Allan Bloom - Stendhal The Red & The Black

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Stendhal,
The Red and the Black
In an attempt to understand that moment in our past when

I Romanticism formed the taste of the reading public and pre-
pared the way for our current taste, I shall discuss four classic
novels, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. All of these
books are post-Rousseauan, that is, they breathe the air of a world
newly articulated by Rousseau. Their authors all read Rousseau and
were both attracted and repelled by him in varying degrees from —
Austen, who most easily resisted his spell, to Tolstoy, who was an
almost unqualified enthusiast. Their relationships to Rousseau are
not as well known as they should be because his once fatal charms
have faded and his traces are less recognizable. But for more than a
century readers of novels were in the grip of his passionate vision of
the way men and women could be together. The only figure today
comparable in power to Rousseau, as is recognized more readily
now, is Nietzsche, and even he hardly rivals Rousseau.
I do not mean to deny the individuality of the great artists who
wrote these novels, nor do I want to appear to violate the aesthetic

integrity of the books by reducing the writers' vision to a formula of
intellectual history originating in Rousseau. However, even though
Stendhal and Austen have almost contrary intellectual, moral, and
artistic tastes, they share certain views about what counts that were
not shared by earlier or later writers. To both Stendhal and Austen,
the intimate contact between one man and one woman seems suffi-
158 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
cient to attract readers and hold their attention without much more
being added.
Some critics may reproach my undertaking because it insists on
the decisive influence of a philosopher on the work of artists. The old

New Critics were the first to take this tack, overreacting with the
laudable intention of rescuing the texts themselves from doctrinaire
They have been seconded by the newest new
intellectual historians.
critics who have a prejudice against reason and insist that artists
cannot be understood to be decisively influenced by the reasoning of

philosophers. These reproaches are usuallymade against those who
bring in thinkerswhose influence has been exhausted and therefore
now belong to the domain of scholarly eunuchs. But it is essential to
underline that Rousseau was more potent for thoughtful and sensi-
tive men and women in the nineteenth century than either Marx or
Freud is for us. And the fact that these reproaches are themselves
doctrinaire can be seen from the way almost all such critics naturally
refer to Marx and Freud when contemporary writers. This
treating
does not mean that all contemporary writers are the same, or that
one properly understands or appreciates them by saying that they
are Marxists or Freudians. It only means that today artists swim in an
ocean discovered by Marx or Freud, and that everybody after Marx
or Freud is moved in one direction or another by their tides. It is very
rare that a serious person can avoid confronting the thought most
important in his times and even rarer that someone can fully over-
come those influences. We would not criticize someone for thinking
that a poet who lived after the foundation of Christianity was influ-
enced by it, or that his understanding of what counts for man might
be different from that of a Greek or Roman poet. Why not, then,
attribute something of that power to a philosopher? Somehow in our
perspective religion is aesthetically potent and respectable, but not
philosophy. Rousseau, however, understood himself to be a rival of
Jesus and his writings to be a rival of the Bible, and his claim was
accepted by many. Rousseau's new world is one where the attach-
ment of men and women became more central than it ever was
before or after, and these writers elaborated that attachment with
unrivaled genius, just as the Christian writers carefully examined
conscience as it never had been examined before or after. Just as
there is a wonderful variety of forms of Christian faith, each inter-
esting in itself but also not to be understood without recognizing the
common inspiration of Christianity, there is a similar variety of Rous-
seauans. This does not detract from any of them, and each must be
addressed on his or her own ground and with perfect openness to
159 The Red and the Black
what he or she says. The phenomenon man appears to reveal itself

by way of the interpretations of it. The artists, who of course can
themselves be such interpreters, usually begin from the deepest in-
terpretations that are available and seem plausible to them.
As against the most current literary hobbyhorses, I conclude that
writers have intentions and knew what they were doing, because
they thought so themselves. cannot arrogate to myself the position
I
superior to my writers that assumed by so many contemporary

is
critics. This seems to be a misapprehension of the critic's place in the

rank order of being, and it also takes away so much of the fun of
reading. There is no reason why an artist cannot use his or her
genius to present a view of the best way of life and the best human
beings. There is nothing anti-artistic about such an endeavor, and
the artists' creation of expressions or representatives of that way of
life surpasses the persuasive power of almost all the philosophers.
Stendhal, on the face of it, would seem tobe an artist very

II far from the spirit of the artist who gave us La Nouvelle He-
loise. Stendhal is a shameless immoralist, a public atheist,
and his heroes are conscienceless adulterers or seducers who live
with their beloveds without concern for marriage. And his style is so
very different. Stendhal is rapid, dry, and ironic, with an apparent
contempt for sentimentality. There are none of the effusions of a
Saint-Preux in his works and none of the edification. The action of
hisbooks gallops. And there is a distaste for equality, which is Rous-
seau's fundamental principle. Stendhal's books are written for the
happy few and evoke rare exaltations of rare persons. Finally, he
expresses regret about the influence that Rousseau had over him. Of
course this regret is also an admission of that influence. Stendhal also
says that his On Love is written for the kind of reader who can
understand Emile} This cynic was, I believe, one of the better stu-
dents in Rousseau's school and reveals his teaching more clearly
than do more unabashedly Romantic writers such as Hugo or Scott.
Stendhal's cynicism is a consequence of his agreement with Rous-
seau that the bourgeois has conquered the world and is the most
contemptible of beings. Stendhal does not look to revolution to cor-
rect this situation, but his art deals with the way in which finer
tempers can live within it. This whole novelistic world is, in one way
or another, incessantly about the opposition between the artist and
bourgeois society. Stendhal's utter contempt for public opinion, a

contempt that he repeatedly directs against the United States as the
true home of public opinion, could be interpreted as the expression
of an aristocratic preference. He does not hesitate to prefer corrupt
old heroes to fresh and vigorous democratic America because in
America everybody is the slave of shopkeepers' opinions and there —
is no opera in America.^ But actually he is arguing for an Emilean
self-legislation, accessible to even the poorest of men, rather than for

the haughtiness of the old regime.
Julien Sorel, the hero of The Red and the Black, is a nobody whose
passions alone separate him from the petty world of the bourgeoisie.
He is the son of a coarse peasant who has shrewdly parlayed a
sawmill into a small fortune. The beautiful, sensitive Julien is treated

like an unwanted changeling by his father and his brutish brothers.
Julien hates them alland lives in a private world of imaginations
of success, corroded by envy of the rich. His vaulting ambition dis-
tinguishes him from everyone else we encounter in the novel. He
represents a heroic aspiration no longer to be found in his contem-
poraries. This is an irreducible fact, a difference of nature, and it is
what makes him interesting to Stendhal. In the midst of the society
supposedly founded on the natural equality of man there are special
kinds of genius deprived of proper vehicles for self-expression.
Julien' s passion, his anger, andimprudence are what make him
his
attractive when others only calculate and use everything, including
nobility and religion, for the sake of comfort and petty distinction.
Julien is incapable of adjusting to this life. His story is his education
in what really counts, and he dies young but superior in all the
sentiments of the heart. This is Rousseauan theme, the
clearly a
superior young man whose pride is wounded by
everything he en-
counters but who refuses to be broken by the system. The problem
of modern man, as Rousseau tells us, is the emergence of a type of
human being whose only concern is property, to be used in the first
place for self-preservation, in the second for comfort, and finally for
the satisfaction of vanity. There was once an aristocracy that had
higher motives, but it exists now only as a reminiscence. And though
religion once elevated the soul, it has now been overcome by a Je-
suitism that is an imitation of the bourgeoisie. Society as a whole
gives witness only to the unjust power of money. There is no relation
whatsoever between position and desert. Nothing could be further
from the American view that liberal society largely gives witness to
the success of equal opportunity. In Stendhal's world no one can
make a claim of justice, and all parties are either trying to hold on to
advantages acquired or trying to wrest them from those who possess

them. Everything is competition and intrigue. There may be ideas of
justice, but they do not reflect the actual condition of society. There-
fore society's laws and morality have no claim on our loyalty, and the
one who manipulates them most skillfully to his advantage solicits
admiration. This is pretty much the condition felt so strongly by the
youth Jean-Jacques when he encounters the Savoyard Vicar.
A reader of Rousseau's Confessions, Julien imitates Rousseau's
wounded pride that rebels against the system, but through insisting
on being recognized by it he makes himself a part of it. When Julien
is hired as a tutor in the house of the rich mayor of Verrieres, he
makes the same demand, without understanding precisely why, that
Rousseau made in similar circumstances,^ that he not be required to
wear a uniform like a lackey and that he dine with the masters and
not with the servants (1.5).* As with so many young people in this
new nineteenth century, Julien is a reader who gets his instruction
about what life is like and how to behave from books. He reads, of
course, only a tiny number of books, the real classics for everyday
use that take the place of the lost authority of the Bible. As for so
many of the most interesting French of his century, Julien' s Bibles are
Rousseau's works and Napoleon's Memorial de Sainte-Helene. Sten-
dhal underlines his point by making Julien know the real Bible,
especially the Gospels, letter-perfect, by heart, in Latin. This means
that he does not take a word of it seriously but uses it as a tool for his
hypocrisy to advance himself in a society that is hopelessly and
incurably hypocritical. Julien is by instinct an unbeliever, and his real
scriptures keep him ever mindful of Rousseau's analysis of modern
society and the grandeur of Napoleon's ambition, which conquered
that society.
Napoleon is much more
Julien' s hero than is Rousseau, and
Stendhal sad awareness that dominated Continental lit-
reflects the
erature throughout the nineteenth century and affected not only
literary expressions of the human situation but also those of philos-
ophy and sociology. Max Weber, when he spoke of the charismatic
leader, really meant Napoleon and lamented his disappearance. This
was the Continent's mood. The last of the heroes has disappeared
forever, and we must make do in this dull world without him. This
post-Napoleonic pathos plays an enormous role in Romanticism and
still affects the categories by which we interpret society. Napoleon's
* All parenthetical citations in this chapter are to part and chapter of Stendhal's The
Red and the Black.
vast ambition and his splendid and unabashed pursuit of glory made
the world young again and gave the opportunity for the Julien Sorels
to play a role on the world stage worthy of them, a role earned by
military courage rather than the moneymaker's ruses. Stendhal's
most beautiful description of this new youth of the world is to be
found in the opening pages of The Charterhouse of Parma when the
French conquer Milan. The hero of that book, Fabrice del Dongo, is
the illegitimate offspring of this conquest; his character and loves are
Napoleonic and yet teach how one must live in a post-Napoleonic
time. One might say Napoleon is more important for Stendhal than
is Rousseau, but the disappearance of Napoleon means only that the
victory of the bourgeoisie predicted by Rousseau has come to pass.

