The Red and the Black
The events in the order the book tells them.
Book I
- Chapter 11
Verrières, the town of profit
The novel opens in Verrières, a town in the Franche-Comté dominated by Mayor Rênal, owner of a nail factory. To complete the garden, he bought the plot where old Sorel's sawmill stood.
- Chapter 42
The book fallen into the stream
Rênal proposes to the carpenter Sorel that his son Julien be tutor to his children. Julien, found reading at the top of a beam, takes a beating from his father, and the Memorial of Saint Helena falls into the stream.
- Chapter 53
The place at the table
Julien refuses to be a servant and asks with whom he will eat, which disconcerts his father. After two hours of haggling, the carpenter wrests four hundred francs a year from Rênal, paid in advance every month.
- Chapter 94
The hand under the linden tree
Julien gives himself until ten o'clock to take Madame de Rênal's hand, or he will go upstairs and kill himself. When the clock strikes, he takes it, she withdraws it, and at last the hand stays.
- Chapter 105
A battle won
In the children's room, Julien confronts Rênal, says he can live without the job, and wrings from Rênal a promise of fifty francs a month, instead of the four hundred a year agreed. Alone in the woods, he calls the feat a battle won.
- Chapter 126
Fouqué's offer
Julien climbs the mountain and visits his friend Fouqué, a timber merchant, who offers him a partnership worth four thousand francs a year. Julien refuses, claiming that his vocation for the sacred ministry does not allow him to accept.
- Chapter 157
The crowing of the rooster
Julien forces himself to go to Madame de Rênal's room at two in the morning. He goes barefoot and trembling, falls in tears at her feet, and she, who thought herself condemned to hell, throws herself into his arms.
- Chapter 208
The anonymous letter
An anonymous letter reaches Rênal. Madame de Rênal devises the plan: Julien will cut words out of a book to forge another letter, so that her husband attributes the first one to Valenod, the director of the poorhouse and his rival.
- Chapter 239
Order to leave
The maid Élisa, rejected by Julien, confesses his affair with her mistress to the two curés. Abbé Chélan demands that within three days he leave for the seminary at Besançon or for Fouqué's house.
- Chapter 2610
The seminary at Besançon
Among three hundred and twenty-one classmates, Julien discovers that being first in one's studies is a sin and that a face of blind faith is worth more than learning, and he sets about composing an entirely new personality.
- Chapter 2811
A procession
On the feast of Corpus Christi, in the cathedral that Julien helped decorate, a woman kneeling in the confessional faints on hearing his steps, and only then does Julien recognize Madame de Rênal; Madame Derville, her friend, dismisses him harshly.
- Chapter 2912
The first promotion
About to leave the seminary, Abbé Pirard appoints Julien tutor of the New and Old Testaments. In the examinations, an examiner in the service of Vicar General Frilair sets a trap for him, and Frilair drops him to 198th place on the list.
- Chapter 3013
The recommendation to Paris
Pirard refuses the post of secretary that the Marquis de La Mole offers him and recommends Julien. The marquis accepts the young man and sends a thousand francs for the trip to Paris.
Book II
- Chapter 414
The La Mole salon
Julien notes the names and character of those who frequent the marquis's salon, where the rule is never to speak of politics. Behind the marquise's armchair, Mathilde presides over a circle of young noblemen.
- Chapter 915
The Duke de Retz's ball
At the ball, Mathilde hears Julien tell Count Altamira, a liberal sentenced to death in his own country, that Danton was the real man, and begins to follow the conversation of the two.
- Chapter 1016
The head of La Mole
Julien sees Mathilde dressed in deep mourning on April 30, the day on which her ancestor Boniface de La Mole was beheaded in 1574, the man Queen Margaret is said to have loved.
- Chapter 1217
A heroic love
Convinced that she loves Julien, Mathilde sets aside the idea of an ordinary love. She imagines a love without contract or notary, like Queen Margaret's love for Boniface de La Mole.
- Chapter 1618
The staircase
Suspecting an ambush, Julien climbs a staircase to Mathilde's room, pistol in hand. She carries out her resolve to surrender herself, and he feels more astonishment than tenderness.
- Chapter 2019
Calculated contempt
Mathilde soon regrets the surrender. In the library she declares that she no longer loves him, and humiliates him with calculated contempt while he tries in vain to justify himself.
- Chapter 2320
The secret note
At a secret meeting, a cardinal argues that no armed party can be formed without the clergy. Julien takes notes on the session in writing, memorizes the four pages of the secret note that the marquis drafts from the minutes, and recites them to a duke, the great personage for whom it is intended, in an inn room.
- Chapter 2421
Korasoff's recipe
In Strasbourg, Julien confesses to the Russian prince Korasoff that he is in love and rejected. He receives a plan and fifty-three ready-made love letters, to copy out for a devout lady, the Marechale de Fervaques.
- Chapter 3022
The box at the Opéra Bouffe
Jealous of the marechale, Mathilde asks Julien in the library, weeping, whether she has stolen his heart. He applies Korasoff's lesson, speaks little, and it is he who demands guarantees that her love will last beyond two days. That night, from the marechale's box, he sees Mathilde in a box in the third row, her eyes full of tears.
- Chapter 3323
The hell of weakness
Pregnant, Mathilde wants to tell her father. The marquis, furious at the idea of seeing his daughter called Madame Sorel and not duchess, insults Julien, who writes a suicide note and discovers in the garden that he loves life.
- Chapter 3424
The knight of La Vernaye
Giving way, the marquis gives Julien lands and sends a commission as lieutenant of hussars to the chevalier Julien Sorel de La Vernaye. He must leave for Strasbourg within twenty-four hours.
- Chapter 3525
The shot in the church
Madame de Rênal's letter to the marquis undoes the match. Julien rushes to Verrières, buys pistols and, during Mass, fires twice at the woman he loved most.
- Chapter 3826
Mathilde in the tower
Dressed as a peasant woman, Mathilde enters the tower where Julien is imprisoned and proposes that they die together. Then she seeks out the vicar general Frilair, on whom everything in Besançon depends, to try to save him.
- Chapter 4127
The speech to the jury
At the court, Julien admits the premeditation and says that they want to punish him for his origins. The jury, in which Valenod sits, finds him guilty, and the death sentence is pronounced.
- Chapter 4328
Never so happy
In the condemned men's cell, Madame de Rênal comes to beg him to appeal. The two forgive each other, and Julien, who no longer calculates anything, says he will never be as happy as he is there.
- Chapter 4529
Julien's death
Julien refuses a showy conversion and forbids Madame de Rênal to ask the king for clemency. He dies without affectation; Fouqué manages to bury him in the grotto above Verrières, and Mathilde follows the procession with his head on her knees; Madame de Rênal dies three days later.