The Red and the Black Read Free Page A

reader may meet with other surprises. One of the main lessons of
the novel would seem to be that it is dangerous to preconceive the
future. As Julien reflects in prison upon his past life, he realizes
that he was distracted from the happiness and fulfilment he could have
found with M me de Rênal by his overriding ambition to seek
fame and fortune. Because his head was filled with all sorts of
fantasies, many of them derived from what he had heard and read about
Napoleon, he was less able to appreciate the value of what reality was
offering him. As if to reinforce this lesson Stendhal plays on his
reader's expectations within the novel in such a way as to lead him or
her into similar error. Repeatedly we are inveigled into speculating
about Juhen's future, both by what some of the characters predict for
him and by the parallels which immediately
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suggest themselves between his life and that of various historical and literary figures.
    Thus the various references to Julien's desire to seek fame and
fortune, together with the recurring possibility that he is a
foundling, put one in mind--and would most certainly have put a reader
of 1830 in mind--of the typical eighteenthcentury novel plot which is
so playfully exemplified in one of Stendhal's favourite novels,
Fielding Tom Jones . Is The Red and the Black to be
another novel about the parvenu, we may wonder. Or are we reading the
biography of another Napoleon, the man whom Julien so much admires? Or
of another Richelieu? Or perhaps of a revolutionary hero in the mould
of Danton, or Robespierre, or Mirabeau? Just before Julien shoots M me de Rênal, it seems that many of these predictions may have been
correct. The parvenu has arrived: money and title, an officer's rank
and the most brilliant match in Paris, all are his. 'When you come to
think about it,' he reflects, 'my story's ended, and all the credit
goes to me alone' ( 11.34).
    But then comes the letter from M me de Rênal, written at the dictation of her confessor and describing
him as another Tartuffe. This portrait is so at variance with the
person he believes himself to be that he goes off to destroy the
supposed purveyor of this distorted image by doing the last thing one
would expect a mercenary and falsely pious hypocrite to do. While he
then spends the remainder of the novel trying to sort out who he
really is ('to see clearly into the depths of his soul': 11. 44), we
also have to answer the same questions: who is Julien? what does he
stand for? We see that there is no substance in the idea that he is a
foundling, we remember that he has been thoroughly uninterested in
money all along, we note that, unlike Napoleon, he owes his commission
to patronage not prowess and that he resembles him only in so far as he
resembles Mathilde's father imitating him at parties, and we
recognize that, while Julien may have a chip on his shoulder, he is no
political radical and has none of the idealism of a Danton. Even his
speech at the trial, we are carefully informed, is an act of bravado
brought on by the insolent look in the eyes of the gloating Valenod.
Nor is he indeed Tartuffe. His ambition to 'make his fortune' is a
nebulous boyish dream of
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somehow bettering himself, in all senses, not the project of a would-be property tycoon.
    The shooting of M me de Rênal explodes our preconceptions of the end of the novel just as
surely as it does Julien's, and it is for this reason that
foreknowledge of it may falsify a first reading of The Red and the Black .
Subsequent readings, on the other hand, may bring one no nearer to
understanding it! Critical opinion about this crucial turn of events
has varied widely in respect both of its significance and of its
aesthetic merits. The notorious view expressed by Emile Faguet at the
end of the last century was that the shooting was implausible and
provided irrefutable evidence of novelistic amateurishness. Quite
definitely