Carpenter's son from Verrières, prodigious memory, a Latinist by heart and a secret reader of Napoleon. He is the protagonist, and the novel exists to follow his calculation from within, without absolving or condemning him.
What moves him
It is not greed, it is place. Julien wants to enter a world that has decided not to let him in, and he soon realizes that the age has closed the door through which he would have entered: the uniform made a general by thirty in Napoleon's time, and what is left is the cassock (see the uniform and the cassock).
The word for the method is not his but the narrator's: hypocrisy, and Stendhal writes it without euphemism, aware that it shocks.
Just before that, in the same chapter, comes the explanation of the method:
Does the word surprise the reader? Before arriving at that horrible word, the soul of the young peasant had to travel a long way.
Resentment comes before ambition, and it is born of a domestic comparison, not of political theory: he is beaten at home and sees, outside, people who live well.
Julien himself records, without dramatizing it, the yardstick he will use from then on:
What a difference from me, thought Julien. Only yesterday my father beat me. How happy these rich people are!
Ch. VIII. Julien reading in secret the book that guides him:
When Monsieur de Rênal was in town, which happened often, he dared to read; before long, instead of reading at night, and taking care to hide the lamp under an upturned flower pot, he was able to give himself up to sleep; by day, in the gaps between the children's lessons, he went to the rocks with the book that was his only rule of conduct and the sole object of his rapture. He found in it, at once, happiness, ecstasy and consolation in the hours of discouragement.
Ch. IX. Julien burning the portrait of Napoleon hidden in his mattress:
All my reputation destroyed, annihilated in a second!, thought Julien as he watched the box burn, and my reputation is my only good, it is for its sake that I live… And yet, what a life, my God!
The method, and where he learned it
In Verrières the conquest is a military performance: every gesture toward Madame de Rênal is a campaign, with a duty imposed on oneself and a victory tallied.
Ch. X. After wresting the raise, Julien climbs into the woods and names what he has done in the vocabulary of the chief he admires, war:
I have won a battle, he said to himself as soon as he found himself in the woods, far from men's eyes. I have won a battle!
In the seminary (see the seminary at Besançon) he discovers that merit is not currency, and that exposed intelligence is a risk. It is the hardest lesson in the book and the one that changes the character for good.
Julien realizes that his first steps were mistaken: the science and logic that set him apart in Verrières are worth nothing here, and the moment he understands the rule of the place is in this bitter realization:
So learning is worth nothing here? [...] My only merit consisted in [...] grasping these nonsenses. [...] And how foolish I was to take pride in myself!
In Paris the method is refined to pure coldness, and he begins to use on Mathilde a tactic that is not even his own, borrowed from a third party: showing the opposite of what is expected.
remember the great principle of the age: show yourself the opposite of what people expect of you. Act exactly as you did eight days before being honored with her favors.
Ch. V. What religion meant to Julien:
Julien was surprised; in his mind the idea of religion was undeniably linked to hypocrisy and the hope of making money.
Julien in the seminary, among enemies:
Following the maxims he had set for himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one classmates enemies, the most dangerous of all being Abbé Pirard. A few days later, Julien had to choose a confessor, and a list was presented to him. Oh, my God! What do they take me for?, he thought. Do they think I don't know where I am treading? He chose Abbé Pirard.
Where he contradicts himself
The character would be small if he were consistent. What saves him is that calculation fails precisely at the decisive moments: when Madame de Rênal's letter undoes the marriage and the future that were already in his hands, he does not maneuver to save what remains, shoots her in the church and loses everything at once, and then, in prison, chooses two months of peace with Madame de Rênal instead of any maneuver to escape.
Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy.
In court he does the opposite of what ambition would dictate: instead of defending himself, he accuses, and turns his own trial into an accusation of class.
Gentlemen, I do not have the honor of belonging to your class; you see in me a peasant who rebelled against the baseness of his lot.
Julien in prison, thinking of Madame de Rênal:
After an act like that, how can I persuade her that it is her alone I love? For, after all, did I want to kill her out of ambition or out of love for Mathilde?
Julien in prison:
Yet it is strange that I have known the art of enjoying life only after seeing its end draw near.
