Stendhal - Project for an Article on Le Rouge et le Noir

Letter to Vincenzo Salvagnoli, 1832

In a letter to his Italian friend, lawyer and politician Vincenzo Salvagnoli, Stendhal includes this draft article on his book Le Rouge et le Noir. The article was never published.

---

Since you wish it, I will put in writing what I had the honor to discuss with you yesterday.

The great occupation of provincial women in France is the reading of novels. Mores are very pure in France in the small towns; every woman watches her neighbor and God knows there has never been a better constituted police force. A man cannot go six times to a house where there is a somewhat passable woman without the whole neighborhood being in an uproar; and the punishments inflicted by this vigilant police are terrible. An unfortunate woman living in a town in France with less than twenty thousand souls, and who got herself talked about (these are the sacramental terms invented by the provincial prudery), is no longer involved in any of the balls which are given in her little town. This official punishment brings universal contempt. If the culprit finds a way to enter the ballroom, the women feign not to speak to her: the shame, the contempt, the pain suffered are excessive. Yet the French character can tolerate anything except contempt expressed in public, and every year we see one of these unfortunate provincial women whom love has somewhat compromised in the eyes of their neighbors, put an end to a now unbearable existence by suicide.

Those who have less determination are content to go and bury themselves in the countryside and no longer reappear at the carnival balls or in the societies of their small town for the rest of their lives. In the countryside, the poorest peasants pity them and despise them a little. We have seen husbands more indulgent than the public of their small town showering with signs of consideration and affection their wives whom the chatters and bigots of the small town had one day declared guilty. These good husbands tried to remove their wives from the countryside; they wanted them to appear in the public walks of their small town; instantly, all the women desert the side of the promenade where the unfortunate outlaw was taking the air with her husband. The young children of the unfortunate woman who accompanied her on the walk, themselves notice this general movement and asked her the cause of it.

These are the mores that the government of Louis XVIII and Charles X gave to the province in France. These princes, especially the first, although very little inclined towards gallantry (he was said to be ill suited¹ for it), had a lot of grace, loved women, knew how to talk to them and were far removed from the stupid prudery which under their reign came to sadden France, and make it lose the rights to the title of gay that it so well deserved before the Revolution. We can say that, in the interests of his despotism, Napoleon founded this annoying prudery, and that the congregation anchored it in the mores of the province. It spread denunciation and espionage everywhere. Its leaders wanted to know the name of the newspaper that was read in every house in every small town in France and they succeeded. They wanted to know the visitors that were received there during each day and they found out, and all this without charge, without expense, only through the voluntary espionage of right-thinking people.

These are the new mores for France that M. de St[endhal], the author of Le Rouge, wanted to depict. But before arriving at the analysis of this work, we must point out another consequence of the moral habits of France, of its mores, as they were established from 1806 to 1832; one can say that they are entirely unknown to foreigners who still look for images of French society in the tales of Marmontel or in the novels of Mrs de Genlis.

Everything has changed completely in France. We will find a faithful image of the mores of provincial towns before the Revolution, not in the musky tales of Marmontel, but in a charming little novel by Baron de Bezenval, entitled the Spleen. One will see how much fun we had in France before 1789. Another proof: all the stories of Napoleon's life begin with the description of the pleasant life he led in Valence (in Dauphiné) when he was an artillery lieutenant in the regiment garrisoned in this small town. There were three or four houses open every evening. Nothing similar today, everything is sad and stuffy in towns of six to eight thousand souls. The foreigner is as embarrassed about his evening there as in England. Men have acquired a taste for hunting and agriculture, and their poor halves who cannot write novels console themselves by reading them.

Hence the immense consumption of novels which takes place in France. There is hardly a provincial woman who does not read five or six volumes a month, many read fifteen or twenty, so there is no small town that does not have two or three reading rooms. There, one rents novels for a coin per volume and per day. When the novel is by some renowned author, it yields two and sometimes up to three coins a day at the literary cabinet. If there are engravings by Tony Johannot, the fashionable illustrator who in fact has a very original talent, and if the novel has been well extolled in the newspapers, the master of the literary cabinet cuts each volume of the novel in two and each half is rented for three coins a day. But to achieve this mark of success, it is essential that the book be printed in octavo format.

