by Stendhal
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which illuminate the mortuary, chapel containing the statue and relic of the saint, the swooning girls, all come to mind at the end of the novel when the decapitated Julien is buried in 'that little grotto magnificently lit by an infinite array of candles', and Mathilde bears off her capital relic amidst the throng of mountain villagers who have come like pilgrims to witness this strange rite. Julien the latter-day apostate is revealed to be more akin to an early Christian martyr. Imagination not only leads Julien away from happiness, it leads him to premature death: 'the red' brings 'the black'.
The wounded neck represented on the statue of St Clement is but one of the several details in the novel which foreshadow Julien's crime and execution and thereby create a sense of fateful inevitability in the mind of the retrospective reader. What may have appeared random now takes on a providential quality. The parallels established by the prospective readerparvenu, foundling, Napoleon, revolutionary hero--may now be replaced by the figure of the man of destiny, the man of exceptional passion and energy whose life is punctuated by intimations of premature mortality and whose superiority is the cause of his downfall. We may remember the piece of paper in the pew in Verrières church and its reference to the execution of one Louis Jenrel. We may smile that Julien notes only that 'his name ends like mine' ( 1. 5), whereas it is an exact anagram of his own, and we may even be led by this to realize that Julien Sorel and Louise de Rênal are anagramatically almost united. We note the crimson drapery and the red light that turns the holy water to blood, and later how the red damask with which, after a funeral service, the abbé ChasBernard transforms Besançon Cathedral to celebrate Corpus Christi provides a prophetic backdrop to Mme de Rênal's collapse. And the crimson curtains are duly drawn when Julien shoots Mme de Rênal at the moment of the elevation of the Host, the Body of Christ. Verrières is even the French for church windows'.
And might we not also note that, when Julien takes his 'first step' in Verrières church, this is said to be a 'station'; that he is tried on a Friday; that there are three days during which he can appeal; that he shares his champagne with two petty
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criminals; that Fouqué must, like Joseph of Arimathaea, plead for his mortal remains; that he is consistently referred to as the son of a carpenter. At the beginning of the novel we learn that Julien could recite the New Testament by heart: was he unwittingly foretelling his future? Has Julien been crucified for the values he proclaims by a society that fears the radical threat they pose? Has the man who won the cross of the Legion of Honour for his energy and imagination been nailed to the cross of bourgeois reaction? After all, we know who made the nails: M. de Rênal.
The road which Julien travels in The Red and the Black is a via dolorosa. But wherein lies redemption? Do we look askance at Julien's imagination and exclaim, as Mirabeau does in the epigraph which precedes the shooting of Mme de Rênal: 'O God, give me mediocrity!' ( 11. 35)? Do we content ourselves with the view that what led Julien away from the paradise of Vergy was mere foolish ambition and that the ultimate truth of the novel lies in his prison-idyll with Mme de Rênal and the discovery of his unique self? Julien, then, is a man saved at the last minute from the error of his ways? Perhaps, even, the lovers are reunited in death? Redemption, according to this line of thinking, would lie in sincerity and true love.
Or do we prefer to revert to the heroic outlook of our prospective view of Julien and see him once more in terms of other people, as indeed a man of destiny, not--as it turns out--of military or political destiny so much as a quasireligious one? Is it perhaps only through imagination that the world can be redeemed? Through the actions of great men with vision enough to transcend the predictable and the orthodox? Through literature too? Did The Red and the Black condemn itself to critical death in order to redeem the world of 1830?