The leaky barrel, and the only way out that prison offers
According to Gorgias, Julien's ambition is the leaky barrel: each victory drains away the instant it is completed. He has just become La Vernaye and thinks his romance is over, and two days later the rank of lieutenant already seems too little. His arc, however, is not Mathilde's. She oscillates without leaving her place; he finds the life that is satisfied with the present day only in prison, when the days are numbered, and this is the irony of the book: temperance arrives when there is no longer any future to contend for.
the part of the soul of the uninitiated in which the passions are located, precisely because it is insatiable and retains nothing, he compared to a leaking barrel, for the very reason that it never shows satiety
In Strasbourg, two days after the commission, victory is no longer enough:
He had barely become a lieutenant, through favor and for two days, when he was already calculating that to be commander in chief by thirty, at the latest, like all the great generals, he had to be more than a lieutenant at twenty-three.
The myth serves Socrates to choose between two lives, and temperance is the name of the one that does not leak. Socrates tells Callicles what he would like to show him, thatyou should resolve to change your opinion, and instead of an intemperate and insatiable life, prefer the well-ordered one that is satisfied with what the present day offers
Arthur Schopenhauer's pendulum serves him by contrast. Julien does not know Mathilde's boredom, he knows only lack, and he leaves the oscillation not through the denial of the will, but through the love regained from Madame de Rênal.
Man's life oscillates, like a pendulum, between pain and boredom; these are in reality its two final elements.
His place in the machinery of the Restoration
Julien's Bonapartism is usually read as the eccentricity of a solitary reader, and the novel itself refutes this: the same nostalgia he keeps hidden is what the masons in the cloister say aloud, without having read anything.
Julien overhears by chance, in the garden, the masons of the cloister discussing conscription, and their talk bluntly names what the Restoration closed off:
In the other one's time, now that was something! A mason became an officer, became a general; you could see it happen.
As he walks away, Julien repeats under his breath the same nostalgia as the masons, proof that his Bonapartism is not a peculiarity of reading but a living sentiment in the street:
The only king the people remember!
This changes the nature of the character. To admire Napoleon in 1830 is not a literary taste, it is a forbidden political position, and his hypocrisy ceases to be a flaw of character and becomes the only language available to someone who thinks this way and wants to eat.
In the seminary he discovers that the quarrel is not theological. Abbé Pirard is a Jansenist and Abbé de Frilair is the Congregation's man, and Julien is punished for being on the losing side, with an administrative precision that the book takes care to name.
The reach of the network that arms this revenge is described without euphemism:
that skilled man who had so wisely organized the network of the Congregation of Besançon, and whose letters to Paris made judges, the governor and even the officers of the garrison tremble, should write, in his own hand, the number 198 beside Julien's name.
In Paris, the one who explains his own position to him is Count Altamira, condemned to death in his own country, and the sentence divides the table into two kinds of foreigner.
You and I, at this dinner, will be the only ones without a stain of blood, but I will be despised and almost hated as a bloodthirsty Jacobin monster, and you, despised simply as a man of the people, an intruder in good society.
His career reaches its high point when he becomes a political instrument, and not when he becomes a son-in-law: in chapter XXI of Book II, the Marquis de La Mole takes him to a conspiratorial meeting of which he writes the minutes, and it is the secret note drawn from it, that of an ultraroyalist conspiracy, that Julien memorizes and carries.
I am going to take you to a salon where twelve people will be gathered; you must note down what each one says.
The secret note the marquis drew up, based on the long twenty-six-page minute written by Julien, was not ready until a quarter to five.
The ending is the same machine closing its hand on him. His speech to the jury is an accusation of class, and the jury that hears it had been arranged by Father de Frilair, who counted on six jurors and gave them to understand that the bishopric depended on them. The arrangement was meant to save him, and it is undone by Valenod, Frilair's own agent, who already has his appointment as governor in his pocket and takes the pleasure of condemning his old rival.
Among the twelve people charged with examining whether the crime of my protégé is incontestable and, above all, whether there was premeditation, I count on six friends devoted to my cause, and I have let them understand that it depends on them to carry me to the bishopric.
She told him that on the day of the trial, Mr. de Valenod, having his appointment as governor in his pocket, had dared to mock Father de Frilair and take the pleasure of condemning Julien to death.
Julien is therefore condemned by a court that works exactly like the career he tried to climb. It is the harshest irony in the book, and it appears only when the trial is read as politics and not as a novelistic ending.