The work which we are going to report on has obtained the honor of the three coins, and moreover, of thus being quartered.

All women in France read novels, but not all have the same degree of education; hence, the distinction which has been established between novels for chambermaids (I beg pardon for the crudeness of this word invented, I believe, by booksellers) and the novel of the salons.

The novel for maids is generally printed in duodecimo format and by M. Pigoreau. He is a bookseller from Paris who, before the commercial crisis of 1831, had earned half a million by making the pretty eyes of the provinces cry. Because despite this contemptuous name of a novel for chambermaids, Pigoreau's novel in-12, where the hero is always perfect and of ravishing beauty, shaped well and with large deep-set eyes, is far more read in the provinces than the novel in-8 printed by Levavasseur or Gosselin, and whose author seeks literary merit.

There is such an author who has written eighty volumes of novels printed in Paris, whose name is on everyone's lips, in Toulouse, Marseille, Bayonne, Agen, and whom absolutely no one knows in Paris. Such is, for example, Mr. Baron de La Mothe-Langon, author of the novel entitled Monsieur le Préfet and twenty others. Misters Paul de Kock, Victor Ducange, etc., would be as unknown in Paris as Mr. le Baron de La Mothe-Langon, if they had not decided to create dramas and melodramas with their novels.

In Paris, in Rouen and a few towns in the north of France, more civilized than the south, the chambermaid's novel never enters the salon. Nothing seems more bland, in Paris, than this always perfect hero, than these unhappy, innocent and persecuted women, from the maid's novels.

The province sometimes reads the novel of good company, the octavo novel printed by Levavasseur, but in general, it does not understand it completely. It reads it more to fulfill a duty rather than for the enjoyment of pleasure.

Walter Scott and Mr. Manzoni were the only exceptions, and the works of these great poets were read in the provinces as in Paris. With this difference however, that Paris is bored with Walter Scott's first volumes, filled with too circumstantial details and too little animated; these details, on the contrary, charm the province. Paris was a little bored with the details that Mr. Manzoni gives on the plague of 1628 in Milan and the Untori, the province, on the contrary, quivered.

Sir Walter Scott had around two hundred imitators in France; all the works of these authors have been read, some have even had several editions and managed to be read in Paris; but after a year or two, they fell into deep oblivion.

In chambermaid novels, it does not matter whether the events are absurd, calculated at the right time to make the hero shine, in a word what we derisively call romanesque.

The little bourgeois women of the province only ask the author for extraordinary scenes which put them all in tears; it matters little what means bring them about. The ladies of Paris, on the contrary, who consume octavo novels, are as severe as the devil when it comes to extra-ordinary events. As soon as an event seems to be just in time to make the hero shine, they throw the book away and the author is ridiculous in their eyes.

It is because of these two opposing demands that it is so difficult to write a novel that will be read both in the bedrooms of provincial bourgeois women and in the salons of Paris.

Such was the state of the French public in 1830 in relation to the novel. The genius of Walter Scott had made the Middle Ages fashionable; one was sure of success by using two pages to describe the view from the window of the room where the hero was; two other pages to describe his clothing, and two more pages to represent the shape of the armchair on which he was placed. Mr. de S[tendhal], bored with all this Middle Ages, with the pointed arch and the clothing of the 15th century, dared to recount an adventure which took place in 1830 and leave the reader in complete ignorance about the form of the dress worn by Madame de Rênal and Mademoiselle de La Mole, his two heroines, because this novel has two, against all the rules followed until now.

The author dared much more than that, he dared to paint the character of the woman from Paris who loves her lover only as much as she thinks she is on the verge of losing him every morning.

Such is the effect produced by the immense vanity which has become almost the only passion in this city where there is so much intellect. Elsewhere, a lover can make himself loved by protesting the ardor of his passion, his fidelity, etc., etc., and by proving these laudable qualities to his beloved. In Paris, the more he convinces himself that he is fixed forever, that he adores, the more he ruins himself in the mind of his mistress. This is something that the Germans will never believe, but I am well afraid, however, that Mr. de S[tendhal] was a faithful painter.

The life of the Germans is contemplative and imaginative, that of French is all vanity and activity.

