The Red and the Black (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

STENDHAL (Marie-Henri Beyle; trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff; intro. Hamilton Basso; illus. Rafaello Busoni). The Red and the Black. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1980.

Large 8vo. Full red leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xvii, 450 pp. Colour illustrations by Rafaello Busoni throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition.

Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), who published his major works under the pseudonym Stendhal, wrote Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830 and had it published that same year in Paris. He was forty-seven. The novel he had produced was one that his own era did not fully understand — it was too psychologically acute, too politically sardonic, too willing to present its protagonist without moral simplification. It took the better part of the nineteenth century before Stendhal's reputation settled into what it has since remained: one of the founders of the realist novel and, alongside Balzac and Flaubert, one of the three indispensable writers of nineteenth-century French fiction.

The novel follows Julien Sorel, the brilliantly intelligent and ferociously ambitious son of a provincial carpenter in the fictional town of Verrières, who sets out to rise in a society that has closed its avenues of advancement to men of his class since the fall of Napoleon. The routes available are the church and the drawing room — the black and the red of the title — and Julien navigates both with a cold strategic intelligence that is perpetually undermined by the fact that he actually feels things. His affair with Madame de Rênal, the gentle wife of the local mayor who employs him as tutor, begins as calculation and becomes something entirely different. His subsequent entanglement with the proud and capricious Mathilde de la Mole, daughter of the Parisian nobleman he serves as secretary, follows a similarly destabilising course. Julien is not a hypocrite who has suppressed a better nature; he is a man in whom ambition and feeling exist in permanent, unresolved conflict, and the tragedy the novel arrives at is entirely consistent with everything we have understood about him from the first page.

The translation is by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (1889–1930), best known for his magisterial English rendering of Proust's À la Recherche du temps perdu, who brought the same exactitude and elegance to Stendhal's more economical prose. The introduction is by Hamilton Basso (1904–1964), the American novelist and New Yorker contributor whose own fiction about the American South shares something of Stendhal's interest in class, aspiration, and the gap between social performance and private feeling.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000483