Book of a lifetime: Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal

From The Independent archive: Piers Paul Read on ‘Le Rouge et le Noir’ by Stendhal

Stendahl’s hero, Julien Sorel, was a notorious social climber (Public Domain)

I was around 17 when I first read Stendhal’s novel Le Rouge et le Noir (Scarlet and Black), and the powerful effect it had on me can only be understood in the context of my life at the time. Until the age of eight, I lived near Beaconsfield and my father commuted to London. Then, in 1949, we moved to a large 18th-century rectory in the North Riding of Yorkshire. There the social landscape was more like Jane Austen’s Hampshire than suburban Bucks in the 20th century.

Because of the size of our house and a public-school education, we mixed with the children of local landowners whose parents had grooms and butlers, changed into dinner jackets and long dresses every evening, and pursued with great seriousness the country gentleman’s traditional pastimes of hunting, shooting and fishing. My parents did not hunt, shoot or fish: they owned no grouse moors or rolling acres.

My destiny seemed to be to remain low in the pecking order of English society. Then I read Le Rouge et Le Noir and the chip on my shoulder disappeared. Stendhal’s witty depiction of the pomposity, vanity and philistinism of provincial notables opened my eyes to the absurd posturing of many of our neighbours who, with fortunes made in coal, beer and banking in the grimy West Riding, behaved as their estates had been granted to their ancestors by William the Conqueror.