The moral, execrable in the eyes of beautiful women, which results from Mr. de S[tendhal's] book is this:

Young men who want to be loved in a civilization where vanity has become, if not the passion, at least the feeling of every moments, each morning, politely persuade the woman who the day before was your beloved mistress, that you are about to leave her.

This new system, if it ever takes hold, will renew the entire dialogue of love. In general, until the moment of the alleged discovery of Mr. de S[tendhal], when a lover did not know what to say to his beautiful, when he was on the verge of getting bored, he would quickly fall into the protest of the most lively feelings, in ecstasy, in the transports of happiness, etc., Mr. de S[tendhal] arrives with his two amusing volumes to demonstrate to poor lovers that these words, which they believed without consequences, are their ruin. According to this author, when a lover is bored with his mistress, which, by all means, can sometimes happen in this very moral century, so hypocritical, and consequently so boring, the best thing to do is simply not to deny one’s boredom. It is an accident, it is a misfortune just like any other. This will seem very simple to our Italy, the naturalness in manners, in speeches, being here the ideal beauty; but in France, a country more affected, it will be a great innovation.

Naturalness in manners, in speeches is the ideal beauty to which Mr. de S[tendhal] returns in all the important scenes of his novel and there are some terrible ones judging only by the vignette that the bookseller Levavasseur, faithful to fashion, placed on the embellished cover of his book: we see the heroine, Mademoiselle de La Mole, who holds in his arms the head of her lover that has just been cut. But before arriving at this state, this head did many follies, and these follies astonish without ceasing to be natural. There is the merit of Mr. de S[tendhal].

In the follies of the heroes of vulgar novels, only the first is good because it surprises. All the others are like the originalities of fools in real life, we expect them, hence they are worthless, they are flat. The flat type is the great pitfall of the novel in-12, written for chambermaids. But the great happiness of writers of this type of novel, is that what seems flat in the salons of Paris is interesting for the small town of eight thousand inhabitants at the foot of the Alps or the Pyrénées and even more for America and abroad where thousands of volumes of French novels will end up.

Moral France is unknown abroad, which is why before coming to Mr. de S[tendhal's] novel it was necessary to say that nothing less resembles the gay, amusing, slightly libertine France, which from 1715 to 1789 was the model of Europe, than grave, moral, morose France bequeathed to us by the Jesuits, the congregations and the government of the Bourbons from 1814 to 1830. As nothing is more difficult in terms of novels than to paint from nature, to not copy books, no one before Mr. de S[tendhal] had ventured to paint the portrait of these so unkind mores, but which despite this, given the sheep spirit of Europe, will end up reigning from Naples to Saint Petersburg.

Notice a difficulty that we do not suspect abroad. By portraying the society of 1829 (the time when this novel was written), the author ran the risk of displeasing the ugly faces whose resemblances he traced, and these ugly faces then all-powerful could very well bring him in front of the courts and send him for thirteen months to the ordeals of Poissy like Misters Magallon and Fontan.

Here is finally the story of this novel which is very interesting.

Verrières is one of the prettiest towns in Franche-Comté, built on the slope of a hill in the middle of clumps of large chestnut trees. The Doubs, one of the most picturesque rivers in France, flows to the south, at the bottom of the hill on the slope of which Verrières extends itself. To the north, Verrières is sheltered by a Jura mountain. It is a cheerful assemblage of white houses with red roofs, sawmills and pretty girls who make nails. The town is clean, because it was largely built since 1814, the time of the fall of Napoleon and the rebirth of commerce in France, but it is devout, it is entirely led by the parish priest, virtuous, by the mayor Mr. de Rênal, appointed by the congregation of 1815, and by the vicar Maslon, sent in 1824 to supervise the priest and the mayor whom the congregation, which had become all-powerful, did not find sufficiently devoted to his interests.

Verrières, in this book, is an imaginary place that the author has chosen as the type of towns of the province.

The mayor, Mr. de Rênal, is a tall man. He has broad features which express nothing but the love of money. He is 48 to 50 years old, he is a knight of several orders, very infatuated with his nobility, he married a very rich woman. He passes through the main street of Verrières, the author shows us the peasants who greet him with respect.

Nothing more natural: for the last eight or ten years, Mr. de Rênal could do anything in Verrières.

