The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  She has the Duke of Wellington,” said a military personage looking very important.

  “Please, gentlemen, silence,” exclaimed the president. “If we are still going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in.”

  “We know that monsieur has many ideas,” said the duke irritably, looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside himself with rage.

  “There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen,” went on the speaker with all the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his listeners to reason. “If there were a new Pitt in England, you would not dupe a nation twice over by the same means.”

  “That’s why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward impossible in France,” exclaimed the military interrupter.

  On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the speaker was put upon his mettle.

  “My audience is eager for me to finish,” he said vigorously, completely discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that Julien thought had expressed his character so well. “It is eager for me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to offend nobody’s ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will be brief.

  “I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases,” continued the speaker, becoming more and more animated, “I will say this to you: Help yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia—who will only have courage but have no money—cannot launch more than one or two campaigns against France.

  “One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes, in the third campaign—in the third campaign I say—you will have the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792.”

  At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four quarters.

  “Monsieur,” said the president to Julien, “Go and make a précis in the next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out.”

  Julien went out, to his great regret. The speaker was just dealing with the question of probabilities, which formed the usual subject for his meditations. “They are frightened of my making fun of them,” he thought. When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,

  “Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, ‘is it god, table or tub?’ especially applicable to this unhappy people. ‘It is god’ exclaims the writer of fables. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and profound phrase seems to apply. Act on your own initiative, and noble France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.

  “England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia would only be able to give battle two or three times. Would that be sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817? I do not think so.”

  At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes of the whole room. It came again from the old Imperial general who wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the secret note.

  “I do not think so,” replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had subsided. He laid stress on the “I” with an insolence which charmed Julien.

  “That’s a pretty piece of acting,” he said to himself, as he made his pen almost keep pace with the marquis’ words.

  M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a well-turned phrase.

  “It is not only on foreign powers,” continued the marquis in a more even tone, “on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military occupation. All those young men who write inflammatory articles in the Globe will provide you with three or four thousand young captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good intentions of a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru.”

  “We did not know how to glorify him,” said the president. “He should have been immortalized.”

  “Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties,” went on M. de la Mole; “but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut lines of cleavage. Let us realise what has got to be crushed. On the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public opinion; youth and all that admire it. While it is stupefying itself with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of administrating the expenditure of the budget.”

  At this point there was another interruption.

  “As for you, Monsieur,” said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, “you do not spend, if the words choke you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from the civil list.”

  “Well, Monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to take you for an example. Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their lives in its service. You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of a rebellion would frighten you yourselves.”

  “Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen, so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.

  “Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews, of real gentlemen, in fact. Each of them will have beside him not a little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815 turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau. Our gentleman will have educated him; it will be his own foster brother if it is possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth of his income in order to form this little devoted force of five hundred men in each department. Then you will be able to reckon on a foreign occupation. The foreign soldier will never penetrate even as far as Dijon if he is not certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each department.

  “The foreign kings will only listen to you when you are in a position to announce to them that you have twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms in order to open to them the gates of France. The service is troublesome, you say. Gentlemen, it is the only way of saving our lives. There is war to the death between the liberty of the press and our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers, become peasants, or take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open your eyes.

  “‘Form your battalions,’ I would say to you in the words of the Jacobin songs. Some noble Gustavus Adolphus will then be found who, touched by the imminent peril of the monarchical principle, will make a dash three hundred leagues from his own country, and will do for you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Do you want to go on talking without acting? In fifty years’ time there will be only presidents or republics in Europe and not one king, and with those three letters R. O. I. you will see the last of the priests and the gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying court to squalid majorities.


  “It is no use your saying that at the present time France has not a single accredited general who is universally known and loved, that the army is only known and organised in the interests of the throne and the church, and that it has been deprived of all its old troopers, while each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments count fifty non-commissioned officers who have seen fire.

  “Two hundred thousand young men of the middle classes are spoiling for war—”

  “A truce to disagreeable truths,” said a grave personage in a pompous tone. He was apparently a very high ecclesiastical dignitary, for M. de la Mole smiled pleasantly, instead of getting angry, a circumstance which greatly impressed Julien.

