Triade primitive du blanc, du rouge et du noir
“At the beginning there was night, the immense night of origins…
The black of the origins is fertile…
Black is also disastrous and the color of mourning”
Michel Pastoureau
“In a word, what made Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from tasting the happiness that lay beneath his feet. She is a young girl of sixteen, who has charming colors, and who, to go to the ball, is crazy enough to wear red.
Mortally frightened by the appearance of Julien, Madame de Rênal was soon prey to the cruelest alarms. Julien’s tears and despair deeply disturbed her.
Even when she no longer had anything to refuse him, she pushed Julien away from her, with real indignation, and then threw herself into his arms. No plan appeared in all this conduct. She believed herself to be damned without remission, and tried to hide the sight of hell by overwhelming Julien with the warmest caresses. In a word, nothing would have been missing from our hero’s happiness, not even a burning sensitivity in the woman he had just kidnapped, if he had known how to enjoy it. Julien’s departure did not stop the transports that agitated her despite herself, and her struggles with the remorse that tore her apart.
My God ! To be happy, to be loved, is that just that? This was Julien’s first thought upon returning to his room. He was in that state of astonishment and uneasy confusion into which the soul falls when it has just obtained what it has long desired. She is used to desiring, can no longer find what to desire, and yet has no memories. Like a soldier returning from a parade, Julien was attentively busy going over all the details of his conduct. – Have I not failed in anything that I owe to myself? Did I play my role well?
And what role? that of a man accustomed to being brilliant with women. »
(…)
“It’s the humid air of this dungeon that makes me think of isolation…
And why still be a hypocrite by cursing hypocrisy? It is neither death, nor the dungeon, nor the humid air, it is the absence of Madame de Rênal that overwhelms me. If, in Verrières, to see her, I was obliged to live for entire weeks hidden in the cellars of her house, would I complain?
The influence of my contemporaries prevails, he said out loud and with a bitter laugh. Speaking alone with myself, two steps from death, I am still a hypocrite… O nineteenth century!
… A hunter fires a gun in a forest, his prey falls, he rushes to seize it. His shoe hits an anthill two feet high, destroys the ants’ dwelling, scatters the ants and their eggs far away… The most philosophical among the ants will never be able to understand this black, immense, terrible body: the hunter’s boot , who suddenly entered their home with incredible speed, and preceded by a terrible noise, accompanied by sprays of reddish fire…
… Thus death, life, eternity, very simple things for those who have the organs large enough to conceive them…
An ephemeral fly is born at nine o’clock in the morning on long summer days, only to die at five o’clock in the evening; how would she understand the word night?
Give her five more hours of existence, she sees and understands what night is like.
So I will die at twenty-three. Give me five more years of life to live with Madame de Rênal.
And he started laughing like Mephistopheles. What madness to discuss these big problems!
1° I am a hypocrite as if there was someone there to listen to me.
2° I forget to live and love, when I have so few days left to live… Alas! Madame de Rênal is absent; perhaps her husband will no longer let her return to Besançon, and continue to disgrace herself.
This is what isolates me, and not the absence of a just, good, all-powerful God, not wicked, not hungry for vengeance.
Ah! if it existed… Alas! I would fall at his feet. I deserved death, I would tell him; but, great God, good God, indulgent God, give me back the one I love! »
“The Red and the Black” Stendhal, 1827
“She’s not pretty, she doesn’t have any red.”
SAINTE-BEUVE
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