After the priest, a very honest man, and the mayor, there is still another man to see, it is Mr. Valenod, director of the poorhouse. This position offers him 10 or 12,000 francs and he only keeps it by showing himself to be the damned soul of the congregation, of which he is the favorite. In the high designs of this all-powerful sect, whatever royalists Mr. de Rênal the mayor and Mr. Chélan the priest may be, they must at the first opportunity be replaced by Mr. Valenod who does not blush at anything and by Mr. the Vicar Maslon, quite the fanatic mind.

At the moment when our novel begins, Mr. Valenod, protected for a long time by Mr. de Rênal, begins to arouse the jealousy of the mayor.

I beg you not to lose sight of these two characters for a moment: Mr. de Rênal and Mr. Valenod. These two men are the portraits of half of the well-off people in France around the year 1825. Mr. de Rênal is the ministerial man, the important man of small towns. Mr. Valenod is the short-robed Jesuit, as he was in the provinces, bold, restless, deceitful, finding himself humiliated by nothing, lending himself to all roles to please his General. On the other hand, this General takes charge of his future; we will see in the course of this story, Mr. Valenod successively becoming baron, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, in a word making a great fortune, he, small bourgeois from a small town to whom his father left a single green coat and 600 pounds of income. At the beginning of this story, the congregation had already made Mr. Valenod director of the Verrières poorhouse; he already has a carriage, horses, he gives dinners to right-thinking people, and the ambitious people of Verrières who want to make their fortune prefer his dinners to those of the very noble Mr. de Rênal, who has great humor.

Recently Mr. Valenod purchased two beautiful Norman horses and his carriage, recently arrived from Paris, eclipses Mr. de Rênal's carriage. To regain his superior position, Mr. de Rênal is thinking of giving a tutor to his three young children. He chose for this task the son of a carpenter from the small town, named Julien Sorel. Julien is the hero of the drama, I need to say who he is.

Julien is a small, weak and pretty young man, with black eyes and passionate feelings. As he is inferior to his brothers and his father in the art of handling the ax (father Sorel has a sawmill), he is despised; Julien is beaten by his brothers and his father, he hates them. He knows how to read, an advantage that no one in his family shares. An uncle, dying, left him the Confessions of J.-J. Rousseau and the Memorial of Saint Helena. Julien devours these works which develop his soul. As, in his family, he is the object, the constant goal of punches and jokes, this deeply sensitive and constantly outraged soul becomes suspicious, angry, even envious of all the happiness of which it sees itself barbarously deprived, proud above all, prouder than Mr. de Rênal with his beautiful house, his wealth, his carriage, his nobility and all the crosses that hang from his buttonhole.

The old and honest priest Chélan taught Latin out of charity to this poor little Julien whom he sees as too weak to become a carpenter. Mr. Chélan, who finds in him drive, deep sensitivity and a passion for reading, plans to send him to the seminary and make him a priest. Mr. Chélan said to Mr. de Rênal: this young man knows Latin perfectly. On this recommendation, the mayor of Verrières begins negotiations with Julien's father so that he may come to his house. After haggling for a long time and having seized the opportunity to represent the habits of the province in France when it comes to money, Mr. de S[tendhal] shows you Julien installed in the beautiful house of Mr. de Rênal, he is the tutor of his three young sons.

Julien knows nothing about men and the world other than what he learned by reading Rousseau's Confessions in secret and without the knowledge of the priest Chélan. Rousseau's position in his youth has more than one connection with his own, hence the immense influence of this book on his character. But Julien is careful not to talk about Rousseau and the Memorial of Saint-Helena. As the priest Chélan and the mayor of Rênal are ardent royalists, Julien never names Napoleon without attaching an insulting epithet to this name which he secretly adores.

In the eyes of the world, Julien knows, for all his knowledge, the Old Testament in Latin, he learned it by heart and recites it, to everyone, starting, if one likes, with the last verse and ending with the first.

This kind of merit is easy to appreciate, it cannot be denied. Memory is like military courage, it does not admit hypocrisy. Also, from the first moment Julien, succeeded with Mr. de Rênal. Mr. de Rênal admires him, the friends and servants of the house admire him. What happiness for the vanity of the mayor of Verrières, the whole little town only talks about the happiness he had in finding such a tutor for his children. To heighten his enjoyment, Mr. Valenod envies this young tutor and does everything in the world to take him away from him.