Stendhal is like those novelists who expressed the mood of the de-
cline of the West, which appeared to be a consequence of the First
World War. Nietzsche, however, had already announced that de-
cline forty years before, and the First World War only confirmed his
announcement. The disappointments following the French Revolu-
tion and Napoleon's Empire served only to confirm Rousseau's ar-
ticulation of the forces that would move modern society. Thinkers
like Rousseau and Nietzsche are prescient, and it takes a half century
for events and lesser men to catch up with them. They saw much
more and predicted much better than did, for example, Marx; and
Tocqueville's remarkable clarity about the future was drawn from his
reading of Rousseau.
But, however much the shadow of Napoleon affects the scenery
of this drama, Stendhal, like Rousseau, does not so much regret lost
heroes as use his loss to discover the highest vocation of man, love.
The hard Stendhal represents more unequivocally than any of the
other writers we are going to treat, and perhaps more than any other
writer, confidence in the redemptive power of love. This is what is
paradoxical about Stendhal: he really believes in the possibility of
love. He has no sympathy for the charms of the profligate Don
Juan, who lacks, according him, the intense experience of the
to
passionate, exclusive love on which one stakes one's life.^ But this
idealistic view of love seems to clash with Stendhal's unvarnished
realism about the deeds and the motives of men. Actually, this love
is and religious standpoints
the standpoint, replacing the aristocratic
that used to serve this function, from which he is able to judge this
world so severely. The spirit of Rousseau is, willy-nilly, in Stendhal's
blood.
Thus Stendhal, in spite of his apparent lack of didacticism and his
concentration on the sentiments of his characters' hearts without any
rhetoric or philosophizing about the cosmic scene within which they

are experienced, actually does show us all the fundamental alterna-
tives that face a serious man as he saw them. With a few deft strokes
he paints the alternatives, Rousseau and liberal society, the Bible and
the religious life, the peasant, the bourgeois, the aristocrat. Napo-
leon and the classical hero. Each of the individuals in his book has an
education, a defective education, that is a pale reflection of the great
choices and most persuasive modern advocates. Using his ur-
their
bane understatement as a cover, Stendhal articulates the whole world
of concern to modern man. His hero's private passions and actions
are significant because they partake of the interesting conflicts among
the fundamental unique gifts as a writer per-
alternatives. Stendhal's
mit him to depict all of this with a perfection vouchsafed no other
novelist. He proceeds at a breakneck speed, bubbling like cham-
pagne in his Rossiniesque superficiality, which is superficial only in
the sense that it bathes the surface of things in the sun of the south.
His story always on the move, getting from here to there with
is
amazing rapidity. Within a couple of pages one is already at the heart

of the story and already involved with its characters.
The story of The Red and the Black is a simple one and was picked
out of the newspapers by Stendhal and reproduced without much
alteration. A young man of modest origins becomes the tutor in the
home of a provincial bourgeois whose wife he seduces. He is forced
to leave and ends up in Paris as the secretary of a noble whose
daughter he seduces. He is denounced by his first love just when he
is on the brink of great worldly advancement, goes to a church where
she is praying, and shoots her. He is condemned to death and loses

his head, while both of his loves plead for his life. This is the whole
story of the newspapers and the novel, nothing more. There are no
dissertations and none of the extraneous excitements provided by
events to which we are accustomed in so many novels like Dickens'
and Zola's. All the excitement, and how very exciting this story is,
consists in the intimate psychology of the important characters, par-
ticularly Julien. The dangers of Julien when he is in Madame de
Renal' s bedroom and his leaping out of her window are dealt with in
a few compact lines and are interesting not for their melodrama but
for Julien' s reactions and reflections about them. Stendhal's marvel-
ous insouciance is described with the greatest skill by Hippolyte
Taine in his essay on Stendhal.^
The story of the tutor who debauches a woman in the home
where he is employed is familiar to us from La Nouvelle Helo'ise. Julien
is different only in that he does it twice and might well have conhn-
ued to do so if his career had not been cut short. In both homes he
expected to further his ambition to make a great career for himself in
society, but in spite of himself he makes his career as a lover, not
cynically but because this is all that has real emotional force for him.
He is not a great sensualist, and his two seductions were not
planned. His involvement with the two exceptional women he en-

counters is all to his credit. No man save him in this novel has any
passionate attachment to women. Love is not a vocation for the
masses. The only notable successes of this young man, so avid of
success and about it, are in the domain of love, which
full of fantasies
did not figure in any of And it is our old

his Napoleonic projects.
friend amour-propre, not love of the beautiful, that pushes him into
his seductions. In both cases, he imposes a duty on himself to sleep
with these women because he thinks they think they are superior to
him, and, moreover, he is wounded by the humiliating servitude to
persons who are merely rich or wellborn. His loves begin as acts of
vengeance. His experience is not unlike that of the child Jean-
Jacques, whose concern that he was despised by the Lambercier
family, with whom he lived as an orphan, led to his braving the
terrors of the kingdom of darkness.^ Inequality is the source of vice,
and the motor of vice is amour-propre, which seeks revenge, to do
harm to those who are superordinated in the management of society
and who make others slaves of their opinions. This is surely a vice
from the points of view of both Rousseau and Stendhal, but it also
constitutes the core of the charm of the two young heroes, for theirs
is, apparently due only to nature's dispensation, the version of
amour-propre that leads to pride rather than vanity.^ The bourgeois

husband of Julien's first love, M. de Renal, when insulted, plots
vengeance, but is always prevented from achieving it by consider-
ations of advantage and of risk involved, whereas Jean-Jacques and
Julien act foolishly and impetuously without calculation to restore
their self-respect in their own eyes. Just as Jean-Jacques passed
through the graveyard while thinking he was, by his daring, making
himself worthy of Plutarch's Roman heroes, Julien is constantly try-
ing to measure his deeds against his Napoleonic vision of himself.
He conducts his seductions as Napoleon conducted the operations of
the Grande Armee. The self-mockery of Rousseau is paralleled by
Stendhal's mockery of Julien, although they both think well of their
heroes. They are both extremely alienated, buffeted by their sense
that they come off badly in comparison with other men, and both use
literary models to distinguish themselves from the herds of sheeplike
men who surround them. Nothing starts from the heart, but they
s
both have great hearts. They are both great reasoners about schemes
for their advancement, but these schemes are comically unrealistic,
and they always end up following an unexpected, even unconscious,
prompting of their hearts. The task of both Rousseau and Stendhal in
their sentimental education of their heroes is to make them discover
the truth and beauty of love and thus cure them of their alienation.
Their amour-propre is the engine of self-awareness that passes through
a long moment of self-deception while providing their souls with the
wings to take them upward toward the sublime. Stendhal's opera-
tive word is "sincerity," and he watches his little hypocrite Julien
destroy the most delicious experiences because he does not yet have
the courage to be sincere. Sincerity (as opposed to hypocrisy), which
prior to Rousseau was a virtue testifying to quality of religious faith,
becomes with him the religion of the godless subjective self. Its rit-
uals are dedicated to inducing it to reveal itself, and its devotees seek
not to be faithful to the true God with all their hearts and their minds
but to be true to themselves.
This Rousseauan psychology is present in aspects of Julien's char-
acter that are rather surprising given his single-minded ambition,
self-absorption, and harsh view of people's motives. He is capable of
tears for the suffering poor. He is indignant, a la Rousseau, at M.
Valenod's dishonest administration of the funds destined for the
indigent and his mistreatment of them (1.7). Julien has the compas-
sion of natural goodness that is lacking in the others, and Stendhal
apparently is so soft as to justify Julien' s extreme egotism and am-
bitiousness by emphasizing the unnaturalness of the society against
which he struggles, a society in which hopes for justice are forlorn.
Stendhal's dislike of moral pieties, which suits his themes, his tastes,
and his talents, breaks down a bit in the passages that reveal Julien'
compassion, along with those that show Julien' s pious respect for
revolutionaries and their causes. All this seems to smack of the
Rousseauan sentimentalism with which Stendhal wishes to break.
This intention is gainsaid by his indignation at the injustices of the
new bourgeois society as well as its philistinism. Julien is interest-
ing because he cannot play that game and thus reveals it for what
it is.
Similarly, Julien' s admiration of persons of single-minded dedi-

cation and high moral standards who are persecuted precisely be-
cause of their virtue is unqualified. In spite of his unbelief, he
respects those who do really believe and live according to the pre-
cepts of Christianity. The two examples are priests, the Cure Chelan
and the Abbe Pirard, both of whom are assigned roles akin to that of
the Savoyard Vicar. Julien's incredulity seems to have to do less with