Why he reappears outside the book
Julien is the model of the modern social climber, and the discussion he opens has not aged: when hypocrisy is the only language available to someone not born in the right place, is it a flaw of character or a rational response? It is the same ground as Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, with a difference that makes the comparison worthwhile: Raskolnikov kills out of theory and collapses out of conscience, Julien calculates out of position and collapses out of affection.
Trajectory
In chapter 4 of Book I, Julien is seen astride a beam at the sawmill, reading, deaf to his father's call; his father knocks him down with a blow and sends the book into the stream. It is the Memorial of Saint Helena, the book he prizes most, and the scene shows from the start what the family despises in him: reading instead of manual labor.
he looked sadly at the stream where the book had fallen; of all his books it was the one he prized most, the Memorial of Saint Helena.
In chapter 5 of Book I, Julien refuses to be treated as a servant in the mayor's house and, on the way there, the narrator explains how the carpenter's son came to the plan of becoming a priest: seeing that the military career had ceased to be open to a poor man, he exchanges his admiration for Napoleon for a feigned vocation.
The sentence that sums up the axis of the whole book does not use the words "red" and "black", but it embodies them:
Nowadays we see priests of forty drawing a hundred thousand francs a year, three times what Napoleon's famous division generals earned. [...] One must become a priest.
In chapter 10 of Book I, Julien confronts Rênal in front of the servants, says he can live without the job, and wrings out a raise of fifty francs a month. Alone in the woods, he gives this the name of a battle won and wonders whether Napoleon's destiny will be his.
Ch. X. After wresting the raise, Julien climbs into the woods and names what he has done in the vocabulary of the chief he admires, war:
I have won a battle, he said to himself as soon as he found himself in the woods, far from men's eyes. I have won a battle!
In chapter 15 of Book I, Julien tells Madame de Rênal that he will come to her room at two o'clock, spends the night unhappily and goes barefoot down the corridor. Before her, he forgets his plans, falls to his knees and weeps, and she receives him. Back in his room, he reviews his own conduct the way a soldier does after a parade.
Julien's question, on leaving the room, is not rhetorical: it is the first sign that the ambition driving him does not know what to do with its own success. The scene ends not in ecstasy but in a performance review:
And what part? That of a man accustomed to being brilliant with women.
In chapter 16 of Book I, Julien conducts the lunch with the prudence of someone studying a role and, on the second night, thinks less about the performance and finds more happiness. Within a few days he is in love, although his love is still largely ambition.
Within a few days calculation gives way, and the narrator marks the turn with a sentence that sums up the whole book:
His love was still ambition; it was the joy of a poor, unhappy creature, so despised, in possessing a woman so noble and so beautiful.
In chapter 23 of Book I, Julien receives from the curé Abbé Chélan the order to leave within three days, for the seminary at Besançon or for Fouqué's house, refuses the six hundred francs that Rênal offers him, and leaves for the seminary. He returns on the third day for one last night with Madame de Rênal, who receives him icily, like a living corpse.
The last night, which she supposes to be the final one, leaves Julien desolate:
Julien was astonished at the lukewarm embraces of that living corpse; he could think of nothing else for many leagues.
In chapter 25 of Book I, Julien arrives at the seminary at Besançon, stands for ten minutes before Abbé Pirard without being noticed, and faints when the director looks at him. Accepted after the theology examination, he is given cell 103.
Julien's arrival at the seminary, before Abbé Pirard:
The man did not notice Julien's presence. Julien stood motionless in the middle of the room, where the porter had left him, and the porter, on leaving, closed the door. Ten minutes went by; the shabbily dressed man was still writing. Julien's emotion and terror were so great that he felt he might collapse at any moment. A philosopher would have said, perhaps mistakenly: Here is the violent impression of ugliness on a soul made to love what is beautiful.
In chapter 26 of Book I, Julien treats his classmates as enemies and discovers that being first in one's studies is a sin there, and that a face of blind faith is worth more than knowledge. He begins to compose a new personality, down to the way he looks and eats.
Julien realizes that his first steps were mistaken: the science and logic that set him apart in Verrières are worth nothing here, and the moment he understands the rule of the place is in this bitter realization:
So learning is worth nothing here? [...] My only merit consisted in [...] grasping these nonsenses. [...] And how foolish I was to take pride in myself!