On 16 August 1819 at St Peter's Fields in Manchester workers demonstrated in favour of better working conditions and, as C. W. Thompson has recently brought to light, they carried red and black flags. Troops intervened and many of the demonstrators met their deaths, the working class its Peterloo. On 29 July 1830 in Paris during the July Revolution a red and black flag was seen flying from the Vendôme column
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signifying a fight to the death. On 25 February 1830 at the first of Hernani red and black tickets were issued to the claque chosen to champion Victor Hugo's new romantic dram within the last bastion of Classical taste, the Coméedie Française. What better title could Stendhal have chosen for his hard-hitting critique of contemporary society which abolishes the conventional happy ending of marriage combined with the acquisition of wealth and enhanced social standing and substitutes that of urunercenary, classless adultery, and which turns the life of a peasant who attemps murder during Mass into a modern version of the Life of Christ?
The Red and the Black is a shocking novel, but it offers no design for living. It presents the incompatibility of happiness and imagination as a problem without solution, a problem illustrated by events in 1830 but for which a solution has been, and will be, sought in every age. Unlike Julien and Mathilde after their reading, the reader of The Red and the Black is left not with heroic preconceptions but with the resonance of an unanswered question, the resonance of a violin which has been played on with tact and expertise. The reader is thus in a better position to obey the golden rule which Stendhal laid down for himself in a diary entry of May 1904: 'regard everything I've read to date about man as a prediction; believe only what I have seen for myself. Joy, happiness, fame, all is upon it.
ROGER PEARSON
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NOTE ON THE TEXT
Le Rouge et le Noir was first published on 13 November 1830. The present translation is based on P.-G. Castex's edition of the text published in the Classiques Gamier series in 1973.
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FURTHER READING
READERS wishing to consult the French text of The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et k Noir) may rely on either of the following annotated editions: (i) ed. Michel Crouzet ( Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1964)
(ii) ed. P.-G. Castex ( Paris, Garnier frères, 1973)
Almost all Stendhal's works have been translated into English at one time or another, some repeatedly. Those wishing to read further novels by Stendhal in translation might next try his other undisputed masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma, which is available in C. K. Scott Moncrieff version (reissued by the Zodiac Press, 1980) or in Penguin Classics (translated by Margaret Shaw, 1958). Armance, the first as well as the shortest of his three completed novels, is available in C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation (republished by the Soho Book Company in 1986) or in that of Gilbert and Suzanne Sale ( Merlin Press, 1960). Lucien Leuwen, his longest but unfinished novel, may be read in H. L. R. Edward translation ( London, 1951).
The Penguin Classics series includes Love (translated by Gilbert and Suzanne Sale, 1957) and the autobiographical work The Life of Henry Brulard (translated by J. Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight , 1973). Of further interest is Richard Howard translation of two shorter narratives The Pink and the Green. Mina de Vanghel ( Hamish Hamilton, 1988); the Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio by Stendhal ( 1814), translated and edited by Richard N. Coe ( London, 1972); and the same translator's Life of Rossini ( London, 1970). Extracts from Stendhal's correspondence may be read in To The Happy Few. Selected Letters, translated by Norman Cameron in 1952 and reissued with an introduction by Cyril Connolly by the Soho Book Company in 1986.
The most useful biography of Stendhal in English is by Robert Alter (in collaboration with Carol Cosman): Stendhal. A Biography ( Allen and Unwin, 1980).
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Critical studies in English devoted solely to The Red and the Black include: John Mitchell, Stendhal: 'Le Rouge et le Noir' ( Edward Arnold, 1973)
Stirling Haig, Stendhal: 'The Red and the Black' ( Landmarks of World Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Recent critical studies in English which contain c
hapters on Le Rouge et le Noir include: Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal ( Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Roger Pearson, Stendhal's Violin: A Novelist and his Reader ( Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988)
Other general critical works on Stendhal in English include: Robert M. Adams, Stendhal: Notes on a Novelist (the Merlin Press, 1959)
Victor Brombert, Stendhal. Fiction and the Themes of Freedom ( University of Chicago Press, 1968)
F. W. J. Hemmings, Stendhal. A Study of his Novels ( Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964)
Geoffrey Strickland, Stendhal. The Education of a Novelist ( Cambridge University Press, 1974)
Margaret Tillett, Stendhal. The Background to the Novels ( Oxford University Press, 1971)
Michael Wood, Stendhal ( Elek, 1971)
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A CHRONOLOGY OF STENDHAL (MARIE-HENRI BEYLE)
1783: 23 January: born in Grenoble into well-to-do family.
