Chapter summary
The next day, at six in the morning, Rênal goes down to the sawmill and proposes to Father Sorel that his son Julien serve as tutor: three hundred francs a year and meals, to which the peasant suddenly adds a demand for clothing, also accepted. The peasant hides his satisfaction behind an air of dissatisfied sadness, and Rênal, who supposes him courted by another offer, sees him ask to consult his son. Julien Sorel is found five or six feet up, mounted on a roof beam, reading, deaf to his father's call because of his book, and receives a blow that knocks the Memorial of Saint Helena (see The Memorial of Saint Helena), the book he prizes most, into the stream. The scene fixes from the start the hierarchy of the house: the peasant father, rough and calculating, despises in his son exactly what sets him apart, intelligence applied to reading rather than to manual labor. The narrator describes the frail boy of eighteen or nineteen, scorned by his brothers, who idolized the old chief surgeon who taught him Latin and history and left him the Legion of Honor decoration and the books. The chapter ends with the father seizing him to question him.
Analysis
Father Sorel hides his satisfaction behind an air of dissatisfied sadness because he calculates that the mayor will pay more if he thinks there is another interested party for the son. Then he beats Julien for being found reading on the beam: for him, work is arms, and an intelligence that reads instead of sawing does not seem to serve any purpose.
Ch. IV. Pushed home by his father, Julien still looks back:
Subscription
The complete analysis of every chapter of The Red and the Black comes with a subscription, along with the explanation of each quote, the quiz, the PDF guide, and the study workbook.