The Little Corporal who made himself Emperor, rudely gesturing aside the Pope and putting the crown on his own head, is Julien’s consuming passion—his only true and lasting one. As tutor in the household of M. de Rênal, he keeps a portrait of Napoleon hidden in his mattress; Mme de Rênal, made aware of the secret, thinks it is a portrait of his mistress, and her instinct is not so wrong. To get ready for the evening when he will need all his courage to seize her hand and hold it, he has devoted an entire day to rereading the Mémorial—apparently he has procured a second copy or else Stendhal forgot. Shortly after this episode, he climbs all alone by a goat path to a rocky peak; standing on a huge crag, he spies a bird of prey, a sparrow-hawk, far above him silently wheeling in immense circles and ponders as he watches its still, powerful movements against the sky: “He envied that force, that loneliness. Such had been the destiny of Napoleon; would it one day be his own?” The idea of Napoleon links itself naturally with images of height and isolation, and it is a reprise, surely, of the Napoleonic idea that at the very end of the novel Julien should choose a mountain grotto for his tomb. Death and transfiguration.
This passion of his, amounting to total identification, is a love, however, that dares not speak its name. Wherever he goes among the rich and mean-spirited, he is beset by enemies, his own and the Emperor’s—it is the same. He must hear him referred to as the “usurper” (“l’usurpateur”) or as “Buonaparté,” a pronunciation of the Corsican family name that brings out the wop in him. They will not speak of him as “Napoleon,” which is a reminder of his imperial title—only kings and Emperors are known by their Christian names; thus Louis XVI was guillotined as “Louis Capet.” In this hateful atmosphere, Julien is obliged to be careful. Wary of M. de Rênal’s tours of inspection of the household, he burns the portrait he has been keeping for safety in his mattress. He must read the “inspired book” at night in secret, hiding the lamp under an inverted vase, and speak of his idol with horror, like the rest of the company, whenever the topic comes up. That is the provinces, but the situation is not much better in Paris, in the household of the Marquis de la Mole.
It is clear that Stendhal views the “inspired book” and Julien’s raptures over it with amusement. Here is one of the points of difference between author and hero. Julien would hardly think of the Mémorial as his “Koran”; that is the author’s dry contribution. Stendhal himself was evidently of two minds about Napoleon. Yet if he had to choose, he would certainly prefer the idolators of the Emperor—Julien, the old Surgeon-Major, Fouqué—to his insensate disparagers. The motives of the former seem comparatively innocent.
What Stendhal actually thought of the martyr of St. Helena is not on record, so far as I know. But there is no doubt that he had been drawn to the younger Napoleon, the carrier of the ideas of the French Revolution, de-throner of archaic tyrannies, “breath of fresh air” blowing through the stuffy salon of Europe. Stendhal was no revolutionary, but he was very susceptible to being thrilled. The trees of liberty springing up in public squares in the wake of the victorious armies, the dancing of the carmagnole, like a welcome march, by joyous populations—all this struck a chord of “enthusiasm” to which he always responded. Moreover he had been present during the days of the first delirium. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”
The explosion of joy set off in Milan by the liberating armies is described in the opening chapter of The Charterhouse of Parma, so memorably that I do not need to quote from it. Milan is drunk on the elixir of freedom, untasted since the Middle Ages, and Fabrice del Dongo is the child of those intoxicating weeks. I am recalling that paean to put it in the gloomy context of The Red and the Black. It cannot be an accident that the history Julien learned, the only history he knew, was precisely the history of that pure, still undefiled period. Here, briefly, the two novels, otherwise so unlike each other, join. From the Italian campaign of 1796, in which the veteran Surgeon-Major had won his croix de guerre, the carmagnole dated, having had its fiery baptism four years earlier at Carmagnola, a town of Piedmont occupied by the revolutionaries. The war dance or dance of liberty came home with the armies, and the music, in double time, served the troops of the Revolution as a marching song. When Napoleon became First Consul, he forbade the playing of the tune.
This marked the end of the honeymoon. The tempering of Stendhal’s own ardor may date from the Russian campaign, in which he served; there trees of liberty were noticeable by their absence, and the army of freedom had turned into a war machine. Or it may have had more to do with the onset of middle age—he was forty-seven when he published The Red and the Black—than with any reasoned reassessment of Napoleon as the bearer of glad tidings to the peoples of the world. It perhaps means something in our context that the young Fabrice’s experience of the battle of Waterloo is simply one of utter, aimless confusion; this child conceived in the brio of the victorious Revolution is unaware of being present at a tragedy of epic proportions, unaware, in fact, of being present at a battle of any kind.