Symbols

The Memorial of Saint Helena The book of the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte that Julien Sorel keeps as the object he prizes most in the world, and one of the three works for which, according to the narrator, he would let himself be killed. It was the old chief surgeon, a veteran of... The uniform and the cassock The two colors of the title are read as two careers: the red is the uniform, which made a man a general at thirty in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the black is the cassock, what remained after the Restoration for anyone who wants to rise without being... The church of Verrières The church of Julien Sorel's town, where the novel places the omen at the beginning and the crime at the end. The seminary at Besançon The seminary to which Julien Sorel goes on the orders of Abbé Chélan, after the anonymous letter. It is there that hypocrisy stops being a provincial trait and becomes a system of training, and Julien learns to pretend by method, not by impulse. The La Mole salon The salon of the mansion of the Marquis de La Mole in Paris, where the marquise receives. If the province measures everything by money, Paris measures by birth, boredom and manners, and the weapon that served in Verrières buys no place there. The severed head The head of Boniface de La Mole, ancestor of Mathilde de La Mole's family, executed in 1574 over a political intrigue, and the legend that Queen Margaret of Navarre, his lover, buried it with her own hands. At the end of the novel, the head is that of Julien...