7.42 Stendhal — La Chartreuse de Parme — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the most famous chapter of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme : the battle of Waterloo seen by a young Italian who does not understand what he sees. Follow a battle told from inside one man's limited point of view, without maps, plans or overview. Recognise Stendhal's irony towards his hero, whom he calls notre héros at the moments he is least heroic. Read the brisk, plain prose that Stendhal said he modelled on the Civil Code. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English L’escorte s’arrêta pour passer un large fossé rempli d’eau par la pluie de la veille The escort stopped to cross a wide ditch filled with water by the previous day's rain La vivandière va me croire un lâche, se disait-il avec amertume The canteen woman will think me a coward, he said to himself bitterly Son bonheur fut au comble His happiness was at its height il avait bu trop d’eau-de-vie, il roulait un peu sur sa selle he had drunk too much brandy, and he was rolling a little in his saddle c’était un cadavre, posé en travers du sentier, qui faisait horreur au cheval et au cavalier. it was a corpse, lying across the path, which horrified horse and rider. Le cheval laissé à lui-même partit ventre à terre et alla rejoindre l’escorte qui suivait les généraux. The horse, left to itself, went off at full gallop and joined the escort that followed the generals. Prerequisites : 7.41 — this reading follows 7.41 Reading . You read the opening of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir in 7.26 Reading ; the history words of 5.26 Vocabulary , especially l'Empire and la bataille , will help. About this text Stendhal, the pen name of Henri Beyle (1783–1842), dictated La Chartreuse de Parme in less than two months in 1838, and it appeared in 1839. Its hero, Fabrice del Dongo, is a young Italian nobleman who worships Napoleon. In 1815, when the Emperor returns from exile, Fabrice runs away from home to fight for him, and arrives in Belgium on the morning of the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, with a horse, a borrowed hussar's uniform and no idea of what war is. This lesson gives about 3,900 words from the third chapter, which is the battle as Fabrice lives it: a kindly canteen woman, a corpse, the marshal's escort, the English dead, the Emperor who passes without being seen, and the theft of his horse. Omissions are marked […] . The text is that of the edition published in Paris by Conquet in 1883, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Stendhal's Waterloo A battle without an overview. Fabrice never sees the battle as a whole. He sees mud, a corpse with one open eye, earth that jumps in the air without his understanding why, red uniforms that look tiny in the distance, smoke. The reader, who knows that this is Waterloo, sees more than he does. This partial view of war was new in 1839, and later novelists, Tolstoy among them, learned from it. Notre héros . Stendhal calls Fabrice notre héros again and again, most often when he is anything but heroic: drunk, lost, ignored, robbed. Once he says it directly: Nous avouerons que notre héros était fort peu héros en ce moment. The irony is affectionate. Stendhal loves his hero's enthusiasm and laughs at it. Dreams and reality. Fabrice measures everything against books: he wants a friendship des héros du Tasse et de l'Arioste , the Italian epic poets. When the hussars he admires steal his horse, he weeps for his broken dream of chivalry more than for the horse. Compare Emma Bovary's reading in 7.36 Reading . A plain style. Stendhal disliked fine writing. His sentences are short, his vocabulary simple, his paragraphs quick; the horror of the wounded horse or of the dying English soldiers is told in a single plain sentence. Reading it a second time, part by part The canteen woman. Fabrice meets a vivandière who guesses that he is no soldier and takes him under her wing. The corpse. On a path through the fields they find a dead soldier; she makes Fabrice shake the corpse's hand to get used to it, and gives him brandy. The edge of the battle. Under the noise of the cannon they come out of a wood and see a corner of the battlefield. The escort. Fabrice's horse follows a group of generals; he joins their escort, splashes a general, and learns that the fat red-faced one is Marshal Ney. Under fire. They gallop across fields of English dead and dying; two hussars fall beside him; he is delighted to have been au feu . The Emperor. Fabrice, drunk on brandy, misses the Emperor as he passes. The theft. When a general's horse is brought down, the hussars lift Fabrice off his horse and give it to the general. Fabrice runs after them shouting thieves, then sits under a willow and weeps. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. The Charterhouse of Parma Fabrice soon came upon some canteen women, and the deep gratitude he felt towards the jailer’s wife at B*** led him to speak to them; he asked one of them where the 4th Hussars, the regiment he belonged to, could be found. “You would do just as well not to be in such a hurry, my little soldier,” said the canteen woman, touched by Fabrice’s pallor and his fine eyes. “Your grip is not yet firm enough for the sabre blows that will be dealt today. Now if you had a musket, I don’t say no; you could fire your bullet just like anyone else.” This advice displeased Fabrice; but however hard he urged his horse on, he could go no faster than the canteen woman’s cart. From time to time the noise of the cannon seemed to come closer and kept them from hearing each other, for Fabrice was so beside himself with enthusiasm and happiness that he had taken up the conversation again. Every word the canteen woman said doubled his happiness by making him understand it. Except for his real name and his escape from prison, he en