In the midst of this sordid grandeur, of this wealth so ugly of an enriched man from a small town, the character of young Julien who, obscurely in the depths of his still young heart, deeply feels all the ugliness of the luxury of Mr. the Mayor, is painted with a naive truth and full of grace. The author in no way treats Julien like the hero of chambermaid novels, he shows all his faults, all the bad movements of his soul, at first very selfish because he is very weak and the first law of all beings from the insect to the hero, is to preserve themselves. Julien is indeed the small humiliated peasant, isolated, ignorant, curious, full of pride, because his soul is generous and he is surprised to despise the baseness of the rich Mr. de Rênal who would do anything for money. Julien sees himself surrounded by enemies. Every day, in his presence, this Napoleon whom he adores is cursed, because he had made a captain and soon a general out of a young peasant who had courage. In order to play his role as a devout young priest, Julien is forced to loudly curse Napoleon. Julien's soul is in a violent situation, he likes no one and every day he is surprised to have to despise Mr. de Rênal, Mr. Valenod, all the notable good royalists of the little town ​​who come to eat the fat capon at the mayor's house.

So far we have spoken of characters painted with truth, but not very pleasant ones. This new provincial life, so boring, so full of suspicion, which has invaded France since 1800, has produced a charming woman's character, and which was impossible in the midst of the gay mores which reigned from 1715 to 1790. I have not yet spoken of Madame de Rênal. Madame de Rênal is a charming woman like there are many in the Province.

Thanks to solitude, to the isolation in which we live in the Province for fear of being denounced by our neighbors, even when we are mayor, even when we are employed by the suspicious congregation, Madame de Rênal is one of these women who do not know if they are beautiful, who ignore it, who regard their husband as the first man in the world, trembling before this husband and believing they love him with all their heart, gentle, modest, entirely devoted to their household, chaste and withdrawn, loving God and praying. Not to mention that their negligee is elegant, that they are most often in white dresses, that they love flowers, woods, flowing water, singing birds, running hens surrounded by their chicks, charming women, without pomp, without sadness, without cheerfulness, and who often die without having known love.

Such was Madame de Rênal, this impossible woman in the promiscuous mores which invaded France at the death of the superb Louis XIV in 1715 and which reigned until the disastrous death of his great-grandson Louis XVI in 1793.

The noble soul of Madame de Rênal was shocked by the rudeness of Mr. de Rênal's feelings, but she did not admit to herself precisely her inner contempt for these souls in whose eyes money is everything. The friends that Mr. de Rênal brought together at his table, like him only valued money and good positions well paid by the government, the crosses that allows one to straighten the legs and carry one’s head high while passing in front of the neighbor who has no ribbons. Madame de Rênal believed that all men were like her husband, when after six months she began to see that this little abbot with a pale face, sitting at the bottom end of the table next to children, does not adore money above all. And yet he is so poor!

Little by little, she compares him to Mr. Valenod, to her husband. Julien, a poor tutor with a salary of 400 francs, is less interested in earning money than Mr. de Rênal who has an income of 30,000 pounds. Little by little, the simple soul of Madame de Rênal sympathizes with the generous, proud, arrogant soul of Julien. She enjoys working while sitting next to him. Madame de Rênal believes that she acts this way out of love for her children. Although she is almost thirty years old, she does not know what love is. She never experienced it. She reads few novels, because modern novels are liberal and she is ultra. Mr. Valenod, with an even more crude soul than her husband, wanted to court her, but he horrified her.

Julien's soul constantly hurt by what he hears said in this royalist house is irritated, and angry. He doesn't like Madame de Rênal at all.

One summer evening the evening is spent under a large chestnut tree in the garden, very close to the house. Madame de Rênal touches by chance Julien's hand and she withdraws it immediately. The soul irritated and angry, Julien almost sees in this movement a mark of contempt. I have to take this hand, he says to himself. I have to obtain that it be left to me. That said, Julien trembles, because he is only nineteen years old, because he has never before held the hand of a young woman. However, Julien has a strong soul, the feeling of duty is all-powerful over him. He drew this religion from the Memorial of Saint Helena. He says to himself: “If at midnight, I have not been able to take it upon myself to take the hand of this young woman who is here next to me, it is clear that I am only a coward, I will go up to my room to blow my brains out.”

