Armance - by Stendhal (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Twenty-year-old Octave de Malivert, ardent, impulsive, and idealistic, is so intent on preserving his purity of mind that he has sworn never to fall in love or marry. This vow is put severely to the test when he meets Armance de Zohiloff, a beautiful but impoverished Russian émigré. Though she returns his affections, Armance fears to be seen as a fortune-hunter; she makes her own vow never to marry him. Still, love manages to blossom between them, as love is wont to do, but a series of misunderstandings, as well as a fatal secret Octave harbors, puts their romance in ever greater peril.

Armance was Stendhal's first novel, published three years before The Red and the Black. A sumptuous tale of convoluted passion and thwarted longing that also offers trenchant commentary on ambition, class, and high-society manners during the Bourbon Restoration, Armance appears here in a dazzling new translation by Paul Eprile. As André Gide writes, "Of all Stendhal's books, I consider this to be the most sensitive and the most beautifully written."

About the Author

André Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt, the novel Call Me by Your Name, and the essay collections False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory and Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. He is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust.

Paul Eprile has translated four novels by Jean Giono--Hill, Melville, The Open Road, and Fragments of a Paradise--and two by Colette--Chéri, and The End of Chéri. For Melville he was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Eprile lives on the Niagara Escarpment northwest of Toronto.