6 See Jonathan Keates's entertaining account in his biography Stendhal (Carroll & Graf, 1997). A member of Byron's party in Milan found Stendhal "a fat and lascivious man."
Introduction
and ambition, or a concession to the concepts of romantic tragedy, or the ultimate expression of Stendhal's ambivalence about his hero, or a moment of high, ironic comedy that laughs at human absurdity, the culmination of which is found in Mathilde's Gothic plans for Julien's grave? Though Julien, Madame de Rênal, and Mathilde de La Mole are themselves creatures of the romantic period, they were formed by someone with a foot in each world, which explains the savagery with which their conflicted creator will turn on his characters at unexpected moments. In any case, it is the harshness of Julien's fate which has sealed posterity's view of Stendhal as a severe, even bitter realist rather than the romantic he struggled to hide, and who emerges despite himself. For what, finally, is more romantic, in the largest sense, than the ending of this remarkable work?
Diane Johnson is the author of ten novels—most recently Le Mariage and Le Divorce— two books of essays, two biographies, and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. She has been a finalist four times for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
THE RED AND THE BLACK Part One Truth, bitter truth. DANTON1 Chapter One: A Small Town Put thousands together Less bad, But the cage less gay. —HOBBES2 The little town of Verrières might be one of the prettiest in all Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their sharp-pointed roofs of red tile stretch down a hillside, every faint ripple in the long slope marked by thick clusters of chestnut trees. A few hundred feet below the ruins of the ancient fortress, built by the Spanish,3 runs the River Doubs. To the north, Verrières is sheltered by a great mountain, part of the Jura range. The first frosts of October cover these jagged peaks with snow. A stream that rushes down from the mountains, crossing through Verrières and then pouring itself into the Doubs, powers a good many sawmills—an immensely simple industry that provides a modest living for most of the inhabitants, more peasant than bourgeois. But the sawmills are not what brought prosperity to the little town. It was the production of printed calico cloth, known as "Mulhouse,"4 which ever since the fall of Napoleon has created widespread comfort and led to the refinishing of virtually every house in Verrières. Just inside the town, there is a stunning roar from a machine of frightful appearance. Twenty ponderous hammers, falling over and over with a crash that makes the ground tremble, are lifted by a wheel that the stream keeps in motion. Every one of these hammers, each and every day, turns out I don't know how many thousands of nails. And it's pretty, smooth-cheeked young girls who offer pieces of iron to these enormous hammers, which quickly transform them into nails. This operation, visibly harsh and violent, is one of the things that most astonishes a first-time traveler, poking his way into the mountains separating France and Switzerland. And if the traveler, entering Verrières, asks who owns this noble nail-making factory, deafening everyone who walks along the main street, he'll be told, in the drawling accent of the region, "Ah—it belongs to His Honor the Mayor."