Midnight strikes. By a final effort of courage and not of love, note this carefully, Julien seizes this white and chubby hand, this hand which is only taken away with extreme difficulty and which is finally left to him.

During the night following this great adventure, Madame de Rênal discovers that she has love for Julien, she horrifies herself. The next day she treats Julien badly when she finds him in the living room. Julien says to himself, she despises me because I am the son of a carpenter. My duty is to force this great lady to love me. Julien's pride, his justly wounded pride, initially prevents him from taking love. If he had taken it, shyness, the inseparable companion of a first passion, would have prevented him forever from triumphing over the very sincere and very real virtue of Madame de Rênal. As, on the contrary, he still has no love, he says to himself after a month or two: I must present myself in Madame de Rênal's room this night at two o'clock. He tells her; despite her love which she now admits to herself and which causes her torment, poor Madame de Rênal has is horrified by this idea.

Only Julien is afraid. However, when two o'clock strikes, he goes up to Madame de Rênal's room. There courage on the one hand, and love on the other bring about a result which would have been impossible if Julien had really been in love. But Madame de Rênal is so pretty that Julien soon enamored with her. This poor, very devout woman has terrible remorse. One of her sons falls ill, she believes that it is God who punishes her adultery, because she does not try to hide her fault. Once she even goes so far as to exile Julien from the house, but after three days she can no longer stand it, she calls him back.

However, the entire small town of Verrières is scandalized. Mr. Valenod writes an anonymous letter to Mr. de Rênal. Jealousy of this husband. Passion gives wit to Madame de Rênal, this simple woman finds a way to neutralize the effect produced by the anonymous letter. Julien admires her, his passion redoubles. Finally an unofficial friend comes to warn Mr. de Rênal of the comments made in his small town. Julien is sent to the seminary of Besançon.

The remarkable part of this novel as a painting of mores is Julien's stay at the Seminary. The director, Mr. abbé Pirard, is a perfectly honest man, but he is a Jansenist. Mr. de Frilair, grand vicar of Besançon and head of the congregation, end up forcing Father Pirard to resign.

Mr. Pirard took refuge in Paris with Mr. the Marquis de La Mole, peer of France and cordon bleu. He is a man of spirit who loves pleasures, a great lord of the Ancien regime. The revolution which only dates back to 1794 (end of the terror) has not yet had time to create its character as a great lord. This amiable man, Mr. de La Mole, needs a secretary who will not allow himself to be bribed by the police. Father Pirard proposes Julien to him. He is brought to Paris. Here he is installed in the hotel of Mr. the Marquis de La Mole. At first everyone makes fun of his clumsiness. Mr. de La Mole and his son Norbert protect him.

After a year, Julien becomes less awkward in the salon. Mr. de La Mole is lazy; Julien is his factotum. Julien sometimes goes to speak in the salon, he finds a way, because he is full of pride or at least does not want to be scorned, he finds a way to shine sometimes in this golden salon filled with Dukes and Peers and spies. Here again we encounter a very true painting of the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The great lords, lazy above all, and regarding work as the worst of evils, and on the other hand afraid of the Jacobins and the return of the Republic of 93, surround themselves with renegade liberals who have become spies. And that is how what is noblest and richest shakes hands with what is most infamous and poorest. This would have been impossible before 1789. Here M. de S[tendhal] enters into the painting of his era.

In the middle of this strangely composed salon, Mademoiselle de La Mole, a young nineteen-year-old Parisian, daughter of the Marquis, shines. She is intended for the Marquis de Croisenois, young squadron leader of Charles X's royal guard, who has an income of sixty thousand francs and will be Duke one day. Mr. de Croisenois is perfectly polite, he always finds something kind to say to the person he is talking to on every subject. In a word, he is perfect according to the ideas of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but Miss de La Mole finds him dull. “When I am his wife,” she tells herself, “he will bore me.”

Five or six young people from the noble suburb flutter around her. They all have charming manners, but among them all there is a scarcity of ideas and even more of feelings. These perfectly generous young people would think themselves lost if they were not all exact copies of each other.

