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Fabrizio Del Dongo
Stendhal is dry and sardonic- and couldn't be more different from Lawrence Sterne who just about loves everybody. What they have in common is they both wrote novels for which you don't have to make allowances. There aren't many "classic" authors of whom that is true....
Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir is a complete prick but Fabrizio in La Chartreuse de Parme is a sweetie. All the girls fall for him because he's so innocently silly- and he falls right back. The chapters in which he skirts the battle of Waterloo and then gets caught up in the chaotic rout of the French army mark an epoch in the deglamorization of war. This is 1815 seen from the perspective of 1839. In Britain we were entering the Victorian Age and no British author would have dared- as Stendhal does- to have a runaway soldier tell an officer he no longer fears to "go fuck himself".
Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir is a complete prick but Fabrizio in La Chartreuse de Parme is a sweetie. All the girls fall for him because he's so innocently silly- and he falls right back. The chapters in which he skirts the battle of Waterloo and then gets caught up in the chaotic rout of the French army mark an epoch in the deglamorization of war. This is 1815 seen from the perspective of 1839. In Britain we were entering the Victorian Age and no British author would have dared- as Stendhal does- to have a runaway soldier tell an officer he no longer fears to "go fuck himself".