a critique of faith than with a doubt about its vitality in modernity.
He anticipates Nietzsche's "God is Dead/' which means that the
trouble with God is not his nonexistence but his incapacity to act and
motivate men in our times. Chelan and Pirard are throwbacks, and
therefore not unqualified objects of imitation, but they are impres-
sive in that they believe in something that affects their lives, whereas
everybody motivated by money, and their relation to higher
else is
things is but an ineffective veneer or self-justification. For Stendhal
or Julien, believing in something is more important than truth. Sten-
dhal seems to say that a clear-sighted person who has lived the
experiences of our time can believe only in passionate love. Julien,
who wants to be Napoleon and who chooses the life of a priest
because, in this hypocritical age, the Church is a support for the
existing social order and the path to power and riches for parvenus,
actually ends up being only a bedroom warrior. All of his spirituality
is exhausted in his wars with the ladies, and his daring and ready wit
are almost exclusively demonstrated in his descents from bedroom

windows with the risks of angry husbands or parents discovering,
disgracing, or killing him. These sexual escapades are compelling
realities whereas is insubstantial acting, dissipated by the
all the rest
love game morning clouds by the sun.
as are the
Even the Rousseauan opposition between city and country is
preserved in Stendhal. It is striking in a writer who manifests little of
the Romantic taste for nature, and who hardly pauses to describe
natural settings, that Julien's moments of greatest inner freedom and
exultation come when he sees the mountains and looks down over
the valleys from them (1. 10). This partakes of the peculiarly Rous-
seauan sublimation of the highest spirituality into landscapes. In
Shakespeare, nature is translated into the human element and gets
its dignity as it gives cosmic meaning to the aspirations and deeds of
human beings. In Rousseau it is the contrary. Man is translated into
nature. The human perspective empathy with the moun-
is lost in
tains, the seas, the heavens, storms, calms, etc. The experience of
nature in this sense is with the capacity to experience compassion.
Nature is strongly contrasted with the artificiality of a society whose
chains are anything but natural. Only the love experience is truly
compelling for Stendhal, but its special character comes to light in the
context of a specific view of the relation between nature and society.
And, although the men in the provinces can hardly be said to be
more natural than those in Paris, the contrast between Mme. de
Renal and Mathilde de La Mole is founded on the perfect naturalness
of the former and the perfect artificiality of the latter. Stendhal even
echoes Rousseau's attack on the corrupting effect of novels. In Paris
the literary modes determine how men and women make love. Mme.
de Renal' s innocence of any literary influence makes her love true
and sincere because she discovers it for herself and in herself,
whereas Mathilde not only reads novels but wants to be a character
in one (1.7, 1.13, 11.11). How Rousseau and Stendhal can square this
view of the effect of novels with their own vocations as novelists is a
vexed question. Taken from the highest point of view, their case is
not entirely dissimilar from that of Plato, who attacks writing in
writing. Here one can only say that all three are conscious of a
problem and respond to it by being writers of a different kind from
the others.
This provides the key to the special brand of immoralism to which
Stendhal is addicted. We are so used to something akin to what
Stendhal presents to us that we forget how shocking it is, and, more
important, how different it is from the tastes of earlier writers. Shake-
speare and the Greek dramatists, for example, do not celebrate the
immoral deeds of their heroes and usually end by supporting the
conventional moral order, perhaps in an unconventional way. For
the last two centuries our sympathies have been attached to the
destroyers of the moral order, so much so that, without any aware-
ness of what this really means, we use the word "subversive" as a
synonym for art. Every bubbleheaded movie star or rock star thinks
it issufficiently impressive to describe his or her art as "subversive."
Stendhal is not so foolish as to take any such description as suffi-
cient, but he has contributed to the success of this point of view, and
its deep source is in Rousseau's distinction between the moral man
and the good man. Although Rousseau makes much more of moral-
ity than does Stendhal, he describes himself as a good man and not
a moral man, and thereby seems to give a certain preference to
goodness. In the wake of this distinction one finds a gradual degra-
dation of morality into bourgeois morality, meaning merely the hyp-
ocritical and repressive rules of the game of a competitive and
exploitative society. A sign of this change is to be found in the "Pro-
logue in Heaven," which introduces Goethe's Faust, where Faust is
referred toby God as a good man.^ He is certainly not a moral man.
In so much of the literature that provides our immediate education
the major characters break the moral rules, and there are no coun-
terbalancing moral characters who indicate by their example the su-
way. It is not that earlier writers did not see
periority of the moral
that there are problems with conventional morality, but they be-
lieved that conventional morality was an imperfect reflection of true

morality, and they were inclined, not merely out of concern for ed-
ifying the public, to look in the direction of a perfected morality and
moral heroes for their elaboration of the most interesting human
types. After Rousseau that direction appeared to be a dead end, and
frankly immoral types began to epitomize the most interesting ways
of life. Julien is a liar, a thief, a cheat, a seducer, an ingrate, but this
does not prevent Stendhal from preferring him to everyone else in
his book. All of this prefigures Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and
Stendhal was a novelist very much to Nietzsche's taste. ^ Goodness
seems to consist in a combination of natural sentiments like compas-
sion combined with energy of soul, and above all, sincerity. A large
part of sincerity is the frank admission of the natural selfishness that
conventional morality does not overcome but lies about. Machiavel-
li's quick-witted and daring characters provide a text for this taste,
and Machiavelli's laughter becomes part of the seriousness of this

new perspective on morality and human interestingness. All of mod-
ern moral and political science gets an artistic expression in these
new heroes. Balzac's criminal hero Vautrin, with his strength and
explosive energy, which contrast with the weakness of the social
forces of justice, is another such character. What is new in the Ro-
mantic idiom is the linkage of these low motives with the highest
idealism and poetry. It is Machiavellianism with a powerful erotic
charge.
The corollary of this taste is an utter contempt for the classic
virtue, moderation. Daring, ready wit, and even a quixotic love of
justice, which are elements of the other virtues in the classical canon,
remain respectable and attractive, but moderation comes to light as
merely repulsive. Moderation is the most important ingredient of
Socratic irony, and if irony remains at all, it is a far cry from that
delicious style one discovers in Xenophon's Socrates. Moderation
appears now to be equivalent to the bourgeois' careful concern for
his self-preservation and avoidance of any life-threatening risks. It
was always believed that men have to be willing to risk their lives for
what they care about, but it never before went to the extreme that
risking one's life is in itself the proof of seriousness. But that is what
Mathilde de La Mole, and many fictional and non-fictional person-
ages after her, set as the single test for lovers and other high types.
Nietzsche expresses and parodies this tendency when he says a good
war hallows any cause. ^° Julien does worry about getting killed, but
mostly out of amour-propre: he doesn't want his inferiors and rivals to
get the better of him. This risks becoming merely a reaction to the
contemptible bourgeois version of prudence, allied as it always is
with moderation. Thus reason is inevitably sacrificed to his taste, for

reason, as we have already noted, is now understood to be calculat-
ing, reductionist, and destructive rather than creative of beautiful
ideals. Romanticism restores imagination to the throne usurped by
reason with the support of the Enlightenment's troops. Julien's rea-
sonings are always ridiculous while his instincts are exciting and
admirable. All this is a gloss on Machiavelli's dictum:
I judge this indeed, that it is better to be impetuous than

cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if
one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down.
And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impet-
uous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like
a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less
cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more au-
^^
dacity.
One might add that this passage seems to be a complete and exhaus-
tive interpretation of the part of The Red and the Black that concerns
Julien's affair with Mathilde.
The preference for youth, beauty, and daring simply dominates
The Red and the Black, which is the purest profession of Stendhal's
faith, but it should be noted that in its rival. The Charterhouse of Parma,
there is a certain qualification of this faith. In it there are two poles of
interest, the romantic hero, Fabrice del Dongo, and the charming,
cynical. Machiavellian political man, Mosca. He is a bit ridiculous
because he is no longer young and was never beautiful and is in love
with the beautiful, but past her prime. Duchess of Sanseverina, who
is really in love with her nephew Fabrice, who
someone else. loves
In spite of this, Mosca charms by his intellect and real knowledge of
life. There is a certain parallelism here to Homer's two books. In the
perspective of the Trojan War, the angry young Achilles is unques-

tionably the most attractive figure, but in peace the wily Odysseus
and his observation of the various ways of men capture our atten-
tion. I doubt that Stendhal fully worked this problem out, but Julien
seems to represent the fantasy life of Stendhal, what this unprepos-
sessing writer would like to have been like, while Mosca represents
the wisdom and the insight of Julien' s creator. Stendhal may have
cherished a preference for his creation but he cannot suppress the
creator's significance, and that creator does not quite fit into the
system.
Stendhal leads Julien through the life of the nineteenth cen-

