heroes; a mysterious, sombre being, “a misanthrope before his time”; coupling with his pride of birth a consciousness of its vanity:—­“Had heaven made me the son of a manufacturer of cloth, I should have worked at my desk from the age of sixteen, while now my sole occupation has been luxury.  I should have had less pride and more happiness.  Ah, how I despise myself!” Yet it is part of Octave’s pretensions to regard himself as superior to love.  When he discovers his passion for his cousin Armance, he is overwhelmed with despair:  “I am in love,” he said in a choked voice.  “I, in love!  Great God!” The object of this reluctant passion, Armance de Zohiloff, is a poor orphan, dependent upon a rich relative.  Like Octave, she struggles against her affection, but for better reasons:  “The world will look upon me as a lady’s-maid who has entrapped the son of the family.”  The history of their long and secret struggle against this growing passion, complicated by outside incidents and intrigues, forms the bulk of the volume.  At last Octave is wounded in a duel, and moved by the belief that he is dying, they mutually confess their affection.  Octave unexpectedly recovers, and as Armance about this time receives an inheritance from a distant relative, the story promises to end happily; but at the last moment he is induced to credit a calumny against her, and commits suicide, when Armance retires to a convent.  The book is distinctly inferior to his later efforts, and M. Rod is the first to find hidden beauties in it.

Very different was his next book, ‘Le Rouge et Le Noir,’ the Army and the Priesthood, which appeared in 1830, and is now recognized as Stendhal’s masterpiece.  As its singular name is intended to imply, it deals with the changed social conditions which confronted the young men of France after the downfall of Napoleon,—­the reaction against war and military glory in favor of the Church; a topic which greatly occupied Stendhal, and which is well summed up in the words of his hero Julien:—­“When Bonaparte made himself talked about, France was afraid of invasion; military merit was necessary and fashionable.  Today one sees priests of forty with appointments of a hundred thousand francs, three times that of Napoleon’s famous generals;” and he concludes, “The thing to do is to be a priest.”

This Julien Sorel is the son of a shrewd but ignorant peasant, owner of a prosperous saw-mill in the small town of Verrieres, in Franche-Comte.  “He was a small young man, of feeble appearance, with irregular but delicate features, and an aquiline nose; ... who could have divined that that girlish face, so pale, and gentle, hid an indomitable resolution to expose himself to a thousand deaths sooner than not make his fortune?” His only schooling is gained from a cousin, an old army surgeon, who taught him Latin and inflamed his fancy with stories of Napoleon, and from the aged Abbe Chelan who grounds him in theology,—­for Julien had proclaimed his intention of studying for