The 19th-century Frenchman is just like you and me, is he not? Perhaps not, but readers will instinctively recognize Julien Sorel, the hero of Stendhal’s Red and Black. They’ll have met his descendants in the work of Roth, Updike, and more recently, Sally Rooney and Jonathan Safran Foer — whose characters are men and women fated to live lives of obsessive self-examination, unable to act without first calculating the ramifications of each decision. Proust wrote, “Every action in Le Rouge et le Noir is followed by a clause showing an unconscious psychological process; it is the novel of motives.” And (as always) Proust was correct.
Red and Black: A Chronicle of 1830 is the tale of Julien Sorel, the ambitious son of a carpenter, befriended by the village priest, who wishes to rise in French society. Two paths are available to a young man of his period and place: the military or the priesthood, the red and black. Napoleon Bonaparte, who died nine years before the events depicted in this narrative, is a figure of much admiration for Julien, but the opportunity for poor men to achieve marshal glory died with the emperor. Europe is at peace, so our young man chooses the priesthood. He becomes a tutor to the children of a wealthy Provençal family in the village where he was born.
Good-looking and intelligent, Julien is cursed with an “indefinable something in your character” according to Father Pirard, one of the many mentors life will throw into Julien’s path. “I can’t quite define it, anyway – you’ll either go on to make your fortune, or you’ll be the target of persecution. With you, there’s no middle way …” In Julien, we see the cynical version of Voltaire’s Candide, innocent of the world’s ways yet skeptical of his fellow men. He is easily offended, suspicious and hypocritical — yet unexpectedly self-aware. He remains confident that destiny has great things in store:
“We shouldn’t automatically foresee a bad end for Julien; he came up with exactly the language a prudent, cunning hypocrisy demanded. And that’s not bad for somebody his age.”
His role as a tutor is short-lived. Julien flees when his affair with his employer’s wife, Madame de Rênal, is discovered. First to a seminary and later to become the secretary of a Parisian diplomat, the Marquis de La Mole. Red and Black is divided into two books. Book one is set in the Franche-Comte region of France, while book two takes us to Paris. Stendhal deftly satirizes the populace of both locales, depicting the religious and political climate of the time. Dualities abound in Red and Black: the military and the priesthood; the country and the city; the Jesuits versus Jansenists; the French Republicans versus Legitimists; and (last but not least) the experienced, nurturing mistress versus the self-centered, young ingenue. Julien is forever choosing between two options and inevitably landing on the wrong one.
Despite being written and set in the 19th century, Red and Black has all the hallmarks of a modern novel. Stendhal enjoys recounting his young protagonist’s adventures, and that enjoyment is contagious. He deploys a narrative voice that is not so much intimate as overly familiar. The jokes made at the characters’ expense are sly but also playful. When Julien’s seduction of his Parisian employers’ daughter becomes a farce of love letters exchanged in the halls, he comments, “It looks like this is going to be one of those epistolary novels …” Later this daughter of the house, Mademoiselle de La Mole, will think to herself how “terribly attractive” Julien looks “when he got up on the chair to replace the sword, in that picturesque location the decorator had chosen for it! I wasn’t so crazy to fall in love with him after all.” Stendhal, who surely read Tristam Shandy, even has his narrator break the fourth wall — at one point, inserting a remarkable exchange between himself and the publisher:
“‘Politics,’ says the author, ‘is like a millstone attached to the neck of literature, one that will sink it altogether in less than six months … The publisher replies, ‘If your characters don’t talk politics, they clearly aren’t French people in 1830 …'”
While it is impossible to assess the accuracy of the translation or how it differs from preceding versions without reading the original French text, even a superficial comparison shows that MacKenzie has taken a less formal approach to the language than his predecessors. The English prose is urbane, witty, and charming – much like, we are told, Stendhal was himself. In addition, Mackenzie has enlivened the narrator’s voice; he says, “‘I wanted him to sound real, natural, human, as he does in French … the ‘spoken’ voice that Stendhal is so good with – both his own and those of his characters.”
Stendhal, whose given name was Marie-Henri Beyle, was born in 1783 and was one of those rare novelists who enjoyed writing without it being his primary source of income. He served in the military under Napoleon (whose biography he would write), taking part in the catastrophic 1812 invasion of Russia. He watched as the Russians burned Moscow to the ground. Beyle was, in fact, one of the few who came out of this military fiasco looking well. He kept his composure and aplomb even under duress (apparently taking the time to shave daily during the retreat) and would receive a series of government postings throughout his life. He published under various pseudonyms before choosing Stendhal, and Red and Black is his best-known work alongside The Charterhouse of Parma. Like Julien, he reputedly had a weakness for the female of the species.
