flow into erotic channels, must be sublimated; she struggles to control her boundless energies, to guide them into outlets of devoted maternal concern and to disguise from herself all the while what she really feels. Ironically, Fabrizio is not genetically related to her, since a French soldier, rather than Gina’s brother, is the hero’s father; for all practical purposes, however, given their background and Fabrizio’s attitude of boyish admiration for his aunt, any sexual relationship between the two would be psychologically incestuous.

The second love relationship in the book is that between Count Mosca and Gina. It is a one-sided affair insofar as the intensity of passion is all on the count’s side; Gina feels a great affinity for Mosca and loves him in a certain fashion but not in the same way as he loves her. The count is a fascinating figure—intelligent, skilled in diplomacy, powerfully ambitious, warm, faithful, benevolent, yet capable of jealousy and anger. What draws Mosca and Gina together are their common wisdom tempered with skepticism, their basic love of humanity, and their fierce hatred of the petty tyrants who hold authority over the rest of humanity. In many ways, Stendhal wrote his own personality not only into Fabrizio but also into the gallant Mosca; it has been said that within him Stendhal “deposited, with his artist’s curiosity, the residue of his knowledge and his disappointments—the supreme irony of a too ambitious ego which ’set its nets too high.’” Significantly, at the close of the novel, only Mosca is strong enough to survive the pain of loss and intense suffering.

The love Fabrizio and Clelia will later feel for each other is foreshadowed very early when Fabrizio gives twelve-year-old Clelia and her father a ride in his carriage. When the hero saves Count Conti, who is traveling in disguise, from exposure to the police, the little girl does not fully understand what is happening but suspects that the young man is somehow noble and admires him shyly from a distance. Years later, when they meet again as adults, their love blossoms slowly as they move through phases of the process which Stendhal called “crystallization.” For Fabrizio, the feeling is new in its degree of intensity and joy; his love is so vehement that, at one point, it causes him to wish for death and to refuse help in escaping rather than to lose it. On Clelia’s side, the reaction to love is more complex. She becomes increasingly passionate and demanding, yet purer in the sense that into her love for Fabrizio she pours her entire soul, concentrating in him all of her capacity for feeling. Her commitment is so total that she can feel compassion toward Gina; yet, simultaneously, jealousy taints her pity, and she leans toward hatred for the older woman. Her love allows her to sleep with Fabrizio after he has become a bishop and she is married, yet superstition makes her cling to her vow to meet him only in darkness and never see his face. The lovers’ depth of emotion extends to their child so strongly that when the child Sandrino dies, his mother follows him shortly afterward, while his father retires to the Carthusian monastery that gives the novel its title.

Behind these four extraordinary figures is ranged a gallery of minor characters, the most memorable being those associated with the court in Parma. People are paraded before the reader’s eyes in all of their vanity and pomposity to instruct the audience in the venality and pettiness of humanity. The Grand Duke Ranuce-Ernest IV leads this gallery of comic figures; in quick flashes, Stendhal reveals a man at once cruel and terrified to indulge his cruelty, proud of his power yet ashamed that it is not greater, affected and overbearing but inwardly filled with fear and indecision. While the main characters are used to show how humans can commit themselves wholly to love, through the minor characters, Stendhal ridicules, in a comic fashion reminiscent of the works of Molière, all the vices and follies of humankind.