The climate of power as Stendhal expresses it is best captured in an odd fact of history. After the restoration of the French Bourbon monarchy in 1814, the new king of France is crowned Louis XVIII, but the last king before the revolution intervened had been Louis XVI. The intervening period is thus invented by the Restoration: there was no Louis XVII. Nevertheless, the return of the Bourbon monarchy was a willful forgetting of the past, which was overlaid with a false continuity. As scholar Sandy Petrey argues, at the root of this political climate is the arbitrariness of titles and the free use of language. (Petrey, Sandy. Realism and Revolution. Cornell University Press. 1989.)

Returning to the Italy of the book’s setting, Gina is made a Duchess by a false marriage, yet the title has meaning insofar as society agrees to it; Fabrizio becomes an Archbishop for a concatenation of reasons that have equally little to do with the office. In these instances and others, readers are given to feel that power is not based on anything that might be considered “real” but is rather conjured up by the arbitrary acts of linguistic naming and other forms of social consensus: what is true is what is agreed upon to be so.