III tury that he so despises.He is elevated from his home,
where he surrounded by cruel peasants who hate this
is
sensitive changeling, to the home of M. de Renal, who, in the ridic-

ulous parody of the ancien regime that was the restoration of Charles
X, tries, out of vanity, to capture a semi-aristocratic status based on
his family origins.
The regime is on its last legs. The novel is written in the light of
the liberal, that is, the commercial or capitalist revolution of 1830 that
brought Louis Philippe to power or, rather, to the shadow of power.
The active political opponents of M. de Renal and his newfangled
reactionary party are the Liberals, who want to reform the social
order in such a way as to favor their own rise to wealth. Persons like
M. de Renal try to win the distinction of those who lived and acted
when throne and altar were still intact. There is a respectable aris-
tocratic past in France, in contrast to America, and this solicits the
imagination or, if you please, the snobbism of M. de Renal and, in
one way or another, everyone else on the scene. Once they have
their money, they want to play at being aristocrats. They fill their
future with imaginations of new and cheapened titles, distinguished
ceremonial positions, and medals and sashes. He and his class live in
terror of a renewal of the Revolution, expecting that their own ser-
vants will cut their throats and pillage their houses. They rely on the
police and the Church to suppress the dangerous canaille, which
threatens them with socialism.
M. de Renal can dedicate himself to embellishing himself and his
properties because he already has made his money out of manu- —
facture. He is, of course, distinguished from the true aristocrat be-
cause he takes these bagatelles with infinite seriousness whereas the
latter, while requiring these things, as Aristotle tells us, despises
them.^^ M. de Renal is an infinitely vulgar man who thinks about the
price he has paid for everything, although he is distinguished from
the liberal upstart Valenod, who will tell all comers what those prices
were. The Valenods, however, are more attuned to the spirit of the
times and are about to win the next round, with the help of the
Jesuits. Reactionary imitators like M. de Renal affect to represent
traditional culture and wish to have tutors who know Latin to edu-
cate their children. They have no interest whatsoever in the content
of Latin literature but care only about the good reputation attached to
the dead language. From the moment Julien arrives on the scene he
is in a continuous battle of vanities with M. de Renal, and Julien
almost always gets the better of him. No real aristocrat would put
himself in a position where a youngster whom he wishes to treat as

a servant continually humiliates him. The key to Julien's success in
the house is M. de Renal' s fear that Julien will be hired away by M.
Valenod and thus his own distinction will be lost.
After showing us M. de Renal and his entourage of typical pro-
vincial characters with their constant intrigues, Stendhal gives us a
picture of the religious establishment through Julien's stay at the
seminary. Religion is still the great educator and is understood by
Stendhal to be the highest expression of a culture. Its debility is the
best symptom of what Stendhal thinks is wrong with nineteenth-
century culture. This interlude is very much like Rousseau's account
in the Confessions of his incarceration in a religious institution in
Turin/^ except that Stendhal does not play upon a putative superi-
ority of contemporary Protestantism, which he would regard as
merely the dull ideology of liberalism. For him Catholicism had much
more poetry and provided a better stage for the various interesting
varieties of the psychology of faith and the lack thereof. Stendhal
wishes to present a true history of the practice of his own time while
measuring it against its highest claims for itself. He is hard on reli-
gion as almost no one is today because he has, perhaps in spite of
himself, such high expectations from it.
The scene in the seminary is of interest because it presents a
world with the highest moral and spiritual pretensions, whose most
striking element is the unrelieved materialism of its actual life. The
heavy and graceless children of peasants are there to escape the
poverty of their lives and are preoccupied with the food they get in
the present and, for the future, exhaust their imaginations about the
comfortable functions they will fulfill when they are priests. Mere
convention and opinion dominate their every thought and deed
while the professors spin the blackest plots for the sake of power and
influence. The seminary contains a discrete mixture of mediocrity
and moral ugliness seasoned with unbelievable stupidity. The most
typical priest is concerned with caring for and manipulating the dead
symbols of a once potent religious impulse, the shell of which is the
great churches still rising impressively above the cities, reminis-
cences of an omnipresence of religion hardly credible to us who have
no such monuments. The body is immortal while the soul was killed
by the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The fallen inheritors of
this legacy calculate their survival on the basis of usefulness to the
political classes while those political classes count on religion to serve
as an opiate of the masses.
Stendhal's analysis differs from Marx's only in that he expects
—
strictly nothing from the masses. Julien is the very model of the
superior man who is hated and distrusted because he does not share
the motives and aspirations of those around him. He does, as I have
mentioned, deeply admire the severe Abbe Pirard, who is a real
believer and adheres to the strict principles of Jansenism. He is the
only person in the book who has moral weight as compared with
Julien. But like the old hermit in Zarathustra, he just hasn't heard that
God is dead. Like so many nineteenth-century atheists, Stendhal is
an admirer of Pascal and Port-Royal. There is an undigested element
of religious extremism in them, feeding on the cult of sincerity and
contempt for bourgeois materialism, rebellious against the spirit of
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the atheists of the eighteenth cen-
tury. The intense element of the soul had been forgotten and was
ready to boil over. This reflects Rousseau's preference for extrem-
— —
ism in politics, morals, love, and religion as over against the easy-
goingness of his contemporaries. Fanatics at least believe in and care
about something. Similarly, the Cure Chelan, the only decent man in
Verrieres, is thought to be a Jansenist. The Jesuits who are in control
represent a flexible semirationalism, an ends-justifies-the-means mo-
rality, and an admixture of calculation about political possibilities
with their faith. Julien' s appearance in this novel in the habit of a

novice represents his attempt to adapt to and master the circum-
stances of his time. His hypocrisy is justified by the character of that
time, but his true self is present underneath that habit.
This religious interlude between the two halves of the novel
provinces versus Paris, parvenus versus aristocrats, Mme. de Renal
—
versus Mathilde de La Mole is an essential part of Stendhal's sketch
of the history of his time. concludes, appropriately, with Julien's
It
encounter with the bishop of Besangon, a true remnant of the ancien

regime, the cultivated ecclesiastic without excess of principle, a man
of perfect taste and true tolerance. He sees right through Julien while
being complicit with the vicar and his cohorts who persecute Julien,
all in the spirit of worldly wisdom. The bishop is the incarnation of
the disinvoltura that delights Stendhal. He concludes his relations

with Julien by giving him a magnificent edition of the pagan Tacitus,
who provides an alternative account of the same period in history
presented in the New Testament.
At last having arrived in Paris, we actually find the true aristo-
crats who have the most exquisite manners, some taste, a pride that
is second nature, because at least there was a past where they had a
great place, and a breadth of views unknown in the provinces. Julien

is honestly seduced by the charms of the old Marquis de La Mole,
who treats him with which is, on deeper reflec-

infinite politeness,
tion, an insult because founded on the Marquis' unassailable
it is
conviction of Julien's social inferiority. The Marquis is not a man to

feel threatened by this clever and talented youngster. He only wants
to make use of him; and, when he finally takes Julien's measure, he
is amused by him, providing him with a blue suit that he is to wear
when they are just friends, in addition to the black suit he wears
when he is the Marquis' secretary. This little world with its palaces
and its titles is a work of refinement developed over centuries, and
on its stage continue to believe that they play a central role
the actors
in Europe,and hence in universal history. (Stendhal admires this
world and was an enthusiastic participant in the opera, which was
the preferred entertainment in it.) This aristocracy is the represen-
tative of tradition and partakes of its strengths and weaknesses. It
presents a heady atmosphere to this boy from the country who per-
fects his manners and manages to become a man a la mode. He is even
able to test his skills as a factotum in the political conspiracies. This
is an excellent education, but it is all too easily learned, and once he
is the master of the Parisian ways, he still remains without anything
significant to do. The prospects of a bishopric or even, finally, a
dukedom fail something important to do.
to satisfy his quest for
Although from the point of view of the social hierarchy, he remains
a man of the lower class, he has all the natural gifts that would allow
him entry into the highest aristocracy. But when he gets a clear look
at the world of Paris, he recognizes that it is tainted by the furious
vanity of fashion and the quasi-impossibility of sincerity. This is a
diminished scene, not one to satisfy an ambition like Julien's. The
Marquis and his friends have become a part of the money world, as
has everyone else, and their powerlessness as aristocrats has culmi-
nated, except for a few halfhearted political conspiracies, in the bor-
ing routine of a high society that has no true vocation and lacks all
firmness of soul. Napoleon, always Julien's hero, represented a vital
new beginning in which individual greatness and great politics
seemed for an illusory moment to be possible in modernity. In the
end the depiction of Paris here is nothing but a rerun of Rousseau's,
though presented in Stendhal's elegant idiom. Julien's stay in Paris
is like Emile's. Each completes his education there, protected against
its corruptions by the presence of a high ideal that makes him more
of an observer than a participant. Julien, however, unlike Emile, has

the misfortune of meeting a woman in Paris who appears worthy of
his attention.
And now we must turn to the two women who together

IV constitute the whole of Julien's sexual experience as well as
the real excitement of this novel. Each is truly extraordi-
nary, standing far above the world in which she is placed. Like every
single good person in The Red and the Black, they are both irresistibly
attracted to this beautiful and singular, but absolutely selfish, young
man. They join the Cure Chelan, Abbe Pirard, Marquis de La Mole,
and Prince Korasof in this strange, supramoral fascination. Each
woman represents one of the two kinds of love Stendhal distin-
guishes in the novel, Mme. de Renal, heart-love, and Mathilde, head-
love. Mme. de Renal is true love, without tincture of amour-propre
and the accompanies it, whereas Mathilde is a po-
role playing that
reenactment of the most vigorous
tent actress, taking as her role the
moments of French history. Julien, of course, brings his overdose of
amour-propre to both affairs, but with Mme. de Renal there is the
possibility of immediate sentimental union, whereas with Mathilde
the entire mechanism is the fevered imagination and the alternation
of mastery and slavery. To contemporary readers, Mme. de Renal is
the stereotype of the submissive woman, passively accepting the role
assigned to her by a male-dominated society, whereas the proud and
rebellious Mathilde seems to represent the possibility of liberation.
In fact, neither Mme. de Renal nor Mathilde is a promising candidate
for liberation because their whole being and the meaning of their
lives are involved with the existence of a man such as Julien. Mme.
de Renal's superiority consists precisely in the unalloyed naturalness
of this vocation in her. Our difference in perspective on these char-
acters is the single most revealing sign of the distance between us
and Stendhal, although he is in so many ways a modern just like us.
He knew that the relations between the sexes had become boring.
Stendhal uses as the epigraph for one chapter a quote from Bar-
nave: ''So this is the beautiful miracle of your civilization! You have
made an ordinary business out of love" (11.31). What he admires is
either a thing of the past or a theme of novels for the happy few, but
he uses all of his art to convince us that the only interesting life is the
one dominated by amour-passion, that of men and women living for
each other, supported by shame, modesty, and idealization of the
sexual act. Nothing of the interesting relationships Stendhal depicts
would be possible for women for whom the sexual act is not a matter
of life and death and sacred honor. These relationships, constructed
like the most complicated movements of great old watches, have as
their mainspring the conviction that the gift of the body comes from
grace of the whole soul, and these special connections are given to
Julien alone against all counsels of prudence and in an act of over-

