Le Rouge et le Noir

An eighteen-year-old youth—pale, with dark eyes and a narrow forehead—sits perched upon a beam in his father's sawmill, reading instead of minding the saw. His father, a Franche-Comté peasant as hard as the wood he cuts, strikes him, sending the book flying into the stream; it is the Memorial of Saint Helena, the book he reveres above all others. Julien Sorel has nothing, owns nothing, and counts for nothing in this world of the Restoration, where birth dictates everything and money finishes what birth began. Yet he possesses a prodigious memory, a consuming ambition, and an obsession: Bonaparte, an obscure lieutenant, made himself master of the world with his sword. But times have changed, the wars are over, and the red of the uniform no longer leads anywhere. What remains is the black of the cassock. Julien learns Latin by heart, memorizes the entire Bible, studies theology—not out of faith, but out of calculation. The old parish priest, Abbé Chélan, who protects and loves him, senses within him a dark fervor that is in no way sacerdotal; nevertheless, he recommends him as a tutor to the mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal, a self-important man and knight of several orders, who has his plane trees pruned to yield shade and cannot conceive of a tree serving any purpose other than generating revenue.

Julien enters the de Rênal household as one embarks on a military campaign. He trembles, feels ashamed of trembling, and despises himself for his timidity. But at the door, a gentle voice asks him what he wants, and he discovers Madame de Rênal—a thirty-year-old woman, beautiful yet oblivious to her own beauty, who has never read a novel and initially mistakes him for a girl in disguise, so pale and delicate is he. She had been expecting a dirty, grumbling priest; instead, she finds a child with fiery eyes. He had anticipated the contempt of the rich; instead, he receives the word "monsieur," spoken with gentleness, and this overwhelms him more than anything else. From the very first moment, he dares to kiss her hand—not out of desire, but out of duty to himself, because it would be cowardly not to dare. All of Julien is contained in this gesture: for him, love always begins as a declaration of war against his own timidity.

He dazzles the household by reciting the entire Bible by heart, in Latin, before the astounded servants and visiting local dignitaries. By evening, all of Verrières flocks to see this marvel. But beneath his triumph, Julien is consumed by hatred: hatred for the rich, for their smugness, for M. Valenod, the director of the workhouse who fattens himself on the property of the poor, and for this provincial society where public opinion is a despotism as stupid as it is in America. He profoundly despises the people he lives with, and is hated by them in return. His only consolations are reading—Rousseau, Napoleon, the bulletins of the Grande Armée—and, gradually, without his realizing it, the presence of this woman who blushes when he speaks, who weeps over his poverty, and who buys books for her children just so he might read them.

Madame de Rênal, for her part, does not know what is happening to her. She has never experienced love, has never seen anything resembling it beyond the vulgar libertinism of M. Valenod. At first, she believes she is ill. Then, she discovers she is happy. One evening, beneath a great linden tree that local lore says was planted by Charles the Bold, Julien wages a grueling battle within himself: he has sworn to take Madame de Rênal's hand, and to him, this hand is what Toulon was to Bonaparte. The clock strikes ten; each chime echoes in his chest like a physical blow, and on the final stroke, he seizes this icy hand, which pulls away, which he takes again, and which finally rests in his. His soul is flooded with joy—not because he loves Madame de Rênal, but because a dreadful torment has just ended. He has done his duty. The following day, he does not even spare her a thought: he goes back to reading the bulletins of the Grande Armée.

Yet love comes, despite him, despite her. It comes in the gilded boredom of the countryside at Vergy, in butterfly chases with the children, in those long summer evenings when the wind moans through the foliage of the linden tree and a few raindrops fall on the lowest leaves. Madame de Rênal, swept up in a happiness she does not understand, is so innocent that she feels almost no remorse. Julien still calculates, though less and less. When he finally enters her room one night, trembling in every limb and ready to die, he finds that she is weeping, that she is wretched, that she first repulses him with horror and then yields. There are no more roles to play, no more Napoleon to imitate—only a man and a woman in the dark. Their happiness lasts for a few weeks, fragile, threatened by anonymous letters, by the jealousy of her maid Élisa, and by the suspicions of M. de Rênal, which a charitable friend takes care to fan. For the first time in her life, Madame de Rênal deploys a cunning intelligence to save her lover, inventing a stratagem involving a forged anonymous letter, and Julien marvels at this woman who knew nothing yet learns everything through love.

