Julien’s course, from the moment we meet him, is determined by ideas. In this he is different from Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma and less attractive. He is programmed, like a just-invented computer, by an idea of duty to himself. That idea—not inclination—compels him to touch Mme de Rênal’s hand for the first time and retain it in his grasp when she seeks to draw it away; soon he owes it to himself as the logical next stage to enter her bedroom and possess her. The same strict duty prevails in his relations with Mlle de la Mole, and always he is surprised by his failure to feel the appropriate emotions— the emotions he has learned from books that he ought to feel. As his tenseness gradually relaxes with Mme de Rênal, he does, to his joy, experience something recognizable to him as passion, even a devotion of the body in which his mind is not involved. This cannot happen with Mathilde de la Mole, who is too much like him. She too has been led, or misled, by books: Manon Lescaut, La Nouvelle Hélo?se, Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Having imbibed Voltaire as well as amorous literature, she has hopes for Julien as a “new Danton.” Each is imitating an accepted model—an idea—of passionate love, with disappointing results. Noting his lack of happiness during their first tryst, Julien has recourse to reason, which tells him he should be happy, listing the reasons. As if to prime the pump, he has just recited some sentences from La Nouvelle Hélo?se to her.
The discrepancy between actual feeling and expected feeling is a leading motif here as in most of Stendhal. One of Julien’s social assets is a prodigious memory; he first makes his mark at the seminary in Besan?on by being able to recite any passage from the Bible on demand. But to know it by heart when he has not taken it to heart is a monstrosity. He has not a trace of religion in him. Careful observation has pointed to the church as the sole career open to his talents, and the disparity of pious outside and impious inside gives him, in his eternal black, the aspect of a hypocrite. That, in the end, is the charge he levels against himself in the solitude of his prison cell, and he is ready to go to the scaffold to refute it. His duty to some kind of consistency in himself forbids him to make use of Mathilde’s ultraist connections and petition the detested crown for mercy.
Like Lucien de Rubempré, born Chardon, Julien is a parvenu. Or—the English word sits on him better—an upstart. And Stendhal is able to feel a half-tender admiration for him as an entirely self-made product. There is pardon, moreover, for Julien given, as it were, in advance of sin, in the picture Stendhal draws of the milieu—a duly objective picture that demonstrates that ambition and calculation are not so unnatural here as they might appear. Taken around the town of Verrières, we see the brutal necessity compelling him to which Julien has conformed his own will. He is self-made, but the tools his will had to work with were of Verrières manufacture.
Born under-privileged, the son of a sawmill operator (“the carpenter’s son” is a gibe he hears too often on his upward-mobile course), delicate, pale, slender, hated by father and brothers, he likes to fancy himself as a foundling. His bookishness and mental gifts make him an object of general suspicion and enforce him in his sense of isolation. He is an idea in his own mind seeking recognition and repelling it with ferocity when he meets it. His poverty and low birth have made him proud, exacting, and distrustful. An insane pride is his undoing, and this insanity, which goes along with his ambition and at the same time constantly thwarts it, is what Stendhal respects in him. Julien is too proud to serve and too proud, finally, even to be self-serving like the common trucklers of his time. His duty to himself contains a higher duty, to the self as pure principled idea.
I have often thought that in plotting the steps of Julien’s career Stendhal intended a wicked analogy with the career of Jesus. The “son of a carpenter,” sure that his nominal “father” cannot be his real father, who, socially speaking, is on high (the notion of being the by-blow of a nobleman gradually gains hold of Julien’s mind), our hero has his John the Baptist in his only friend, Fouqué, with whom early in his career he sojourns in the wilderness, at Fouqué’s little sawmill up the River Doubs—Jordan. Like Jesus, Julien is surrounded by faithful women—Mathilde and Mme de Rênal, two sorrowing Marys; he is crucified (the guillotine) and buried. Mathilde and the loyal Fouqué accompany his body to the tomb, a grotto of Julien’s own choosing high in the Jura mountains which Mathilde in due course will have embellished, like an early-Christian basilica, with Italian marble sculptures. Meanwhile, in the grotto “magnificently illuminated by an infinite number of tapers,” the last rites are sung by twenty priests, and all the inhabitants of the little mountain villages, attracted by the strange ceremony, have followed the cortège. Christ’s burial and apotheosis seem to have telescoped.