The Red and the Black (2 page)

-vii-

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,

-ix-

'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

-x-

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

-xi-

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 M
^me
Michoud, a well-to-do couple who lived in Brangues. Whether M
^me
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 M
^me
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
M
^me
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 M
^me
Michoud, whom he
now repeatedly threatened to murder. On Sunday 22 July 1827, during
Mass in the church at Brangues, Antoine Berthet shot M
^me
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.

Adrien Lafargue was treated
rather more leniently than Berthet. A cabinet-maker by trade, he was a
good-looking, well-spoken young man of 25 whose work had brought him
temporarily to the town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the Pyrenees. At his
lodgings the daughter of the house, called Thérèse, was a married
woman who claimed to have been left by her husband. She took to
Lafargue, and they became lovers.

-xii-

Though he had a fiancée in Bayonne, Lafargue became sincerely attached
to Thérèse and was therefore all the more put out one morning to find
her in bed with a painter. Accepting her story that this was a former
lover whose sentimental appeal to their shared past had vanquished her
scruples, Lafargue forgave her. On his uncle's advice he then moved
out of the lodgings, but continued to see Thérèse. She, however, tired
of him, particularly when he refused to lend her some money, and
soon she had the police forbid him to see her or to enter her house.
Embittered by what he saw as an abuse of his sincerity and tolerance
and bent on ridding the world of 'a nasty piece of work', Lafargue
resolved to shoot her. On 21 January 1829 he went to her in her room.
He fired once and missed, fired a second time and killed her. Fearing
she was not dead, he then slit her throat. After this, as he had
intended, he shot himself, but there was only powder in the pistol and
he survived. He was found guilty of voluntary but unpremeditated
manslaughter under grave duress, and sentenced to a mere five years'
imprisonment.

The Berthet case
provided Stendhal with the main shape of his plot together with many
incidental details, while the Lafargue case led him to speculate that
energy and strength of purpose of the kind once evinced by Napoleon
were now to be found only amongst the working classes, and that the
great men of the future would come not from the etiolated ranks of
the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie but from those whose characters
were still forged on the anvil of an unsheltered existence. Such is
part of the message of
The Red and the Black
, and indeed of
Julien Sorel's speech at his trial. Energy, sincerity, imagination and
a certain nobility of soul: these are the qualities so lacking in the
world of Verrières and Paris, yet these are the qualities which are
absolutely necessary to the pursuit of happiness.

Plainly Julien Sorel has these qualities himself, and Stendhal's
unflinching exposé of what, in his proposed review, he called 'a land
of affectation and pretension' is illuminated by the central presence
of this young and energetic hero. Julien sets out to conquer the
society of his time by playing it at its own game of hypocrisy while
yet remaining free from moral

-xiii-

taint by virtue of his own lucidity. Just when it seems that he may
have lost this lucidity, he rejects the false image of himself
contained within M
^me
de Rênal's letter to the Marquis de la
Mole and in an act of murderous passion recovers his real self. The
violence of the deed stands as testimony to its integrity, and the
aftermath--the willing acceptance of responsibility, the discovery of
happiness, the poetic remembrance of things past--points to a form of
authenticity that is the quarry of every Stendhalian hero.

More than one hundred and fifty years after
The Red and the Black
first appeared this has now become the orthodox way to read the
novel, but in 1830 it would not have been an easy lesson for the
reader to assimilate. Consequently he might well have been left cold
by the numerous comic aspects which enliven the narrative (such as
Julien's trouserless departure at the end of Book I or the various
shenanigans with ladders), and which combine with its more tragic
moments to provoke that blend of laughter and tears which Stendhal so
treasured as an effect of the
opera buffa
of Mozart and
Cimarosa. Equally the narrator's delicious sense of irony may have
struck the reader as simply irritating. For
The Red and the Black
to work, he or she has got to have some sympathy for its central
character, and if a sense of moral outrage takes over, then the
scandalized reader is suffering from that emotion which Stendhal
repeatedly stated that he least wanted to stir: 'impotent hatred'.

Such a reader may also have been put off by another shocking aspect of the novel: its style.
The Red and the Black
may not describe the July Revolution, but it was itself a
revolution. The bastions of supposed good taste and novelistic
propriety are stormed with resolve. Not for Stendhal the sonorous
periods of Chateaubriand and the rhetorical grand gestures of Victor
Hugo. Not for him either the navelregarding intricacies of confessional
novels like Chateaubriand's
René
and their anguished portraits of pathological passivity. He had already poked fun at these in his first novel
Armance
( 1827). Instead he aimed now at a narrative which would have
something of the energy and directness of its lowborn protagonist. While
he later felt that he might have gone

-xiv-