Gide’s Cuttlefish

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000

From Anna Bostock

That John Bayley (LRB, 17 February) doesn’t much care for Stendhal is a pity but does not, of course, disqualify him from commenting on a new translation of The Charterhouse of Parma. What does, however, disqualify him is that he does not seem to have noticed that Fabrice Del Dongo is not, in fact, the scion of an ‘ancient Piedmontese house’: he is the son of the penniless Frenchman, Lieutenant Robert, to whom the Marquise regularly reports on the boy’s progress and who later becomes that Napoleonic general whose horse is so ungently replaced by Fabrice’s own during the Battle of Waterloo. This means, among other things, that Gina Sanseverina is not Fabrice’s aunt and (unlike him) knows it, having been a wide-awake adolescent witness to the Marquise’s affair with the Lieutenant. It also means that all the social advantages Fabrice enjoys during the restoration era are based on an ironic misapprehension. This surely casts an oblique new light on many of the events in the later chapters John Bayley finds so boring, and perhaps even on the novel’s much-discussed mysterious title.

It is true that Stendhal differs from Scott and Balzac in that he does not remind us over and over again of the basic facts of his stories. He takes the efficiency of our memory for granted, and if his confidence turns out to have been misplaced, that’s too bad.

Anna Bostock
Meyrin, Switzerland