Mapped
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
A young nobleman crosses Napoleonic Europe and the intrigues of a tiny Italian court. The map runs across northern Italy: Milan under the French, the family castle on Lake Como, and the little despotic state of Parma with its citadel prison, where the story ends in a monastery. One scene falls far outside the setting, at Waterloo in Belgium, where the hero wanders the battle without ever grasping it.
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The Red and the Black
Stendhal
The carpenter's son Julien Sorel, brilliant, proud and ambitious in a France where the army's red is closed to him and only the church's black offers a poor man a ladder, climbs through hypocrisy and seduction toward a ruin of his own making. Stendhal maps a real Restoration France: the provincial town of Verrières in the Franche-Comté, the seminary at Besançon, and the aristocratic Paris where Julien's rise and fall play out.
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