The Red and the Black Read Free

bourgeois because he is bourgeois, and the artistocrat because he is aristocrat. Nevertheless, as a gallery of the most varied characters, patricians and plebeians, prudes and profligates, Jesuits and Jansenists, Kings and coachmen, bishops and bourgeois, whose mutual difference acts as a most effective foil to each other’s reality, Le Rouge et Le Noir will beat any novel outside Balzac.
    We would mention in particular those two contrasted figures, Mme. de Rênal the bourgeoise passionée, and Mathilde de la Mole the noble damozel who enters into her intrigue out of a deliberate wish to emulate the exploits of a romantic ancestress. But after all, these individuals stand out not so much because their characterization is better than that of their fellow-personages, but because it is more elaborate. Even such minor characters, for instance, as de Frilair, the lascivious Jesuit, Noiraud, the avaricious gaoler, Mme. de Fervaques, the amoristic prude, are all in their respective ways real, vivid, convincing, no mere padded figures of the imagination, but observed actualities swung from the lived life on the written page.
    The style of Stendhal is noticeable from its simplicity, clear and cold, devoid of all literary artifice, characteristic of his analytic purpose. He is strenuous in his avoidance of affectation. Though, however, he never holds out his style as an aesthetic delight in itself, he reaches occasionally passages of a rare and simple beauty. We would refer in particular to the description of Julien in the mountains, which we have already mentioned, and to the short but impressive death scene. His habit, however, of using language as a means and never as an end, occasionally revenges itself upon him in places where the style, though intelligible, is none the less slovenly, anacoluthic, almost Thucydidean.
    After the publication of Le Rouge et Le Noir Stendhal was forced by his financial embarrassment to leave Paris and take up the post of consul at Trieste. Driven from this position by the intrigues of a vindictive Church, he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and highly respectable daughter of his laundress. He then returned to Paris where he remained till 1842, where he died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine in the full swing of all his mental and physical activities.
    His later works included, La Chartreuse de Parme, Lucien, Leuwen and Lamiel, of which the Chartreuse is the most celebrated, but Lamiel certainly the most sprightly. But it is on Le Rouge et Le Noir that his fame as a novelist is the most firmly based. It is with this most personal document, this record of his experiences and emotions that he lives identified, just as D’Annunzio will live identified with Il Fuoco or Mr. Wells with the New Macchiavelli. Le Rouge et Le Noir is the greatest novel of its age and one of the greatest novels of the whole nineteenth century. It is full to the brim of intellect and adventure, introspection and action, youth, romance, tenderness, cynicism and rebellion. It is in a word the intellectual quintessence of the Napoleonic era.
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    HORACE B. SAMUEL.
    TEMPLE,
Oct., 1913.

A CHRONICLE OF 1830
    I. A Small Town
    Put thousands together less bad,
But the cage less gay.—Hobbs.
    The little town of Verrières can pass for one of the prettiest in Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their pointed red-tiled roofs stretch along the slope of a hill, whose slightest undulations are marked by groups of vigorous chestnuts. The Doubs flows to within some hundred feet above its fortifications, which were built long ago by the Spaniards, and are now in ruins.
    Verrières is sheltered on the north by a high mountain which is one of the branches of the Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra are covered with snow from the beginning of the October frosts. A torrent which rushes down