La Chartreuse de Parme

Paris, Ambroise Dupont, 1839.
2 vols. (125 x 200 mm) of [2] ff., 402 p. and 1 ff.; [2] ff. and 445 p. Tawny morocco, sand-coloured suede goatskin endpapers and pastedowns, gilt titles on covers, gilt edges on endpapers, folders with title and volume number, bound in a double-slipcase (binding signed by Renaud Vernier – Claude Ribal, 2025).

First edition.
Copy on wove paper, i.e. “papier vélin” – first issue.

Presentation copy, inscribed:

« À Madame d’André, hommage respectueux de l’auteur ».

[To Madame d’André, respectful hommage from the author].

Well-preserved contemporary copies are rare and those offered by the author can be counted on the fingers of both hands.

Precious copy offered to Madame Claire d’André, wife of Count Antoine d’André (1788-1860), governor of Rome and Strasbourg, baron of the Empire and prefect of the Paris gendarmerie. The latter, an officer cadet at the military school in Vienna and then a lieutenant in the Austrian Emperor’s light cavalry regiment, was recalled to the service of France in 1809 and fought in the Russian campaign. Promoted to lieutenant adjutant major in 1813, he took part in the campaigns in Spain, Russia and Germany. On the return of the Bourbons, he returned to his post in the gendarmerie, which he helped to reorganise, and repressed the unrest in Paris. Under Louis-Philippe, he became Inspector General of the Gendarmerie, replacing Lieutenant-General Latourg-Maubourg in this post.

No other copy of La Chartreuse de Parme has been given to a woman and this copy is therefore the first to bear such a mark. It should be noted that this is also the case for Le Rouge et le Noir, of which the only copy known with certainty to have been owned by a woman is that of Baroness Charles de Rothschild – the only named copy – since the six other known copies with dedications bear only the simple mention ‘homage of the author’ – and among these, only two recipients are identified: Félix Faure, and Baron Adolphe de Mareste.

We have only been able to identify seven copies bearing an autograph inscription from Stendhal (the same number as for Le Rouge et le noir):

• Inscribed to Frédéric Soulié (Destailleur copies [1891] then Montgermont [1912], cited by Vicaire and Carteret);
• Inscribed to Romain Collomb (Grenoble Library);
• Inscribed to Albert Stapfer (sale, 1931, then Drouot Rive gauche, Sacha Guitry Library, March 1976, no. 222);
• Inscribed to Paul-Émile Daurand Forgues (Christie’s, May 2013, no. 208; €38,000, modern binding by Devauchelle);
• Inscribed to Count Amédée de Pastoret (Pierre Bergé & Associés, Bibliothèque Michel Audiard, May 2016, no. 76, modern binding)
• Inscribed to Doctor Jean-Louis Prévost (copies Paul Voûte, Robert Fleury then collection Ribes, Sotheby’s, II, no. 187, modern binding);
• Inscribed to Joseph Lingay (volume 1 only, returned to the author who made handwritten corrections; Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, Rés. 739841)
• Let’s quote too an autograph manuscript of 117 pages, together with a copy of the original edition annotated by Stendhal, entered the BnF in 2006. It was then the most important literary manuscript of a 19th-century French novel still in private hands, initially catalogued in the sixth Bérès sale (20 June 2006, no. 91). The copy was ultimately ‘transferred’ amicably to the National Library. Finally, for the sake of completeness, there is a third annotated copy, the counterpart of the previous one, owned by Eugène Chaper (not inscribed). It is now kept at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York [H.572].

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

‘La Chartreuse de Parme is a work of our time, and to date, in my opinion, the masterpiece of literary ideas […]. M. Beyle has written a book in which the sublime bursts forth from chapter to chapter. At an age when men rarely find grandiose subjects and after having written some twenty extremely witty volumes, he has produced a work that can only be appreciated by souls and by truly superior people’.
— Balzac, Revue parisienne, 25 September 1839.

Having just returned from his ‘tourist’ trips in August 1838, Beyle began to write a short story, L’Origine de la grandeur des Farnèse, then, interrupting himself, decided to turn it into a ‘romanzetto’, and by 3 September he had decided to set the story in the 19th century. This was the birth of The Charterhouse of Parma. Two months later, taking leave from his post as consul, he set about writing his story: on 4 November, he shut himself away in his Paris apartment on Rue Caumartin.

Some fifty days later, on 26 December, the work was finished and Stendhal was able to send his notebooks to his cousin and right-hand man, Romain Colomb, so that he could defend his editorial interests in a negotiation in which he did not wish to see his name mentioned, finding it impossible ‘under pain of losing his job, to give his name to public notoriety’ (Vittorio Del Litto). As he had done a few months earlier for the Memoirs of a Tourist, Colomb turned to the publisher Ambroise Dupont. With success: the bookseller bought the publishing rights for 2,500 francs, via a contract signed on 24 January 1839, which records the sale of ‘the entire and exclusive property, for five consecutive years, of a manuscript entitled: The Charterhouse of Parma, by the author of Red and Black’.

