e 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 ma