The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  As for Julien, he had done something, he was less unhappy; his eyes chanced to fall on the Russian leather portfolio in which Prince Korasoff had placed the fifty-three love letters which he had presented to him. Julien saw a note at the bottom of the first letter: No. 1 is sent eight days after the first meeting.

  “I am behind hand,” exclaimed Julien. “It is quite a long time since I met Madame de Fervaques.” He immediately began to copy out this first love letter. It was a homily packed with moral platitudes and deadly dull. Julien was fortunate enough to fall asleep at the second page.

  Some hours afterwards he was surprised to see the broad daylight as he leant on his desk. The most painful moments in his life were those when he woke up every morning to realise his unhappiness. On this particular day he finished copying out his letter in a state verging on laughter. “Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that there ever lived a young man who actually wrote like that?” He counted several sentences of nine lines each. At the bottom of the original he noticed a penciled note. “These letters are delivered personally, on horseback, black cravat, blue tail-coat. You give the letter to the porter with a contrite air; expression of profound melancholy. If you notice any chambermaid, dry your eyes furtively and speak to her.”

  All this was duly carried out.

  “I am taking a very bold course!” thought Julien as he came out of the Hôtel de Fervaques, “but all the worse for Korasoff. To think of daring to write to so virtuous a celebrity. I shall be treated with the utmost contempt, and nothing will amuse me more. It is really the only comedy that I can in any way appreciate. Yes, it will amuse me to load with ridicule that odious creature whom I call myself. If I believed in myself, I would commit some crime to distract myself.”

  The moment when Julien brought his horse back to the stable was the happiest he had experienced for a whole month. Korasoff had expressly forbidden him to look at the mistress who had left him, on any pretext whatsoever. But the step of that horse, which she knew so well, and Julien’s way of knocking on the stable door with his riding-whip to call a man, sometimes attracted Mathilde to behind the window-curtain. The muslin was so light that Julien could see through it. By looking under the brim of his hat in a certain way, he could get a view of Mathilde’s figure without seeing her eyes. “Consequently,” he said to himself, “she cannot see mine, and that is not really looking at her.”

  In the evening Madame de Fervaques behaved towards him, exactly as though she had never received the philosophic mystical and religious dissertation which he had given to her porter in the morning with so melancholy an air. Chance had shown Julien on the preceding day how to be eloquent; he placed himself in such a position that he could see Mathilde’s eyes. She, on her side, left the blue sofa a minute after the maréchale’s arrival; this involved abandoning her usual associates. M. de Croisenois seemed overwhelmed by this new caprice: his palpable grief alleviated the awfulness of Julien’s agony.

  This unexpected turn in his life made him talk like an angel, and inasmuch as a certain element of self-appreciation will insinuate itself even into those hearts which serve as a temple for the most august virtue, the maréchale said to herself as she got into her carriage, “Madame de la Mole is right, this young priest has distinction. My presence must have overawed him at first. As a matter of fact, the whole tone of this house is very frivolous; I can see nothing but instances of virtue helped by oldness, and standing in great need of the chills of age. This young man must have managed to appreciate the difference; he writes well, but I fear very much that this request of his in his letter for me to enlighten him with my advice, is really nothing less than an, as yet, unconscious sentiment.

  “Nevertheless how many conversions have begun like that! What makes me consider this a good omen is the difference between his style and that of the young people whose letters I have had an opportunity of seeing. One cannot avoid recognising unction, profound seriousness, and much conviction in the prose of this young acolyte; he has no doubt the sweet virtue of a Massillon.”

  LVII. The Finest Places in the Church

  Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a côterie.

  Telemaque

  The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.

  “I have a hard task before me to-day,” he said to himself as he came in with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; “let us hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first.”

  It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.

  “It is even more bombastic,” he said to himself, “than those official documents of the Treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made me copy out at London.”

