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THE RED AND THE BLACK

A Chronicle of 1830

BY

STENDHAL


TRANSLATED BY HORACE B. SAMUEL, M.A.,

Late Scholar Corpus Christi College, Oxford


LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD

NEW YORK: E.P. DUTTON AND CO.

1916




INTRODUCTION


Some slight sketch of the life and character of Stendhal is
particularly necessary to an understanding of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_
(_The Red and the Black_) not so much as being the formal stuffing of
which introductions are made, but because the book as a book stands
in the most intimate relation to the author's life and character. The
hero, Julien, is no doubt, viewed superficially, a cad, a scoundrel,
an assassin, albeit a person who will alternate the moist eye of the
sentimentalist with the ferocious grin of the beast of prey. But
Stendhal so far from putting forward any excuses makes a specific point
of wallowing defiantly in his own alleged wickedness. "Even assuming
that Julien is a villain and that it is my portrait," he wrote shortly
after the publication of the book, "why quarrel with me. In the time of
the Emperor, Julien would have passed for a very honest man. I lived in
the time of the Emperor. So--but what does it matter?"

Henri Beyle was born in 1783 in Grenoble in Dauphiny, the son of a
royalist lawyer, situated on the borderland between the gentry and
that bourgeoisie which our author was subsequently to chastise with
that malice peculiar to those who spring themselves from the class
which they despise. The boy's character was a compound of sensibility
and hard rebelliousness, virility and introspection. Orphaned of his
mother at the age of seven, hated by his father and unpopular with his
schoolmates, he spent the orthodox unhappy childhood of the artistic
temperament. Winning a scholarship at the Ecole Polytechnique at
the age of sixteen he proceeded to Paris, where with characteristic
independence he refused to attend the college classes and set himself
to study privately in his solitary rooms.

In 1800 the influence of his relative M. Daru procured him a commission
in the French Army, and the Marengo campaign gave him an opportunity
of practising that Napoleonic worship to which throughout his life he
remained consistently faithful, for the operation of the philosophical
materialism of the French sceptics on an essentially logical and
mathematical mind soon swept away all competing claimants for his
religious adoration. Almost from his childhood, moreover, he had
abominated the Jesuits, and "Papism is the source of all crimes," was
throughout his life one of his favourite maxims.

After the army's triumphant entry into Milan, Beyle returned to
Grenoble on furlough, whence he dashed off to Paris in pursuit of
a young woman to whom he was paying some attention, resigned his
commission in the army and set himself to study "with the view of
becoming a great man." It is in this period that we find the most
marked development in Beyle's enthusiasm of psychology. This tendency
sprang primarily no doubt from his own introspection. For throughout
his life Beyle enjoyed the indisputable and at times dubious luxury
of a double consciousness. He invariably carried inside his brain
a psychological mirror which reflected every phrase of his emotion
with scientific accuracy. And simultaneously, the critical spirit,
half-genie, half-demon inside his brain, would survey in the
semi-detached mood of a keenly interested spectator, the actual emotion
itself, applaud or condemn it as the case might be, and ticket the
verdict with ample commentations in the psychological register of its
own analysis.

But this trend to psychology, while as we have seen, to some extent,
the natural development of mere self-analysis was also tinged with the
spirit of self-preservation. With a mind, which in spite of its natural
physical courage was morbidly susceptible to ridicule and was only too
frequently the dupe of the fear of being duped, Stendhal would scent
an enemy in every friend, and as a mere matter of self-protection set
himself to penetrate the secret of every character with which he came
into contact. One is also justified