THE RED AND THE BLACK
A Chronicle of 1830
BY
STENDHAL
TRANSLATED BY HORACE B. SAMUEL, M.A.,
Late Scholar Corpus Christi College, Oxford
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD
NEW YORK: E.P. DUTTON AND CO.
1916
INTRODUCTION
Some slight sketch of the life and character of Stendhal is
particularly necessary to an understanding of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_
(_The Red and the Black_) not so much as being the formal stuffing of
which introductions are made, but because the book as a book stands
in the most intimate relation to the author's life and character. The
hero, Julien, is no doubt, viewed superficially, a cad, a scoundrel,
an assassin, albeit a person who will alternate the moist eye of the
sentimentalist with the ferocious grin of the beast of prey. But
Stendhal so far from putting forward any excuses makes a specific point
of wallowing defiantly in his own alleged wickedness. "Even assuming
that Julien is a villain and that it is my portrait," he wrote shortly
after the publication of the book, "why quarrel with me. In the time of
the Emperor, Julien would have passed for a very honest man. I lived in
the time of the Emperor. So--but what does it matter?"
Henri Beyle was born in 1783 in Grenoble in Dauphiny, the son of a
royalist lawyer, situated on the borderland between the gentry and
that bourgeoisie which our author was subsequently to chastise with
that malice peculiar to those who spring themselves from the class
which they despise. The boy's character was a compound of sensibility
and hard rebelliousness, virility and introspection. Orphaned of his
mother at the age of seven, hated by his father and unpopular with his
schoolmates, he spent the orthodox unhappy childhood of the artistic
temperament. Winning a scholarship at the Ecole Polytechnique at
the age of sixteen he proceeded to Paris, where with characteristic
independence he refused to attend the college classes and set himself
to study privately in his solitary rooms.
In 1800 the influence of his relative M. Daru procured him a commission
in the French Army, and the Marengo campaign gave him an opportunity
of practising that Napoleonic worship to which throughout his life he
remained consistently faithful, for the operation of the philosophical
materialism of the French sceptics on an essentially logical and
mathematical mind soon swept away all competing claimants for his
religious adoration. Almost from his childhood, moreover, he had
abominated the Jesuits, and "Papism is the source of all crimes," was
throughout his life one of his favourite maxims.
After the army's triumphant entry into Milan, Beyle returned to
Grenoble on furlough, whence he dashed off to Paris in pursuit of
a young woman to whom he was paying some attention, resigned his
commission in the army and set himself to study "with the view of
becoming a great man." It is in this period that we find the most
marked development in Beyle's enthusiasm of psychology. This tendency
sprang primarily no doubt from his own introspection. For throughout
his life Beyle enjoyed the indisputable and at times dubious luxury
of a double consciousness. He invariably carried inside his brain
a psychological mirror which reflected every phrase of his emotion
with scientific accuracy. And simultaneously, the critical spirit,
half-genie, half-demon inside his brain, would survey in the
semi-detached mood of a keenly interested spectator, the actual emotion
itself, applaud or condemn it as the case might be, and ticket the
verdict with ample commentations in the psychological register of its
own analysis.
But this trend to psychology, while as we have seen, to some extent,
the natural development of mere self-analysis was also tinged with the
spirit of self-preservation. With a mind, which in spite of its natural
physical courage was morbidly susceptible to ridicule and was only too
frequently the dupe of the fear of being duped, Stendhal would scent
an enemy in every friend, and as a mere matter of self-protection set
himself to penetrate the secret of every character with which he came
into contact. One is also justified in taking into account an honest
intellectual enthusiasm which found its vent in deciphering the rarer
and more precious manuscripts of the "human document."
With the exception of a stay in Marseilles, with his first mistress
Mélanie Guilhert ("a charming actress who had the most refined
sentiments and to whom I never gave a sou,") and a subsequent sojourn
in Grenoble, Stendhal remained in Paris till 1806, living so far as was
permitted by the modest allowance of his niggard father the full life
of the literary temperament. The essence, however, of his character was
that he was at the same time a man of imagination and a man of action.
We consequently find him serving in the Napoleonic campaigns of 1806,
1809 and 1812. He was present at the Battle of Jena, came several
times into personal contact with Napoleon, discharged with singular
efficiency the administration of the State of Brunswick, and retained
his sangfroid and his bravery during the whole of the panic-stricken
retreat of the Moscow campaign.
