S.G. Talmor

There are books one has read.
And there are books one has lived with.

Not because one quotes them often, nor because one returns to them regularly, but because they have altered something far more durable: the inner climate in which a life is lived. The outer world remains the same, with its constraints, disappointments, and habits. But it is now crossed differently—by figures, voices, and rhythms that illuminate it from within.

The Charterhouse of Parma was one of those books for me.

I read it very young, without scholarly apparatus, without critical distance, with the total openness one has at seventeen, when one does not yet know exactly what one is seeking, but recognizes immediately what is alive. That novel plunged me into a lasting joy. Not a fleeting exaltation, not the enthusiasm of youth, but a new way of inhabiting life. Something in me aligned itself there—and never entirely fell out of tune again.

Stendhal writes lived intensity.
Joy, desire, momentum, shame, exaltation—without defensive irony, without moral prudence, without the distancing that protects but impoverishes. He writes the way one lives when one agrees to live fully. This vital energy needs no explanation. It transmits itself.

He also writes inner freedom.
His characters seek to live according to their own rhythm, against conventions, against family expectations, against social structures that assign destinies. They stumble, they err, they sometimes make fools of themselves—but they move forward. This insistence on a singular trajectory, whatever the cost, is deeply universal, and perhaps today deeply American.

What touched me most, however, was his affective courage.
To love without tepidness. To risk ridicule. To go all the way with what one feels, even when it complicates everything. This is not psychology, still less morality—it is a stance toward life. It says that certain things deserve to be lived fully, even if they promise neither comfort nor safety.

Over the years, Stendhal ceased to be an author for me.
He became a companion. A discreet but constant presence. Someone one walks alongside through life, sometimes without even noticing. As though certain voices, once heard, continue to speak within us long after the book has closed.

There is a very simple and very strong sign of this:
it was not my age that loved this novel—
it was already me.

Perhaps the most tangible proof of this entanglement between life and book lies elsewhere. I named my daughter Clélia. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps life found in the novel the name it was waiting for. In the end, it hardly matters. This hesitation itself is meaningful: life and literature had ceased to be separable. They had intertwined. The book did not remain symbolic; it engaged filiation, time, the future.

Years later, I reread The Charterhouse of Parma with apprehension. I feared my early fervor had been that of a young man. The effect was the same. The same joy. The same familiarity. The same sense that a book had once helped me live—and was still, quietly, doing so.

The text that follows is neither an exercise nor a model nor a demonstration.

It is given as it is. It recounts a moment when, without having planned it, I entered that novel—not as a reader, but as a character. Not for the sake of a device—many writers have used it—but because, at that precise moment, something in my life called for that displacement.

I do not seek to explain what happens when one enters a work in this way. Some experiences can only be transmitted through their trace.

Stendhal said he wrote for the happy few.

I have never known exactly who they were.
Perhaps simply those in whom a text continues to work, long after the last page has been turned.

I pass the relay, without knowing who will take it.

I was at the maternity ward in La Ciotat, beside my wife, who was about to give birth. I was holding her hand as the contractions grew stronger and closer together. The midwife then called the doctor, who arrived not alone but accompanied by two interns and a nurse. As they were about to administer the first care and there were many of them, they asked me to step out into the corridor for five minutes. I obeyed.

I found myself alone, thoughtful, in a long corridor dimly lit by a few windows. One perceives the passage of time differently when standing beside a woman in labor, and I discovered, to my great surprise, that daylight was already fading. Near me, a transparent plastic crib seemed abandoned against the wall. An empty crib, furnished only with a small mattress… I stepped closer and was struck by a sudden shock when I saw that an anonymous hand had already written on the crib the first name of my future daughter: Clélia.

Children come into the world by chance, or because they were desired—but also because they were dreamed of. Until then, my masculine reverie had lingered on my wife’s belly rounding day after day, on the arrangement of a small bedroom, on the purchase of baby clothes. I imagined holding a baby in my arms; I could also see myself one day with a little two-year-old girl walking while holding my hand. She would be beautiful like her mother. Her name would be so difficult to pronounce that I had declared it would serve as a first filter among her future suitors…

What nonsense one says when one does not know what one is talking about! I believe the birth of a child must resemble a true apparition for a father, and that one becomes a father at the very moment one discovers one is responsible for a life. I think I discovered all this brutally, alone, standing before that name written on an empty crib.

