7.26 Stendhal — Le Rouge et le Noir — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read two chapters from the opening of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir , about 2,700 words: a small town in the east of France, its proud mayor, and a carpenter's son who would rather read than work. Recognise Stendhal's irony: a narrator who seems to describe and admire, while making fun of vanity and money. Follow the narrator's game with the reader: vous , the traveller who arrives in town and sees what the narrator shows. Meet Julien Sorel, one of the great ambitious heroes of the French novel. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Ce ne sont pas cependant les scies à bois qui ont enrichi cette petite ville. It is not, however, the sawmills that have made this little town rich. Chacun de ces marteaux fabrique, chaque jour, je ne sais combien de milliers de clous. Each of these hammers makes, every day, I know not how many thousands of nails. les petits morceaux de fer qui sont rapidement transformés en clous the little pieces of iron that are quickly turned into nails Un torrent, qui se précipite de la montagne, traverse Verrières avant de se jeter dans le Doubs A mountain stream, rushing down from the mountain, runs through Verrières before flowing into the Doubs Avec quel ton de suffisance il parlerait du précepteur de ses enfants ! With what a self-satisfied tone he would speak of his children's tutor! Enfin, malgré son âge, celui-ci sauta lestement sur l’arbre soumis à l’action de la scie, et de là sur la poutre transversale qui soutenait le toit. At last, despite his age, he jumped nimbly onto the trunk being sawn, and from there onto the cross-beam that held up the roof. Prerequisites : 7.25 — this reading follows 7.25 Reading . You need the politics and economy words of 5.15 Vocabulary and 5.17 Vocabulary : le maire , l'industrie , le revenu . About this text Note: this text contains a beating. Stendhal is the pen name of Henri Beyle (1783–1842), who served in Napoleon's armies, lived for years in Italy, and wrote novels that were little read in his lifetime and are now among the most admired in French. Le Rouge et le Noir , subtitled Chronique de 1830 , appeared in 1830. Its hero, Julien Sorel, is the son of a sawmill owner in the small town of Verrières , in Franche-Comté . Clever, proud, a worshipper of Napoleon, he knows that after 1815 a poor young man can no longer rise through the army, the red, and chooses the Church, the black. That is the usual reading of the title, which Stendhal never explained. The first chapter, Une petite ville , presents Verrières and its mayor, Monsieur de Rênal , who owns the nail factory, builds walls to show his wealth, and has bought land from old Sorel at a high price. In the fourth chapter, Un père et un fils , the mayor goes to the sawmill to offer old Sorel a post for his son Julien: tutor to his children. Old Sorel goes to find Julien, who is not watching the saw. The text here gives chapters 1 and 4 of the first book, about 2,700 words, in the edition published in Paris by Michel Lévy frères in 1854, as transcribed in French Wikisource. The chapters between them are left out and marked […]. The short epigraphs at the head of each chapter are not given. Reading Stendhal The traveller. The narrator guides vous , an imaginary traveller arriving in Verrières : vous a frappé en entrant à Verrières . This makes the description feel like a visit, and lets the narrator point out what the traveller would not understand alone. Irony. Stendhal seems to praise, and mocks. The town's industry is admirable; the young girls who feed the hammers are fraîches et jolies ; the mayor's walls are la récompense de la science of Monsieur de Rênal . Read the sentence twice: behind the praise is a portrait of vanity, where respect is bought with walls and stone. Short and clear. Stendhal wrote that, to find the right tone, he read a few pages of the Civil Code each morning; he admired its dry, exact style. His sentences are short, his vocabulary plain, and his effects come from what he chooses to tell. Interior monologue. Chapter 4 opens inside Monsieur de Rênal 's head, in his own words ( je , moi ): Avec quel ton de suffisance il parlerait du précepteur de ses enfants ! Here il is not the mayor but his rival, le directeur du dépôt : the mayor hires a tutor so that the rival cannot boast of one. Reading it a second time, part by part The town. Verrières on its hillside, the Doubs, the torrent that drives the sawmills, and the nail factory with its twenty hammers. The mayor. Monsieur de Rênal , the owner of the nail factory, with his greying hair, his grey clothes and his self-satisfied air, and the walls and terraced gardens of his house. Old Sorel. How old Sorel, a cunning peasant, made the mayor pay dearly for a piece of land and moved his sawmill to a better place on the river. The mayor's plan. After the omission: Monsieur de Rênal walks to the sawmill to engage Julien as a tutor, thinking of the prestige it will bring him over his rival. The sawmill. A description of the water-driven saw. Old Sorel looks for Julien and finds him astride a beam under the roof, reading. Two blows: the book falls into the stream, and Julien almost falls into the machine. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. The Red and the Black The little town of Verrières may pass for one of the prettiest in Franche-Comté . Its white houses, with their pointed roofs of red tiles, spread over the slope of a hill, whose slightest curves are marked by clumps of sturdy chestnut trees. The Doubs flows a few hundred feet below its fortifications, built long ago by the Spaniards and now in ruins. Verrières is sheltered on the north side by a high mountain; it is one of the ranges of the Jura. The broken peaks of the Verra are cover