“Les prisons de Parme étaient vides, le comte immensément riche, Ernest V. adoré de ses sujets, qui comparaient son gouvernement à celui des grands-ducs de Toscane.”
Well may he have added to that the final address, To the happy few! I should do him wrong if I did not remark that it is on the last page of the novel that Stendhal mentions, for the first and only time in it, the Chartreuse de Parme itself.
The French novelists favour irony at the close. It may be that they owe it to Voltaire:
“Pangloss used to say sometimes to Candide: All the things that happen to us are linked one to another in this best of all possible worlds; for indeed if you had not been driven out of a fine castle by kicks behind for Cunégonde’s sake, if you had not endured the Inquisition, traversed America on your two feet, driven your sword through the Baron’s body, lost all your fine sheep of Eldorado, you would not at this moment be eating lemon preserve and pistachio nuts. It is well said, replied Candide; but we must go on digging our garden.”
Flaubert adopted that sort of thing for l’Education Sentimentale, whose last is its best page. It is good to have arrived there, anyhow; and pleasant to depart on a happy thought.
How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to tell the strictly modern reader—who also knows more about it than I do. Aposiopesis has its points, one of which certainly is that as anything you please has happened already, it can happen again, and may as well. But it presumes too much upon the immunity afforded by the printing-press. If the modern story-teller tried that game upon an auditorium, and proposed to take himself off with his characters left sitting, it is long odds that he himself would not have anything worth talking about left to sit upon. The only requital open to the reader, unfortunately, is to cease to be one; and that is very much what I understand him to be doing.