Acts of suppression: Adapting Le Rouge et le Noir.

Toute adaptation est fatalement une trahison, et nous devons faire de
notre mieux pour que cette trahison--et cela peut se faire tres bien--,
soit une bonne trahison. c'est-a-dire qu'elle respecte non pas
l'integralite, l'integrite de l'oeuvre, mais qu'elle en respecte
l'esprit.
(Autant-Lara 253)

Every adaptation is fatally a betrayal, and we must do our best so that
that betrayal--and this can easily be done--, is a good betrayal, that
is, that it respects not the entirety or the integrity of the work, but
that it respects its spirit. (2)

If Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) is a classic literary text, it is so at least partly because it continues to resist our attempts to settle it into univocal meaning. In other words, one of the reasons why the novel retains the power to fascinate its readers is that the motivations of the principal characters, and the meanings of the novel's title, its epigraphs, and even its ending, remain a matter for debate. Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe's very handsome 1997 adaptation of Le Rouge et le Noir as a two-part film for French television effectively achieves what critical interpretations of the novel have never quite been able to do: it successfully suppresses the most problematic aspects of the work, and transforms it into an internally coherent love story. What makes this albeit banal gesture of suppression worthy of analysis is firstly the fact that it illustrates nicely a maneuver typical of many readings of Le Rouge et le Noir, and secondly the fact that this maneuver would seem to be anticipated and thematized by the text itself.

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Le Rouge et le Noir makes a theme of resistance to reading and the reactions that this resistance provokes. It is Julien Sorel's perceived difference from other men that inspires Madame de Renal's and Mathilde de la Mole's love for him. The latter is particularly intrigued and attracted by Julien's "resistance sincere et nonjouee" 'sincere and not acted resistance' (511) and by his quality of "inconnu" 'unknown' (530). (3) It is when Julien is least responsive to her, most "silen-cieux et sombre" 'silent and melancholic' (640), that he appears most elevated and adorable to the young aristocrat: "Je ne connais pas Julien; ce mot la jeta dans une reverie" 'I do not know Julien; this idea threw her into a reverie' (639). However, other characters are less enamored of Julien's resistance to understanding. The Marquis de la Mole, for example, finds that there is "quelque chose de reel" 'something real' in Julien, but it is precisely "ce point reel" 'this real point' that frightens the imaginative and intelligent marquis; because it is "difficile a saisir" 'difficult to grasp' (637). Julien's difference from his brothers, and later from his fellow seminarians, earns him their hatred; he concludes from his experience at the Besancon seminary that "difference engendre haine" 'difference engenders hatred' (393). The novel implies, therefore, that resistance to understanding has the potential to inspire passion, fear, and hatred. It also suggests that the recognition of resistance invites acts of suppression. For example, the Marquis de la Mole attempts--by means of dance lessons and a variety of external ennoblements--to quash all evidence of the hero's plebeian origins, while Mathilde dreams of harnessing the energies of this young "Danton" for her own politically reactionary purposes.

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If Julien provides a focus of resistance in Stendhal's novel, so does Mathilde, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and headstrong young heroines in French literature. Her willful non-conformism intrigues and perplexes those around her. Mathilde is thus a characteristically Stendhalian creation, at least to the extent that "Etre stendhalien, c'etait (et ce sera toujours peu ou prou) resister" 'To be Stendhalian was (and always will be, more or less) to resist' (Berthier 143). As in the case of Julien, however, Mathilde's difference from others invites acts of suppression: her father, despite admiring her spirit of resistance, wishes to marry her to a respectable young man, the Marquis de Croisenois, who in turn has difficulty tolerating his fiancee's non-conformity. Similarly, despite recognizing and approving of Mathilde's difference from her peers, Julien and the narrator occasionally deny and disparage that difference.