The work was published in the first week of April 1839; the edition was not sold out until the end of the following year. A slow-burning success, therefore, which received little press coverage. Stendhal dedicated the work ‘to the happy few’, and the public returned the favour: elitist, difficult, documented, the work did not find its readership. But one person in the literary world did not miss it. Honoré de Balzac, in his Revue parisienne, published on 25 September 1939 a Study on M. Beyle, which is a veritable eulogy of The Charterhouse of Parma over more than 70 pages: ‘He wrote The Modern Prince, the novel that Machiavelli would write, if he had lived banished from Italy in the nineteenth century. Also, the greatest obstacle to Mr Beyle’s well-deserved renown comes from the fact that the Chartreuse de Parme can only find readers capable of appreciating it among diplomats, ministers, observers, the most eminent people of the world, the most distinguished artists, in short, among the twelve or fifteen hundred people who are at the head of Europe. So don’t be surprised that, in the ten months since this surprising work was published, not a single journalist has read it, understood it, studied it, announced it, analysed it, praised it, or even paid it any attention. I, who think I know a little about it, have read it for the third time in recent days: I found the work even more beautiful, and I felt in my soul the kind of happiness that a good deed brings.‘

’Perhaps never before has a living author been praised so splendidly,’ says Paupe (p. 123). And this would last, since The Charterhouse of Parma, a ‘unique book’, a ‘complete book’, became a legendary book from the 19th century onwards, thanks to Gobineau, Barbey d’Aurevilly and Henry James, for whom Stendhal’s novel ‘ranks among the finest ever written’.

‘The most beautiful novel in the world’, according to André Gide, Marcel Proust considered The Charterhouse of Parmato be “the most beautiful French novel that has ever existed”; Julien Gracq elaborated a little in En lisant en écrivant: ‘They are fortunate, the books of which one feels that, behind the agitation, even frenetic, that can occasionally inhabit them, they have been written from start to finish as if in golden dust […]. The Charterhouse of Parma is written in its entirety, and for me it stands out from start to finish against this halo of ripening sunlight […]. The allegro of The Charterhouse is that of travellers without luggage who do not even bother with bulky Balzacian vans. When reading La Chartreuse, I sometimes imagine that I am listening to a bewitching but unique musical theme, a ‘petite phrase’ in the style of Vinteuil, which, when repeated inexhaustibly, but each time with a different timbre, by successive groups of instruments, is enough to give me pleasure. Let’s face it: you need a certain state of grace to read this marvellous novel, which you can’t just will yourself […] because it is the climate of love that sustains the book, but it is not so much that of Sanseverina for Fabrice, or of Fabrice for Clélia Conti; it is the novelist’s manifest love for his novel, as for an Eden revisited in a dream.’ The Italian Italo Calvino, a player, concluded that ‘the most beautiful novel in the world can only be this one’, especially since for him it is above all ‘The Great Italian Novel’, from the title of an article he wrote in 1983 for Le Magazine littéraire.

A fine modern unanimity around a work written and dictated in fifty-three days! To write a complex and profound fresco in less than two months is undoubtedly the work of a genius; from the Napoleonic armies to the intrigues of the court of Parma, this bildungsroman traces the spiritual journey of Fabrice del Dongo, ’ a hero who is not very much of a hero’, a sublime reflection of a soul that is both frustrated and exalted by the Mal du siècle, that of a generation of young Frenchmen who, like him, had rallied behind Napoleon. When he fell, seeing the return of reactionary ideas to power, these young men became melancholic. Fabrice Del Dongo, as such, is the embodiment of this break between the man and his era, spending the novel ‘chasing happiness’. But how can one be happy in a world that does not understand us? This is the whole point of the novel, which draws its charm from the ‘sublime landscapes’ of Lombardy.

The total print run of the edition was 1,200 copies, divided into two parts: the first, on wove “vélin” paper, without mention; the second, whose copies bear the mention ‘second edition’, is printed on laid “vergé” paper. The collation of the volumes is identical for both print runs. When the first edition was published in March 1839, Stendhal was still in Paris. He did not return to his consular residence in Civita Vecchia until 10 August.

Stendhal had been French consul for the Papal States since 1831. This was the most productive period for the writer, who during this decade wrote Lucien Leuwen, The Life of Henri Brulard, Lamiel, the Chroniques italiennes and, in 1839, this swan song, this La Chartreuse de Parme, in which his love for Italy and a peaceful vision of things are blended with inspirations from Correggio, Cimarosa and Mozart.

‘Very rare and extremely sought-after. Often pitted’ according to Clouzot, “this work is extremely rare in beautiful condition” (Carteret).

Precious copy, wonderfully and perfectly established by Renaud Vernier.

Volume 1 is missing two pages (pp. 72-74), which were missing from the first contemporary binding, which was unfortunately too dilapidated to be preserved. We have decided not to add sheets from another copy or facsimile pages, in order to preserve this volume in its original condition, even though it was probably faulty due to the fault of the original bookbinder.

Cordier 125; Vicaire, 458; Carteret, II, 358; Cordier, Bibliographie stendhalienne, no. 87; Cordier, Comment a vécu Stendhal, pp. 188-189; V. Del Litto, E. Williamson and J. Houbert (ed.), Correspondance générale de Stendhal, Paris, Champion, 1997-1999, III; La Chartreuse de Parme: J. Houbert, ‘Le Contrat d’édition de La Chartreuse de Parme’, in L’Année stendhalienne, no. 5, Paris, Champion, 2006, 325-329; Stendhal, Journal, in: Oeuvres intimes, Paris, La Pléiade, 1982; Paupe, Histoire des oeuvres de Stendhal, 120 et seq.; Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, edited by Mariella Di Maio, Paris, Gallimard, 2003.