Red and Black (English Original)

"The Red and the Black" is a landmark novel published in 1830 by the French critical realist master Stendhal. The subtitle "Chronicle of 1830" refers directly to the drastic changes in French society before the July Revolution. Through the tragic rise of Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter, the novel reveals the joint strangulation of common people by the feudal nobles and the Catholic Church during the Bourbon Restoration. Julien uses his extraordinary memory as a weapon, and is trapped in two paths of promotion: "red" (military merit) and "black" (ecclesiastical robes): first, he works as a tutor in the mayor de Renal's family, and develops a forbidden love intertwined with lust and calculation with the mayor's wife; later, he enters the Besançon seminary and pretends to be pious, wandering around the residence of the Marquis de Murre in Paris, winning the love of the Marquis's daughter Mathilde, but his future is ruined because of a gunshot wound to his old lover. Stendhal used a psychological microscope to depict the mental tearing of careerists under the iron curtain of class. His "dialectics of the soul" pioneered modern psychological novels, and the spatial contrast between the city of Verrières and the Paris Salon became a model specimen of social anatomy in the 19th century.