It is, moreover, to this period that we date Stendhal's liaison with
Mme. Daru the wife of his aged relative, M. Daru. This particular
intrigue has, moreover, a certain psychological importance in that
Mme. Daru constituted the model on whom Mathilde de la Mole was drawn
in _The Red and the Black_. The student and historian consequently who
is anxious to check how far the novelist is drawing on his experience
and how far on his imagination can compare with profit the description
of the Mathilde episode in _The Red and the Black_ with those sections
in Stendhal's Journal entitled the _Life and Sentiments of Silencious
Harry_, _Memoirs of my Life during my Amour with Countess Palfy_,
and also with the posthumous fragment, _Le Consultation de Banti_, a
piece of methodical deliberation on the pressing question. "Dois-je ou
ne dois-je pas avoir la duchesse?" written with all the documentary
coldness of a Government report. It is characteristic that both Bansi
and Julien decide in the affirmative as a matter of abstract principle.
For they both feel that they must necessarily reproach themselves in
after life if they miss so signal an opportunity.
Disgusted by the Restoration, Stendhal migrated in 1814 to Milan, his
favourite town in Europe, whose rich and varied life he savoured to
the full from the celebrated ices in the entreates of the opera, to
the reciprocated interest of Mme. Angelina Pietragrua (the Duchesse
de Sansererina of the Chartreuse of Parma), "a sublime wanton à la
Lucrezia Borgia" who would appear to have deceived him systematically.
It was in Milan that Stendhal first began to write for publication,
producing in 1814 _The Lives of Haydn and Mozart_, and in 1817 a series
of travel sketches, _Rome, Naples, Florence_, which was published in
London.
It was in Milan also than Stendhal first nursed the abstract thrills
of his grand passion for Métilde Countess Dunbowska, whose angelic
sweetness would seem to have served at any rate to some extent as a
prototype to the character of Mme. de Rênal. In 1821 the novelist was
expelled from Milan on the apparently unfounded accusation of being
a French spy. It is typical of that mixture of brutal sensuality and
rarefied sentimentalism which is one of the most fascinating features
of Stendhal's character, that even though he had never loved more than
the lady's heart, he should have remained for three years faithful to
this mistress of his ideal.
In 1822 Stendhal published his treatise, _De l'Amour_, a practical
scientific treatise on the erotic emotion by an author who possessed
the unusual advantage of being at the same time an acute psychologist
and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by
concrete practice and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself and
observe in others into broad general principles.
In 1825 Stendhal plunging vigorously into the controversy between the
Classicists and the Romanticists, published his celebrated pamphlet,
_Racine and Shakespeare_, in which he vindicated with successful
crispness the claims of live verse against stereotyped couplets and
of modern analysis against historical tradition. His next work was
the _Life of Rossini_, whom he had known personally in Milan, while
in 1827 he published his first novel _Armance_, which, while not
equal to the author's greatest work, give none the less good promise
of that analytical dash which he was subsequently to manifest. After
_Armance_ come the well-known _Promenades Rome_, while the Stendhalian
masterpiece _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ was presented in 1830 to an
unappreciative public.
Enthusiasm for this book is the infallible test of your true
Stendhalian. Some critics may prefer, possibly, the more Jamesian
delicacy of _Armance_, and others fortified by the example of Goethe
may avow their predilection for _The Chartreuse de Parme_ with all the
_jeune premier_ charm of its amiable hero. But in our view no book by
Stendhal is capable of giving the reader such intellectual thrills as
that work which has been adjudged to be his greatest by Balzac, by
Taine, by Bourget. Certainly no other book by Stendhal than that which
has conjured up _Rougistes_ in all countries in Europe has been the
object of a cult in itself. We doubt, moreover, if there is any other
modern book whether by Stendhal or any one else, which has actually
been learnt by heart by its devotees, who, if we may borrow the story
told by M. Paul Bourget, are accustomed to challenge the authenticity
of each other's knowledge by starting off with some random passage only
to find it immediately taken up, as though the book had been the very
Bible itself.
The more personal appeal of what is perhaps the greatest romance
of the intellect ever written lies in the character of Julien, its
villain-hero. In view of the identification of Julien with Stendhal
himself to which we have already alluded, it is only fair to state
that Stendhal does not appear to have ever been a tutor in a bourgeois
family, nor does history relate his ever having made any attempt at the
homicide of a woman. So far, in fact, as what we may call the external
physical basis of the story is concerned, the material is supplied
not by the life of the author, but by the life of a young student of
Besançon, of the name of Berthet, who duly expiated on the threshold
that crime which supplied the plot of this immortal novel. But the
soul, the brain of Julien is not Berthet but Beyle. And what indeed is
the whole book if not a vindication of _beylisme_, if we may use the
word, coined by the man himself for his own outlook on life? For the
procedure of Stendhal would seem to have placed his own self in his
hero's shoes, to have lived in imagination his whole life, and to have
recorded his experience with a wealth of analytic detail, which in
spite of some arrogance, is yet both honest and scientific.
