Le rouge et le noir
Julien Sorel is a clever, proud carpenter's son in Restoration France who despises the provincial world he was born into and burns to rise above it. Armed with a prodigious memory for scripture and a cold talent for calculation, he schemes his way upward — first as tutor in the household of the mayor of Verrières, where he seduces Madame de Rênal, and later in aristocratic Paris, where he entangles himself with the willful Mathilde de la Mole.
Stendhal's great novel of ambition anatomizes a young man torn between genuine feeling and relentless self-advancement, and a society in which hypocrisy is the price of every door. Psychologically acute and mordantly ironic, The Red and the Black is one of the founding works of the realist novel.
An ambitious carpenter's son determined to rise above his station.
The proud aristocrat Julien becomes entangled with in Paris.
The mayor's wife, whom Julien seduces as a household tutor.
