[1] Telling the story of an Italian nobleman in the Napoleonic era and later, it was admired by Balzac, Tolstoy, André Gide, Lampedusa, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway.
The Charterhouse of Parma chronicles the adventures of the young Italian nobleman Fabrice del Dongo from his birth in 1798 to his death.
Fabrice spends his early years in his family's castle on Lake Como, while most of the rest of the novel is set in a fictionalized Parma (both locations are in modern-day Italy).
The book begins with the French army sweeping into Milan and stirring up the sleepy region of Lombardy, which was allied with Austria.
Fabrice grows up surrounded by intrigues and alliances for and against the French — his father the Marchese comically fancies himself a spy for the Viennese.
The novel's early section describes Fabrice's rather quixotic effort to join Napoleon when the latter returns to France in March 1815 (the Hundred Days).
He is imprisoned as a spy, but escapes with the aid of the jailer's wife who develops a fondness towards Fabrice, donning the uniform of a dead French hussar.
Stendhal, a veteran of several Napoleonic campaigns (he was one of the survivors of the retreat from Moscow in 1812), describes this famous battle as a chaotic affair: soldiers gallop one way and then another as bullets plow the fields around them.
Count Mosca's plan has Fabrice go to seminary school in Naples, with the idea that when he graduates he will come to Parma and become a senior figure in the religious hierarchy, and eventually the Archbishop, as the current office holder is old.
The book then describes in great detail how Gina and Count Mosca live and operate in the court of the Prince of Parma (named Ranuce-Erneste IV).
In the resulting fight, Fabrice kills the man and flees Parma for Bologna, fearing correctly that he will not be treated justly by the courts.
The following morning, the Prince connives to have Fabrice imprisoned for twelve years by signing an order affixed with a date preceding the note purporting to release him.
For the next nine months, Gina schemes to have Fabrice freed and manages to get secret messages relayed to him in the tower, in part by means of an improvised semaphore line.
They fall in love, and after some time he persuades her to communicate with him by means of letters of the alphabet printed on sheets ripped from a book.
After fourteen months of suffering for both, she agrees to meet with him every night, on the condition that it is in darkness, lest she break her vow to the Madonna to never see him again and they both be punished for her sin.
[3] According to Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Times, this "obscures the important narrative conceit that this whole tale is one we're hearing from a Frenchman who has, in turn, heard it from Italians who knew the principals.
"[3] Mendelsohn goes on to say that the translation "moves with admirable rapidity, fully conveying what James called the 'restlessness' of Stendhal's 'superior mind' by means of a number of subtle but quite concrete choices on Howard's part, not least of which is his rendering of French verbs more crisply and colloquially than has been done before.".
While in some respects it is a "romantic thriller", interwoven with intrigue and adventures, the novel is also an exploration of human nature, psychology, and court politics.