And the life of this scoundrel, this ingrate, this assassin, certainly
seems to have been eminently worth living. In its line, indeed, it
constitutes a veritable triumph of idealism, a positive monument of
"self-help." For judged by the code of the Revolution, when the career
was open to talents, the goodness or badness of a man was determined by
the use he made of his opportunities. Efficiency was the supreme test
of virtue, as was failure the one brand of unworthiness. And measured
by these values Julien ranks high as an ethical saint. For does he
not sacrifice everything to the forgiving of his character and the
hammering out of his career? He is by nature nervous, he forces himself
to be courageous, fighting a duel or capturing a woman, less out of
thirst for blood or hunger for flesh, than because he thinks it due
to his own _parvenu_ self-respect to give himself some concrete proof
on his own moral force. "Pose and affection" will sneer those enemies
whom he will have to-day as assuredly as he had them in his lifetime,
the smug bourgeois and Valenods of our present age. But the spirit
of Julien will retort, "I made myself master of my affectation and I
succeeded in my pose." And will he not have logic on his side? For what
after all is pose but the pursuit of a subjective ideal, grotesque no
doubt in failure, but dignified by its success. And as M. Gaultier has
shown in his book on _Bovarysme_, is not all human progress simply the
deliberate change from what one is, into what one is not yet, but what
nevertheless one has a tendency to be? Viewed from this standpoint
Julien's character is what one feels justified in calling a _bonâ fide_
pose. For speaking broadly his character is two-fold, half-sensitive
tenderness, half ferocious ambition, and his pose simply consists
in the subordination of his softer qualities for the more effective
realization of his harder. Considered on these lines _Le Rouge et Le
Noir_ stands pre-eminent in European literature as the tragedy of
energy and ambition, the epic of the struggle for existence, the modern
Bible of Nietzschean self-discipline. And from the sheer romantic
aspect also the book has its own peculiar charm. How truly poetic, for
instance, are the passages where Julien takes his own mind alone into
the mountains, plots out his own fate, and symbolizes his own solitary
life in the lonely circlings of a predatory hawk.
Julien's enemies will no doubt taunt him with his introspection, while
they point to a character distorted, so they say, by the eternal mirror
of its own consciousness. Yet it should be remembered that Julien lived
in an age when introspection had, so to speak, been only recently
invented, and Byronism and Wertherism were the stock food of artistic
temperaments. In the case of Julien, moreover, even though his own
criticisms on his own acts were to some extent as important to him as
the actual acts themselves, his introspection was more a strength than
a weakness and never blunted the edge of his drastic action. Compare,
for instance, the character of Julien with the character of Robert
Greslou, the hero of Bourget's _Le Disciple_, and the nearest analogue
to Julien in _fin de siècle_ literature, and one will appreciate at
once the difference between health and decadence, virility and hysteria.
One of the most essential features of the book, however, is the swing
of the pendulum between Julien's ambition and Julien's tenderness. For
our hunter is quite frequently caught in his own traps, so that he
falls genuinely in love with the woman whom, as a matter of abstract
principle, he had specifically set himself to conquer. The book
consequently as a romance of love, ranks almost as high as it does as a
romance of ambition. The final idyll in prison with Mme. de Rênal, in
particular, is one of the sweetest and purest in literature, painted
in colours too true ever to be florid, steeped in a sentiment too deep
ever to be mawkish. As moreover, orthodox and suburban minds tend to
regard all French novels as specifically devoted to obscene wallowings,
it seems only relevant to mention that Stendhal at any rate never finds
in sensualism any inspiration for ecstatic rhapsodies, and that he
narrates the most specific episodes in the chastest style imaginable.
Though too the sinister figure of the carpenter's son looms large
over the book, the characterization of all the other personages is
portrayed with consummate brilliancy. For Stendhal standing first
outside his characters with all the sceptical scrutiny of a detached
observer, then goes deep inside them so that he describes not merely
what they do, but why they do it, not merely what they think, but
why they think it, while he assigns their respective share to innate
disposition, accident, and environment, and criticizes his creations
with an irony that is only occasionally benevolent. For it must be
confessed that Stendhal approves of extremely few people. True scion
of the middle-classes he hates the bourgeois because he is bourgeois,
and the aristocrat because he is aristocrat. Nevertheless, as a gallery
of the most varied characters, patricians and plebeians, prudes and
profligates, Jesuits and Jansenists, Kings and coachmen, bishops and
bourgeois, whose mutual difference acts as a most effective foil to
each other's reality, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ will beat any novel outside
Balzac.