coming the Each gives herself to Julien with a fair degree of ease
will.
in the circumstances and rather shamelessly, but in the conviction

that the overpowering love they experience is itself the standard for
good and evil. Their passions are natural, especially in the case of
Mme. de Renal, but so in another sense are the conventions that
forbid them to have or indulge such passions. They live in societies
where what they do is condemned, and necessarily so. For these
women, their giving themselves necessarily entails civil death, a ban-
ishment from society, unlike the hypocritical affairs of ordinary adul-
teresses. Each of these women is heroic in her utter abandon, which
is a kind of social suicide for the sake of the imperious demand of her
attraction. Neither Mme. de Renal nor Mathilde could hope to hide

her involvement with Julien for very long, whereas Julien could eas-
ily hide his involvement, and for a man the consequences are much
more benign in any event. The loosening of bourgeois morals in the

generations after Stendhal did not so much make life easier for lovers
as destroy the conditions of love. This is what is anticipated in the
quote from Barnave. Love is really the business of "the happy few.''
In Stendhal, a man who surely knew all the physical charms of
sex, there is almost no description of them. Stendhal's descriptions
of the act itself do not go beyond remarks like "when Julien left
Mme. de Renal's room, it could have been said, in novelistic style,
that he had nothing more to desire," or "she had nothing more to
refuse him" (1.15). Stendhal's reticence is not in any sense prudish-
ness, although an earlier literature that was coarser could speak more
openly, perhaps because it believed less in love. In Shakespeare,
both modes are present, but certainly most of his loves (Cleopatra's
is the great exception) seem to support Stendhal's way. This reti-
cence is due partly to Stendhal's agreement with Rousseau that the

illusions of love and the interesting psychological effects of the illu-
sions are far more important than the act of love itself. But it also has
to do with the fact that the physical details of the act, reproduced in
pictures or words, are not what the sexual act really is for those who
participate in it, for their imaginations are engaged with their specific
relationship, and mere spectators cannot see this. Everything is in
the sentiments leading up to the bodily act and following upon it, the
attractions and repulsions connected with this fulfillment, and the
spiritual exaltations and excesses surrounding what is in the world of
nature the most banal and ordinary satisfaction. This is what is wrong
with pornography. It distorts and impoverishes sensuality. Stendhal
wants his readers to imagine, after he has seduced them into becom-
ing lovers of his personages, what they do together, so that they

themselves can be accomplices in the romantic illusion. Stendhal
believed that his descriptions would be much more sexually exciting
to his readers of choice than any explicit depiction could ever be. The
reader has to contribute, if he is to be a participant in the novelistic
description. Far from being hampered by the various kinds of imag-
ination, the sexual act is nurtured by them.
None of this is meant to gainsay the fact that much of what
Stendhal hints about Julien's sexual experiences indicates that he,
like so many other men and women, rarely really enjoys sex because
he is thinking about other things while doing it, or is, not to put too
fine a point on it, worried about how he looks to his beloved or to a
watching world. But this is all part of the story of love, and Julien
ends up by being cured.
Moreover, the wild and misguided amour-propre that Julien brings
to his relationships with women is not simply a vice. Without it there
would be no relationship. One has to worry about what the other
party thinks, and that is difficult, if not impossible, to know. Amour-
propre is, to repeat, the instrument of human sociality because it is
the part of us concerned with others' wills. The imperious need to
subjugate another's will leads to many perversions, because every
ounce of one's self-esteem depends on success in the venture. And,
as all the searing complaints of jealous men and women tell us, there
seems to be no way to predict or control the esteem that is necessary
for our self-esteem. Will can overcome our desires, but it cannot
make us sexually attractive. The seduction of another's desire can
easily become an end in itself, therefore culminating in contempt or
at least loss of interest in the one who is conquered, and in simple
self-hatred when one fails. Further, the demands of amour-propre in
love relationships escalate, so that one wants the other not only to
respond but to respond to what one really is, truly and sincerely. The
game is ever more subtle and the truth of the relationship is difficult
to determine. And there is so much pain in all of this that amour-
propre must constantly prepare safety nets so that desperate doubt
does not send us into an abyss. Self-protective interpretations distort
the truth of the affair. Finally, one begins to wonder how there can
ever be a reciprocity of affection, mutual and sincere admiration,
without each of the parties misinterpreting and using the other. But
these are the facts, perhaps sad facts, about the difficulty of human
relationships. How much simpler isolation or frank acceptance that
one is just using others would be. Love is the no-man's-land, stud-
ded with mines, between these alternatives. The true meaning of the
civilized sexual act is that one has successhilly navigated this mine-
field.
But the fact of this book is that Mme. de Renal is naturally and
wholly in love with Julien, without reflection and without second
thoughts. Her inclination is everything a man could ask for. Julien's
problem is double: he has to persuade himself both that Mme. de
Renal' s attachment is really like this and that he reciprocates and can
get his satisfaction in the calm acceptance of a love that excludes so
many others and so many objects of ambition.
Mme. de Renal is an innocent even though she is a product of
and lives within a very corrupt society. She is so indifferent to the
charms which attract the other provincials that she is proof against
their influence. It is as though she were sleepwalking, and only her
accidental meeting with Julien awakens her and brings to the surface
the depths of passion hidden beneath what appears to be a perfect
calm. Her imagination is not inflamed, and she alone is able to have
immediate enjoyment without fantasies that surely embellish affairs
but that also mean that one is enjoying the fantasy and not the
reality. She is, of course, not a natural savage, which means she has
her share of amour-propre and imagination, but hers is the kind that
Rousseau prescribes for Sophie and Emile, so that her worry about
the opinions of others concerns only Julien' s opinion, and her imag-
ination embellishes her own situation rather than imitating other
persons'. Julien is always calling the whole world to witness every-
thing he does, particularly the inner witness he has constructed for
himself. If Mme. de Renal had read novels, she would have been
way out ahead about what really happens in her relation with Julien
and would have been deprived of the deliciousness of the experi-
ences, which she would have interpreted prior to having them. She
is a natural, but she is also something of an aristocrat, with a great
—
inheritance in prospect. Her education for Stendhal education is of
—
the essence for knowing what a person is was the typical convent
education that did not in any way attach the young girls' sensuality
to a true religious experience but taught a conventional and routine
piety. It left her untouched, and its failings were compounded by the
fact that she was treated with the greatest respect by the nuns be-
cause she was an heiress. She did not experience contempt for those
around her, but her aristocratic superiority was expressed by her
indifference to them.
Mme. de Renal is the archetypical Romantic heroine in her inno-
cence, her unpretentious high-mindedness, and her unalloyed fem-
ininity. A woman in one of my classes once exclaimed, "She's
nothing but a cow!'' And it could look this way to persons for whom
the sentimental life is a drag or too much of a burden, but Mme. de
Renal is capable of the tenderest and most passionate relationship.
One wonders how long a couple could go on like this, but that is not
such a problem. Stendhal thinks this experience is worth it, no mat-

ter how brief. Julien has only a few days to enjoy the perfectly unself-
conscious love of Mme. de Renal, and Fabrice del Dongo's Clelia dies
after only three years of a furtive affair. Unlike Rousseau, Stendhal
does not think of marriage and family but concentrates only on the
two partners, which is, in spite of its claims, of short
love affair of
duration. The intense episode is preferred to the calm of the philos-
opher or the security looked for by the bourgeois.
Mme. de Renal is the typical Romantic heroine also in that she is
a married woman whose marriage is loveless but who is very capable
of love. When she encounters a man she can love, she is caught in
the conflict between duty and love. This is an endlessly interesting
situation for people who and love seriously and
take both marriage
it provided the theme for the literature to which the bourgeoisie was
addicted well into the twentieth century. Mme. de Renal and her
kind cannot be blamed because they had no idea of what love is
when they married and took marriage to be a social institution into
which one enters for good and prudent reasons. The assumption is
that love, passionate, physical love, is a very good and important
thing. If this does not justify adultery it at least makes us sympathetic
to the sinner.
She is, like Julie, above all a mother. Her deeply felt obligations to
her children her between them and Julien. Julien enters her life
split
by way of her children and almost as a substitute father to them.
When she gets to know him she wishes he were the father of her
children. This not only gives her heart the excuse for occupying itself
with him but allows it to formulate the sophistry that her love of him
is part of her love of them. In spite of her having been married for a
dozen years, Mme. de Renal is to all intents and purposes a virgin.

