WHEN SPEAKING OF THE Red and the Black, I said that Julien Sorel patterned his conduct on ideas he had got out of books. In his love-making, for instance, his model was La Nouvelle Hélo?se, and he was disappointed by not feeling the transports Rousseau had led him to expect. But—on purpose—I failed to mention one book, the book that inspired him in all his actions, the book he took for his Bible, that he is immersed in when we first catch sight of him seated astride a roof beam in his father’s carpentry shed, oblivious of the mechanical water-saw on a platform a few feet beneath him whose movement he is supposed to be watching and of the shouts of his approaching father. Surprised by his parent in the truant act of reading, he receives a heavy blow that causes the book to fall into the millstream below. A cuff on the head follows, half stunning him. Bleeding and tearful, Julien returns to his place by the saw, but the tears in his eyes are less for the physical pain than for the loss of the book he adores. Jerked to ground level by an iron hook (used for knocking walnuts off a tree), and chased toward the house, sadly he watches the stream—which in fact is the common gutter—that is carrying the book away. It is the Mémorial de Ste. Hélène—a semi-spurious collection of thought gems claimed to have been taken down verbatim from Napoleon’s conversation during the years of confinement on St. Helena.
In this first telling glimpse, Julien’s whole nature and the forces operating it, in a regular action like the sawmill’s, are compressed into two and a quarter pages. We have been shown the play of vectors that determines his direction; what follows will be development and amplification. Before the brief chapter is over, we learn that the cruelly lost volume was part of Julien’s legacy from an old Surgeon-Major of Napoleon’s armies who had taught the peasant boy Latin and what he himself knew of history, i.e., the history of the Italian campaign of 1796. The Latin and the bit of history are all Julien needs to know to set him in motion. From the veteran he has inherited, besides, the cross of the Legion of Honor, a collection of the bulletins of the Grand Army, and Rousseau’s Confessions. Those three books and the cross comprise Julien’s hope chest.
Multiply Julien and you have the tragi-comedy of France under the Restoration. For lowborn youths fired by ambition, Napoleon was an upstart figure raised to the point of sublimity. His career offered hope and food for thought to every gifted outsider; the fact that the career had been meteoric could not take away its glory or discourage imitation. On the contrary, the precipitous fall of Napoleon from the zenith—did he fall or was he pushed?—added to the bitterness and sense of injustice among the disadvantaged that were in themselves incentives for a new try. Had Napoleon died Emperor rather than prisoner and outlaw, his heirs would have been heirs of his well-cared-for body rather than his soul. There is a vengeful element in Julien’s determination to rise. He will show the bien pensants who wrong his hero that despite them Napoleon lives on, like the hydra; Julien will be a fierce new head poking up among them that mistakenly they will try to stroke.