In chapter 29 of Book I, Julien becomes, at Pirard's choice, tutor in the New and Old Testaments and shines in the examinations, but Abbé de Frilair writes the number 198 in his own hand beside his name, out of revenge against Pirard. In the end, Julien delivers Pirard's dismissal to the bishop, wins over the prelate by reciting odes of Horace, and Pirard, who receives from the marquis de La Mole a parish near Paris, leaves the seminary.
The reach of the network that arms this revenge is described without euphemism:
that skilled man who had so wisely organized the network of the Congregation of Besançon, and whose letters to Paris made judges, the governor and even the officers of the garrison tremble, should write, in his own hand, the number 198 beside Julien's name.
In chapter 30 of Book I, Julien is recommended by Pirard as the marquis's secretary. Before leaving, he passes through Verrières, enters Madame de Rênal's room at dawn by a ladder and, with calculated coldness, makes her yield by announcing that he is leaving forever. He escapes through the window under gunfire.
Before seeing Madame de Rênal again, Julien sees in Fouqué's warning only the pettiness of a provincial bourgeois:
Julien saw in all of that only the narrowness of mind of a provincial bourgeois. He was finally going to act on the stage of great events.
In the darkness of the room, Julien's love turns into calculation once again:
he had the misfortune of becoming a cold politician, almost as calculating and as cold as when, in the seminary courtyard, he was the target of some cruel prank by a classmate stronger than he was.
In chapter 2 of Book II, Julien is introduced to the marquis de La Mole, is given two days off in Paris, is lodged in an attic room, and is dazzled by the palace library.
Ch. II. In the library of the La Mole palace:
Once the task was finished, Julien dared to approach the books: he nearly went mad with joy on finding an edition of Voltaire.
In chapter 7 of Book II, Julien becomes the marquis's reading companion. When he wears the blue suit, the marquis receives him as an equal, the younger son of the Duke de Chaulnes, and thinks to himself that he treats him like a son, and begins to look after the accounts of his affairs. Sent to London, he learns from Prince Korasoff the rule of always doing the opposite of what is expected, and returns with a decoration.
If one can grow attached to a fine cocker spaniel, thought the marquis, why am I so ashamed of growing attached to this little priest? He is original. I treat him like a son. Well then! Where is the impropriety?
Ch. VII. Prince Korasoff, in London, on the age:
always do the opposite of what they expect you to do. There, on my honor, is the only religion of the age.
In chapter 13 of Book II, Julien, determined to leave for Languedoc, receives from Mathilde a declaration of love. The joy of having beaten the marquis de Croisenois does not keep him from fearing a trap: he has the letter copied and keeps the original, hidden in a Bible, with a servant of Fouqué.
In chapter 16 of Book II, Julien climbs the ladder to Mathilde's room with a pistol in hand, suspecting an ambush, and realizes that he has not defeated Croisenois, only succeeded him. The night is cold: what Julien feels is not the voluptuousness of the soul he had known with Madame de Rênal, it is the keenest joy of ambition.
It was not, it is true, that voluptuousness of the soul he had sometimes found with Madame de Rênal. Nothing tender was there in his feelings in that first moment. It was the keenest joy of ambition, and Julien was above all ambitious.
In chapter 21 of Book II, the marquis tests Julien's memory and gives him a mission: to note down what is said at a secret meeting and take a summary to an important figure. It is the first time the marquis entrusts him with a political mission, and he asks for no oath of secrecy, because he trusts him.
I am going to take you to a salon where twelve people will be gathered; you must note down what each one says.
In chapter 23 of Book II, the meeting ends at dawn: the secret note the marquis drafts from the twenty-six-page minutes written by Julien is not ready until a quarter to five, and Julien memorizes it in order to carry it.
The secret note the marquis drew up, based on the long twenty-six-page minute written by Julien, was not ready until a quarter to five.
In chapter 24 of Book II, Julien, rejected by Mathilde, meets Prince Korasoff in Strasbourg, who gives him the recipe for winning her back: see Mathilde every day without seeming cold or angry, show himself the opposite of what she expects, court without any sign of passion a woman in her circle, and keep his ardent passion for the letters to that other woman, which the prince supplies ready-made. The chosen target is the Marechale de Fervaques, a devout widow who frequents the La Mole house.
Remember the great principle of the age: show yourself the opposite of what people expect of you. Act exactly as you did eight days before being honored with her favors.
I have here with me six bundles of handwritten love letters. There is a letter for every kind of woman, including the one of the highest virtue.
