THE RED AND THE BLACK
STENDHAL (Henri Beyle) was born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble, where his father was a lawyer and his maternal grandfather a doctor. He lost his mother at the age of 7. After distinguishing himself in mathematics at the Ecole Centrale in Grenoble, he moved to Paris in 1799 intending to study for admission to the Ecole Polytechnique, but preferred to make his début in the world of art and literature. He was employed at the Ministry of War, and took part in the Napoleonic campaigns in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia from 1800 to 1814. At the fall of the Empire he settled in Milan, where he began to write on painting and music. Returning to Paris in 1821, he lived as a dandy in high society, publishing a treatise on love in 1822, his first novel Armance in 1827, followed by Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830.
The last phase of his career was spent as a diplomat in Italy, with postings as Consul in Trieste and then Civitavecchia. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1835. The Chartreuse de Parme, a novel of military and romantic adventure set in Italy, appeared in 1839. Stendhal died of a stroke in 1842 during a period of leave in Paris. His remaining fictional and autobiographical works were published posthumously. His literary achievement went largely unrecognized during his lifetime, and it was left to later generations to appreciate his penetrating psychological and social insights and his ironical humour.
CATHERINE SLATER was Fellow and Tutor in French Language and Linguistics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1971 to 1987, and is now an Honorary Research Fellow. She works in Bristol at HewlettPackard's European research laboratories.
ROGER PEARSON is a Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen's College, Oxford, and the author of Stendhal's Violin: a Novelist and his Reader ( Clarendon Press, 1988). He has also edited Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma for Oxford World's Classics.
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STENDHAL
The Red and the Black
A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
Edited and Translated with Notes by CATHERINE SLATER
With an Introduction by ROGER PEARSON
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Translation and Notes © Catherine Slater 1991 Introduction, Further reading, and Chronology © Roger Pearson 1991
The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published as a World's Classics paperback 1991 Reissued as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 1998
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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stendhal, 1783-1842. [Rouge et le noir. English]
The red and black: a chronicle of the nineteenth century / Stendhal; translated by Catherine Slater, with an introduction by Roger Pearson.
p. cm.--(Oxford world's classics)
Translation of: Le rouge et le noir
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Slater, Catherine. II. Pearson, Roger III. Title. IV. Series. [PQ2435.R7E5 1991] 843′.7 dc20 90-47949
5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
Note on the text xxiv
Further reading xxv
A chronology of Stendhal xxvii
The Red and the Black
BOOK ONE 1 A small town 3
2 A mayor 7
3 Care of the poor 11
4 Father and son 17
5 Striking a bargain 21
6 Boredom 29
7 Elective affinities 37
8 Minor events 48
9 An evening in the country 56
10 A generous heart and a meagre fortune 64
11 In the evening 68
12 A journey 73
13 Openwork stockings 80
14 A pair of English scissors 85
15 The crowing of the cock 89
16 The day after 93
17 First deputy 98
18 A king in Verrières 103
19 Thinking brings suffering 116
20 Anonymous letters 125
21 Dialogue with a master 129
22 Modes of behaviour in 1830 143
23 The woes of high office 156
24 A capital city 170
25 The seminary 177
26 The world 185
27 First experience of life 195
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28 A procession 199
29 First promotion 206
30 A man of ambition 221
BOOK TWO 1 Pleasures of the countryside 239
2 Entry into society 250
3 The first steps 258
4 The Hôtel de la Mole 262
5 Sensitivity and a great lady's piety 275
6 A matter of accent 278
7 An attack of gout 285
8 What decoration distinguishes a man? 293
9 The ball 303
10 Queen Marguerite 312
11 The power of a young lady 320
12 Might he be a Danton? 324
13 A plot 330
14 A young lady's thoughts 339
15 Is it a plot? 345
16 One o'clock in the morning 350
17 An old sword 357
18 Cruel moments 362
19 The Opera Bouffe 368
20 The Japanese vase 377
21 The secret memorandum 383
22
The discussion 389
23 The clergy, forests and freedom 397
24 Strasburg 406
25 The Ministry of Virtue 413
26 Propriety in love 420
27 The best positions in the Church 424
28 Manon Lescaut 428
29 Boredom 432
30 A box at the Opera Bouffe 436
31 Frightening her 441
32 The tiger 446
33 The infernal torment of weakness 451
34 A man of intelligence 457
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35 A storm 464
36 Sorry details 469
37 A keep 476
38 A powerful man 481
39 Politicking 488
40 Tranquillity 493
41 The trial 497
42 504
43 510
44 515
45 523
Explanatory Notes 530
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INTRODUCTION
THE RED AND THE BLACK is a shocking novel. One of the principal shocks which it administers comes in Book II, Chapter 35, and the reader who is not already privy to the nature of this shock would be well advised to treat this introduction as a postface. For, as Stendhal himself wrote: 'the essential thing about a novel must be that the reader who begins it one evening should stay up all night to finish it: to reveal a novel's plot in advance would therefore be tantamount to robbing him of the greater part of his interest in it.'
To reveal it in the case of The Red and the Black would be robbery indeed. One of the principal themes of the novel concerns the value of unpredictability in an age of the only too predictable, and one of its intended delights for the Happy Few 1 to whom it is dedicated is precisely the liberating effect of surprise upon the imagination. 'The novel is like a bow,' wrote Stendhal, 'the body of the violin which gives back the sounds is the reader's soul.'The Red and the Black's status as a World's Classic depends substantially on the moral and aesthetic worth of its shockingness, and a reader coming to this novel for the first time will need to have undergone some state of shock before he or she can consult the sounds given back by their soul, the better then to decide whether its classic status is justified.
