The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century

by Stendhal

  The duke was a man of fifty, dressed like a dandy, who walked as if on springs. He had a narrow head, a big nose, and a curved profile with all his features drawn forwards; no one could have had more noble and more insignificant an air. His arrival was the sign for the meeting to begin.

  Julien was sharply interrupted in his observations of physiognomy by the voice of M. de La Mole. 'May I introduce Father Julien Sorel,' the marquis was saying. 'He's gifted with an astonishing memory; it's only an hour since I told him about the mission he might be honoured with, and in order to demonstrate his memory, he has learned the first page of La Quotidienne off by heart.'

  'Ah! the Foreign News section written by poor old N-----,' said the host. He seized the newspaper eagerly, and, giving Julien a look that was comic, so hard was he trying to appear important, 'Speak, sir,' he said.

  There was a deathly hush, with all eyes riveted on Julien; he recited so well that after twenty lines: 'That'll do,' said the duke. The little man who looked like a wild boar sat down. He was presiding, for he was no sooner seated than he pointed out

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  a card-table to Julien and signalled to him to bring it up close to him. Julien settled himself at it with the wherewithal to write. He counted twelve people seated round the green baize.

  ' M. Sorel,' said the duke, 'please withdraw into the next room; you'll be summoned back.'

  The host took on a worried expression. 'The shutters aren't closed,' he said in a half-whisper to his neighbour. 'There's no need to look out of the window,' he called foolishly after Julien. Here I am in the thick of a conspiracy at the very least, thought the latter. Fortunately it isn't one of the kind that leads to the Place de Grève * . Even if there were danger in it, I owe this and more besides to the marquis. How glad I'd be if I were granted a chance to make up for all the sorrow my follies may one day cause him!

  All the time he was thinking of his follies and his misfortune, he was looking at his surroundings in such as way as never to forget them. Only then did he remember that he hadn't heard the marquis tell the footman the name of the street, and the marquis had arranged for a cab to bring them here, which was unheard of for him.

  For a long while Julien was left to his reflections. He was in a room hung with red velvet edged with wide gold braid. On the side table there was a large ivory crucifix, and on the mantlepiece a gilt-edged copy of M. de Maistre book On the Pope, * magnificently bound. Julien opened it so as not to appear to be listening. At times voices were raised very loud in the next room. At last the door opened and he was called in.

  'Consider, gentlemen,' said the chairman, 'that from now on we are speaking in front of the Duke of-----. This gentleman', he said with a gesture in Julien's direction, 'is a young Levite devoted to our holy cause, who will easily be able, thanks to his astonishing memory, to transmit everything we say, down to the last word.

  'It's this gentleman's turn to speak,' he said, indicating the individual with an unctuous expression who was wearing three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it would have been more natural to refer to the gentleman in the waistcoats by name. He took some paper and wrote down a great deal.

  (At this point the author would have liked to put a page of

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  dots. 'That's not very accommodating,' said his publisher. 'And if you don't accommodate your readers' tastes it spells death for a frivolous work like this one.'

  'Politics', replied the author, 'is a millstone round the neck of literature, which sinks it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of concerns of the imagination is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is harsh without being dynamic. It doesn't blend in with the sound of any instrument. All this politics will mortally offend one half of my readers and bore the other, even though they found it quite special and dynamic in the morning paper...'

  'If your characters don't talk politics', the publisher rejoined, 'they cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror, as you would have it...')

  The minutes taken by Julien were twenty-six pages long; here is a very colourless extract from them, for it was necessary, as always, to suppress the ridiculous excesses which would have struck readers as odious or scarcely credible (see La Gazette des Tribunaux). *

  The man in the waistcoats with the unctuous look (he was perhaps a bishop) smiled frequently, and this gave his eyes with their flabby lids a strange gleam and a less indecisive expression than usual. This figure, whom they invited to speak first in front of the duke (but which duke? Julien wondered), apparently to expound the different viewpoints and carry out the function of assistant public prosecutor, struck Julien as lapsing into the hesitancy and inability to draw firm conclusions that such lawyers are often reproached with. During the course of the discussion, the duke himself went so far as to reproach him with this.

  After several sentences of moralizing and indulgent philosophizing, the man in the waistcoats said:

  'Noble England, guided by a great man, the immortal Pitt, spent forty billion francs to stem the revolution. If this gathering will allow me to allude quite frankly to a dismal subject, England did not realize clearly enough that with a man like Bonaparte, especially when all they had to put in his way was a handful of good intentions, the only decisive factor would have been individual initiative...'

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  'Ah! advocating assassination * again!' said the host uneasily. 'Spare us your sentimental homilies,' the chairman exclaimed in annoyance; his boar's eye glinted ferociously. 'Carry on,' he said to the man in the waistcoats. The chairman's cheeks and forehead turned crimson.

  'Noble England', went on the spokesman, 'is crushed today, for before an Englishman can buy his bread, he is obliged to pay the interest on the forty billion francs used against the Jacobins. The country hasn't got a Pitt any more...'

  'She does have the Duke of Wellington,' said a military gentleman who assumed an air of great importance.

  'Silence, I beg you, gentlemen,' called out the chairman; 'if we argue any more, it'll have been pointless to call in M. Sorel.'

  'We all know that you, sir, are not short of ideas,' said the duke, glaring at the interruption, from a man who had been one of Napoleon's generals. Julien realized that this comment alluded to something personal and highly offensive. Everyone smiled; the turncoat general looked beside himself with anger.

  'There's no Pitt any more, gentlemen,' the spokesman went on, with the discouraged look of a man despairing of getting his listeners to see reason. And were there to be a new Pitt in England, you can't pull the wool over a nation's eyes twice in the same manner...'

  'That's why a victorious general, a Bonaparte, is henceforth impossible in ` France,' interrupted the military man again.

  This time round, neither the chairman nor the duke dared get angry, although Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would have dearly liked to. They lowered their gaze, and the duke was content with sighing in such a way as to be heard by all.

  But the spokesman had taken umbrage.

  'No one can wait for me to finish,' he said vehemently, completely dropping the smiling courtesy and measured language which Julien believed to be the expression of his character. 'No one can wait for me to finish; I'm not being given any credit for the effort I'm making not to offend anyone's ears, however long they may be. All right then, gentlemen, I shall be brief.'

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  'And I shall tell you in very blunt terms: England hasn't got a farthing left to further the good cause. Even if Pitt himself were to come back, all his genius would be of no avail to pull the wool over the English smallholders' eyes, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign on its own cost them a billion francs. Since you want plain speaking', the spokesman added, getting more and more animated, 'I say to you: 'Go out and seek your own help, * for England hasn't got a guinea to give you, and when England doesn't pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia, who only have courage and not money, cannot wage more than a campaign or two
against France.

  'It is to be hoped that the young soldiers mustered by the forces of Jacobinism will be defeated in the first campaign, or maybe in the second; but in the third, at the cost of seeming a revolutionary in your biased eyes, in the third you'll get the soldiers of 1794, * who that time round weren't the pressganged peasants of 1792.'

  At this point interruptions fired off from three or four quarters at once.

  'Sir,' said the chairman to Julien, 'go into the next room and copy out the beginning of the minutes you've taken.' Julien left the room, much to his regret. The spokesman had just touched on eventualities which formed the subject of his customary meditations.

  They're afraid I'll laugh at them, he thought. When he was recalled, M. de La Mole was saying, with a seriousness which struck Julien, who knew him, as highly comic:

  '...Yes, gentlemen, it's particularly appropriate to ask of this unfortunate nation:

  Will it be a god, a table or a basin?

  'It will be a god! * the fable-writer exclaims. You, gentlemen, seem to be the ones for whom these most noble and profound words are destined. Act on your own, and noble France will reappear much as our ancestors had created her and our eyes still saw her before the death of Louis XVI. *

  ' England--her noble lords, that is--loathes base Jacobinism as much as we do: without English gold, Austria, Russia and Prussia can only fight two or three battles. Will that be enough

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  to bring about the desired occupation, like the one M. de Richelieu * so stupidly failed to exploit in 1817! * I don't think so.'

  Here there was an interruption, but it was stifled by sounds of sshh! from everyone else. It again came from the former imperial general * who was after a Blue Sash, and wanted to cut a figure among the authors of the secret memorandum.

  'I don't think so,' M. de La Mole resumed when the hubbub died down. He stressed the I in a tone of insolence that delighted Julien. That was well played, he said to himself, making his pen fly almost as fast as the marquis's speech. With a word said right, M. de La Mole destroys all twenty of this turncoat's campaigns.

  'It isn't only to foreign hands', the marquis continued, 'that we can look for a fresh military occupation. All these young men writing inflammatory articles in Le Globe * will provide you with three or four thousand young captains in whose midst there may be a Kléber, * a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru, but less well-intentioned.

  'We failed to give him due honour,' said the chairman, 'His memory should have been made immortal.'

  'We must ultimately have two parties in France,' M. de La Mole went on, 'but two parties not in name alone, two parties that are quite distinct, quite separate. Let's be clear who it is we must crush. On the one hand journalists, voters, public opinion, in short: youth and all its admirers. While its head is being turned by the sound of its idle words, we on our side have the sure advantage of feeding off the budget.'

  Another interruption here.

  'You, sir,' said M. de La Mole to the interrupter with admirable hauteur and polish, 'you don't "feed off it"--if the term shocks you--you devour forty thousand francs from the State budget and eighty thousand you receive from the civil list.

  'Well, sir, since you drive me to it, let me boldly take you as an example. Like your noble ancestors who followed St Louis to the Crusades, you ought, in return for these hundred and twenty thousand francs, to have at least a regiment to show us--a company, or come now! a half-company, even if it had

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  no more than fifty men in it ready to fight, and devoted to the good cause, in life and in death! You've only got lackeys who, if it came to an uprising, would frighten the daylights out of your good self.

