The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  “But here is a witness whom everyone will believe, and who will testify to the whole of Verrières that I showed weakness when confronted with death, and who will exaggerate it into the bargain! I shall be taken for a coward in an ordeal which comes home to all!”

  Julien was nearly desperate. He did not know how to get rid of his father. He felt it absolutely beyond his strength to invent a ruse capable of deceiving so shrewd an old man.

  His mind rapidly reviewed all the alternatives. “I have saved some money,” he suddenly exclaimed.

  This inspiration produced a change in the expression of the old man and in Julien’s own condition.

  “How ought I to dispose of it?” continued Julien more quietly. The result had freed him from any feeling of inferiority.

  The old carpenter was burning not to let the money slip by him, but it seemed that Julien wanted to leave part of it to his brothers. He talked at length and with animation. Julien felt cynical.

  “Well, the Lord has given me a message with regard to my will. I will give a thousand francs to each of my brothers and the rest to you.”

  “Very good,” said the old man. “The rest is due to me: but since God has been gracious enough to touch your heart, your debts ought to be paid if you wish to die like a good Christian. There are, moreover, the expenses of your board and your education, which I advanced to you, but which you are not thinking of.”

  “Such is paternal love,” repeated Julien to himself, dejectedly, when he was at last alone. Soon the gaoler appeared.

  “Monsieur, I always bring my visitors a good bottle of champagne after near relations have come to see them. It is a little dear, six francs a bottle, but it rejoices the heart.”

  “Bring three glasses,” said Julien to him, with a childish eagerness, “and bring in two of the prisoners whom I have heard walking about in the corridor.” The gaoler brought two men into him who had once been condemned to the gallows, and had now been convicted of the same offence again, and were preparing to return to penal servitude. They were very cheerful scoundrels, and really very remarkable by reason of their subtlety, their courage, and their coolness.

  “If you give me twenty francs,” said one of them to Julien, “I will tell you the story of my life in detail. It’s rich.”

  “But you will lie,” said Julien.

  “Not me,” he answered, “my friend there, who is jealous of my twenty francs, will give me away if I say anything untrue.”

  His history was atrocious. It was evidence of a courageous heart which had only one passion—that of money.

  After their departure Julien was no longer the same man. All his anger with himself had disappeared. The awful grief, which had been poisoned and rendered more acute by the weakness of which he had been a victim since Madame de Rênal’s departure, had turned to melancholy.

  “If I had been less taken in by appearances,” he said to himself, “I would have had a better chance of seeing that the Paris salons are full of honest men like my father, or clever scoundrels like those felons. They are right. The men in the salons never get up in the morning with this poignant thought in their minds, how am I going to get my dinner? They boast about their honesty and when they are summoned on the jury, they take pride in convicting the man who has stolen a silver dish because he felt starving.

  “But if there is a court, and it’s a question of losing or winning a portfolio, my worthy salon people will commit crimes exactly similar to those, which the need of getting a dinner inspired those two felons to perpetrate.

  “There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing more than a silly anachronism well worthy of the advocate-general who harried me the other day, and whose grandfather was enriched by one of the confiscations of Louis XIV. There is no such thing as right, except when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment.

  “Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry. To put it in one word—need. No, the people whom the world honours are merely villains who have had the good fortune not to have been caught red-handed. The prosecutor whom society put on my track was enriched by an infamous act. I have committed a murder, and I am justly condemned, but the Valenod who has condemned me, is by reason alone of that very deed, a hundred times more harmful to society.

  “Well,” added Julien sadly but not angrily, “in spite of his avarice, my father is worth more than all those men. He never loved me. The disgrace I bring upon him by an infamous death has proved the last straw. That fear of lacking money, that distorted view of the wickedness of mankind, which is called avarice, make him find a tremendous consolation and sense of security in a sum of three or four hundred louis, which I have been able to leave him. Some Sunday, after dinner, he will shew his gold to all the envious men in Verrières. ‘Which of you would not be delighted to have a son guillotined at a price like this?’ will be the message they will read in his eyes.”

  This philosophy might be true, but it was of such a character as to make him wish for death. In this way five long days went by. He was polite and gentle to Mathilde, whom he saw was exasperated by the most violent jealousy. One evening Julien seriously thought of taking his own life. His soul was demoralised by the deep unhappiness in which Madame de Rênal’s departure had thrown him. He could no longer find pleasure in anything, either in real life or in the sphere of the imagination. Lack of exercise began to affect his health, and to produce in him all the weakness and exaltation of a young German student. He began to lose that virile disdain which repels with a drastic oath certain undignified ideas which besiege the soul of the unhappy.

  “I loved truth . . . Where is it? Hypocrisy everywhere or at any rate charlatanism. Even in the most virtuous, even in the greatest,” and his lips assumed an expression of disgust. “No, man cannot trust man.”

  “Madame de——when she was making a collection for her poor orphans, used to tell me that such and such a prince had just given ten louis, a sheer lie. But what am I talking about? Napoleon at St. Helena . . . Pure charlatanism like the proclamation in favour of the King of Rome.