In turn, critics of Le Rouge et le Noir have often had difficulty accepting certain problematic or resistant aspects of the novel. The characters of Julien and Mathilde, for example, posed at least as many difficulties for contemporary readers of Stendhal's novel as they do for characters within the novel. While Madame de Renal was usually regarded (and continues to be regarded by many) as a thoroughly plausible and acceptable female character, both Mathilde and Julien were often considered to lack verisimilitude, as the following critical responses indicate:

    Mme de Renal [...] se prend d'une chaleureuse passion pour le jeune
    Julien; elle l'aime. Est-elle aimee? C'est ici que la question
    devient aussi inexplicable que le caractere donne par l'auteur a son
    heros. C'est tout ensemble de la passion et du calcul, de la candeur
    et de l'hypocrisie, de la naivete et de la morgue, que le coeur de
    ce jeune homme [...]. Reste a dire notre opinion sur les deux tetes
    [= Mathilde et Julien] qui sortent du cadre. A coup sur, elles sont
    neuves, bizarres. etranges, opposees; c'est le rouge et le noir. (4)
    Mme. de Renal [...] develops an intense passion for the young
    Julien; she loves him. Is she loved? This is where the question
    becomes as inexplicable as the character given by the author to his
    hero. This young man's heart is all passion and calculation, candour
    and hypocrisy, naivety and haughtiness [...]. As for the two
    characters [= Mathilde and Julien] that really stand out, they are
    certainly new, bizarre, strange, opposed; this is the red and the
    black.

    Non, ce jeune homme si atroce n'est pas dans la nature. [...] Cette
    Mathilde est folle. elle pleure, elle rit, elle appelle la mort,
    elle se frappe en heroine; on n'a jamais imagine une fille comme
    cela. Je n'ose pas croire qu'il y ait a Paris une societe qui
    ressemble a celle que veut peindre M. de Stendhal. (5)
    No, this dreadful young man does not exist in nature. [...] This
    Mathilde is mad: she cries, she laughs, she calls out for death, she
    beats herself heroine style; nobody has ever imagined a girl like
    that. I dare not believe that there is, in Paris, a society similar
    to the one that Mr. Stendhal wants to paint.

    Son Julien est un monstre moral [...]. Le machiavelisme de roue et
    de mechant qu'il porte dans la moins reflechie, la moins concerlee
    des passions, est un phenomene ridicule d'impossibilite. [...] Les
    haines. les dedains, les frenesies de Mathilde sont fausses comme un
    rire force: la peinture de sa passion n'a rien de senti. (6)
    His Julien is a moral monster [...]. The rakish and spiteful
    machiavellianism that he brings into the least considered, the least
    planned of passions, is a ridiculously impossible phenomenon. [...]
    The hatreds, the snubs, the frenzies of Mathilde are false like a
    forced laugh: the portrait of her passion has nothing felt about it.

    Le caractere de Julien Sorel est [...] faux, contradictoire,
    impossible, incomprehensible en certaines parties. (7)
    The character of Julien Sorel is [...] false, contradictory,
    impossible, and incomprehensible in certain episodes.

More recent criticism, instead of highlighting the disconcerting aspects of the characters of Julien and Mathilde, tends to suppress what is troubling about them. In other words, much criticism of the novel translates Mathilde's difference into a kind of mimetic conformism and reads Julien as a more consistent character than the logic of the novel allows.

Turning now to the 1997 adaptation, Daniele Thompson (co-author, with Verhaeghe, of the screenplay), in her paratextual description of Julien Sorel, tellingly focuses on the hero's victimization by love rather than on his ambition or hypocrisy:

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    Il s'appelait Julien Sorel. Il etait le revolte, le decu des
    promesses de l'Empirc, il etait l'enfant mal aime. Il devint un
    jeune homme trop aime. Car personne ne resistait a Julien, ni ses
    maitres, ni les puissants, ni les pretres, ni surtout les
    femmes [...] Grace a elles, il s'elevera au-dessus de sa condition.
    A cause d'elles, il se perdra.
    He was called Julien Sorel. He was the rebel, betrayed by the
    promises of the Empire, he was the badly loved child. He became a
    young man to1o well loved. Because nobody could resist Julien, not
    his masters, nor the powerful, nor priests, nor especially
    women [...] Thanks to these latter, he will raise himself above his
    condition. Because of them, he will lose everything.

Julien is very clearly presented here, as in the film, as the quintessential romantic hero. Kim Rossi Stuart, the actor who plays Julien, portrays the character as an irresistibly attractive innocent. The film's disproportionate focus on the sentimental elements of the plot prompted an eminent Stendhalian scholar, the late Victor Del Litto, to remark in an interview with Telerama that "On s'embrasse beaucoup trop" 'There is too much kissing' in Verhaeghe's adaptation (Del Litto, "C'est long" 76). It is far from unusual for film adaptations of literary texts to dwell on scenes involving physical intimacy, but what is at stake here is less a disproportionate emphasis on the amorous than a crucial deformation of the text.