When The Red and the Black was first published on 13 November 1830, it was a novel ahead of its time. In a curious way this was literally so since its title-page bore the date 1831 and a reconstruction of the historical time-scale within the novel suggests that the events of the last few chapters take place also in 1831. But it was ahead of its time principally because it was uncomfortably topical, and topicality is the aspect of the novel which Stendhal stressed when he tried to have his own review of it published anonymously in a Florentine literary review two years later. 'The author', he writes,
____________________ 1 On 'the Happy Few', see note to p. 1 on p. 530.
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'dared recount an adventure which took place in 1830.' Even more daringly the author pulled no punches in his depiction of contemporary society, and this 'Chronicle of 1830' presents a comprehensive and damning account of France at the time. Stendhal spent much of his life in Italy, but between 21 November 1821 and 6 November 1830 he had lived in Paris. His chronicle is based on first-hand experience and the information of well-placed friends.
The reader meets a wide variety of social representatives ranging from the inmates of Valenod's workhouse to the king himself, and while each level of society appears superficially different, hypocrisy, deviousness and callous self-interest are omnipresent. This is part of 'the truth, the truth in all its harshness' proclaimed by the first epigraph in the novel. Julien Sorel's mercenary father with his peasant cunning, the seminarists who wish for a quiet life and a full stomach, the counter-revolutionary aristocrats plotting the invasion of their own country, Rênal and Valenod swapping political parties for their opportunistic convenience, these are the paltry players in the sordid drama of post-Napoleonic France. Chélan, Pirard and Chas-Bernard provide honourable exceptions for the Church and, among the vapid youth of Restoration Paris, Croisenois at least is man enough to die defending Mathilde's reputation, but generally the picture is bleak. Add to this the industrialization of Verrières and the environmental nonchalance of its mayor, the increasing power of the new money and its tasteless attempts to imitate the old, the propagandistic purpose and architectural inadequacy of the restoration of the abbey at Bray-le-Haut, the feud between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, and the all-pervasive influence of the Jesuits' secret society, the Congregation, and the sheer scope of Stendhal's indictment becomes readily apparent.
One important element seems, however, to be missing: the July Revolution of 1830. Where are those three 'Glorious Days' which saw the overthrow of the reactionary Bourbon king Charles X, his replacement by the supposedly more liberal Orleanist Louis-Philippe and the advent of the so-called Bourgeois Monarchy? Nowhere, except for an ironically understated and dismissive reference in the fictional Publisher's Note
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with which the novel begins. And why are there two sub-titles: 'A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century' and 'A Chronicle of 1830'? Are they perhaps satirically synonymous? Even this momentous year has changed nothing: regimes may come and go, but cant and conventionality still rule.
The marked topicality of The Red and the Black may not always strike a modern reader, of course, but if one substitutes the politics and personalities of one's own day and thinks what one's reaction might be then, it becomes evident that Stendhal was playing with fire. He was also breaking new ground. As Erich Auerbach has stated in his celebrated study Mimesis: 'in so far as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving--as is the case today [ 1946] in any novel or film--Stendhal is its founder.' No wonder the author of The Red and the Black thought that his literary merits would not be recognized for another fifty years. The contemporary reader might, like Balzac, have seen the pertinence of Stendhal's 'chronicle', but he may well have been too caught up personally in the issues presented to be able to view them within the larger and less timebound context to which the novel also offers imaginative access.
Be that as it may, the contemporary reader would almost certainly have been disconcerted, not to say scandalized, by the main story which the novel has to tell--namely, how a carpenter's son attempts to murder his ex-mistress, the mayor's wife, during Mass. That was simply not what novelists should be writing about, and anyway, of course, the whole thing was quite implausible. Here, however, the laugh would have been on the reader since the story is based on, and the novel originally inspired by, two court cases which Stendhal read about in the Gazette des Tribunaux. This publication, which appeared every weekday and contained full and largely reliable accounts of court proceedings, provided Stendhal with some of his favourite reading matter. He found it 'very entertaining' and to be both incontrovertible testimony to the power of human passion, which the decorum of polite society but thinly concealed and contained, and an invaluable source of
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information about the everyday lives of ordinary French men and women.
The two cases which caught the novelist's attention concerned Antoine Berthet and Adrien Lafargue, two murderers who met with remarkably different fates. Berthet was a short, thin man with a pale complexion, the son of a blacksmith in Brangues. He had spent four years in a seminary in Grenoble training to be a priest when, at the age of 21, ill health forced him to leave; and his protector, the village priest, secured him a post as tutor to one of the children of M. and Mme Michoud, a well-to-do couple who lived in Brangues. Whether Mme Michoud became his mistress remains uncertain, but some aspect of their relationship led to Berthet's dismissal after a year. After two years in another seminary, Berthet returned to Brangues in 1825 and began to write to Mme Michoud accusing her of having got him the sack and of being the mistress
of his successor as tutor. There followed a series of reverses: expulsion from another seminary in Grenoble after one month, dismissal--again after one year--from a post as tutor to the de Cordon family, possibly because he seduced Mlle, de Cordon and possibly after M. de Cordon had received a letter from Mme Michoud. Although M. Michoud was trying behind the scenes to help Berthet and actually got him a job working for a notary, Berthet became increasingly bitter and blamed his repeated failure to be accepted by a seminary (and the consequent frustration of his ambition to become a priest) on Mme Michoud, whom he now repeatedly threatened to murder. On Sunday 22 July 1827, during Mass in the church at Brangues, Antoine Berthet shot Mme Michoud twice and then himself. Both survived. Berthet was subsequently found guilty of attempted murder 'with all aggravating circumstances' and sentenced to death. He was executed on 23 February 1828.