5 Retranslated from the French
Introduction
sober intellectual and writer. It is fortunate that as both a provincial bureaucrat in Italy and a Parisian dandy he would have had considerable leisure time, during which he wrote critical essays in French journals, articles which were translated for English magazines, wrote extensively on painting, music, and opera, as well as travel pieces, stories, and of course his five novels, of which the most famous are The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. By these efforts he supplemented his small private income. Today Stendhal is secure in the smallish pantheon of the greatest French novelists (Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, and Proust), but he is not uncontroversial, and some of his qualities, especially his natural, almost conversational style, invite comparisons with Flaubert, always to Stendhal's disadvantage. Flaubert, an exquisite stylist, is, at the moment at least, the undisputed roi of French prose, but for many, Stendhal is the more enjoyed, and is above all a greater creator of characters, perhaps excepting Madame Bovary. An American reader is most likely to have encountered The Red and the Black at about the age of its protagonists, Julien Sorel and Mathilde de La Mole, who are eighteen or nineteen when we meet them. The other important figure, Madame de Rênal, is "about thirty, but still quite pretty." As with many novels, to take it up again at an older age is to experience a different book. At first reading, you are caught up in Julien's precarious career, with his love affairs and mishaps, and with the adorable, tempestuous Mathilde and poor Madame de Rênal. We are drawn to Julien's egotism, so like our own, laugh when Julien falls off his horse or fights a duel, and are generally swept along by the story and the brilliance and candor of its understanding of human motivation. American literature has not produced a writer like this, though the reader may think of Twain's similar mixture of irony and romanticism. We were not apt to be distracted by the character of Stendhal himself, his cynicism, social perspicacity, the complexity of his attitude toward Julien, and his inability to hide his writerly cards. What on first reading had seemed a tone expressive of the dawn of the romantic period, we now find to be heavily ironic, often patronizing, even sarcastic and impatient, and to owe a lot to Voltaire and the eighteenth-century philosophes, as well as to romantic ironists like Byron. This is especially true at the beginning of the novel, as Stendhal sets off on his task of recounting Julien Sorel's rise and fall. We see as the novel progresses that the author softens toward his hero, even identifies with him, and puts a lot of his own experience into a tale that began more objectively. The reader then may become fascinated by the character of Stendhal, who positions himself in the tale as a presiding intelligence without ever seeming to be in charge of what happens; he always makes it clear that it is the characters themselves who direct their fates, reacting in the light of the corrupt realities of their society. Julien Sorel's story was taken from the actual case of Antoine Berthet, reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux in December 1827, whose career and crime become Julien's. At first one senses that Stendhal felt constrained by the story he had chosen: a bookish boy, son of a brutal peasant who beats him and whose family doesn't understand him, sees a way out of his situation by studying for the priesthood and taking a job as a tutor in a prosperous bourgeois family, the Rênals. Here he has an affair with Madame de Rênal, and in other ways furthers his career, learning manners and something of the world. He is intelligent and good-looking, the epitome of a romantic hero with his large, dark eyes and tousled curls. More important, he has "an unshakable determination to undergo a thousand deaths rather than fail to achieve success." This accounts for the side of Julien that is calculating, flattering, insincere, and inwardly hostile even to people who intend to help and love him—indeed, he is an early example of an antihero of whom, at first, even Stendhal cannot approve. But there is a side of Julien that is loving despite himself, that is deservedly proud of his superiority to many, if not most, people
The Red and the Black
in the ranks above him, and who takes pleasure in the pleasures of life with natural spontaneity. It is his most admirable side, when he finally becomes truthful and sincere and listens to his own heart, that dooms him, an outcome that of course reflects Stendhal's own cynical view of a world where hypocrisy, scheming, wealth, and rank are necessary to success. Unlike Byron, Stendhal himself was far from irresistible to women, at least as a lover, and there is some suspicion that he was rather too direct and clumsy in his approaches to them, or unrealistically romantic, or self-protective in that he more often than not fell in love with married women. In any case, despite his innumerable love affairs, perhaps complicated by having syphilis (like many other figures of the period), he never married, and confessed to occasional homosexual impulses. By all accounts, however, he was a delightful friend to women, admiring those with intelligence and learning, qualities warmly appreciated by French men in this time of famous salons and witty hostesses. This was generally an eighteenth-century frame of mind, which was in part to disappear in the covert misogyny of later nineteenth-century writers. That Stendhal liked women helps explain why he is such a great portrayer of women characters. His portrait of Mathilde de La Mole in The Red and the Black is clearly drawn by a man who understood women—he had a beloved sister—and Mathilde is a woman the modern reader can understand without having to allow for the attitudes of an earlier time. Unlike the heroines of certain English novels, who are apt to be clinging, frail, and doomed like Clarissa or Tess, to die at the least transgression, Stendhal's heroines are witty, rational, responsible for their own actions, and willing sometimes to sacrifice our pity for our respect. Above all, they are women in a French novel, which is quite a different tradition, always franker about sex and infinitely less censorious. Almost more than his racy, vernacular style (very well rendered in this new translation), defying the developing taste of his period for a more florid style of prose (Victor Hugo found him horribly prosaic, and Henry James "unreadable"), his portraits of women seem utterly modern. But Julien Sorel is, of course, his greatest creation, perhaps because Stendhal himself embodied some of the contradictions of Julien's nature. At pains to demonstrate Julien's muddle of inexperience, romantic delusion, ambition and naïveté, pride and timidity, Stendhal sometimes betrays his own exasperation with these qualities, but by the time Julien is installed in the splendor of the aristocratic Parisian de La Moles' mansion, Stendhal's scorn turns instead on the fashionable Royalist society to which they belong, an attitude reflecting his republican views. The long scene where Julien sits in on the Royalist discussion is a masterly precis of the political climate of his day. Here Stendhal falls under the spell of his own, perhaps rather autobiographical, creation. It is easy to imagine as least some of Julien's misadventures in Parisian society to have come from actual experience, whether Stendhal's own or that of others he observed floundering in that exacting setting. Stendhal's friends said Julien reminded them of him; in other words, as the novel progresses Julien becomes more like Stendhal, and hence his creator comes to like him better.6 Perhaps this is why he spares us a harrowing account of Julien's end, a fate the present reader may passionately resent, as this one did at first reading. For, alas, things are to end badly, leaving Madame de Rênal to die of grief, and poor Mathilde pregnant, though far from ruined. What is one to make of Julien's fate? Was Stendhal bound by the actual case, in that Antoine Berthet was executed? Is it an ultimately cynical statement about the futility of life