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In an interview, Verhaeghe makes the following remark about Julien's character: "C'est un role difficile, car il n'est pas toujours sympathique, avec son arrivisme. En meme temps, il est tres different d'un Rastignac. Il y a chez lui un cote romantique" 'It is a difficult role, because he is not always likeable, with his social-climbing. At the same time, he is very different from a Rastignac. He has a romantic side' (Verhaeghe). In fact, there is little sign of Julien's arrivisme in the 1997 film, the emphasis being placed most unambiguously on his "cote romantique" 'romantic side.' Assuming that the disjunction between words and lips, on account of Rossi Stuart's Italian nationality, bears no ironic significance, there are very few pointers toward Julien's hypocrisy in Verhaeghe's film. Early in the film he lies to M. Valenod about his feelings for Napoleon Bonaparte and later, subsequent to his courtroom speech, he tells Mathilde, with a facetious twirl of the hand, that he allowed himself to be sincere for the first time in his life. However, apart from such isolated moments, there is little in the film to suggest the often unpalatable complexity of Julien's character.

For example, Julien is represented by Verhaeghe and Thompson as reluctant to leave the Renal household for the seminary, despite the obvious advantages of this move for his career. In Stendhal's novel, Julien does not hesitate to leave Verrieres and Madame de Renal behind him, even if he does take a moment at the beginning of his journey to regret his departure from his mistress:

    Il etait fort emu. Mais a une lieue de Verrieres, ou il laissait
    tant d'amour, il ne songea plus qu'au bonheur de voir une capitale,
    une grande ville de guerre comme Besancon. (367-38)
    He was very emotional. But one league outside of Verrieres, where he
    left so much love, he no longer thought about anything other than
    the pleasure of seeing a capital, a big military city like Besancon.

Julien's love for Mme. de Renal is represented as almost entirely innocent in Verhaeghe's telefilm, virtually the only suggestion of emotional inauthenticity taking the form of Julien's bragging to his friend Fouque subsequent to his symbolic seizing of her hand. By contrast, the insincerity of Julien's love for Mme. de Renal at the beginning of their relationship is made absolutely explicit in Stendhal's text, their first bedroom encounter being largely a matter of role-play on the hero's part. In Claude Autant-Lara's 1954 cinematic adaptation of Le Rouge et le Noir, the complex nature of Julien's feelings for Mme. de Renal is conveyed by, among other details, the inclusion of the scene from the novel where the young hero flirts with a barmaid, Amanda Binet, on his way from the Renal household to the seminary at Besancon. Verhaeghe's adaptation, however, preserves Julien's appearance of sincerity by suppressing this scene.

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In the Telerama interview already cited, Del Litto remarks of Verhaeghe's film that "on n'explique rien au telespectateur" 'nothing is explained to the television viewer' and attributes this lack to the difference between literature and cinema. However, in Autant-Lara's interpretation of Stendhal's novel, the duplicity of Gerard Philippe's Julien had been conveyed in a variety of ways specific to cinema: through the extensive use of voice-over, through his mechanical movements, shifting eyes, and solitary laughter; and through gestures such as the benediction he offers to his mirror reflection when dressed as the Chevalier de la Vernaye, visually echoing the hypocritical movements of the bishop d'Agde earlier in the film. If the absence of explanation in Verhaeghe's telefilm were to raise questions in the viewer's mind, this would at least have the advantage of remaining faithful to the spirit of the notoriously resistant Le Rouge et le Noir. On the contrary, the absence of explanation serves effectively to pre-program the viewer's interpretation of the film. In both the novel and the 1997 film, for example, the hero is unnerved by Mme. de Renal's ingenuity in devising a means of diverting her husband's suspicions with regard to her affair with Julien; in the novel, we are made aware that Julien's surprise stems from an offended sense of loyalty to his gender; however, the television viewer unfamiliar with Stendhal's text would naturally assume that his astonishment arises from his own lack of deviousness. In the absence of sufficiently numerous indications of Julien's duplicity, the uninformed viewer of Verhaeghe's telefilm is likely to draw conclusions from his behavior that are not only nowhere warranted by Stendhal's text but that in fact contradict its spirit.