My thoughts raced. I grew tender over my new role as a father, over that of all fathers. Let us take a detail to begin with: the responsibility of choosing a first name. Had I truly thought through the consequences of such a choice? Yes—at least a little. I would not, for instance, have wanted my child to bear the weight of an ancestor’s name. I still shuddered at the thought of Van Gogh, burdened with the name of a brother who had died before his birth. Would the name Clélia, which we had chosen with such apparent lightness, at least help her cross this turbulent century that was just beginning? Might it protect her?

Clélia is a Roman heroine who defied the king of the Etruscans by leading, at night, a troop of three hundred young girls taken hostage—inter tela hostium—right under the noses of the enemy, swimming across the Tiber to bring them home. A fine example, one to which my daughter could one day refer, if need be! But I had to admit to myself that I had not chosen this name with that model in mind. I had simply thought—without being clearly aware of it—of Clélia Conti, the young heroine of Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, which I had read with enthusiasm in my youth but had since forgotten. I could not remember whether she had a mother. How difficult it must have been for her father to raise her alone! Like me with my daughter, he too must have wished the best for her—a good marriage, a…

Indignation suddenly flushed my face. I now recalled how the novel portrayed that famous father: a petty, sly, calculating man, a general who thought only of securing his fortune and increasing his income by marrying off his daughter as quickly as possible to a marquis. What a splendid model of a father! And yet his only daughter loved him.

I continued to reflect. Why Clélia and not Gina, the other heroine of Stendhal’s novel? The Duchess Sanseverina bore the name of a magnificent woman—passionate, courageous, capable of choosing and deciding. But she was a fully formed woman, whereas I had been a very young man when I read the novel. Clélia was the romantic heroine par excellence, as beautiful as the Princess de Clèves, but endowed as well with the grace of a lover who had dared to overcome her own resistance and then all her father’s decrees. She was Fabrice’s beloved—a young man worthy of her, who would love her in return. It was only a novel, but I was in love with love, the only thing ever invented to defy death. I sensed it then; I believe it still today. That is why I had chosen this name for my daughter.

What destiny awaited this baby who was about to be born at any moment? Clélia Conti’s destiny had been sealed on the day her eyes met Fabrice’s.

When was that again? What a demiurge that Stendhal was! I thought next. Or perhaps he had no hand at all in the fate of his characters? What exactly does a writer do? I now saw Stendhal as though he were standing beside me, feverishly dictating his novel to a secretary. I have always said that if I were allowed to take only one book to a desert island, it would be that one. Yet I had never reread it, fearing disappointment: would it withstand rereading by the man I had become, entering the twenty-first century?

And in fact, I realized I had forgotten nothing. It was as though the book were opening of its own accord before me. The sentences formed by themselves before my eyes, as though I were dictating them. I felt Stendhal’s fever and understood the urgency with which he was writing. I crossed out the same sentences he did; I stumbled over the same words. When he hesitated too long, it was I who whispered the continuation.

Where were we now? Fabrice was already imprisoned in the Farnese Tower and, through the air vent of his cell, observed with tenderness Clélia moving gracefully in her garden. He was falling in love. And instead of rejoicing in this touching scene, I was seized by a growing distress: I saw the nets of a fatal destiny closing around these two children. No, Clélia was not merely a romantic heroine touched by love’s grace; she was a tragic figure trapped in a narrow era, crushed by social and religious conventions that would undo her.

Because of a foolish vow she had made before an impassive Madonna—to never see Fabrice again—she would allow herself to be married to a marquis she did not love. Yes, she would still have a child by Fabrice, conceived in darkness (again because of that vow), who would die quickly, and she herself would not survive him. One cannot prevent everything, and I think Stendhal, who loved life so deeply, treated the death of his heroes exactly as it should be treated: with disdain, dispatched in half a final page. But could misfortune not be prevented from occurring?