But the small town is a trap from which one does not escape unscathed. Julien must leave. Abbé Chélan, dismissed for having stood up to the authorities, sends him to the seminary in Besançon. Julien enters it as though stepping into a tomb. Three hundred seminarians with vile faces and skin yellowed by bad food, who think only of the fat, comfortable parishes awaiting them at the end of their studies. Among them, Julien is an alien—too brilliant, too proud, too visibly superior. Within days, he makes enemies. His only ally is Abbé Pirard, the Jansenist director of the seminary, a harsh and just man who recognizes in Julien a rare and dangerous mind. When Pirard, defeated by Jesuit intrigues, is forced to leave Besançon, he takes Julien with him and secures him a position as secretary to the Marquis de La Mole in Paris.

Paris. The Hôtel de La Mole on the Rue Saint-Dominique. Julien discovers a world whose existence he never suspected: people who never discuss money, who are bored with consummate elegance, and who sincerely despise anyone not descended from those who rode in the King's carriages. The Marquis's salon is the most brilliant and the most lifeless in Paris—nothing is ever said there that might offend anyone, and consequently, nothing is ever said. Julien learns to dance, to ride a horse, to duel with pistols. The Marquis, a man of wit, grows attached to him as one grows attached to a fine spaniel; he introduces him into high society, sends him to England, procures him the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and embroils him in political conspiracies. Julien becomes indispensable.

And then there is Mathilde. Mathilde de La Mole, nineteen years old, tall, blonde, with magnificent eyes, the most sought-after heiress in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—and the most bored. She lives in reverence of an ancestor, Boniface de La Mole, whose embalmed head was carried by Queen Marguerite of Navarre. Every year on the 30th of April, Mathilde wears mourning for this decapitated lover. She despises the young men of her set—all handsome, all well-born, all perfectly insignificant. She seeks a man of character, and she finds him in Julien. But Mathilde's love is a love of the mind, a love that watches itself love, that calculates, that swings between exaltation and disgust. She throws herself at Julien's feet, then despises him because he is a carpenter's son. She repulses him, then returns, furious with herself for loving a man so low. Julien suffers agonizingly from these reversals. Where Madame de Rênal loved with the simplicity of a soul that had never looked at itself in a mirror, Mathilde loves with the full weight of her pride, her imagination, and her reading.

To win Mathilde back after one of their ruptures, Julien follows the advice of a Russian prince he meets in society: he courts the Maréchale de Fervaques, a ridiculous and powerful dévote, by copying out ready-made love letters for her. The ruse works: Mathilde, consumed by jealousy, returns to his feet. She becomes pregnant. She confesses this to her father. The Marquis is thunderstruck—his daughter, a La Mole, pregnant by a petty secretary of no birth! But the Marquis is a man of the world: he swallows his fury, grants Julien a name, an estate, and a commission as a lieutenant in the hussars. Julien Sorel becomes M. de La Vernaye, Knight of the Legion of Honor. His fortune is made, the dream is fulfilled, the carpenter's son wears the uniform.

Then everything collapses. Before consenting to the marriage, the Marquis writes to Verrières to inquire about Julien. The reply comes from Madame de Rênal—or rather, from her confessor, who has dictated a terrible letter to her in which Julien is painted as an unscrupulous seducer, a hypocrite who insinuates himself into households to seduce the most prominent woman and exploit the master's influence for his own gain. The Marquis revokes everything. Upon reading this letter, Julien no longer thinks, no longer calculates, no longer plays a part. He buys pistols, takes the mail coach to Verrières, enters the church at the moment of the Elevation, and fires two shots at Madame de Rênal.

She is not dead. Julien, however, is arrested and locked in the prison of Besançon, at the top of a tower that commands a boundless horizon. And it is there, in that cell, that the novel turns. Julien does not want to be saved. He refuses to plead, to beg, to play the charade of remorse. Mathilde rushes to him, unleashing a furious energy to get him acquitted, bribing judges and moving heaven and earth. But Julien no longer wants any of it. For the first time in his life, he stops calculating. He realizes that the only true happiness he has ever known was during those days at Vergy with Madame de Rênal, when he was not thinking of his career, when he was simply happy without knowing it. And Madame de Rênal comes to see him in prison. She forgives him. She loves him more than ever. Together they spend hours of a sweetness they had never known, because there is no longer anything to fear, nothing left to hope for, and nothing between them but the truth.

Julien mounts the scaffold on a spring morning, his face calm. Mathilde, faithful to the cult of her beheaded ancestor, takes her lover's head upon her lap and buries him with her own hands in a cave at the top of a mountain in the midst of the Jura. Madame de Rênal, who had promised to live for her children, dies three days later while embracing them.