Le Rouge Et Le Noir: Chronique Du Xixe Siècle

In post-Napoleonic France, a young man from nowhere decides he will not remain nowhere. Handsome, brilliant, and seething with ambition, Julien Sorel masters the art of appearing what he is not: a devout seminarist, a calculated seducer, a social climber with no discernible limits. Stendhal maps the terrain of Julien's rise with surgical precision first through the provincial town of Verrières, where he insinuates himself into the household of Mayor de Rênal, and then into the glittering salons of Parisian aristocracy. But Julien's greatest enemy is not the corrupt society he exploits it is himself. The emotions he believes he has transcended keep breaking through: love that humiliates him, pride that destroys him, a longing for authenticity in a world built on performance. The Red and the Black is a ruthlessly funny, deeply unsettling novel about what happens when a man decides that feelings are weaknesses and then discovers they are the only things that can ruin him.