In chapter 26 of Book II, back in Paris, Julien puts Korasoff's plan into practice: he begins to frequent the Marechale de Fervaques and, in conversations at the La Mole house, speaks well, but only to reach Mathilde's soul.
In chapter 31 of Book II, Julien decides to frighten Mathilde and makes her wait in the library. When she offers to leave with him, he replies in a glacial tone that there is no guarantee he will love her for eight days.
TO FRIGHTEN HER, he exclaimed suddenly, flinging the book far away. The enemy will obey me only in proportion as I frighten him, so he will not dare to despise me.
In chapter 33 of Book II, the marquis, on learning of the pregnancy, heaps insults on Julien. Julien leaves a suicide note, goes into the garden and discovers that he loves life and must keep it for the sake of his child.
But, by God, I love life… I must keep it for my son.
In chapter 34 of Book II, Julien sees Mathilde almost every day, hidden in Pirard's presbytery, while the marquis holds out. He then receives a lieutenant's commission in the hussars in the name of the chevalier Julien Sorel de La Vernaye, and concludes that his romance is over.
After all, he thought, my romance is over, and the merit is entirely my own.
In chapter 35 of Book II, Julien, a lieutenant in Strasbourg, already calculates the next rank. Summoned to Paris by Mathilde, he reads the letter in which Madame de Rênal denounces him as a poor and ambitious man, leaves Mathilde in the street, goes to Verrières and shoots twice at Madame de Rênal during Mass.
In Strasbourg, two days after the commission, victory is no longer enough:
He had barely become a lieutenant, through favor and for two days, when he was already calculating that to be commander in chief by thirty, at the latest, like all the great generals, he had to be more than a lieutenant at twenty-three.
Julien no longer recognized her so well; he fired once and missed; he fired a second time, and she fell.
In chapter 36 of Book II, arrested in the church itself, Julien tells the judge that he premeditated the crime and deserves death. Only when the jailer tells him that Madame de Rênal did not die does he fall to his knees, weeping, and begin to repent.
Only then did Julien begin to repent of the crime he had committed.
In chapter 39 of Book II, in prison, Julien's ambition dies and the memory of Vergy and Verrières takes its place. Mathilde's extravagant devotion wearies him, and he asks her to leave their son with a wet nurse in Verrières, under Madame de Rênal's watch.
Ambition was dead in his breast, another passion had risen from the ashes; he called it remorse for having shot Madame de Rênal.
In chapter 40 of Book II, Julien lives in the tower with a tranquility that leaves him indifferent even to Mathilde's presence. He refuses to plead jealousy as a defense and spends his last days smoking cigars on the terrace and thinking of Vergy.
Julien in prison:
Yet it is strange that I have known the art of enjoying life only after seeing its end draw near.
In chapter 41 of Book II, Julien lets the lawyer speak and, at the end of the session, rises and makes a speech to the jury in which he admits to premeditation and says that they want to punish him for his origin. The jury declares him guilty unanimously, and he is sentenced to death.
Gentlemen, I do not have the honor of belonging to your class; you see in me a peasant who rebelled against the baseness of his lot.
Julien before the sentence:
Only these words: I judge myself justly condemned.
In chapter 42 of Book II, taken to the condemned cell, Julien refuses to appeal the sentence, because he now feels brave enough to die without provoking laughter, and does not know whether he will still have that courage in two months.
Julien in prison, thinking of Madame de Rênal:
After an act like that, how can I persuade her that it is her alone I love? For, after all, did I want to kill her out of ambition or out of love for Mathilde?
In chapter 43 of Book II, Julien wakes with tears in his hand and discovers that it is Madame de Rênal, who has come to beg him to appeal. The two forgive each other, and he agrees to appeal if she swears she will not attempt her own life. Three days later, her husband summons her back to Verrières. Humiliated by the scheming priest who prays in the street, at the prison door, Julien ends up receiving him and, a quarter of an hour after he enters, feels fear of death for the first time.
Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy.
In chapter 45 of Book II, Julien refuses the conversion his confessor advises as a means of obtaining clemency, spends his days with Madame de Rênal without any self-regard, and dies without affectation, under a beautiful sun. Before that, he demands from her the oath that she will live for Mathilde's son.
Julien had no self-regard whatsoever before her, and told her all his weaknesses.