3. Plebeian Heaven

       Paris, 1830

      On that day, when Mathilde and Fouqué tried to tell him of certain public rumours very suitable, in their opinion, to raise his hopes, Julien stopped them at the first word.

      —Leave me my ideal life. Your little tricks and details from real life, all more or less irritating to me, would drag me out of heaven. One dies as one can; I want to think about death only in my own personal way. What do other people matter? My relations with other people are going to be severed abruptly. For heaven’s sake, don’t talk to me of those people any more: it’s quite enough if I have to play the swine before the judge and the lawyer.

      As a matter of fact, he told me himself, it seems that my fate is to die in a dream. An obscure creature like myself, who is sure to be forgotten in two weeks’ time, would be a complete fool to play out the comedy …

      Still, it is strange that I have learned the art of enjoying life only since I have seen the end of it so close to me.

      He passed these last days walking about the narrow terrace atop his tower, smoking some excellent cigars Mathilde had had brought from Holland by a courier; he never suspected that his appearance was awaited each day by every telescope in town. His thoughts were at Vergy. He never talked about Mme de Rênal with Fouqué, but two or three times his friend told him that she was recovering rapidly, and the phrase reverberated in his heart.¹

      When Red and Black was published in 1830, critics did not fail to denounce the novel’s implausible characters and situations. How could this rather uncouth little peasant become an expert in high-society intrigues so suddenly? How could this child show so much maturity, and how could this cold calculator prove to be the most passionate of lovers?² However, no critic noticed the strangest of these inconsistencies: at the end of his long endeavours to escape his condition and rise up in society, Julien Sorel has lost everything. He is waiting to be judged and condemned to death for the shot fired at the woman who denounced him. And it is at this moment, inside the prison walls, that he finally begins to enjoy life. He can only ask the man and woman conspiring to free him not to bother him with the details of real life. A little later, after his condemnation, he will say it to Madame de Rênal: he will never have been as happy as during the days spent beside her in prison.

      The little plebeian’s paradoxical pleasure in his prison gives Stendhal’s novel a conclusion that seems to contradict both its structure and its tone. Indeed the book, in effect, is the work of a man who clearly displays his contempt for stories of sentimental dreamers and lovers of a heavenly ideal. He prefers the tales of Italian chroniclers of the past or picaresque stories like Tom Jones, whose situations and characters he imitates occasionally: ladders to boldly climb up to windows, closets to hide in, sudden departures, meeting pretty maids, young dim-witted noblemen, professional intriguers, romantic or pious young women sensitive to the charms of well-built young men. He thus conforms to an old model of novelistic fiction: the story of a character who is placed outside his normal position by some unforeseeable event, and forced to traverse the various circles of society, from princely palaces to port city dens, from farms or country parishes to aristocratic or bourgeois salons. This class disorder – symbolized in the eighteenth century by the bastard Tom Jones or by Marivaux’s ‘upstart peasant’ – took on a new meaning after the French Revolution. It was then identified with the plebeian’s hazardous climbing in a society that had not yet found its new shape, and where the nobility’s nostalgia and ecclesiastical intrigues were mixed with the reign of bourgeois interests. Stendhal experienced the fever of the Revolution as a child, the wars of Empire as a young man, and later the plots of the Restoration. The story of the ambitious young plebeian gave him the opportunity to exploit the experience he had thus acquired. To show his knowledge of the world and to describe the social intrigues that followed the revolutionary and imperial epic, he surrounded his heroes with a multitude of experts: Russian aristocrats, who act as professors of political diplomacy and romantic strategy; Jansenist priests aware of all the Jesuit intrigues; Italian conspirators with expert intelligence of state secrets; Parisian academics up to speed on the secrets of noble families. And he spares us no details about manoeuvres to obtain a diocese or a position as a tax collector, the conspiracies led by the Ultras to re-establish the old regime, and the fifty-three model letters to send in sequence to overpower even the most unassailable virtues. Later, in Lucien Leuwen, he explains at length how to ‘run’ an election and how to overthrow a cabinet. It is not difficult to see why an illustrious reader, Erich Auerbach, considered Red and Black to mark a decisive moment in the history of the realist novel. ‘Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving – as is the case today in any novel or film – Stendhal is its founder.’³ The circumstances surrounding the book seem to confirm his analysis: 1830, the year the novel appeared, was also the year the people of Paris expelled the last of the Bourbons in three days. Two years later Balzac became famous as a writer for La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin), in which the banker Taillefer’s banquet for journalists provides a tableau of the bourgeois royalty of opinion, which seems to respond precisely to the aristocratic and ecclesiastical intrigues described in Red and Black. How could one fail to notice the concordance between the fall of the last monarch of divine right and the growth of the great novelistic genre, which describes the inner workings of post-revolutionary society and thus takes the place of traditional poetic genres in the new literature? And how could one ignore that this growth begins with the story of the young plebeian setting out to conquer high society?

      Yet the promised concordance between the growth of a genre and the rise of a class is immediately muddled. The Revolution of July 1830 had already displaced the narrative of an ambitious plebeian facing a society marked by nostalgia for nobility and Jesuit intrigues. Various critics remarked as much when the book was released: the diplomat–writer’s knowledge of the world referred to the world that had just been overthrown.⁴ But the rupture created by the July days between the world that had given rise to the book and the one in which it was published is not the most important one. It is in