Armance

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.”