  “Great God! If a man like that at a time when misfortune ought to summon him sternly to his duty will sink to charlatanism, what is one to expect from the rest of the human species?

  “Where is truth? In religion. Yes,” he added, with a bitter smile of utter contempt. “In the mouth of the Maslons, the Frilairs, the Castanèdes—perhaps in that true Christianity whose priests were not paid any more than were the apostles. But St. Paul was paid by the pleasure of commanding, speaking, getting himself talked about.”

  “Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair. About as comforting as a Chevalier de Beauvoisis.

  “But a true priest, a Massillon, a Fénelon. Massillon sacrificed Dubois. Saint-Simon’s memoirs have spoilt the illusion of Fénelon, but he was a true priest anyway. In those days, tender souls could have a place in the world where they could meet together. We should not then have been isolated. That good priest would have talked to us of God. But what God? Not the one of the Bible, a cruel petty despot, full of vindictiveness, but the God of Voltaire, just, good, infinite.”

  He was troubled by all the memories of that Bible which he knew by heart. “But how on earth, when the deity is three people all at the same time, is one to believe in the great name of GOD, after the frightful way in which our priests have abused it.”

  “Living alone. What a torture.”

  “I am growing mad and unreasonable,” said Julien to himself, striking his forehead. “I am alone here in this cell, but I have not lived alone on earth. I had the powerful idea of duty. The duty which rightly or wrongly I laid down for myself, has been to me like the trunk of a solid tree which I coul
d lean on during the storm. I stumbled, I was agitated. After all I was only a man, but I was not swept away.

  “It must be the damp air of this cell which made me think of being alone.

  “Why should I still play the hypocrite by cursing hypocrisy? It is neither death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, but Madame de Rênal’s absence which prostrates me. If, in order to see her at Verrières, I had to live whole weeks at Verrières concealed in the cellars of her house, would I complain?”

  “The influence of my contemporaries wins the day,” he said aloud, with a bitter laugh. “Though I am talking to myself and within an ace of death, I still play the hypocrite. Oh you nineteenth century! A hunter fires a gunshot in the forest, his quarry falls, he hastens forward to seize it. His foot knocks against a two-foot anthill, knocks down the dwelling place of the ants, and scatters the ants and their eggs far and wide. The most philosophic among the ants will never be able to understand that black, gigantic and terrifying body, the hunter’s boot, which suddenly invaded their home with incredible rapidity, preceded by a frightful noise, and accompanied by flashes of reddish fire.”

  “In the same way, death, life and eternity are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o’clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o’clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word ‘night’?”

  “Give it five more hours of existence, and it will see night, and understand its meaning.”

  “So, in my case, I shall die at the age of twenty-three. Give me five more years of life in order to live with Madame de Rênal.”

  He began to laugh like Mephistopheles. How foolish to debate these great problems.

  “(1). I am as hypocritical as though there were someone there to listen to me.

  “(2). I am forgetting to live and to love when I have so few days left to live. Alas, Madame de Rênal is absent; perhaps her husband will not let her come back to Besançon any more, to go on compromising her honour.”

  “That is what makes me lonely, and not the absence of a God who is just, good and omnipotent, devoid of malice, and in no wise greedy of vengeance.”

  “Oh, if He did exist. Alas, I should fall at His feet. I have deserved death, I should say to Him, but Oh, Thou great God, good God, indulgent God, give me back her whom I love!”

  By this time the night was far advanced. After an hour or two of peaceful sleep, Fouqué arrived.

  Julien felt strongly resolute, like a man who sees to the bottom of his soul.

  LXXV

  “I cannot play such a trick on that poor Abbé Chas-Bernard, as to summon him,” he said to Fouqué: “it would prevent him from dining for three whole days.—But try and find some Jansenist who is a friend of M. Pirard.”

  Fouqué was impatiently waiting for this suggestion. Julien acquitted himself becomingly of all the duty a man owes to provincial opinion. Thanks to M. the Abbé de Frilair, and in spite of his bad choice of a confessor, Julien enjoyed in his cell the protection of the priestly congregation; with a little more diplomacy he might have managed to escape. But the bad air of the cell produced its effect, and his strength of mind diminished. But this only intensified his happiness at Madame de Rênal’s return.

  “My first duty is towards you, my dear,” she said as she embraced him; “I have run away from Verrières.”

  Julien felt no petty vanity in his relations with her, and told her all his weaknesses. She was good and charming to him.

  In the evening she had scarcely left the prison before she made the priest, who had clung on to Julien like a veritable prey, go to her aunt’s. As his only object was to win prestige among the young women who belonged to good Besançon society, Madame de Rênal easily prevailed upon him to go and perform a novena at the abbey of Bray-le-Haut.

  No words can do justice to the madness and extravagance of Julien’s love.

  By means of gold, and by using and abusing the influence of her aunt, who was devout, rich and well-known, Madame de Rênal managed to see him twice a day.

  At this news, Mathilde’s jealousy reached a pitch of positive madness. M. de Frilair had confessed to her that all his influence did not go so far as to admit of flouting the conventions by allowing her to see her sweetheart more than once every day. Mathilde had Madame de Rênal followed so as to know the smallest thing she did. M. de Frilair exhausted all the resources of an extremely clever intellect in order to prove to her that Julien was unworthy of her.

