The ending of The Red and the Black: happiness in the cell

Anyone who reaches the end of The Red and the Black is left with two questions: why does a young man who was one step away from everything shoot the woman he loved, and why does the novel give him, in a condemned man's cell, the happiness that his whole career did not give? This article tells the whole ending, with spoilers, in the order of the book: the letter, the shot in the church, the speech to the jury, the cell, and the last two chapters. If you have not read the novel yet, save this for later.

What happens before: the victory that lasts two days

Julien Sorel is at the height of his fortunes. Mathilde de La Mole, the marquis's daughter, is expecting his child, and the marquis, furious, finally gives in: he gives Julien land, a noble name, the title of Chevalier de La Vernaye, and a lieutenant's commission. It is the red at last, the uniform he has wanted all his life. Two days later, Julien is already calculating the next rank. For someone who lives on campaign, nothing is enough.

Then a letter arrives. The marquis had asked Madame de Rênal for information about Julien, and her reply says:

"Poor and ambitious, it was with the help of the most consummate hypocrisy, and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman, that this man tried to attain a position and become somebody." (Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Book II, ch. 35, Penguin Companhia edition, translated by Raquel de Almeida Prado.)

Everything comes crashing down.

Why does Julien shoot Madame de Rênal?

Julien rushes to Verrières, buys pistols and enters the church during Mass. The novel describes what follows in a single line:

"Julien no longer recognized her so well; he fired once and missed; he fired a second time, and she fell." (Book II, ch. 35.)

Madame de Rênal survives, wounded. And the question every reader asks is why he fired. The book does not answer with a single sentence, and there are two readings that the text supports.

The first is revenge: the letter describes Julien as poor, ambitious, hypocritical, a seducer of a weak woman, and it comes from the woman he loved most, on the day when everything had been won. The second is an explosion without calculation. The shot was premeditated, with pistols bought and loaded, but his hand trembles before it fires, and the narrator says he no longer recognized her well. It is the gesture of a young man who spent years repressing everything and who, all at once, destroys the only thing he had pursued until then, his rise. Someone who calculates would not do that.

Julien himself does not know. In prison, thinking of her, he asks himself:

"After an act like that, how can I persuade her that it is her alone whom I love? For, after all, did I want to kill her out of ambition or out of love for Mathilde?" (Book II, ch. 42.)

Further on, the book reveals a fact that changes who he believed he had wounded: the letter that struck him was written by the young priest who was Madame de Rênal's spiritual adviser, and then copied out by her (Book II, ch. 43).

And there is the world outside the novel. Stendhal did not invent the shot out of nothing. In 1827, a former seminarian named Antoine Berthet shot his former lover inside a church, during Mass. She survived, as Madame de Rênal did. Berthet was tried and guillotined in Grenoble, Stendhal's native city, in February 1828. Stendhal read the trial report in the newspaper, and what he added was everything the trial did not have: Julien's ambition, the Paris salons and the speech to the jury. In other words, the why of the shot, in the novel, is Stendhal's invention, and that is why it weighs so much.

The speech at the trial

Once imprisoned, Julien tells the judge that he premeditated the crime and deserves to die. The narrator marks the moment remorse is born: only when the jailer tells him that Madame de Rênal did not die: "Only then did Julien begin to repent of the crime he had committed" (Book II, ch. 36). Guilt, for him, is personal before it is legal.

At the trial, he refuses the defense the lawyer suggests, a plea of jealousy, and lets the lawyer speak. Past midnight, when the president asks whether he has anything to add, he rises and accuses the court:

"Gentlemen, I do not have the honor of belonging to your class; you see in me a peasant who rebelled against the baseness of his lot." (Book II, ch. 41.)

Instead of asking for mercy, he admits the premeditation, accepts the penalty as just, and tells the jurors that what they want to punish in him is his origin: the poor young man who had the audacity to mix with what the rich call good society. The jury finds him guilty, and the death sentence is pronounced.

Notice how strange the gesture is. The young man who spent the whole book pretending to please those who decided over him, the seminarian, the secretary, the lover, says in front of everyone what he is: a peasant.

The cell: the happiness he did not calculate

It is in the cell that the book turns inside out. Julien loses his ambition at once. He no longer thinks of Paris, nor of Mathilde, nor of the uniform. He thinks only of Vergy, the Rênals' country house, and of the walks in the woods. And he is puzzled by what he feels:

"Yet it is strange that I should have learned the art of enjoying life only after seeing its end draw near." (Book II, ch. 40.)

Then Madame de Rênal comes to see him. The two forgive each other, and he says:

"Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy." (Book II, ch. 43.)

Compare this with the night in the garden, early in the book, when Julien holds her hand while counting the strokes of the clock. There, happiness came and went the moment he went back to calculating. Here there is nothing left to calculate. In the final chapters, the text says that Julien "had not the least pride before her and told her all his weaknesses" (Book II, ch. 45), and he makes his own reckoning of what ambition took from him:

"[...] when I could have been so happy on our walks in the woods of Vergy, an impetuous ambition carried my soul off into imaginary regions. [...] No, I would have died without knowing happiness if you had not come to see me in this prison." (Book II, ch. 45.)

This is what the Nous class calls the turning point: for the first time, Julien is who he really is. He is no longer the peasant pretending to be a priest, nor the secretary pretending to be a nobleman. And the image that closes the scene is a painting, the one of Napoleon seated at Fontainebleau, in dirty boots, surrounded by a luxury that no longer serves any purpose. Julien carried the image of the crowned Napoleon his whole life, and he ends with the second picture: seated in a cell, without a uniform that is worth anything, with nothing left to conquer. Both paintings are discussed in The Coronation of Napoleon: what David's painting shows.

What the novel tells after

The class ends in the cell, where the reading is decided. The book goes on for a few more chapters, and it is worth knowing what is in them.

Julien refuses the showy conversion that the confessor advises as a means of winning mercy, and forbids Madame de Rênal to go and beg the king for a pardon. On the morning of the execution he is guillotined, and he dies without affectation, under a lovely sun. Beforehand, he makes her swear that she will live for Mathilde's son. Fouqué, the old friend, buys the body and takes it to a grotto on the mountain overlooking Verrières. Mathilde attends the burial and takes Julien's head to kiss it on the forehead, repeating the legend of her ancestor, the beheaded La Mole whose memory had fascinated her since the Paris salon.

And the novel closes Madame de Rênal's story like this:

"Madame de Rênal kept faithful to her promise. She made no attempt whatever on her own life; but three days later she died, embracing her children." (Book II, ch. 45.)

What the ending means

For the class, everything fits in one sentence: Julien spent his life pretending in order to rise, and he was only happy when he stopped pretending. The novel neither condemns ambition nor absolves it. It shows a young man who believed in the promise of his time, that each person can make himself alone, and who fails despite all his talent and all his effort. His failure does not lie in the fall. It lies in having spent his whole life on campaign, without noticing that the happiness he had came in the hours when he stopped pretending.

That is why the cell is not a punishment. It is the only place in the book where Julien has nothing to prove to anyone. And the question the class leaves open, and the book with it, is whether it is possible to arrive at this before the cell, in the middle of life, with everything still at stake.

Anyone who has not read the novel yet and wants to start with the right edition will find the way in Which Portuguese Translation of The Red and the Black?. Those who want the whole novel in order, without skipping the parts that tend to stall, have What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about and Is The Red and the Black good? Where the book stalls.

Continue: What The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, is about · Who was Julien Sorel? The young man who lived on campaign · The Coronation of Napoleon: what David's painting shows · A culture that accuses and does not absolve
Source class: O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal