The Red and the Black

Original title: Le Rouge et le Noir

Stendhal (1783-1842), trans. Horace Barnett Samuel

Translation en 189821 words First published 1830 France Tales Reborn

Julien Sorel is the son of a provincial carpenter in the France of the Restoration: frail, proud, with a prodigious memory for Latin and a secret admiration for Napoleon. Since a military career is closed to a young man of his station in peacetime, he chooses the other road to advancement and becomes an abbe, hiding his true ambitions behind a mask of piety. His employment as tutor to the children of the mayor of the small town of Verrieres, M. de Renal, draws him into the world above his birth. Julien is resolved to be respected and, quietly, to have his revenge on the class that despises him. His affair with Madame de Renal begins partly as a calculated act of conquest, then turns into something he neither planned nor understands. Forced to leave town when the affair is exposed in an anonymous letter, he enters the austere seminary of Besancon under the protection of the abbe Pirard, learns the hard lessons of clerical politics, and is finally recommended to the Marquis de la Mole of Paris as a secretary. In the capital Julien rises fast. He is Useful, discreet, and increasingly trusted; he wins the friendship of the marquis and, more dangerously, the love of the marquis's proud, brilliant daughter Mathilde. Stendhal watches his hero with a surgeon's eye, tracing every calculation of vanity, class, and desire in a society where the color of a uniform or a cassock decides a man's fate. First published in 1830, this Chronicle of 1830 is among the founding novels of psychological realism, and its verdict on ambition without principle remains as sharp as ever.

Public domain in the United States; translated by Horace B. Samuel, text sourced from Project Gutenberg.

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