  Plunged though she was in all these torments, she only loved him the more, and made a horrible scene nearly every day.

  Julien wished, with all his might, to behave to the very end like an honourable man towards this poor young girl whom he had so strangely compromised, but the reckless love which he felt for Madame de Rênal swept him away at every single minute. When he could not manage to persuade Mathilde of the innocence of her rival’s visits by all his thin excuses, he would say to himself: “at any rate the end of the drama ought to be quite near. The very fact of not being able to lie better will be an excuse for me.”

  Mademoiselle de la Mole learnt of the death of the Marquis de Croisenois. The rich M. de Thaler had indulged in some unpleasant remarks concerning Mathilde’s disappearance: M. de Croisenois went and asked him to recant them; M. de Thaler showed him some anonymous letters which had been sent to him, and which were full of details so artfully put together that the poor marquis could not help catching a glimpse of the truth.

  M. de Thaler indulged in some jests which were devoid of all taste. Maddened by anger and unhappiness, M. de Croisenois demanded such unqualified satisfaction, that the millionaire preferred to fight a duel. Stupidity triumphed, and one of the most lovable of men met with his death before he was twenty-four.

  This death produced a strange and morbid impression on Julien’s demoralised soul.

  “Poor Croisenois,” he said to Mathilde, “really behaved very reasonably and very honourably towards us; he had ample ground for hating me and picking a quarrel with me, by reason of your indiscretion in your mother’s salon; for the hatred which follows on contempt is usually frenzied.”

  M. de Croisenois’ death changed all Julien’s ideas concerning Mathilde’s future. He spent several days in proving to her that she ought to accept the hand of M. de Luz. “He is a nervous man, not too much of a Jesuit, and will doubtless be a candidate,” he said to her. “He has a more sinister and persevering ambition than poor Croisenois, and as there has never been a dukedom in his family, he will be only too glad to marry Julien Sorel’s widow.”

  “A widow, though, who scorns the grand passions,” answered Mathilde coldly, “for she has lived long enough to see her lover prefer to her after six months another woman who was the origin of all their unhappiness.”

  “You are unjust! Madame de Rênal’s visits will furnish my advocate at Paris, who is endeavouring to procure my pardon, with the subject matter for some sensational phrases; he will depict the murderer honoured by the attention of his victim. That may produce an impression, and perhaps some day or other, you will see me provide the plot of some melodrama or other, etc., etc.”

  A furious and impotent jealousy, a prolonged and hopeless unhappiness (for even supposing Julien was saved, how was she to win back his heart?), coupled with her shame and anguish at loving this unfaithful lover more than ever, had plunged Mademoiselle de la Mole into a gloomy silence, from which all the careful assiduity of M. de Frilair was as little able to draw her as the rugged frankness of Fouqué.

  As for Julien, except in those moments which were taken up by Mathilde’s presence, he lived on love with scarcely a thought for the future.

  “In former days,” Julien said to her, “when I might have been so happy, during our walks in the wood of Vergy, a frenzied ambition swept my soul into the realms of imagination. Instead of pressing to my heart that charming arm which is so near my lips, the thoughts of my future took me away from you; I wa
s engaged in countless combats which I should have to sustain in order to lay the foundations of a colossal fortune. No, I should have died without knowing what happiness was if you had not come to see me in this prison.”

  Two episodes ruffled this tranquil life. Julien’s confessor, Jansenist though he was, was not proof against an intrigue of the Jesuits, and became their tool without knowing it.

  He came to tell him one day that unless he meant to fall into the awful sin of suicide, he ought to take every possible step to procure his pardon. Consequently, as the clergy have a great deal of influence with the minister of Justice at Paris, an easy means presented itself; he ought to become converted with all publicity.

  “With publicity,” repeated Julien. “Ha, Ha! I have caught you at it—I have caught you as well, my father, playing a part like any missionary.”

  “Your youth,” replied the Jansenist gravely, “the interesting appearance which Providence has given you, the still unsolved mystery of the motive for your crime, the heroic steps which Mademoiselle de la Mole has so freely taken on your behalf, everything, up to the surprising affection which your victim manifests towards you, has contributed to make you the hero of the young women of Besançon. They have forgotten everything, even politics, on your account. Your conversion will reverberate in their hearts and will leave behind it a deep impression. You can be of considerable use to religion, and I was about to hesitate for the trivial reason that in a similar circumstance the Jesuits would follow a similar course. But if I did, even in the one case which has escaped their greedy clutches, they would still be exercising their mischief. The tears which your conversion will cause to be shed will annul the poisonous effect of ten editions of Voltaire’s works.”

  “And what will be left for me,” answered Julien, coldly, “if I despise myself? I have been ambitious; I do not mean to blame myself in any way. Further, I have acted in accordance with the code of the age. Now I am living from day to day. But I should make myself very unhappy if I were to yield to what the locality would regard as a piece of cowardice. . . .”