The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

THOUGH STENDHAL CALLED this a short novel, it is quite substantial, in length as in design. And yet he wrote it in less than two months, in late 1838. It is set in the north of Italy, his favorite region, in the aftermath of Napoleon, his sometime hero. Stendhal had a fantasy that he was half Italian and hints that Fabrizio del Dongo, the delightful male protagonist and nephew-by-marriage of the marvelous Duchess Gina Sanseverina, who is in love with him, was the illegitimate son of Lieutenant Robert, who turns up later in the novel on the battlefield of Waterloo. When he reappears, he is General Count d'A*** Robert, whom Fabrizio has no way of recognizing, yet, as Stendhal remarks, "How happy he would have been to find Fabrizio del Dongo! " With Stendhalian irony, the father steals the son's horse.

Fabrizio's experience of Waterloo is a famous set-piece. He fights on the side of the French, sees and hears cannon fire and gunfire and even, at a distance, the Emperor Napoleon, though by then the young Italian nobleman is so high on brandy he cannot be sure what he sees. The French army breaks up, and the victorious Prussian cavalry causes such hysteria in the ranks that poor Fabrizio, obeying orders, is severely wounded by French deserters. The noble scamp finds his way back home eventually, and Stendhal charges on.