Julien soon realises that in post-Napoleonic France the surest path to success for a poor peasant boy is the priesthood, just as the military had been in Napoleon’s day: ‘All right then! he said to himself, laughing like Mephistopheles, I’ve got more intelligence than they have I can pick the right uniform for my century.
His prodigious memory and astonishing ability to quote entire passages from the New Testament in Latin secure him his first job, as tutor to the sons of the Mayor of Verrieres, an imaginary town in the foothills of the Jura Mountains where Julien grows up. Unlike his older brothers who work in their father’s sawmill, Julien learns to read and write. Handsome, proud and overly sensitive, driven by passion and ambition like Napoleon, Julien is convinced a great destiny awaits him. Inspired by Napoleon, Julien dreams of rising to the glorious heights of French society from his meagre peasant origins. The hero of The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel, is a young man with a ‘mad passion for Bonaparte’.
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