The plebeians have more ideas and less elegance in manners. Julien with his simple black coat somewhat scandalizes these brilliant young men who sometimes appear in the living room on their return from the Tuileries covered in the most brilliant uniforms. Despite so many advantages, they bore Mademoiselle de La Mole, to whom Julien never speaks.

Like a true Parisian, she annoys him. The restraint of his father's favorite secretary seems almost contemptuous to her. She doesn't see that it is only pride, only fear of being looked down upon. The excessive vanity of Mademoiselle de La Mole strives to disturb the tranquility of Julien's heart.

Julien's pride behaves so well that Mademoiselle de La Mole is completely piqued; and here we must read the details in the book itself, we must look for nuances that are imperceptible, in appearance, but decisive for the vanity of a young girl from Paris.

Finally, Mademoiselle de La Mole who will have a dowry of a million and what is better: the favor of the Court for her husband, Mademoiselle de la Mole, this young person so dazzling, so popular, made for princes, a thousand times more educated about the world than Madame de Rênal, married, would you believe it? The proud Mademoiselle de La Mole will love her father's secretary, his servant!

Why? It was because by chance, through dint of pride, Julien had the behavior necessary to pique the vanity of Mademoiselle de La Mole. Two or three times, seriously and not playfully, he was on the verge of leaving her there. This is the whole secret of love among Parisian women today.

Through his coldness, Julien leads Mademoiselle de La Mole to declare to him her love by letter.

Mademoiselle de La Mole is seduced because she imagines that Julien is a man of genius, a new Danton. The Faubourg Saint-Germain in 1829 had a terrible fear of a revolution which it imagined would have to be bloody like that of 1793. It did not know, the noble Faubourg, that a revolution is only bloody in exact proportion of the atrocity of the abuses that it is called to uproot.

Yet the abuses of 1829 were not atrocious. The number of generals shot by the Bourbons following Ney, Mouton-Duvernet, Labédoyère, the Faucher brothers, does not amount to one hundred and fifty.

In any case, Mademoiselle de La Mole is afraid, like her whole class and, strangely enough, she esteems Julien because she imagines that he will be a new Danton. This is yet another circumstance in our novel which would have been impossible before 1789. A young plebeian could only seduce a great lady through… temperament.

Let's return to Mademoiselle de La Mole's letter. When Julien receives it, he thinks it's a trap. He takes his assurances. “They will perhaps kill me at this meeting that they have offered me,” he tells himself, because Mademoiselle de La Mole, in her confusion, had gone that far. “If they kill me,” Julien continues, “it is too clear that the original of this letter will be taken away from me. I will pass for a monster and a fool who wanted to enter Miss de La Mole's apartment at night. Gently, misters great lords!”

Julien sends Mademoiselle de La Mole's letter to one of his friends in Verrières, with the order to publish it, if he hears that he, Julien, was murdered. Julien feels remorse at seducing his benefactor's daughter in this way! But he saw this benefactor returning from the Tuileries with the secrecy of the State playing with loans without fail, which to Julien seems like fraud.

He allows himself to be wrong about this fault in order to commit a greater one. Dazzled by the glory of braving the daggers of the young gentlemen who court Mademoiselle de La Mole and whom he believes gathered to fool or kill him in Mademoiselle de La Mole's room, where she has arranged to meet him, he goes down to the garden, he takes a ladder, he leans it against the wall of the hotel and there he enters through the window the room of this noble and beautiful young lady.

The day after that night, Mademoiselle de La Mole is ashamed of the man to whom she gave herself up to. Julien is in despair, he is truly in love. In the provinces, the prospect of this Paris, of which he was constantly thinking, prevented him from appreciating the good and simple Madame de Rênal. Mademoiselle de La Mole is well against him all the reveries that for ten years Julien devoted to imagining the adventures and charms of Paris.

The Marquis de La Mole sends Julien to take a letter to an ambassador in Mainz. Julien, madly in love, is in despair. He finds a fool of his friends, who not only gives him the banal advice to court a woman, from the society of the one who despises him, but moreover, what is even better, gives him the courage to follow this advice. The laziness of the fool stocked up on letters addressed to women by men who wanted to seduce them. The fool gives a series of these letters to Julien: “Copy them,” he tells him, “address them to the woman you have chosen from the society of the woman who despises you and do not get discouraged until you have sent the copy of the last of these letters.”