We would mention in particular those two contrasted figures, Mme. de
Rênal the _bourgeoise passionée_, and Matilde de la Mole the noble
damozel who enters into her intrigue out of a deliberate wish to
emulate the exploits of a romantic ancestress. But after all these
individuals stand out not so much because their characterization is
better than that of their fellow-personages, but because it is more
elaborate. Even such minor characters, for instance, as de Frilair, the
lascivious Jesuit, Noiraud, the avaricious gaoler, Mme. de Fervaques,
the amoristic prude, are all in their respective ways real, vivid,
convincing, no mere padded figures of the imagination, but observed
actualities swung from the lived life on the written page.
The style of Stendhal is noticeable from its simplicity, clear and
cold, devoid of all literary artifice, characteristic of his analytic
purpose. He is strenuous in his avoidance of affection. Though,
however, he never holds out his style as an aesthetic delight in
itself, he reaches occasionally passages of a rare and simple beauty.
We would refer in particular to the description of Julien in the
mountains, which we have already mentioned, and to the short but
impressive death scene. His habit, however, of using language as a
means and never as an end, occasionally revenges itself upon him in
places where the style, though intelligible, is none the less slovenly,
anacoluthic, almost Thucydidean.
After the publication of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ Stendhal was forced
by his financial embarrassment to leave Paris and take up the post
of consul at Trieste. Driven from this position by the intrigues of
a vindictive Church he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he
remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his
autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and
highly respectable daughter of his laundress. He then returned to Paris
where he remained till 1842, where he died suddenly at the age of
fifty-nine in the full swing of all his mental and physical activities.
His later works included, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, _Lucien, Leuwen_
and _Lamiel_, of which the _Chartreuse_ is the most celebrated, but
_Lamiel_ certainly the most sprightly. But it is on _Le Rouge et Le
Noir_ that his fame as a novelist is the most firmly based. It is
with this most personal document, this record of his experiences
and emotions that he lives identified, just as D'Annunzio will live
identified with _Il Fuoco_ or Mr. Wells with the _New Machiavelli_.
_Le Rouge et Le Noir_ is the greatest novel of its age and one of the
greatest novels of the whole nineteenth century. It is full to the brim
of intellect and adventure, introspection and action, youth, romance,
tenderness, cynicism and rebellion. It is in a word the intellectual
quintessence of the Napoleonic era.
HORACE B. SAMUEL, TEMPLE, Oct., 1913.
THE RED AND THE BLACK
A CHRONICLE OF 1830
CHAPTER I
A SMALL TOWN
Put thousands together less bad,
But the cage less gay.--_Hobbes_.
The little town of Verrières can pass for one of the prettiest in
Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their pointed red-tiled roofs
stretch along the slope of a hill, whose slightest undulations are
marked by groups of vigorous chestnuts. The Doubs flows to within some
hundred feet above its fortifications, which were built long ago by the
Spaniards, and are now in ruins.
Verrières is sheltered on the north by a high mountain which is one of
the branches of the Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra are covered
with snow from the beginning of the October frosts. A torrent which
rushes down from the mountains traverses Verrières before throwing
itself into the Doubs, and supplies the motive power for a great number
of saw mills. The industry is very simple, and secures a certain
prosperity to the majority of the inhabitants who are more peasant than
bourgeois. It is not, however, the wood saws which have enriched this
little town. It is the manufacture of painted tiles, called Mulhouse
tiles, that is responsible for that general affluence which has caused
the façades of nearly all the houses in Verrières to be rebuilt since
the fall of Napoleon.
One has scarcely entered the town, before one is stunned by the din of
a strident machine of terrifying aspect. Twenty heavy hammers which
fall with a noise that makes the paved floor tremble, are lifted
up by a wheel set in motion by the torrent. Each of these hammers
manufactures every day I don't know how many thousands of nails. The
little pieces of iron which are rapidly transformed into nails by these
enormous hammers, are put in position by fresh pretty young girls. This
labour so rough at first sight is one of the industries which most
surprises the traveller who penetrates for the first time the mountains
which separate France and Helvetia. If when he enters Verrières, the
traveller asks who owns this fine nail factory which deafens everybody
who goes up the Grande-Rue, he is answered in a drawling tone "Eh!
it belongs to M. the Mayor."
