Back to the Classics 2021 #17

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

19^th Century Classic: My general theme for this challenge was to read classics that I’ve been hearing about virtually my entire adult life - like Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) - but never found time to read. Until this wretched pandemic. So there are always silver linings. Always.

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

In the university town of Grenoble in the 1820s, failed seminarian Antoine Berthet, son of a poor artisan, was hired as a tutor in the service of a bourgeois family. He seduced his employer's wife. Stressed out after various failures, he bought a gun and shot his mistress in the middle of mass. Berthet was condemned to the guillotine.

Chop.

Ho-hum, we ordinary people think, as we listen to the news not attentively and wonder how stupid work is going to be today. But when an artist like Stendhal stumbles across an everyday news item, look what happens - one of the major novels of the 19th century in France and in translation, in the world.

Our anti-hero is young Julien Sorel, a version of unfortunate Antoine Berthet. Sorel is a scoundrel. Too handsome for female types to keep their heads when they’re around him, he’s also too young to know how to keep his own posing in bounds. His hero is Bonaparte so he’s full of excessive ambition to make something new in the world. So nobody is all one thing, we’re a mix of the admirable and the deplorable - he’s idealistic and romantic but still a scoundrel.

This novel recounts the social and amatory adventures of this character. In part one, as the tutor to the children of M. de Rênal, mayor of the fictional village of Verrières, he seduces the lady of the house Madame de Rénal. After an unfortunate (but excellently rendered) stint at the seminary, he goes to Paris, hobnobs with the aristocracy and embarks on a new romantic interlude with Mathilde, the dangerously attractive daughter of his employer, the Marquis de La Mole.

The lovers are young. So the novel has plenty of love’s nocturnal encounters, love’s ladders under the window, love’s transports, love’s rumors and insecurities, love’s scruples and love’s pride, love’s tiffs and  rejections, love’s passionate indiscreet letters, love’s jealousies and love’s duplicities games and scenes.

But society doesn’t make patient allowances for love’s youthful indiscretions. The end is not happy.

It’s not only a novel – it’s a world, as the subtitle points out: “a chronicle of the 19th century.” As a satire, it paints brilliant characters: the Abbé Pirard, the Chevalier de Beauvoisis, the Prince Korasoff, the singer Geronimo, Amanda (memorably seductive in a too short scene, like Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep).

I recommend this novel highly, especially the first part. Granted, the writer devotes many chapters at parties in the salons of the Marquis De La Mole. Yet another lavish ball feels endless at times, like yet another Welsh wingding in How Green was My Valley. Beautiful writing, timeless psychological analysis of pride and ambition, social satire – the story has plenty enough to balance an old-fashioned story of love’s nocturnal encounters, love’s ladders under the window, etc. etc.