Julien's reinvention by Verhaeghe and Thompson as a fatally attractive romantic hero, virtually devoid of the calculating spirit that characterizes Stendhal's realist anti-hero, is particularly marked toward the end of the film. In this version, Julien's impassioned courtroom speech finishes, as Del Litto wryly notes, with the male lead being forcefully removed by two gendarmes. In the novel, however, as in Autant-Lara's film, the courtroom speech is anything but passionate, being described as taking "[un] tour un peu abstrait" '[a] slightly abstract turn' despite which the female members of the public break down in tears. The romantic rehabilitation of Julien in the 1997 film is evidenced also by the fact that his unconscious cruelty toward the rejected Mathilde at the end of the novel, while clearly suggested in Verhaeghe's film, is nevertheless mitigated by his request for her pardon; instead of asking, as in the novel, that she allow Mme. de Renal to raise the child she is bearing, he caresses her pregnant front affectionately and begs her forgiveness.

Mathilde too is a far less disturbing character in Verhaeghe's telefilm than in Stendhal's novel. In the latter, her continuing presence after Julien's imprisonment acts as an uncomfortable reminder, for the hero as for the reader, of his emotional inconsistency. How did his passion for the young aristocrat transform so suddenly into indifference? Why did his love for Mme. de Renal reawaken so suddenly subsequent to his attempt on her life? To its credit, Verhaeghe's telefilm, unlike Autant-Lara's earlier adaptation, maintains Mathilde's presence in the final part of the story, but parries the uncomfortable questions her presence raises about Julien's attractiveness (and coherence) as a character by showing her to be quietly accepting of her former lover's choice. Verhaeghe and Thompson even see fit to invent a scene of reconciliation and complicity between Carole Bouquet's Mme. de Renal and Judith Godreche's Mathilde; the two are shown to meet in a garden in an attempt to devise a means of obtaining Julien's pardon.

In Verhaeghe's version of Le Rouge et le Noir, as in Autant-Lara's before it, Mathilde's signature scene, the most unsettling passage of the novel, is entirely suppressed. The importance of this scene cannot be underestimated; it was even depicted on the frontispiece of the second volume of the novel upon its first publication by Levavasseur. The scene takes place subsequent to the whisking away, at Julien's request, of Mathilde and Mme. de Renal in a carriage together. Julien's intention was that the two women should be "un peu distraites de leur affreuse douleur" 'a little distracted from their dreadful sorrow' (698). However, Mathilde characteristically rejects Julien's plot, and returns to the site of his dead body:

    [Fouque] vit entrer Mathilde. Peu d'heures auparavant, il l'avait
    laissee a dix lieues de Besancon. Elle avait le regard et les yeux
    egares.
    --Je veux le voir, lui dit-elle.
      Fouque n'eut pas le courage de parler ni de se lever. Il lui
    montra du doigt un grand manteau bleu sur le plancher; la etait
    enveloppe ce qui restait de Julien.
      Elle se jeta a genoux. Le souvenir de Boniface de la Mole et de
    Marguerite de Navarre lui donna sans doute un courage surhumain.
    Ses mains tremblantes ouvrirent le manteau. Fouque detouma les yeux.
      Il entendit Mathilde marcher avec precipitation dans la chambre.
    Elle allumait plusieurs bougies. Lorsque Fouque cut la force de la
    regarder, elle avait place sur une petite table de marbre, devant
    elle, la tete de Julien, et la baisait au front [...] (698)
    [Fouque] saw Mathilde come in. Just a few hours beforehand, he had
    left her ten leagues from Besancon. Her gaze and eyes were
    distraught.
    --I want to see him, she told him.
      Fouque did not have the courage to speak or stand up. He pointed
    To a big blue coat on the floor; this covered what remained of
    Julien.
      She threw herself to her knees. The memory of Boniface de la Mole
    and Marguerite de Navarre undoubtedly gave her a superhuman courage.
    Her trembling hands opened the coat. Fouque looked away.
    He heard Mathilde walk hurriedly around the room. She lit several
    candles. When Fouque got the strength to look at her, she had
    placed, on a low marble table in front of her, Julien's head, and
    was kissing it on the forehead.

Verhaeghe's telefilm refers to this sensational episode only in incomplete and distorted fashion, in a voice-over just prior to the closing credits:

    Mathilde suivit le corps de Julien jusqu'au tombeau, et voulut
    ensevelir de ses propres mains la tete de son amant, refaisant ainsi
    le geste de son ancetre. Mme de Renal fut fidele a sa promesse. Elle
    ne chercha en aucune maniere a attenter a sa vie. Mais trois jours
    apres Julien. elle mourut, en embrassant son enfant.
    Mathilde followed Julien's body to the grave, wanting to bury her
    lover's head with her own hands, thereby repeating the gesture of
    her ancestor. Mme. de Renal was true to her word. She did not seek
    in any way to put an end to her life. But three days after Julien,
    she died, while embracing her child.

