingeniously un scrupulous in reconciling the duties of his sta tion with the demands of his lusts. Palla, a political outlaw and highwayman, the philander ing agent of the duchess' criminal designs, is an interesting age-fellow of Hugo's Hernani. All four illustrate as many phases of Stendhal's conception of the unreasoning fatality of love.