  “A truce to unpleasant truths; let us resume, gentlemen. The man who needs to have a gangrened leg cut off would be ill advised to say to his surgeon, ‘this disease is very healthy.’ If I may use the metaphor, gentlemen, the noble Duke of——is our surgeon.”

  “So the great words have at last been uttered,” thought Julien. “It is towards the——that I shall gallop to-night.”

  LIII. The Clergy, the Forests, Liberty

  The first law of every being, is to preserve itself and live. You sow hemlock, and expect to see ears of corn ripen.—Machiavelli

  The great personage continued. One could see that he knew his subject. He proceeded to expound the following great truths with a soft and tempered eloquence with which Julien was inordinately delighted:—

  “1. England has not a guinea to help us with; economy and Hume are the fashion there. Even the saints will not give us any money, and M. Brougham will make fun of us.

  “2. The impossibility of getting the kings of Europe to embark on more than two campaigns without English gold; two campaigns will not be enough to dispose of the middle classes.

  “3. The necessity of forming an armed party in France. Without this, the monarchical principle in Europe will not risk even two campaigns.

  “The fourth point which I venture to suggest to you, as self-evident, is this:

  “The impossibility of forming an armed party in France without the clergy. I am bold enough to tell you this because I will prove it to you, gentlemen. You must make every sacrifice for the clergy.

  “First, because as it is occupied with its mission by day and by night, and guided by highly capable men established far from these storms at three hundred leagues from your frontiers——”

  “Ah, Rome, Rome!” exclaimed the master of the house.

  “Yes, Monsieur, Rome,” replied the cardinal haughtily. “Whatever more or less ingenious jokes may have been the fashion when you were young, I have no hesitation in saying that in 1830 it is only the clergy, under the guidance of Rome, who has the ear of the lower classes.

  “Fifty thousand priests repeat the same words on the day appointed by their chiefs, and the people—who after all provide soldiers—will be more touched by the voices of its priests than by all the versifying in the whole world.” (This personality provoked some murmurs.)

  “The clergy has a genius superior to yours,” went on the cardinal raising his voice. “All the progress that has been made towards this essential point of having an armed party in France has been made by us.” At this juncture facts were introduced. “Who used eighty thousand rifles in Vendée?” etc., etc.

  “So long as the clergy is without its forests it is helpless. At the first war the minister of finance will write to his agents that there is no money to be had except for the curé. At bottom France does not believe, and she loves war. Whoever gives her war will be doubly popular, for making war is, to use a vulgar phrase, the same as starving the Jesuits; making war means delivering those monsters of pride—the men of France—from the menace of foreign intervention.”

  The cardinal had a favourable hearing. “M. de Nerval,” he said, “will have to leave the ministry, his name irritates and to no purpose.”

  At these words everybody got up and talked at the same time. “I will be sent away again,” thought Julien, but the sapient president himself had forgotten both the presence and existence of Julien.

  All eyes were turned upon a man whom Julien recognised. It was M. de Nerval, the prime minister, whom he had seen at M. the Duc de Retz’s ball.

  The disorder was at its height, as the papers say when they talk of the Chamber. At the end of a long quarter of an hour a little quiet was established.

  Then M. de Nerval got up and said in an apostolic tone and a singular voice:

  “I will not go so far as to say that I do not set great store on being a minister.

  “It has been demonstrated to me, gentlemen, that my name will double the forces of the Jacobins by making many moderates divide against us. I should therefore be willing to retire; but the ways of the Lord are only visible to a small number; but,” he added, looking fixedly at the cardinal, “I have a mission. Heaven has said: ‘You will either lose your head on the scaffold or you will re-establish the monarchy of France and reduce the Chambers to the condition of the parliament of Louis XV.,’ and that, gentlemen, I shall do.”

  He finished his speech, sat down, and there was a long silence.

  “What a good actor,” thought Julien. He made his usual mistake of ascribing too much intelligence to the people. Excited by the debates of so lively an evening, and above all by the sincerity of the discussion, M. de Nerval did at this moment believe in his mission. This man had great courage, but at the same time no sense.