  It was only then that he remembered Madame de Fervaque’s letters which he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos. He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant everything and nothing. “It’s the Æolian harp of style,” thought Julien. “The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable fear of ridicule.”

  The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope of catching sight of Mathilde’s dress, working, going in the evening to the opera on those evenings when Madame de Fervaques did not come to the Hôtel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien’s life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde’s eyes underneath a feather of the maréchale’s hat, and he would wax eloquent. His picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was both more striking and more elegant.

  He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde’s eyes, but he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. “The falser my speeches are, the more I ought to please,” thought Julien, and he then had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the eyes of the maréchale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.

  Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were passed in inaction.

  “But,” he said to himself one evening, “here I am copying out the fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have been duly delivered to the maréchale’s porter. I shall have the honour of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that Russian friend of Korasoff’s who was in love with the pretty Quakeress of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more overwhelming.”

  Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the manœuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl. The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived a life of inordinate bore
dom, had to be induced to contract the habit of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid than her everyday life.

  One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms of Madame de Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an invitation to dinner.

  He rushed to Prince Korasoff’s instructions. Unfortunately the young Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the maréchale’s dinner.

  The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de Diane in the Tuilleries with panelled oil-paintings.

  There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. “What a moral century!” he thought.

  He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of ——, the maréchale’s uncle, had the disposition of the ecclesiastical patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. “What immense progress I have made,” said Julien to himself with a melancholy smile, “and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the famous bishop of——.”

  The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.

  “It’s like the small talk in a bad book,” thought Julien. “All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater—the speaker’s bombast, or his abominable ignorance?”

  The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the academician, and intended to be professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of the Hôtel de la Mole with his base calumnies.

  It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though Madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau’s sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien’s success; “but since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the same time any more than a fool,” said the future professor to himself, “if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime maréchale, she will obtain some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of him in the Hôtel de la Mole.”

  M. the Abbé Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his success at the Hôtel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous maréchale which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.

  LVIII. Manon Lescaut

  Accordingly once he was thoroughly convinced of the asinine stupidity of the prior, he would usually succeed well enough by calling white black, and black white. Lichiemberg

  The Russian instructions peremptorily forbade the writer from ever contradicting in conversation the recipient of the letters. No pretext could excuse any deviation from the rôle of that most ecstatic admiration. The letters were always based on that hypothesis.

  One evening at the opera, when in Madame de Fervaques’ box, Julien spoke of the ballet of Manon Lescaut in the most enthusiastic terms. His only reason for talking in that strain was the fact that he thought it insignificant.

  The maréchale said that the ballet was very inferior to the Abbé Prévost’s novel.

  “The idea,” thought Julien, both surprised and amused, “of so highly virtuous a person praising a novel! Madame de Fervaques used to profess two or three times a week the most absolute contempt for those writers, who, by means of their insipid works, try to corrupt a youth which is, alas! only too inclined to the errors of the senses.”

  “Manon Lescaut,” continued the maréchale, “is said to be one of the best of this immoral and dangerous type of book. The weaknesses and the deserved anguish of a criminal heart are, they say, portrayed with a truth which is not lacking in depth; a fact which does not prevent your Bonaparte from stating at St. Helena that it is simply a novel written for lackeys.”

  The word Bonaparte restored to Julien all the activity of his mind. “They have tried to ruin me with the maréchale; they have told her of my enthusiasm for Napoleon. This fact has sufficiently piqued her to make her yield to the temptation to make me feel it.” This discovery amused him all the evening, and rendered him amusing. As he took leave of the maréchale in the vestibule of the opera, she said to him, “Remember, monsieur, one must not like Bonaparte if you like me; at the best he can only be accepted as a necessity imposed by Providence. Besides, the man did not have a sufficiently supple soul to appreciate masterpieces of art.”

  “When you like me,” Julien kept on repeating to himself, “that means nothing or means everything. Here we have mysteries of language which are beyond us poor provincials.” And he thought a great deal about Madame de Rênal, as he copied out an immense letter destined for the maréchale.