The experience of sex with her husband has left her utterly un-
moved. It is part of the social convention of marriage, even though
it has resulted in the very natural product of her sons. This merely
serves to underline the difference between love and motherhood,

which is for Mme. de Renal the major contradiction produced by
civilization. She never succeeds in resolving this contradiction, al-
though her behavior with respect to both elements of it is tragically
noble. Her husband simply has no substantial existence for her. She
doesn't hate him, and her adultery serves only to bring to light the
fact that he was never anything real for her. He is as crude in his
relation to women as he is to everything and everyone else. He is
used to her and counts on her, but he has taken her for granted and
is incapable of understanding or sympathizing with the movements
of her soul. In a recapitulation of the human relations of the bour-

geoisie in general, she is for him who remains intransi-
the other
gently the other, whereas love is the story of the other becoming
one's own or one's His sufferings are only comic and are them-
self.
selves a justification for her adultery. He thinks about having a duel,

which Julien would have agreed to in an instant, but after thinking
it through decides that it would be imprudent. The appearance of
prudence covers over the fact of cowardice. He cannot send her away
because that would compromise the inheritance from her rich aunt.
He is really very unhappy, but the ways of his unhappiness are
contemptible and ridiculous. Stendhal stacks the deck in favor of
Mme. de Renal's adultery. He underlines the fact that she is an
adulteress by making us always think of her as Mme. de Renal, while
Mathilde is always Mathilde, and Julien always Julien. We learn that
her Christian or intimate name is Louise only when Stendhal lets us
enter the mind of M. de Renal, who reflects that he is very used to
Louise (L21). She is always clad in the respectability of marriage,
even and especially when she is committing adultery.
As Mme. de Renal comes to admire Julien more and more she
knows only delight and pleasure. Her little bit of amour-propre ex-
presses itself when she finds out that her servant Elisa loves Julien
and she fears that Julien may reciprocate. This amour-propre deceives
her into thinking she is performing a disinterested deed when she
offers to aid Elisa in her hopes for Julien. Thus amour-propre assists in
making her aware that she loves and in adding value to Julien' s love.
She suddenly asks herself, "Is it possible that I am in love ?" . . .
(1.8). Then one night while tossing in her sleep she is struck by the
frightful word "adultery," prior to the actual event (I.H). As Taine

points out, the mere word, a kind of abstraction, terrifies her and
changes the whole meaning of what is going on in her heart. ^^ It never
stops what is going on there. It doesn't even poison her affections.
When she is with Julien she is purely and wholly in love with him, but
this word fractures the unity of her being, while it also deepens the
love and its significance. The detailed depiction of this psychology is
where Stendhal excels, and it is what interests him most. If one does
not have or has lost the taste for such examination, Stendhal's book
becomes a hollow shell, at best a tame story of adventure. For a real
psychologist, which is what Nietzsche thinks Stendhal is in the high-
est degree, his novels are endlessly fascinating because they observe
these phenomena with precision and without interpretive abstrac-
tion. The loss of this taste accounts, at least in part, for critics' need
to look to all kinds of external things in order to keep in business.
They want to teach Stendhal their boring science because they are
deaf to the fascination of he has to teach us.
all
Mme. de Renal goes through the motions of resisting Julien at his

first approaches, but this mere habitual behavior, appropriate to
is
her position as the proper wife of the mayor of Verrieres, and her
resistance rapidly melts. One never doubts that she will give in or
that she will be faithful to her choice. Her token resistance, some-
what reinforced by doubts about Julien's seriousness, disappears
rapidly because she is so sure of her instincts. This woman, who
appears so passive and gentle, evinces the daring and the firmness of
a general when she is involved in her affair and needs to protect
Julien, her children, and herself. There is no weakness, and she
behaves perfectly. She has no more bad conscience about deceiving
her husband in these circumstances than does a general about de-
ceiving an enemy. Her reaction to the anonymous letters that de-
nounce her is quick-witted and subtle. All of this is a surprise to us
and to her.
The affair's vulnerability comes from Mme. de Renal' s attachment
to her children, that other pole of her nature. When the eldest of her
sons gets sick she is overcome with guilt and terror, fearing that this
is punishment, divine punishment, for her adultery. The tension

between her love and her children is expressed in her religious ter-
rors. This tension is the most essential characteristic of female psy-
chology in Stendhal's world. The love of her children is very real but
also relatively feeble compared with the total passion she has for
Julien. She experiences no need to reinforce her sentiments toward
her husband, but her concern for her children does require this re-
ligious supplement. This is exactly the same mechanism that was at
work with Julie when she covered over her love of Saint-Preux with
worry about her husband's atheism. In the actual presence of Julien
she is completely his and confident in what she does, although she
does not forget her children. In another twist on the status of chil-
dren with respect to the erotic life, Julien at the very end wants Mme.
de Renal to be the real mother of his child, with whom Mathilde is
pregnant. The child who naturally belongs to the individual who
bears apparently should really belong to the one with whom one is
it
in love. This is what nature should want, if the law of love is believed
to be primary. Goethe plays on this theme with great delicacy in
Elective Affinities when husband and wife, who are each in love with
someone else, make love, or make-believe love, with their true loves
in mind. The child who results from the act resembles the true loves
who were imagined during it.^^
Mme. de Renal' s religion is most powerful when she must do
without Julien. She is no longer able to return to her pre-Julien rou-
tine, so only a life of dedication to religious duty and consolation can
maintain her without Julien. Although she has faith in her faith
during these periods, the mere presence of Julien suffices to dispel all
that. During the time when Julien is in the seminary and cannot
communicate with her, she devotes herself to religious practice. But
an impromptu visit by Julien late in the night encounters only -pro
forma resistance, although that resistance is almost too much for the
eager Julien. He always deprives the poor woman of her self-
deceptions that make it more or less possible for her to exist without
him. But one is not sure whether this cruelty is so awful, because she
is at her best when she is loving Julien.
Julien makes love to this prodigy in ridiculous ways appropriate

to his proud nature. He meets her and says, as it were, to himself,
"This means war." He conducts his seduction as Napoleon con-
ducted his battles, and he issues bulletins to himself. He begins his
attachment to her out of revenge against her husband's superior
position and gradually moves closer to her out of revenge for what
he takes to be her belief that she is superior to him. M. de Renal does
wish to humiliate Julien because he thinks such behavior is aristo-
cratic. (The real aristocrats humiliate Julien without meaning to do
so, although Julien always sees slights as intended.) Julien imagines

putting himself in the position of being rebuffed and then actually
being rebuffed. He plots real revenge in response to this humiliation
that exists only in his imagination. Self-respect is his only motive,
and he has absolutely no interest in the love of Mme. de Renal.
Because he has such a need to keep his defensive forces on the alert,
he cannot permit himself any trust in the enemy. He misinterprets
almost every signal she gives him. He makes holding her hand a
duty. Hours of anxiety and fear precede his grasping the forbidden
hand, and his only interest is whether he will have the courage to do
so. He owes it to his Roman character to do this. Again, when the
moment has come, his great interest is whether he will be able to
fulfill his project by taking the ladder and climbing up to the room.
His intrepidity, which is the half-false variety founded on his amour-

propre, is in stark contrast with hers, which is set in motion without
doubt or hesitation simply because of the supreme value for her of
their being together. All of this is high comedy as presented by

Stendhal. Julien has moments, when he calms down a bit as a result
of his habitual intercourse with her, when he is actually present in
the love affair without making it into a war. But these moments are
short-lived, and he isalways ready to go off to new adventures that
will further his Napoleonic ambition. When he returns for the one
night after leaving the seminary on his way to Paris, his adventure is
fueled by the desire to reassert himself over the powers of religion.
It takes him a couple of hours to break down her resistance. Stendhal
points out that if she had acceded to his requests a little earlier, he
would have enjoyed the lovemaking. But it took too long and again
the whole business became an issue of the vanity of winning instead
of the pleasure of being together.
Julien' s silliness does not lead simply to a negative evaluation of
him. He does have an element of Don Quixote in him, but the com-
edy is that of the talented upstart in a world where there are no
longer roles for his talent. Stendhal laughs through his tears and
suggests that Julien would have put it all in place if he had lived
longer and healed his wounded amour-propre. Yet that amour-propre is
the source of what is best about him. Stendhal appears unable to
depict a fully ripe man. Successful maturity is doubtful for him, and
he may in this reflect a problem with the Romantic mood altogether.
As the Marquis de La Mole, no mean observer of men, says, Julien
responded to his condition not by seeking petty advantage but by
asserting himself against contempt, real or imagined. Thus, while
being the slave of these others who might despise him, he insists on
himself, on his own dignity, on what is within him and what he
owes himself. At the very end he regards his peculiar merit, the
quality that saves him from being a nothing, to be the law of duty that
he has imposed on himself. This is his characteristic form of amour-
propre and an illustration of Rousseau's ideas of soul construction.
Ultimately, Rousseau hoped that this formation of the idea of duty
would become independent of the slights of others in which it began,
and Stendhal's admiration for Julien' s character echoes this hope.
The man who bases his action precisely on rejection of petty desires
and petty fears is the antibourgeois.
The comic side of Julien is represented by his encounter with a
bully in a bar in Besangon, who challenges Julien by looking at him.
It does not come to a fight or a duel, but Julien senses himself to have
been humiliated, a condition that endures for more than a year. This
bully is a low type who should not engage the vanity of a gentleman
and with whom a gentleman would refuse to fight. Julien runs into
him again in the street in Paris, challenges him to a duel, and takes
his card. When he goes for the ritual visit with his second, he finds
that the name and address on the card are those of a fatuous young
diplomat whose servant the bully turns out to be. So Julien has to
have a parody of a duel with the master. The servant is dismissed by
his master and is beaten by Julien, who is then wounded in the duel
and becomes the friend and companion of the man who wounds
him. The whole business of dueling is a now absurd remnant of the
ancien regime}^ There is not enough vitality in the idea of honor to
justify it, although the decent Marquis de Croisenois dies in a duel in
defense of Mathilde's lost honor. Once Julien is able to put his Be-
sang:on antagonist in his proper place, he never thinks about him
again. But this haughty will to assert his natural place against the
insults of the conventional world remains the central aspect of his
soul. We are a step away from
the triumph of the will. His capacity
to experience love can emerge only when he is definitively cured of
this feverish amour-propre, but it is the condition for his tasting true
love,which itself is free of this struggle.
By contrast, without that true love, the relation between Julien
and his Parisian love, Mathilde de La Mole, consists entirely oi amour-
propre. If Stendhal didn't carry this episode off with such wit, it
would be the stuff of Hollywood melodrama, the provincial who

