4 Professor Jean-Jacques Hamm has concluded that only fifteen of the seventy-three epigraphs in The Red and the Black are correctly and verifiably attributed. For the rest, it is virtually impossible to determine precisely which are playful inventions, mistakes, or intentional misattributions by Stendhal. As a rule, citations
The Red and the Black
highly unlikely sources. With one exception, I present them, here, as he wrote them. When Stendhal attributes to Virgil a passage written in fact by Horace, I have added a correction. Caveat lector. The many different currencies in use, in Stendhal's France, have here been converted (mostly in due proportion) to more readily comprehensible francs. Famous names, battles, and the like have more often than not been explicated, in the text proper, by an added word or two. M., the standard French abbreviation for monsieur, has without exception been given its full form. In conversational passages, monsieur has usually been translated as "sir." And so on. Or, as Stendhal would say, and I have been careful to let him say, etc., etc. Introduction Diane Johnson I always think that Stendhal, the name Marie-Henri Beyle chose as his nom de plume, would have preferred to be Lord Byron, the prototypical romantic hero of the early nineteenth century, handsome, gifted, aristocratic, and rich. The two men met a time or two in Milan, and Stendhal greatly admired "le joli homme de génie."5 Though Byron, the younger, was long dead by 1830, when Stendhal's great novel Le Rogue et le Noir was published, Stendhal's tone often reminds one of Byron in his letters, or in Don Juan, a work which Stendhal cites in epigraphs to his chapters. Like Byron, Beyle had a masculine life of action. He served in the military under Napoleon—between 1800 and 1813 in Italy as a second lieutenant, and with the campaigns in Germany, Russia, and Austria as aide to the Napoleonic general Michoud. At other times he lived in Paris, where he exerted himself to lead a strenuous, somewhat rakish life about town, and would become a diplomat—a French consul-general—in Civita Vecchia, Italy, the country he most loved and appreciated. His years there seem to have been happier than those he spent in Paris, where, as a provincial born in Grenoble, he perhaps did not quite fit in, being neither handsome enough (plain, short, and plump) or rich enough to cut a swath in the society he would have preferred. The period of Beyle's lifetime (1783–1842), one of the most turbulent in European history, included the French Revolution, the Terror, the reign of Napoleon, Napoleon's wars, the subsequent restorations of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and upheavals caused by various factions struggling to make France a Republic. Altogether, in France alone during this period there were at least six political regimes, culminating in 1830 with the July Revolution, which put an end to the Bourbon rule, and instead of fulfilling the author's republican hopes, brought to the throne a new king, Louis-Philippe, who would still be ruling at Beyle's death. And when we consider the upheavals in Italy, so long dominated by Austria, and by 1830 divided into various papal and other states, it is not surprising that politics play an important part in Stendhal's books, as in his life. The period covered in The Red and the Black is almost coextensive with the moment it was being written. But the contradictions involved in leading a life of fashion as well as the life of a writer were something else he shared with Lord Byron. At the same time that the Marie-Henri Beyle side of his nature was drawn to mondaine life in the military and social worlds, Stendhal was a
attributed to English, Latin, and Italian writers were given in the original languages—which Stendhal knew— those of German origin were translated into French.