  “How is it,” she said to him the following day, with an assumed indifference which he thought was clumsily assumed, “that you talk to me about London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, I think, when you came back from the opera?”

  Julien was very embarrassed. He had copied line by line without thinking about what he was writing, and had apparently forgotten to substitute Paris and Saint Cloud for the words London and Richmond which occurred in the original. He commenced two or three sentences, but found it impossible to finish them. He felt on the point of succumbing to a fit of idiotic laughter. Finally, by picking his words he succeeded in formulating this inspiration: “Exalted as I was by the discussion of the most sublime and greatest interests of the human soul, my own soul may have been somewhat absent in my letter to you.

  “I am making an impression,” he said to himself, “so I can spare myself the boredom of the rest of the evening.” He left the Hôtel de Fervaques at a run. In the evening he had another look at the original of the letter which he had copied out on the previous night, and soon came to the fatal place where the young Russian made mention of London and of Richmond. Julien was very astonished to find this letter almost tender.

  It had been the contrast between the apparent lightness of his conversation, and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of his letters which had marked him out for favour. The maréchale was particularly pleased by the longness of the sentences; this was very far from being that sprightly style which that immoral man Voltaire had brought into fashion. Although our hero made every possible human effort to eliminate from his conversation any symptom of good sense, it still preserved a certain anti-monarchical and blasphemous tinge which did not escape Madame de Fervaques. Surrounded as she was by persons who, though eminently moral, had very often not a single idea during a whole evening, this lady was profoundly struck by anything resembling a novelty, but at the same time she thought she owed it to herself to be offended by it. She called this defect: Keeping the imprint of the lightness of the age.

  But such salons are only worth observing when one has a favour to procure. The reader doubtless shares all the ennui of the colourless life which Julien was leading. This period represents the steppes of our journey.

  Mademoiselle de la Mole needed to exercise her self-control to avoid thinking of Julien during the whole period filled by the de Fervaques episode. Her soul was a prey to violent battles; sometimes she piqued herself on despising that melancholy young man, but his conversation captivated her in spite of herself. She was particularly astonished by his absolute falseness. He did not say a single word to the maréchale which was not a lie, or at any rate, an abominable travesty of his own way of thinking, which Mathilde knew so perfectly in every phase. This Machiavellianism impressed her. “What subtlety,” she said to herself. “What a difference between the bombastic coxcombs, or the common rascals like Tanbeau who talk in the same strai
n.”

  Nevertheless Julien went through awful days. It was only to accomplish the most painful of duties that he put in a daily appearance in the maréchale’s salon.

  The strain of playing a part ended by depriving his mind of all its strength. As he crossed each night the immense courtyard of the Hôtel de Fervaques, it was only through sheer force in character and logic that he succeeded in keeping a little above the level of despair.

  “I overcame despair at the seminary,” he said, “yet what an awful prospect I had then. I was then either going to make my fortune or come to grief just as I am now. I found myself obliged to pass all my life in intimate association with the most contemptible and disgusting things in the whole world. The following spring, just eleven short months later, I was perhaps the happiest of all young people of my own age.”

  But very often all this fine logic proved unavailing against the awful reality. He saw Mathilde every day at breakfast and at dinner. He knew from the numerous letters which de la Mole dictated to him that she was on the eve of marrying de Croisenois. This charming man already called twice a day at the Hôtel de la Mole; the jealous eye of a jilted lover was alive to every one of his movements. When he thought he had noticed that Mademoiselle de la Mole was beginning to encourage her intended, Julien could not help looking tenderly at his pistols as he went up to his room.

  “Ah,” he said to himself, “would it not be much wiser to take the marks out of my linen and to go into some solitary forest twenty leagues from Paris to put an end to this atrocious life? I should be unknown in the district, my death would remain a secret for a fortnight, and who would bother about me after a fortnight?”