We sing that there is no happy love, that passions end badly. I know all that. It is a great engine of literature. But Clélia Conti deserved happiness, and I would have given all of literature for her to know it. Stendhal surely thought as I did, but perhaps he felt overwhelmed by the tragic mechanisms he himself had set in motion? He continued dictating new pages while, seized by anger, I leafed through the book beside him, searching for something—even though I did not know what. I had to act.

I came upon, for example, Fabrice’s declaration during a reception at the Prince of Parma’s palace:
“It seems to me, Mademoiselle, that once, near a lake, I already had the honor of meeting you, accompanied by gendarmes.”

I traced the scene back to that meeting on the shores of Lake Como, where Fabrice was already being sought for arrest. Clélia was only twelve then, though she appeared fourteen or fifteen. Destiny was already in motion; nothing could be changed. I went directly to the last page—and discovered it was blank. It had not yet been written! Perhaps Stendhal himself did not yet know what he would write. I went back again and saw what he was dictating: a letter hurled by sling into Fabrice’s prison, in which Gina warned her nephew of the danger of poisoning and outlined the means of his escape using ropes.

The next instant, one of the conspirators, Ludovic, would deliver those ropes to Clélia after having put General Conti to sleep with laudanum—and the instant after that… I knew what followed, and I was seized by mortal anxiety: the next moment, Clélia, believing her father poisoned, would swear before the Madonna that if he survived, she would never see Fabrice again. A perfectly useless vow, since I knew no poison had been administered. He was merely sleeping deeply—and would even become minister by the end of the novel. But because of that vow, Clélia would never again be happy.

How could Stendhal allow this? He had never had children; it showed! I already reproached him enough for having consented without protest to the execution of Julien Sorel in an earlier novel. Yet Stendhal had stopped dictating. He seemed to hesitate, as though listening, as though looking in my direction—but I was already gone.

In the page just written, the fortress of Parma rose darkly against the black sky. At the foot of its walls, I sought to recognize the place. I had to hurry, for I knew that soon two hundred soldiers would reinforce the garrison, on orders from the general, who suspected an escape attempt. A cry from the ramparts terrified me—I thought I had been spotted—but it was only the call exchanged by the sentries every quarter hour: “All is well around my post!” I rushed toward the drawbridge, and since the conspirators had managed to enter the fortress, I ran in after them, hoping to reach the chapel before it was too late.

I saw Clélia emerge from the room where Ludovic had just placed the ropes; she was running toward me, shaken by sobs. I barely had time to seize her arm and say, in a torrent of hurried words, in my broken Italian:
“Please believe me. Your father will not die—he will even become minister at the end of this story. Do not swear to the Madonna, in order to save a father who is not in danger, that you will never see Fabrice again. Do not marry the marquis your father wants for you to increase his fortune. Marry Fabrice and flee with him to Naples. His aunt and Count Mosca will welcome you there!”

She looked at me as though I were a creature sprung from hell; she made the sign of the cross and ran on, crying out:
“Great heavens! I am in league with the poisoners of my father—and I let them escape! And perhaps this man, under torture, would confess to something other than laudanum!”

She opened the door of that sinister chapel adorned with colossal marble skulls crossed over bones and shut herself inside.

I wished no harm to anyone. I did not want to prevent the writing of the novel. I only wanted to speak to Clélia—as a father, a better father than her own. And I could do nothing. That is the truth. The page turned by itself.

I made other attempts, traveling backward through other pages—trying, for instance, to visit Gina in her palace to persuade her to seduce the Prince of Parma and perhaps marry him. Count Mosca would have resigned himself. But the duchess’s people would not even let me enter. And then I no longer believed. The ink on the pages grew pale, Lake Como blended with the white mountains above it. I no longer had a place in that book when it closed.

Another title appeared on the cover—a simple name: Clélia. Not the one born on October 24, 1803, but the one about to be born two hundred years later, on September 20, 2004, before whom all the possibilities of life lay open, a life whose pages were yet to be written. I might have a role to play in some of those pages, and I prayed to God that I would behave better than General Conti.

My eyes were closed. I opened them again. What time was it? I looked around. I was still in the corridor beside the empty crib. A door opened; someone came out to take the crib and said kindly:

“Come in quickly, sir. Your daughter is about to be born.”