arrives on the great stage and immediately has a love affair with the
greatest and apparently most unattainable of stars, in this case, the
richest, the noblest, and most beautiful of Parisian women. Their
epic struggle is framed by the fact that she is condescending to him
and he appears to be social climbing. Neither can accept the indignity
of this disproportion in their social positions. Mathilde, of course,
unlike Julien, has everything and need not aspire to anything in the
real world around her. She is bored, and it is this boredom that
expresses the ultimate situation of man in the nineteenth century.
Julien is too busy climbing the ladder to be bored, but Mathilde, who
isborn on its highest rung, is able to survey the scene and recognize
that, once there, nothing is worth doing. Boredom had become a
theme of French literature in the seventeenth century with Pascal's
account of it as the special experience of the man without God.
Nothing is left to do in a world whose beautiful surface has been
dissolved by the rational criticism of the Cartesian cogito. The life of
such a man alternates between furious, self-forgetting activity and
boredom, which homogenizes everything on the outside and makes
nothing appear to be worthy of concern. This is the strand in French
thought that counters the Enlightenment and its optimistic this-
worldly concerns. Pascal is the genius invoked by nineteenth-century

French literature in its antipoetic Enlightenment science and politics.
But what is striking about Stendhal and many other Romantics is that
they adopt Pascal's analysis without the radical religious faith that
made it possible. For Pascal it is the absence of God for those who are
hungry for Him that is the source of their boredom. Only the pres-
ence of that hunger makes it clear that the ordinary food of the soul
does not nourish. But Stendhal denies that there is or ever was a
God. A nothingness becomes the standard for the judgment of the
world. Longing, not the object of longing, is his standard for such
judgment. The emptiness at the top haunts this literature. Stendhal
tries to fill this emptiness with love or poetic creation.
The impoverishment of Mathilde's world comes to light by way
of her imagination of a world where there were real men and real
lovers, willing to die for their causes and their beloveds. Her criticism
issimply the old refrain: what's wrong with the bourgeoisie, above
the absence of anything to die for or the willingness to die.
all, is
Willingness to die is the touchstone for her and is her great mystery.
Her boredom seeks drama, which would permit self-forgetting. The
historicalepoch to which she attaches herself, her novel, is the age of
Henri which was indeed the peak of French vigor, the moment of
III,
the religious wars where faith was still compelling enough to fight
about. This was also close to the moment of the Fronde, when proud,
independent aristocrats still could rebel against the creeping abso-
lutism of the monarchy. Aristocrats were aristocrats then and kings
were kings, which neither are now. One of her ancestors was the
queen and was put to death because of his participation in
lover of a
a conspiracy. This was a stage worth acting on; and, although
Mathilde's imagination injects too much of the romantic element into
the great theological and political issues of that day, that element was
certainly present in France more than The proud
in other countries.
and willful girl makes and each year
a cult of this family tradition,
she celebrates the anniversary of her ancestor's execution and forces
the family to play along, using the antique names for her various
relatives. The nineteenth century as presented here through
Mathilde's eyes is the careful, self-protective moment of the bour-
geoisie, prior to the spurious corrective of bohemianism and the even
later attempt of the bourgeoisie itself to be bohemian. Stendhal
would, I believe, say that the fundamental motives are revealed in
this earliest stage and that what came later was elaborate deception
and self-deception.
There is no moment when Mathilde simply sees someone and
loves or hates him. Everybody must pass through her internal cast-
ing bureau in order to see whether he fits a role in the play she
produces. This casting is the framework in which her relationship
with Julien evolves. At first he is a matter of no more interest than
any servant to her, and he thinks that she is really unattractive in her
haughtiness. Then she notices his firm heroic stance when she hears
him talking about politics. Her first reflection is that this is not a man
born on his knees. The two previously had a certain union of taste,
both filching volumes of Voltaire from the Marquis' library, the no-
torious Voltaire, forbidden in Julien's seminary and Mathilde's con-
vent as well as by the public opinion of the Bourbon restoration.
Unlike Mme. de Renal, both Julien and Mathilde are readers, and
readers who read essential books. Her first attraction to Julien occurs
in the context of his relationship to theCount d' Altamira, who is the
leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy of Naples and is
under sentence of death. That makes Altamira interesting too. Julien

certainly is attracted by him, and his discussion with Altamira makes
him forget the mannequins who inhabit the Marquis' salon. But
Altamira' s attractiveness for Mathilde is ruined by the fact that he is
a Liberal, which means that his standard is utility, the last thing
Mathilde wants. She would want a revolution against utility, in
which one sacrificed one's life for the beau geste alone.
Perhaps it should be added that the Count d' Altamira is appar-
ently not very good-looking, whereas Julien is exceptionally beauti-
ful. Mathilde would not see it in this way. Julien' s good looks would
have to be an expression of his proud rebellious soul for her, but that
soul would probably be uninteresting to her if it did not come in such
a body. Of course Mathilde has to think about how she could square
an affair with Julien with her grand sense of her position. She en-
gages in a great deal of sophistry with herself about natural aristoc-
racy and the possibility of raising Julien in the social order. All of this
fantasizing is an essential part of the passion that is developing. Its
gestation is furthered by Julien' s apparent indifference to her, which

makes him a special challenge. How dare this roturier be indifferent
to such a great lady? Julien, on his side, thinks he has no interest in
her, but he is really preoccupied with the improbability of such a
great lady's being interested in him or, if she were, the probability of
her merely playing with him. His sensitive vanity furthers the ro-
mance because he appears to manifest a noble indifference, some-
thing worth the effort to combat. Thus, mutual misunderstanding is
the stuff on which imagination and amour-propre feed. When the
involvement reaches its culmination, the immediate response of this
girl is, "How could I have done such a thing with such a low per-
son?" The release of sexual tension puts Julien, not precisely back
into perspective, but into another false perspective. Then she hates
and wounds him to the extent of her appreciable gifts at doing so.
This leads to a scene in the Marquis' library where Julien pulls an
antique knife from its scabbard and threatens to kill her. She is rav-
ished by this sign of affection. There follows another great night
together, this time with the drama continuing after the act. Julien,
disappearing, as is his wont, through the window and down the
ladder, receives a huge lock of his mistress's hair, which is thrown
after him. This permits Mathilde to use her art of doing up her hair
in such a way as to hide what she has done from her family while
providing an exciting secret understanding between Julien and her-
self. Piquancy is added by a certain desire to be discovered and to
flaunt the conventions openly. These are the kinds of things that fuel
the mad passions essential to her.
The fact is that the entire affair between these two strange per-
sons is an erotic version of the dialectic of master and slave. When
she is up, he is down, and vice versa. It is a struggle for mastery over
another's desires, and as in all such conquests, the interest is only in
the acquisition, not in the enjoyment of what has been acquired.
Each seeks the validation of his or her worth by another who is a
worthy judge. The problem is that as soon as this other has capitu-
lated, he or she is no longer a worthy judge. The capitulation proves
weakness, and the struggle comes up empty. The only things that
keep this affair going are the counterattacks of the apparently de-
feated enemy and the need to come back to the charge in order to
make the conquest final. In this war no prisoners are taken and the
psychological cruelties are barbaric. Julien goes through the most
extreme sufferings, where he accepts her negative judgments as de-
finitive and true evaluations of his small worth. He lives entirely in
the capricious movements of her soul. This is exquisite torture and as
extreme an alienation as can be imagined. Life is drained of all con-
tent except obsessive reflection about what has happened and how
he can restore himself. This too is a variety of love. No one can doubt
the connectedness here, but there is no moment of true reciprocity or
enjoyment of each other for what each really is.
Finally, Julien explicitly that he must subjugate
recognizes
Mathilde. He one of Stendhal's great comic in-
restores himself in
ventions, paralleled only by Fabrice del Congo's sermons as arch-
bishop of Parma in which he makes love to Clelia. A wild Russian
suggests that he court the prudish and ridiculously snobbish wife of
a field marshal in order to make Mathilde jealous and provides a

packet of ready-made love letters written by a Russian friend in an
attempted seduction of an English lady. Julien sends these letters off
daily, sometimes forgetting to change London to Paris in them or to
perform any of the other alterations necessary to make the letters
appropriate. He does not bother reading the responses. He coolly
tortures Mathilde, who is reengaged by his indifference and the ap-
pearance of an apparent rival on the stage. Mathilde loses all dignity,
sidling up to Julien in the salon to hear what he is saying to the field
marshal's wife. By a great act of will and the aid of the ready-made
battle plan of the Russian, he for the moment brings her back to heel.
This is when he begins using the word ''subjugation'' and asks for
guarantees. The final guarantee that Mathilde offers is her preg-
nancy, which means that she has sacrificed everything to him.
This affair might well today be characterized as sadomasochistic.
And this language would not be completely groundless if one
stripped it of its perverse and pseudoscientific overtones. The Mar-
quis de Sade, who wrote not long before this time, seemed to think
that the most intense pleasure was the pain one could cause another,
and used the sexual excitement he hoped to generate as an excuse for
sermonizing about alienated social relations. There seems to be a
certain advantage contained in relations of pain in a world where it
is doubtful whether pleasures can be social or shared. This doubt
seems justified in the gentler sexual activities, but there is no doubt