Julien plays coldness with such strength of character that Mademoiselle de La Mole is piqued at having left so little despair in a man who one day she deigned to make her lover. Besides, she has a lot of vanity, but she is not corrupt, she is young and has no… temperament — [Stendhal writes here in Italian] in French I will put an allusion, render it honestly — Julien was her first love. She begins to love him again.

Julien has the advantage of being able to play coldness. This proves that he really had great character. This test is undoubtedly one of the most difficult to which the human heart can be subjected. This heroism is crowned with the greatest success. After two months of coldness and acted out contempt, Mademoiselle de La Mole arranges a second meeting with Julien. But Julien tells her: “It is vanity which is piqued and recalls me, this is not love.” Mademoiselle de La Mole cuts a whole side of her beautiful blond hair for Julien, she throws them to him in the garden. Asinus fricat se ipsum².

This painting of Parisian love is absolutely new. It seems to us that it cannot be found in any book. It makes a beautiful contrast with true, simple love, not regarding itself, of Madame de Rênal. It is the love based on intellect compared to the love of the heart. Besides, this contrast, sharp in France, loses much of its merit in the eyes of people who, like us, live three hundred leagues from these nuances which are so difficult to paint.

This article is already so long that we dispense with following the various incidents of the love affairs of Julien and Mademoiselle de La Mole. The reader who knows high society will easily imagine them, it is love of the brain.

The progress of the mind allows us to imagine the greatest events, the greatest actions without the need for genius. For example, Mr. de Polignac, who is neither a Machiavelli nor a Mazarin, wakes up one fine day with this idea: to overthrow the charter, and he boldly throws himself into this action without having assembled troops, without having purchased judges, etc., without having done any of the things necessary for success and which Cardinal Mazarin would not have failed to do.

Such is the intellectual love that exists in Paris among some young women. What's the most decisive thing a young girl can do? Well, this young girl from Paris will get herself kidnapped without love, only to give herself the pleasure of believing she has a great passion.

Julien's love affairs, the story of which we do not have the space to tell the reader, will end in a marriage with a girl who will make him a great lord. We are going to see Madame de Rênal again.

Mr. Marquis de La Mole, who knows that his favorite Julien was tutor to Madame de Rênal's children, has the very simple idea of ​​asking this lady for information about him. However, Madame de Rênal, estranged from her lover, did not take another as is customary. She has a truly tender soul, this poor woman. She tries to love God; she is repentant of her earthly loves. The repentant Madame de Rênal is led by the young Jesuit from Verrières. The Jesuit believes he is sure of his fortune and will please Mr. de La Mole if he manages to detach his noble daughter from her mad love for the son of a carpenter. He dictates to his penitent Madame de Rênal a letter in which Julien is depicted as a young man who has no other passion than that of money and who seeks to make his fortune through women. An indignant Mr. de La Mole gives this letter to his daughter Mathilde. Mathilde shows it to Julien. Julien is furious, he leaves, arrives in Verrières during mass, enters, he sees Madame de Rênal and shoots her twice at point blank range.

Julien is in prison; Madame de Rênal, healed from her injury, hopes to obtain pardon for the man she still loves, by seeing him in his prison and publicly reconciling with him. The description of these moments preceding Julien's death is Asinus asinum fricat³.

One thing will surprise the reader. This novel is not one. Everything it says really happened in 1826 in the vicinity of Rennes⁴. It was in this town that the hero died after having fired two pistol shots at his first mistress, whose children he had been the tutor, and who by a letter prevented him from marrying his second mistress, quite a rich girl; Mr. de S[tendhal] has invented nothing.

His book is lively, colorful, full of interest and emotion. The author was able to paint with simplicity tender and naive love.

He dared to paint the love of Paris. No one had attempted it before him. No one either had painted with such care the mores given to the French by miscellaneous governments which have weighed on them during the first third of the 19th century. One day, this novel will paint ancient times like those of Walter Scott.

—Don Gruffot Papera⁵

1. Impotent

2. “The donkey rubs itself”

3. “The donkey rubs the donkey”

4. The actual story Stendhal references, l’Affaire Berthet, occurred in Grenoble in 1827.

5. Stendhal signed all letters of this period by a pseudonym. N.B. Stendhal is itself an anonymous pseudonym.