The Red and the Black (4 page)

which illuminate the mortuary, chapel containing the statue and relic
of the saint, the swooning girls, all come to mind at the end of the
novel when the decapitated Julien is buried in 'that little grotto
magnificently lit by an infinite array of candles', and Mathilde bears
off her capital relic amidst the throng of mountain villagers who
have come like pilgrims to witness this strange rite. Julien the
latter-day apostate is revealed to be more akin to an early Christian
martyr. Imagination not only leads Julien away from happiness, it leads
him to premature death: 'the red' brings 'the black'.

The wounded neck represented on the statue of St Clement is but one
of the several details in the novel which foreshadow Julien's crime
and execution and thereby create a sense of fateful inevitability in
the mind of the retrospective reader. What may have appeared random
now takes on a providential quality. The parallels established by the
prospective readerparvenu, foundling, Napoleon, revolutionary hero--may
now be replaced by the figure of the man of destiny, the man of
exceptional passion and energy whose life is punctuated by intimations
of premature mortality and whose superiority is the cause of his
downfall. We may remember the piece of paper in the pew in Verrières
church and its reference to the execution of one Louis Jenrel. We may
smile that Julien notes only that 'his name ends like mine' ( 1. 5),
whereas it is an exact anagram of his own, and we may even be led by
this to realize that Julien Sorel and Louise de Rênal are
anagramatically almost united. We note the crimson drapery and the red
light that turns the holy water to blood, and later how the red
damask with which, after a funeral service, the abbé ChasBernard
transforms Besançon Cathedral to celebrate Corpus Christi provides a
prophetic backdrop to M
^me
de Rênal's collapse. And the crimson curtains are duly drawn when Julien shoots M
^me
de Rênal at the moment of the elevation of the Host, the Body of Christ. Verrières is even the French for church windows'.

And might we not also note that, when Julien takes his 'first step'
in Verrières church, this is said to be a 'station'; that he is tried
on a Friday; that there are three days during which he can appeal;
that he shares his champagne with two petty

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criminals; that Fouqué must, like Joseph of Arimathaea, plead for his
mortal remains; that he is consistently referred to as the son of a
carpenter. At the beginning of the novel we learn that Julien could
recite the New Testament by heart: was he unwittingly foretelling his
future? Has Julien been crucified for the values he proclaims by a
society that fears the radical threat they pose? Has the man who won
the cross of the Legion of Honour for his energy and imagination been
nailed to the cross of bourgeois reaction? After all, we know who
made the nails: M. de Rênal.

The road which Julien travels in
The Red and the Black
is a
via dolorosa.
But wherein lies redemption? Do we look askance at Julien's
imagination and exclaim, as Mirabeau does in the epigraph which
precedes the shooting of M
^me
de Rênal: 'O God, give me
mediocrity!' ( 11. 35)? Do we content ourselves with the view that
what led Julien away from the paradise of Vergy was mere foolish
ambition and that the ultimate truth of the novel lies in his
prison-idyll with M
^me
de Rênal and the discovery of his
unique self? Julien, then, is a man saved at the last minute from the
error of his ways? Perhaps, even, the lovers are reunited in death?
Redemption, according to this line of thinking, would lie in sincerity
and true love.

Or do we prefer to
revert to the heroic outlook of our prospective view of Julien and see
him once more in terms of other people, as indeed a man of destiny,
not--as it turns out--of military or political destiny so much as a
quasireligious one? Is it perhaps only through imagination that the
world can be redeemed? Through the actions of great men with vision
enough to transcend the predictable and the orthodox? Through
literature too? Did
The Red and the Black
condemn itself to critical death in order to redeem the world of 1830?

On 16 August 1819 at St Peter's Fields in Manchester workers
demonstrated in favour of better working conditions and, as C. W.
Thompson has recently brought to light, they carried red and black
flags. Troops intervened and many of the demonstrators met their
deaths, the working class its Peterloo. On 29 July 1830 in Paris
during the July Revolution a red and black flag was seen flying from
the Vendôme column

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signifying a fight to the death. On 25 February 1830 at the first of
Hernani
red and black tickets were issued to the claque chosen to champion
Victor Hugo's new romantic dram within the last bastion of Classical
taste, the Coméedie Française. What better title could Stendhal have
chosen for his hard-hitting critique of contemporary society which
abolishes the conventional happy ending of marriage combined with the
acquisition of wealth and enhanced social standing and substitutes
that of urunercenary, classless adultery, and which turns the life of a
peasant who attemps murder during Mass into a modern version of the
Life of Christ?

The Red and the Black
is a shocking novel, but it offers no design for living. It presents
the incompatibility of happiness and imagination as a problem without
solution, a problem illustrated by events in 1830 but for which a
solution has been, and will be, sought in every age. Unlike Julien and
Mathilde after their reading, the reader of
The Red and the Black
is left not with heroic preconceptions but with the resonance of an
unanswered question, the resonance of a violin which has been played
on with tact and expertise. The reader is thus in a better position to
obey the golden rule which Stendhal laid down for himself in a diary
entry of May 1904: 'regard everything I've read to date about man as a
prediction; believe only what I have seen for myself. Joy, happiness,
fame, all is upon it.

ROGER PEARSON

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Le Rouge et le Noir
was first published on 13 November 1830. The present translation is
based on P.-G. Castex's edition of the text published in the
Classiques Gamier series in 1973.

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