1790: 23 November: death of his mother Henriette (née Gagnon).
1799: After three successful years at the Ecole Centrale, is recommended to apply to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Arrives on 10 November but prefers not to take the entrance examination.
1800: Family connections bring him a job at the Ministry of War. His visit to Milan at the end of May marks the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Italy. 23 September: appointed to a commission as sub-lieutenant in the cavalry (of Napoleon's army in Italy).
1801-2: Granted sick leave and resigns his commission on returning to Paris, where he devotes more time to study and to his many attempts to write a comedy.
1804-5: Falls in love with an actress, Mélanie Guilbert. Follows her to Marseille, where he briefly finds employment with a colonial import and brokerage firm.
1806: Returns to Paris without Mélanie. Departs to join Napoleon's army in an administrative position. Posted to Brunswick.
1809: Working in Vienna. Illness keeps him from the battle of Wagram.
1810-11: Returns to Paris and promotion. Presented to the empress. Spends three months in Italy. Affair with Angela Pietragrua. Works on a history of Italian painting.
1812: Leaves Paris for Russia with dispatches. After a month in Moscow departs just before the main retreat.
1814: Paris occupied by the Allies. Signs declaration recognizing the Bourbon restoration. 20 July: leaves Paris to live in Milan.
1815: Publishes his Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase. End of the affair with Angela Pietragrua.
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1816-17: Meets Lord Byron at La Scala. Publishes his Histoire de la peinture en Italie and Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (in which he uses the pseudonym ' Stendhal' for the first time). Begins work on a life of Napoleon.
1818: 4 March: beginning of his great and unrequited passion for Matilde Dembowski (née Viscontini).
1819: 20 June: death of his father Chérubin, who leaves him some minor debts rather than the fortune he had expected. Passing friendship with Rossini.
1820-1: Working on De l'amour. Suspected by his left-wing friends of being a French agent, and by the authorities of involvement in left-wing plots. Departure from Milan and Matilde. Return to Paris.
1822: Publishes De l'amour. Begins regular contributions (until 1828) on the Parisian cultural scene to English periodicals, such as the New Monthly Magazine.
1825: 1 May: death of Matilde Dembowski.
1827: Publishes his first novel, Armance.
1829: 25-6 October: his 'first idea' of Le Rouge et le Noir.
1830: 8 April: signs contract with Levavasseur for publication of Le Rouge et le Noir. 25 September: after considerable persistence finally offered the post of consul in Trieste. 6 November: departure from Paris, after making a written proposal of marriage to Giulia Rinieri (which is refused). 13 November: publication of Le Rouge et le Noir. Arrival in Trieste. Accreditation refused.
1831: 11 February: appointed consul in Civitavecchia. 5 March: publication of second edition of Le Rouge et le Noir (in pocket-book format). 25 April: accredited as consul by the Holy See.
1833: Begins elaboration of short stories on the basis of late Renaissance manuscripts discovered in Rome. These stories, posthumously dubbed his Chroniques italiennes, are published at periodic intervals in the Revue des Deux Mondes during the late 1830s.
1834: Starts work on Lucien Leuwen but abandons the novel some 700 pages later when, on 23 September 1835, he hears of the abolition of the freedom of the press--by his employers.
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1835: Awarded the cross of the Legion of Honour for services to literature (would have preferred it for services to diplomacy). 23 November: begins work on his autobiography, the Vie de Henry Brulard, which he abandons on 17 March
1836: The subject exceeds the saying of it.'
1836: 24 May: arrives in Paris on leave, which he manages to protract until 1839.
1838: Dictates La Chartreuse de Parme in its entirety between 4 November and 26 December.