  During the silence that followed the impressive words, “I shall do it,” midnight struck. Julien thought that the striking of the clock had in it a certain element of funereal majesty. He felt moved.

  The discussion was soon resumed with increasing energy, and above all with an incredible naïveté. “These people will have me poisoned,” thought Julien at times. “How can they say such things before a plebeian?”

  They were still talking when two o’clock struck. The master of the house had been sleeping for some time. M. de la Mole was obliged to ring for new candles. M. de Nerval, the minister, had left at the quarter to two, but not without having repeatedly studied Julien’s face in a mirror which was at the minister’s side. His departure had seemed to put everybody at their ease.

  While they were bringing new candles, the man in the waistcoats whispered to his neighbour: “God knows what that man will say to the King. He may throw ridicule upon us and spoil our future.”

  “One must own that he must possess an unusual self-assurance, not to say impudence, to put in an appearance here. There were signs of it before he became a minister; but a portfolio changes everything and swamps all a man’s interests; he must have felts its effect.”

  The minister had scarcely left before the general of Buonaparte closed his eyes. He now talked of his health and his wounds, consulted his watch, and went away.

  “I will wager,” said the man in the waistcoats, “that the general is running after the minister; he will apologise for having been here and pretend that he is our leader.”

  “Let us now deliberate, gentlemen,” said the president, after the sleepy servants had finished bringing and lighting new candles. “Let us leave off trying to persuade each other. Let us think of the contents of the note which will be read by our friends outside in forty-eight hours from now. We have heard ministers spoken of. Now that M. de Nerval has left us, we are at liberty to say ‘what we do care for ministers.’”

  The cardinal gave a subtle smile of approval.

  “Nothing is easier, it seems to me, than summing up our position,” said the young bishop of Agde, with the restrained concentrated fire of the most exalted fanaticism. He had kept silent up to this time; his eye, which Julien had noticed as being soft and calm at the beginning, had become fiery during the first hour of the discussion. His soul was now bubbling over like lava from Vesuvius.

  “England only made one mistake from 1806 to 1814,” he said, “and that was in not taking direct and personal measures against Napoleon. As soon as that man had made
dukes and chamberlains, as soon as he had re-established the throne, the mission that God had entrusted to him was finished. The only thing to do with him was to sacrifice him. The scriptures teach us in more than one place how to make an end of tyrants” (at this point there were several Latin quotations).

  “To-day, gentlemen, it is not a man who has to be sacrificed, it is Paris. What is the use of arming your five hundred men in each department, a hazardous and interminable enterprise? What is the good of involving France in a matter which is personal to Paris? Paris alone has done the evil, with its journals and its salons. Let the new Babylon perish.

  “We must bring to an end the conflict between the church and Paris. Such a catastrophe would even be in the worldly interests of the throne. Why did not Paris dare to whisper a word under Buonaparte? Ask the cannon of Saint-Roch?”

  Julien did not leave with M. de la Mole before three o’clock in the morning.

  The marquis seemed tired and ashamed. For the first time in his life in conversation with Julien, his tone was plaintive. He asked him for his word never to reveal the excesses of zeal—that was his expression—of which chance had just made him a witness. “Only mention it to our foreign friend, if he seriously insists on knowing what our young madmen are like. What does it matter to them if a state is overthrown, they will become cardinals and will take refuge in Rome. As for us, we shall be massacred by the peasants in our châteaus.”

  The secret note into which the marquis condensed Julien’s full report of twenty-six pages was not ready before a quarter to five.

  “I am dead tired,” said the marquis, “as is quite obvious from the lack of clearness at the end of this note; I am more dissatisfied with it than with anything I ever did in my whole life. Look here, my friend,” he added, “go and rest for some hours, and as I am frightened you might be kidnapped, I shall lock you up in your room.”

  The marquis took Julien on the following day to a lonely château at a good distance from Paris. There were strange guests there whom Julien thought were priests. He was given a passport which was made out in a fictitious name, but indicated the real destination of his journey, which he had always pretended not to know. He got into a carriage alone.