Mathilde's dramatic overturning of Julien's wishes at the end of the novel is entirely effaced by the assertion that she followed his body to its burial place, the verb "suivrc" 'to follow' here implying an obedience that is strongly qualified in the novel, not only by her disobedience in returning to the site of Julien's corpse but also by her disruption of the hero's plans for his own modest burial. If it is true, as the critic Richard Bolster proposes, that Mathilde's sensationalization of Julien's funeral and burial place confirms that "la jeune Parisienne personnifie les aberrations d'une sensibilite theatrale" 'the young Parisian personifies the aberrations of a theatrical sensibility,' and that it constitutes the author's "condamnation sans appel" 'unconditional condemnation' of his young heroine (Bolster 37-38), then Verhaeghe's omission of this scene would necessarily make her seem a far more sympathetic character than the one that appears in the novel. However, it also has the effect of making Mathilde a far less challenging presence than Stendhal so clearly intended her to be.

There are a number of reasons why it makes good film sense to conclude the story of Le Rouge et le Noir with Julien's execution, as do both Autant-Lara and Verhaeghe. Mathilde's closing gestures grotesquely appropriate Julien's story of social revolt, and assimilate it into her own royalist narrative, wherein she assumes the starring role of her heroine, Marguerite de Navarre. This rewriting of Julien's plot undermines his authority and credibility as the hero of Le Rouge et le Noir. It also raises questions about the meaning of the novel's ending, questions that would almost certainly detract from the viewer's sense of closure at the conclusion of the film.

Nevertheless, by suppressing the discomfort produced by the novel's ending and generally reducing the complexity of the novel's two most problematic characters, Verhaeghe's film transforms this classic resistant text into the kind that the author himself disparaged as a novel for chamber-maids. What is perhaps most interesting about Verhaeghe's distortion of Stendhal's novel is that it mirrors a gesture of appropriation that is repeatedly performed by characters within the novel. In doing so, however, it misses the opportunity to create the kind of enduring fascination that Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir produces in its readers.

Maria Scott

Mational University of Ireland, Galway

Notes

(1) I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellowship that supported my research on Stendhal from Sept. 2004 to Aug. 2005.

(2) All translations are the author's own.

(3) Where no other details are given, all parenthetical page numbers refer to the Gallimard edition of Le Rouge et le Noir.

(4) Le Figaro, 20 Dec. 1830, qtd. in Del Litto 2001. 586, 588.

(5) Jules Janin, Journal des Debats, 26 Dec. 1830, qtd. in Del Litto 2001. 593, 598.

(6) "N.," Le Correspondant, 14 Jan. 1831, qtd. in Del Litto 2001. 610.

(7) Auguste Bussicre, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Jan. 1843, qtd. in Del Litto 2001. 890.

Works Cited

Autant-Lara, Claude, et al. "Stendhal a l'ecran: Debat." Stendhal-Balzac: Realisme et cinema. Ed. Victor Del Litto. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1978. 249-67.

Bolster. Richard. Stendhal, Balzac, et le feminisme romantique. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1970.

Del Litto, Victor. Stendhal sous l'oeil de la presse quotidienne (1817-1843). Ed. Victor Del Litto. Paris: Champion, 2001.

______. "C'est long, long, long." Interview with Agnes Bozon-Vcrduraz and Orianne Charpentier. Telerama 2501 (17 Dec. 1997).

Le Rouge et le Noir. Dir. Claude Autant-Lara. Perf. Danielle Darrieux, Gerard Philippe, Antonella Lualdi. 1954.

Le Rouge et le Noir. Dir. Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe. Scr. Daniele Thompson. Perf. Carole Bouquet, Judith Godreche, Claude Rich, Kim Rossi Smart. TF1/Alya Productions/Telfrance/Mediaset/Tellux-Film GmbH, 1997.

Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir. Romans et nowvelles. Ed. Henri Martineau. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1948-52. Vol. I, 193-730.

Verhaeghe, Jean-Daniel. "Chez Mine de Renal." Interview with Didier Senecal. Lire. Dec. 1997/Jan. 1998 <http://www.lire.fr.>.