1839: 6 April: publication of La Chartreuse de Parme. 13 April: begins work on Lamiel, his last, unfinished novel. 24 June: leaves Paris to resume office as consul and is back at his desk on 10 August.
1840: 1 January: suffers first stroke. 25 September: Honoré de Balzac publishes elogious review of La Chartreuse de Parme (in which he also tells its author how he could have written it better).
1841: Further illness. 15 September: granted sick leave. 22 October: leaves for Paris.
1842: 22 March: collapses in the street after dinner with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and dies in his lodgings at 2 a.m. the following morning. 24 March: buried in the cemetery of Montmartre. Desired epitaph: 'Arrigo Beyle Milanese. Scrisse. Amò. Visse.'
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THE RED AND THE BLACK
A Chronicle of 1830
TO THE HAPPY FEW *
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE *
THIS work was ready for publication when the great events of July * supervened and left French minds rather unreceptive to creations of the imagination. We have reason to believe that the pages which follow were written in 1827. *
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BOOK ONE
The truth, the truth
in all its harshness.
DANTON *
CHAPTER 1
A small town
Put thousands together
Less bad.
But the cage less gay.
HOBBES
THE small town of Verrières may be regarded as one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté. * Its white houses with their steeply pitched roofs of red tile are spread over a hillside where clumps of sturdy Spanish chestnuts mark out the slightest dips in the terrain. The river Doubs flows several hundred feet beneath the old town walls, built in former times by the Spaniards and now fallen to ruin.
Verrières is sheltered on its northern side by a high mountain ridge, part of the Jura range. Right from the earliest cold spells in October the jagged peaks of the Verra are covered with snow. A mountain stream which comes tumbling down from the heights passes through Verrières on its way to join the Doubs, and supplies power to numerous sawmills. This simple form of industry provides a reasonably comfortable living for the majority of the inhabitants, who are peasants rather than townsfolk. The wealth acquired by this little town does not, however, come from the sawmills, but rather from the factory where painted fabrics are produced in the Mulhouse tradition. * This is the source of the general prosperity which, since the fall of Napoleon, has enabled all the house-fronts in Verrières to be refurbished.
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You have scarcely set foot in the town before you are deafened by the din from a noisy and fearful-looking machine. Twenty massive hammers come thundering down with a noise to set the cobbles shaking, and are lifted up again by a wheel driven by the waters of the stream. Each one of these hammers makes countless thousands of nails every day. It is the task of pretty, fre
sh-cheeked girls to hold out the little pieces of iron which the enormous hammers beat speedily into nails. This rough-looking work is one of the activities which the traveller who ventures for the first time into the mountains separating France from Switzerland finds most surprising. If on his arrival in Verrières the traveller asks who owns this fine nail factory which deafens people as they go up the main street, he will be told in the drawling local accent: 'Ah! that belongs to his worship the mayor.'
If the traveller stops but a moment in the main street of Verrières, which climbs up from the bank of the Doubs almost to the top of the hill, you can bet a hundred to one he will see a tall man appearing on the scene with the look of someone going about important business. As he passes, all hats are raised with alacrity. His hair is turning grey, and grey is what he wears. He is a member of several orders of knighthood, * he has a high forehead and a Roman nose, and his face is not without a certain overall regularity: people even think at first sight that it combines the dignity befitting a village mayor with that special charm which can still be found in someone rising fifty. But soon the traveller from Paris is shocked by a certain look of self-satisfaction and complacency mingled with an indefinable hint of narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination. You feel in the end that the wit of this man does not go beyond making sure he is paid on the dot whatever is owed to him, and leaving it to the last possible moment to pay back what he himself owes.
Such is the mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal. He walks solemnly across the road and disappears from sight into the town hall. But if the traveller continues his stroll he will notice, a hundred yards or so further up, a rather fine-looking house and, through the iron gate next to it, some very splendid gardens. The skyline beyond is formed by the hills of
