Volume 46, Number 14 · September 23, 1999
Genius Con Brio
By Bernard Knox
The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard
The Modern Library, 507 pp., $24.95
We know a great deal about Stendhal's methods and habits as a writer, for he was an irrepressible diarist. He left not only journals that cover the first half of his life but also hundreds of notes and comments jotted down on manuscripts, on proofs, in the margins or on the blank pages of books he was reading, material that throws light on the products of his later years, particularly on his masterpiece, La Chartreuse de Parme, which he wrote just a few years before he died in Paris in 1842. He wrote these notes sometimes in French, sometimes in English (which was not always correct), and sometimes in a mixture of the two with a dash of Italian added. At times he encoded them, as in the sentence he wrote on one of the blank pages of the first printed copy of La Chartreuse to reach him: 'Aimetumie ux avoireut rois fem mesoua voir fa itcemanro?' With the proper word divisions restored and the backslang at the end rearranged, it reads: Aime(s)-tu mieux avoir eu trois femmes ou avoir fait ce roman?[1] Which do you like best—to have had three women or to have written this novel?
Review, 2246 words
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