  'The throne, the altar, the nobility risk destruction tomorrow, until such time as you set up a force of five hundred devoted men in every département; and I mean devoted, not just with the true bravery of the French, but also the constancy of the Spaniards.

  'Half of each band will have to consist of our children, our nephews, real gentlemen, that is. Each one of them will have at his side not some talkative petty bourgeois, ready to sport the red-white-and-blue emblem if 1815 * repeats itself, but a good, straightforward, loyal peasant like Cathelineau; * our gentleman will have instructed him, they will have been suckled by the same nurse if possible. Let each one of us sacrifice a fifth of his income to set up this little band of five hundred devoted men in each département. Then you'll be able to count on a foreign occupation. Your foreign troops will never even get as far as Dijon if they aren't sure of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in every département.

  'Foreign kings will only listen to you when you announce the presence of twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms to open the gates of France to them. Guaranteeing this support is a burden, you'll tell me; gentlemen, our heads remain on our shoulders at this price. It's war to the death between freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers or peasants, or take up your guns. Be cautious if you wish, but don't be stupid; open your eyes.

  'Form your battalions, I'd say to you with a line from the Jacobins' song, * then some noble Gustave-Adolphe * will come along and, moved by the imminent threat to the cause of the monarchy, will speed three hundred leagues from his own country to do for you what Gustave did for the Protestant princes. Do you intend to go on producing talk and no action? In fifty years time there will only be presidents of republics in Europe, and not a single king. And with those four letters K-I-N-G, gone are priests and gentlemen. All I can see is candidates currying favour with grubby majorities.

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  'It's no use saying that at this moment France doesn't have an accredited general known and loved by all; that the army is only organized to serve the interests of throne and altar; that all the old troopers have been removed from it, whereas every single Prussian or Austrian regiment has fifty sub-officers who've been in the firing line.

  'Two hundred thousand young men from the lower middle classes are infatuated with war...'

  'A pax on unpalatable truths,' said a solemn individual complacently; he was apparently high up in the ecclesiastical ranks, for M. de La Mole smiled engagingly instead of getting angry, which was a very telling sign for Julien.

  'A pax on unpalatable truths; let us sum up, gentlemen: a man with a gangrened leg that needs amputating is in no position to say to his surgeon: "this diseased leg is perfectly healthy." If you'll excuse the expression, gentlemen, the noble Duke of ----- is our surgeon.'

  At last the great name has been uttered, thought Julien; I shall be galloping off towards the ----- tonight. *

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  CHAPTER 23

  The clergy, forests and freedom

  The first law of every creature is self-preservation and life. You sow hemlock and make out that you'll see corn ripening!

  MACHIAVELLI

  THE solemn individual went on: it was obvious he knew what he was talking about; he expounded the following great truths with a gentle, well-tempered eloquence which Julien appreciated enormously: 1. England doesn't have a guinea to further our cause; economics and Hume * are in fashion there. Even the Saints * won't give us any money, and Mr Brougham * will laugh at us.

  2. Impossible to get more than two campaigns out of the kings of Europe without English gold; and two campaigns won't suffice against the lower middle class.

  3. Need to form an armed party in France, otherwise the royalist cause in Europe won't risk even these two campaigns.

  'The fourth point I venture to put to you as self-evident is this:

  Quite impossible to form an armed party in France without the clergy. I say this boldly, because I'm going to prove it to you, gentlemen. We must give everything to the clergy.

  1. Because they are engaged in their business night and day, and guided by men of great ability settled at a safe distance from the storms three hundred leagues from your frontiers...'

  'Ah! Rome, Rome!' exclaimed the host...

&nb
sp; 'Yes, sir, Rome!' the cardinal continued proudly. 'Pace the jokes of greater or lesser ingenuity that were in fashion when you were young, let me declare openly, in 1830, that the clergy, guided by Rome, is alone in being able to speak to the lower orders.

  'If fifty thousand priests repeat the same words on the day appointed by the leaders, the common people, who, after all, provide the soldiers, will be more moved by their priests'

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  words than by all the doggerel * in the world...' (This slighting allusion set off murmurs.)

  'The clergy has greater understanding than you do,' the cardinal went on, raising his voice; 'all the steps you have taken to achieve this crucial aim, having an armed party in France, have been taken by us.' Here he threw in facts... 'Who sent eighty thousand rifles to the Vendée? * ... etc., etc.

  'As long as the clergy is deprived of its forests * it possesses nothing. When the first war comes along, the finance minister is going to send word to his agents that there's no more money available except for parish priests * . Basically, France is not a religious country, and she loves wars. Whoever it happens to be who gives her war will be doubly popular, because waging war means starving the Jesuits, as the common people would put it; and waging war means delivering those monsters of pride, the French, from the threat of foreign intervention.'

  The cardinal's words were going down well... 'What is needed', he said, 'is for M. de Nerval * to leave the Cabinet: his name puts people's backs up unnecessarily.