Book One, Chapters I–V: Verrières

Truth, bitter truth. — Danton

The little town of Verrières may pass for one of the prettiest in Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their pointed roofs of red tiles spread over the slope of a hill, whose least undulations are marked by clumps of vigorous chestnut trees. The Doubs flows some hundreds of feet below its fortifications, built long ago by the Spaniards, and now in ruins.

Verrières is sheltered on the north by a high mountain, one of the branches of the Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra are covered with snow from the first cold days of October. A torrent rushes down from the mountain, passes through Verrières before throwing itself into the Doubs, and sets in motion a great number of sawmills. It is an industry of a very simple kind, which brings a certain comfort to most of the inhabitants, who are more peasants than townsmen. But it is not the sawmills that have made this little town rich. It is to the manufacture of printed calicoes, called "Mulhouse prints," that it owes the general prosperity which, since the fall of Napoleon, has refaced the fronts of almost all the houses in Verrières.

Hardly has one entered the town than one is deafened by the din of a noisy machine, terrible in appearance: twenty heavy hammers, falling with a noise that shakes the pavement, and raised by a wheel which the water of the torrent drives. Each of these hammers makes, every day, I do not know how many thousands of nails. If, entering Verrières, the traveller asks to whom this fine nail factory belongs, he is told, in a drawling accent: "Eh! It belongs to Monsieur the Mayor."

The mayor, M. de Rênal, was a man of about fifty, tall, with a grave air, grey-haired, decorated with several orders. At first sight he seemed handsome; but on a second look one saw in him a certain self-satisfaction mixed with a narrowness and lack of imagination. He belonged to an old family; he had made a fortune, and he had built himself a fine house, with gardens enclosed by walls. In Franche-Comté, the more walls a man builds, the more he acquires the respect of his neighbours.

Stendhal mocks the provincial worship of money — "bringing in revenue" (rapporter du revenu) is the supreme value of Verrières.

The mayor had a public walk built along the hillside, the "Cours de la Fidélité," above the valley; and he had the great plane trees that line it pruned so savagely every year that they could hardly grow. Of all the men in the town, only the old curé, M. Chélan, and a few others protested.

M. Chélan was eighty years old, but had the health and the character of iron. He had recently shown round the prison and the poorhouse a visitor from Paris, M. Appert, an inspector of prisons, without asking the leave of the director of the poorhouse, M. Valenod — a man of wealth, vulgar and brazen, who was rumoured to steal from the inmates' rations. For this, M. Chélan was in danger of being removed.

The Sawyer's Son

M. de Rênal had decided to take a tutor for his children: it would give him an advantage over M. Valenod, who had bought two fine Norman horses and had no tutor. He thought of the younger son of old Sorel, the sawyer, who was said to be a prodigy of learning, and who was studying for the priesthood with the curé.

Old Sorel had a sawmill on the bank of the stream. Approaching it, he called loudly for his son Julien. No one answered. He saw only his elder sons, giants, squaring trunks of fir with heavy axes. He went into the shed, and found Julien, instead of watching the saw as he should have been, sitting astride one of the beams of the roof, reading. Nothing was more hateful to old Sorel; he could perhaps have forgiven Julien his slender build, unsuited to heavy work and so different from his elder brothers; but this passion for reading he hated — he could not read himself.

A violent blow sent the book Julien was holding flying into the stream; a second, just as violent, on the head, almost made him lose his balance. He would have fallen twelve or fifteen feet among the levers of the working machine, which would have crushed him, had not his father caught him with his left hand as he fell.

The book was Julien's favourite: the "Memorial of Saint Helena," the recollections of Napoleon in exile.

Julien keeps hidden a portrait of Napoleon, and reads in secret the Memorial, the bulletins of the Grand Army and Rousseau's "Confessions" — the three books that make up his whole library.

Julien was a small young man of eighteen or nineteen, weak in appearance, with irregular but delicate features, and an aquiline nose. His large black eyes, which in calm moments showed thought and fire, were at that moment animated by an expression of the fiercest hatred. His dark chestnut hair, growing very low, gave him a small forehead, and in moments of anger a wicked look. Everyone at home despised him, and he hated his brothers and his father.

He had been taught by an old army surgeon, a veteran of the Italian campaigns of Napoleon, who had left him his cross of the Legion of Honour, his books and his memories. From him Julien learned to dream of glory. When he was very young, he had seen the dragoons of the 6th regiment, in their long white cloaks, with helmets with long black horsehair crests, coming back from Italy; and he had been mad to be a soldier.

But then, when he was fourteen, a new church was being built in Verrières; and he heard of a justice of the peace who had been overruled by a young vicar of thirty, and of priests of forty who had a hundred thousand francs a year — three times as much as Napoleon's famous generals. He understood: the age of the sword was over. Now, he said to himself, one must be a priest. He set himself to learn by heart the whole New Testament in Latin, and de Maistre's "On the Pope," in which he did not believe at all.

Old Sorel, in his peasant cunning, bargained with M. de Rênal over his son's wages as if over a load of timber, and wrung from him three hundred francs a year, with board — and that Julien should eat with the family, not with the servants. Julien, on his side, had resolved never to eat with the servants: in Rousseau's "Confessions" he had read of such humiliations. He would rather be killed.