Two romances propel the plot of Red and Black: Julien’s affairs with the older Madame de Rênal and the younger Mademoiselle de la Mole. Stendhal’s treatment of the two women, his portrayal of their inner lives, and the agency he gives them, is extensive and received the approbation of no less than Simone de Beauvoir. We learn as much about their thoughts and motivations as Julien’s. Mademoiselle de la Mole, Mathilde, is not the more interesting of the two mistresses but makes for more exciting reading. She, in many ways, is Julien’s equal in foolishness. A descendent of the French Queen Margot’s doomed lover, Joseph Boniface de la Mole, she romanticizes her ancestor with the same passion as Julien idolizes Napoleon. Stendhal seems to simultaneously mock and admire this young couple. Their misunderstandings, mismatched temperaments, and the back-and-forth nature of their relationship, are familiar. Substitute texts for love letters, and you can easily imagine the modern equivalent of these unsuitable lovers featured in a reality show on Bravo.
Some of the novel’s funniest moments come as asides, offhand comments that surprise the reader. Stendhal is endlessly clever. His humor cuts so quickly that there’s no time to anticipate, and we’re left grinning in awe at his ability to score such a direct hit on his subject. A sample:
“The prince found him decidedly sad. ‘Ah, my friend,’ he asked as they returned to Strasbourg, ‘have you lost all your money, or have you fallen in love with some little actress?’
The Russians copy the French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. They are, as of this writing, in the century of Louis XV.”
Raymond MacKenzie makes good use of his Translator’s Introduction and the copious end-notes to explain historical details, point out Stendhal’s propensity to invent and falsely attribute chapter epigraphs, and educate the reader on the nuances of language. For example, when Julien attempts the seduction of Madame de Renal, she addresses him as “my friend,” indicating to French readers that he is succeeding. Later, after a lover’s quarrel, she slips from the use of the formal back into the intimate “tu,” a subtle form of endearment that has no equivalent in English.
MacKenzie also points out that had Stendhal been more prudent, he would have called his novel A Chronicle of 1829, the year he finished writing. Red and Black was published in November, 1830, four months after the overthrow of Charles X, the second to last of the French Bourbon kings, in what came to be known as the Three Glorious Days and the Second French Revolution. While Stendhal alludes to the middle class’s discontent with the monarchy and the nobility’s fear of another Reign of Terror, he didn’t foresee the consequences. In short, he missed the mark. Contemporary readers must have felt the glaring omission in a novel that is a commentary on the period’s politics and socio-economic divide. Fortunately for today’s readers, this is no more than a noteworthy but ultimately unimportant bit of trivia. It is easy to imagine Stendhal laughing at the irony of the situation.
Comparisons to the 19th-century novel have been making the rounds in literary circles this year. Whether it is a Spanish police procedural in which the detective’s favorite book, Les Misérables, plays a key role, a 21st Century Chinese-American retelling of The Brothers Karamazov, or the Twitter thread of a famous writer describing the merits of Henry James (or the demerits of the latest Jane Austen adaptation), 2022 readers seem to feel an affinity with the 19th-century realists and romantics. Or, at least, the marketing departments of the major publishing houses think so. Maybe there is no obvious or explainable reason, and we are in a cultural moment where these grand story arcs of fallible heroes (and heroines) resonate. Maybe literature runs in a 200-year cycle just as fashions return every 20 years. Or perhaps it is just that Stendhal was ahead of his time with his interior monologues, metafictional flourishes, and vivid characterizations and remains eternally relevant.
Does the world need another translation of Red and Black? MacKenzie writes, “Translating a book you love is something you just do. An analogy that always made sense to me is with a musical score. Everybody looks at it and ‘hears’ it a little — or a lot — differently, and many will want to perform it themselves. There are better and worse performances of it, but no one performance is ever definitive. And it stays alive as long as people continue performing it.”
We’re fortunate not only to have been given yet another chance to enjoy Stendhal — but now in a mode that resonates with Anglophones. Yes, Red and Black is populated by a cast of self-absorbed and silly people, separated by wealth, class, and an exaggerated sense of their own importance. At the height of his success, Julien will stumble in a deeply tragic and sublimely ridiculous way. It is a combination that perhaps only Stendhal could pull off. Yet, despite all their pretensions, his characters remain likeable. Their story is a grand adventure, propelled by bad decisions which leave us groaning in frustration. We see ourselves, our ambitions, vanities, and insecurities in them — those 19th-century French men and women who, in the end, are not so different from you and me.
[Published by the University of Minnesota Press on September 27, 2022, 504 pages, $24.95 paperback]