The novel ends with Julien Sorel's execution in Besançon and with two opposite farewells: Mathilde de La Mole buries her lover's head with her own hands in a grotto in the mountains of the Jura, and Madame de Rênal dies three days later, embracing her children.
After the shot in the church at Verrières, Julien confesses the crime to the judge and awaits death. At the trial, instead of defending himself, he accuses the jurors of wanting to punish in him the poor young men who dare to rise, and the jury declares him guilty of premeditated murder. At first he refuses to appeal. Madame de Rênal, who survived the shot in the shoulder, goes to the prison to beg him to appeal. He agrees to sign the appeal, the two forgive each other, and Julien tells her: "I will never have been so happy."
In his last days he lives on this love and takes stock of what ambition took from him. He tells her that he could have been happy on the walks through the woods of Vergy, but that ambition carried his soul far away. He asks to rest in the small grotto on the mountain that overlooks Verrières, where ambition once inflamed his chest. On the day of the execution, under a beautiful sun, he feels brave.
The ending sets the two loves of the book side by side. Mathilde reenacts the legend of Boniface de La Mole and Queen Margaret, with candles, priests, and coins thrown to the people; Madame de Rênal keeps her promise not to attempt her own life and dies in silence. One love produces ceremony, the other produces consequence, and the narrator does not say which is worth more.