in the mind of someone who causes pain that his screaming victim is
relating to him. It is also true that the passive partner is gratified by
the real interest expressed by the active one in his torture. Sadomas-
ochism is a peculiarly modern form of lovemaking. The elaborate and
absurd rituals that often accompany sadomasochistic relations as
they are practiced today indicate that this is where we now find the
free play of imagination in erotic encounters and almost the only
place where ritual is still alive. Although I would not deny the pos-
sibility that there were such experiences among men and women in
earlier ages, I doubt they were very central. I am inclined to think
that sadomasochism achieves its new power only at a time when the
possibility of love based on nature has become doubtful. It is an
eroticization of the will and the peculiar pleasures of its exercise in
imposing order on a chaotic world. Merely labeling sadism and mas-
ochism as a perversion does not deal with the existential situation
underlying them. Nature, homogenized, no longer authorizes rela-
tions of sub- and superordination, nor does free consent or conven-
tion. Rank order is constituted merely by the will and the force the
will can generate. The stronger will wills the weaker will's willing to
be formed and put into an order. This is the struggle between form
and matter when form no longer naturally informs matter. Stendhal
is not a follower of Sade, but he does depict powerfully, attractively,
and amusingly a love whose content is entirely provided by amour-

propre, the desire for primacy. He offers an alternative in the love of
Mme. de Renal, but if there is no Mme. de Renal, one has to make
do with Mathilde. Just as she longs for the willingness to die without
much consideration of that for which one dies, she admires the pure
will of the one who is able to dominate her. The absence of men who
care enough to enter into this struggle is an abiding theme of much
Romantic literature. The distinction between seduction and force,
both based upon man's superior strength, begins to disappear, and
leads to Nietzsche's dictum, "Are you going to women? Don't forget
the whip."^^ In sum, when the will to power has become our meta-
physics, love becomes a derivative expression of power.
When Julien is winning his war with Mathilde, after getting the
habit of the ups and downs of the relationship and before he has a
chance to become bored and contemptuous in his turn, he develops
a certain real affection for this spirited girl and her passion to play a
role in the human comedy. But there is little time for such self-aware
affection, and it is not, in any event, substantial enough to sustain
itself.Almost immediately, she is lifting him to the heights, arrang-
ing a brilliant military and diplomatic career, and presenting him
with what he assumes will be a son to be an heir to his achievements.
He is on the verge of a dukedom, his natural father being declared
not to be his father while he becomes the son of an old duke, a status
fitting his nature. This is the peak of what the nineteenth century can
offer to ambition, but for him it is also the peak of alienation; he lives
the actualization of dreams that arose out of envy.
Just at the moment of fulfillment, as he approaches the sun in his
winged chariot, he is shot down by his old provincial love. The
denouement of this novel is induced by Mme. de Renal's piety.
Julien has disappeared in the vortex of Parisian life, and she has
returned to her remorseful observance. He has the gall to suggest
that she be a reference for him to the Marquis de La Mole, who is
deciding whether to accept Julien as a son-in-law for his daughter.
Under the direction of her scheming confessor, who is trying to make
a reputation for himself, Mme. de
Renal writes a letter, not utterly
counterfactual, accusing Julien of moving
into households and using
the women in them to further his ambition. Julien, in a rage, goes
and shoots her in church. But by his attempted murder he purges
himself of his amour-propre and the indignation that defends it. The
only person whom this hero actually shoots in the novel is a praying
woman. She of course repents her religious excess and returns to her
true religion, Julien. Everything about the piety of this woman is said
by her confessor: she is in love with Julienand calls it remorse. This
is all a very curiousand interesting commentary on competition
between and eroticism for the spiritual energy of the human
religion
soul. Which of the two is more real and more satisfying is obvious.
Finally, Julien recognizes that what he regarded as only an episode
or a stepping-stone was and is the thing in itself. The very being
together, the total absorption in each other, is now accompanied by
the awareness that this is sufficient happiness because he has had
the experiences that prove its worth. Poor Mathilde is reduced to her
true proportions. False love is destroyed by true love. With her, no
such being together is possible. Without any ill will or any involve-
ment of vanity, he is convinced that she will go on to others and
another life, whereas with Mme. de Renal and him this is all there is.
Their senses of their own existence depend on each other without
any contradiction between them. One might say, as Julien some-
times does in prison, that he has ruined his life by his incapacity to
recognize this. But Stendhal appears to suggest that the few days of
perfect harmony between Julien and Mme. de Renal are enough to
judge their lives happy. Similarly, the death of Julien at twenty-three
might seem to be tragic, cutting off a life before it has begun, but
again, Stendhal suggests that Julien has had the most important
experiences and that no sequel could live up to the richness of what
he has done with his life and its conclusion. Intensity is ever so much
more important than duration, and no adult bourgeois life is any-
thing but duration. Julien imitates Socrates, Boethius, and many
others who proved that happiness can be completed in a prison.
They demonstrated the power and the consolation of philosophy.
Julien demonstrates the power and consolation of love. This is Sten-
dhal's legacy.
In prison Julien goes through many and re-
hesitations, doubts,
versals of sentiment and opinion. He continues worry about what
to
men will think of him. His speech in the court is a mixture of bravado
and pathetic complaint about the injustice to the poor in conven-
tional political orders. Terror of death assaults him, and he wonders
whether the law of firmness he has prescribed to himself will suffice
to overcome this animal instinct and permit him to go proudly to his
execution. But amid all of this confusion, the presence of Mme. de
Renal conquers, and he dies with the same gay abandon with which
he lived when he was His love gives him a little touch of

at his best.
eternity when there no other eternity for him. Mathilde, like the
is
queen of Navarre, gets his head after bribing the craven priests who
are in charge of death and its public interpretation. She buries him in
a grotto with suitable pageantry and establishes a shrine for a cult
dedicated to this great lover. Three days after Julien's execution,
Mme. de Renal, who is not jealous of Mathilde and needs no aping
of sacred ceremony for the public expression of her love, for whom
the only witness is simply dies with the thought of Julien and
Julien,
in the presence of her children, the only two things that had any
reality for her and which express the problem of a human life for a
good woman. The end of the two lovers is sad but also somehow
sweet and heartening. The utter despair we find in Madame Bovary is
not to be found here.
Julien and Mme. de Renal did find each other in spite of the
thickets of propriety and convention. This is Stendhal's response to
any suspicions that human existence is futile.

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^.

In an attempt to understand that moment in our past when

wrote these novels, nor do I want to appear to violate the aesthetic

the decisive influence of a philosopher on the work of artists. The old

cannot be understood to be decisively influenced by the reasoning of

what he or she says. The phenomenon man appears to reveal itself

superior to my writers that assumed by so many contemporary

critics. This seems to be a misapprehension of the critic's place in the

Stendhal, on the face of it, would seem tobe an artist very

bourgeois society. Stendhal's utter contempt for public opinion, a

self-legislation, accessible to even the poorest of men, rather than for

sawmill into a small fortune. The beautiful, sensitive Julien is treated

advantages acquired or trying to wrest them from those who possess

victory of the bourgeoisie predicted by Rousseau has come to pass.

rhetoric or philosophizing about the cosmic scene within which they

amazing rapidity. Within a couple of pages one is already at the heart

she is praying, and shoots her. He is condemned to death and loses

planned. His involvement with the two exceptional women he en-

did not figure in any of And it is our old

amour-propre that leads to pride rather than vanity.^ The bourgeois

165 The Red and the Black

Similarly, Julien' s admiration of persons of single-minded dedi-

the Savoyard Vicar. Julien's incredulity seems to have to do less with

are almost exclusively demonstrated in his descents from bedroom

lieved that conventional morality was an imperfect reflection of true

and Machiavelli's laughter becomes part of the seriousness of this

contemptible bourgeois version of prudence, allied as it always is

with moderation. Thus reason is inevitably sacrificed to his taste, for

I judge this indeed, that it is better to be impetuous than

perspective of the Trojan War, the angry young Achilles is unques-

Stendhal leads Julien through the life of the nineteenth cen-

sensitive changeling, to the home of M. de Renal, who, in the ridic-

himself in a position where a youngster whom he wishes to treat as

172 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

with their faith. Julien' s appearance in this novel in the habit of a

encounter with the bishop of Besangon, a true remnant of the ancien

the disinvoltura that delights Stendhal. He concludes his relations

great place, and a breadth of views unknown in the provinces. Julien

who treats him with which is, on deeper reflec-

conviction of Julien's social inferiority. The Marquis is not a man to

of an observer than a participant. Julien, however, unlike Emile, has

And now we must turn to the two women who together

Julien alone against all counsels of prudence and in an act of over-

in the circumstances and rather shamelessly, but in the conviction

attraction. Neither Mme. de Renal nor Mathilde could hope to hide

more benign in any event. The loosening of bourgeois morals in the

cence is due partly to Stendhal's agreement with Rousseau that the

ing lovers of his personages, what they do together, so that they

such a problem. Stendhal thinks this experience is worth it, no mat-

dozen years, Mme. de Renal is to all intents and purposes a virgin.

serves to underline the difference between love and motherhood,

of her soul. In a recapitulation of the human relations of the bour-

selves a justification for her adultery. He thinks about having a duel,

frightful word "adultery," prior to the actual event (I.H). As Taine

Mme. de Renal goes through the motions of resisting Julien at his

is punishment, divine punishment, for her adultery. The tension

Julien makes love to this prodigy in ridiculous ways appropriate

so, although Julien always sees slights as intended.) Julien imagines