Kol., otherwise Romain Colomb, Beyle's executor, relates in the Notice Biographique prefixed to Armance that in January, 1839, while the Chartreuse was going through the press, a cahier of sixty pages of the manuscript was mislaid. Unable to find it among the mass of papers that littered his room, Beyle rewrote the sixty pages, and the new version was already in type when he told Colomb of his loss. Colomb at once searched for and found the missing cahier, whereupon Beyle, "stupefied by the ease of my discovery, dreading, in a sense, the sight of this manuscript, would not even glance over it, much less compare it with the pages that had taken its place."
It was published in March, 1839. In the same year, Beyle began to correct, reduce and amplify the whole work, before he was moved by Balzac's criticism to condense the first fifty-four pages into four or five. Three copies thus annotated are in existence, one of which has been reproduced in facsimile in an extremely limited edition: (Paris, Edouard Champion, 3 vols. 1921—100 copies only.) In 1904 M. Casimir Stryienski reprinted in the first volume of Les Soirées du Stendhal Club (Mercure de France) the two fragments of which a translation follows. The first is intended for inclusion in Chapter V, in the brief account of Fabrizio's convalescence at Amiens. Colonel Le Baron, the wounded officer whom he met and left at the White Horse Inn at the end of Chapter IV, is now re-introduced as returning to his family at Amiens, and a story is told them which supersedes the account of General Pietranera's death in Chapter II. The second fragment is a small expansion of the already over-long Chapter VI.
Visitors to Parma will look in vain for most of the architectural monuments which met the gaze of Fabrizio. The Torre Farnese has never existed, though it may have been suggested, as to mass, by the huge fragment of the Palazzo Farnese at Piacenza, as well as by the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, and as to origin, by the story of Parisina and Ugo d'Este, told in English by Gibbon and Byron. In appearance, it would have been not unlike the tower, also damaged by an earthquake, which stands in the background of Mantegna's fresco of the Martyrdom of Saint James, in the Church of the Eremitani at Padua. The problem of how a road running out of Parma to the south could lead directly to Sacca and the Po is as insoluble as that of the guarded permission given to Fabrizio in 1815 to read the novels of Walter Scott.
The Steccata of course exists, and the Church of San Giovanni, but the latter is singularly bare of monumental tombs. There is even a Charterhouse, at San Lazzaro Parmense, though it has escaped the attention of Baedeker. There were Farnese, but the last of them died, of the pleasures of the table, in 1731; a portrait of him in his corpulence may be seen by the curious in the Reale Galleria in the Piletta—another large Farnese Palace also unfinished. There is indeed a Cathedral, but there is no Archbishop, and the Bishop's Palace is an untidy piece of patched-up antiquity.
It is probable that Beyle was led to place the scene of his story at Parma, which, in Rome, Naples et Florence, he had dismissed, not unjustly, as ville d'ailleurs assez plate, precisely because there was not, in 1838, any reigning dynasty in that State. The Duchy of Parma was held and admirably governed by Marie-Louise, the wife and widow of Napoleon, from 1815 until after Beyle's death in 1843, when she was still in the prime of life, being by some years his junior. Suddenly, in 1847, she died. The Bourbon dynasty, which had been transplanted to the brief Kingdom of Etruria, and in 1814 had been placated with the Republic of Lucca as a temporary Duchy (which Charles II had finally sold, a few months earlier, to its legal heir, the Grand Duke of Tuscany), returned, and rapidly converted Stendhal's fiction into historical fact. Charles II was almost at once obliged to abdicate. His son, Charles III, proceeded to emulate the career of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV until, in 1854, he met a similar fate. His widow, a daughter of the Duc de Berri, then acted as Regent for her son Robert I, until in 1859 the Risorgimento swept them for ever from their Duchy. Duke Robert died in 1907, the father of twenty children, one of whom, Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, shewed in the late war some reflexion of the spirit of Fabrizio del Dongo, as the curious English reader may find in my translation of his L'Autriche et la paix séparée (Austria's Peace Offer, London, Constable and Co., Ltd., 1921). Another is the Empress Zita, while a third has re-established the Bourbon dynasty in Northern Europe by becoming the father of the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
Francesco Hayez, the Milanese painter immortalised by his decoration of the palazzo Crescenzi and by his portrait of Fabrizio del Dongo, died at a great age in 1882, having outlived the date appointed by Beyle for his own immortality.
C. K. S. M.
[FRAGMENT I
BIRAGUE'S NARRATIVE]
Fabrizio, well received in this house which seemed to him very pleasant, sought never to speak of the battle, since memories of that sort depressed the Colonel; but as he thought without ceasing of the details of which he had been a witness, he would sometimes return to the topic; then the Colonel placed a finger on his lips with a smile, and spoke of something else. On the other hand, Fabrizio was careful never to say anything that might let it be guessed by what succession of chances he had been brought into the neighbourhood of Waterloo. The ladies especially were constantly placing him under the necessity of finding polite answers which should tell them nothing of what they desired to know. At every moment, by phrases which betrayed the keenest interest, they placed him under the necessity of telling them something; but he got well out of the trap and the ladies knew absolutely nothing, except that he was called Vasi, and even then they had good reason to believe that this name was assumed.
Colonel Le Baron, his wife and the ladies of their acquaintance were therefore devoured by curiosity, this young man's adventures must indeed be extraordinary.