It is not just La Chartreuse which may be classed as an operatic text, for one perhaps makes the most sense of Stendhal and does him the greatest justice if one regards all his novels as opera, as fictional equivalents of the opera buffa. This is not because of the existence of the formal parallels that I have identified in the foregoing chapter, but because the operatic principle as I have discerned it in Stendhal is ultimately a novelistic principle, and may be seen as Stendhal's overall response to the exigencies implied by the contemporary conception of the novel as a mirror.

It is a response through which Stendhal gestures both backwards and forwards in the history of the genre. In the backwards sense it shows how far Stendhal remained a man of the eighteenth century, nostalgically harking back to values and a way of life which the nineteenth century had no place for. His belief that the mirror of the nineteenth century was capable only of reflecting a sad and prosaic reality drove him to find a solution which could accommodate the pre-Revolutionary and fundamentally aristocratic qualities of ‘le romanesque’ and ‘la grace’. The anachronistic appeal to the sublime which Stendhal's operatic model promotes is, in this sense, frankly regressive: as he himself admitted, ‘En musique, comme pour beaucoup d'autres choses, je suis un homme d'un autre siècle’ (Haydn, p. 399).