And if the traveller stops a few minutes in that Grande-Rue of
Verrières which goes on an upward incline from the bank of the Doubs to
nearly as far as the summit of the hill, it is a hundred to one that he
will see a big man with a busy and important air.
When he comes in sight all hats are quickly taken off. His hair is
grizzled and he is dressed in grey. He is a Knight of several Orders,
has a large forehead and an aquiline nose, and if you take him all
round, his features are not devoid of certain regularity. One might
even think on the first inspection that it combines with the dignity
of the village mayor that particular kind of comfortableness which is
appropriate to the age of forty-eight or fifty. But soon the traveller
from Paris will be shocked by a certain air of self-satisfaction and
self-complacency mingled with an almost indefinable narrowness and lack
of inspiration. One realises at last that this man's talent is limited
to seeing that he is paid exactly what he is owed, and in paying his
own debts at the latest possible moment.
Such is M. de Rênal, the mayor of Verrières. After having crossed the
road with a solemn step, he enters the mayoral residence and disappears
from the eye of the traveller. But if the latter continues to walk
a hundred steps further up, he will perceive a house with a fairly
fine appearance, with some magnificent gardens behind an iron grill
belonging to the house. Beyond that is an horizon line formed by the
hills of Burgundy, which seem ideally made to delight the eyes. This
view causes the traveller to forget that pestilential atmosphere of
petty money-grubbing by which he is beginning to be suffocated.
He is told that this house belongs to M. de Rênal. It is to the
profits which he has made out of his big nail factory that the mayor
of Verrières owes this fine residence of hewn stone which he is just
finishing. His family is said to be Spanish and ancient, and is alleged
to have been established in the country well before the conquest of
Louis XIV.
Since 1815, he blushes at being a manufacturer: 1815 made him mayor
of Verrières. The terraced walls of this magnificent garden which
descends to the Doubs, plateau by plateau, also represent the reward
of M. de Rênal's proficiency in the iron-trade. Do not expect to find
in France those picturesque gardens which surround the manufacturing
towns of Germany, like Leipsic, Frankfurt and Nurenburgh, etc. The
more walls you build in Franche-Comté and the more you fortify your
estate with piles of stone, the more claim you will acquire on the
respect of your neighbours. Another reason for the admiration due to
M. de Rênal's gardens and their numerous walls, is the fact that he
has purchased, through sheer power of the purse, certain small parcels
of the ground on which they stand. That saw-mill, for instance, whose
singular position on the banks of the Doubs struck you when you entered
Verrières, and where you notice the name of SOREL written in gigantic
characters on the chief beam of the roof, used to occupy six years
ago that precise space on which is now reared the wall of the fourth
terrace in M. de Rênal's gardens.
Proud man that he was, the mayor had none the less to negotiate with
that tough, stubborn peasant, old Sorel. He had to pay him in good
solid golden louis before he could induce him to transfer his workshop
elsewhere. As to the _public_ stream which supplied the motive power
for the saw-mill, M. de Rênal obtained its diversion, thanks to the
influence which he enjoyed at Paris. This favour was accorded him after
the election of 182-.
He gave Sorel four acres for every one he had previously held, five
hundred yards lower down on the banks of the Doubs. Although this
position was much more advantageous for his pine-plank trade, father
Sorel (as he is called since he has become rich) knew how to exploit
the impatience and _mania for landed ownership_ which animated his
neighbour to the tune of six thousand francs.
It is true that this arrangement was criticised by the wiseacres of the
locality. One day, it was on a Sunday four years later, as M. de Rênal
was coming back from church in his mayor's uniform, he saw old Sorel
smiling at him, as he stared at him some distance away surrounded by
his three sons. That smile threw a fatal flood of light into the soul
of the mayor. From that time on, he is of opinion that he could have
obtained the exchange at a cheaper rate.
In order to win the public esteem of Verrières it is essential that,
though you should build as many walls as you can, you should not adopt
some plan imported from Italy by those masons who cross the passes
of the Jura in the spring on their way to Paris. Such an innovation
would bring down upon the head of the imprudent builder an eternal
reputation for _wrongheadedness_, and he will be lost for ever in the
sight of those wise, well-balanced people who dispense public esteem in
Franche-Comté.
As a matter of fact, these prudent people exercise in the place the
most offensive despotism. It is by reason of this awful word, that
anyone who has lived in that great republic which is called Paris,
finds living in little towns quite intolerable. The tyranny of public
opinion (and what public opinion!) is as _stupid_ in the little towns
of France as in the United States of America.