STENDHAL
9
by which he seduces Madame de Renal is an affair not so much
of the heart as of the will. It is his "duty" to make love to this
virtuous and naive woman in order to prove to himself that he is
the equal of the class to which she belongs. "It would he cowardly
on my part not to carry out an action which may he of use to me,
and diminish the scorn which this fine lady probably feels for a
poor workman, only just taken from the sawhench." And again,
"The ruthless warfare which his sense of duty was waging with his
natural timidity was too exhausting for him to he in a condition to
observe anything outside himself." This condition is not relieved
until the first great climactic scene, in which Madame de Renal
permits him to hold her hand. "His heart was flooded with joy,
not because he loved Madame de Renal, hut because a fearful
torment was now at an end." The next morning he is filled with
joy that
"He had done his duty, and a heroic duty."
Duty toward what or toward whom? Fortunately, Stendhal
provides an explanation: "Instead of paying attention to the trans–
ports that he excited, and to the remorse that increased their vivac–
ity, the idea of
duty
was continually before his eyes. He feared a
terrible remorse, and undying ridicule, should he depart from the
ideal plan that he had set himself to follow. In a word, what made
Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from
enjoying the happiness that sprang up at his feet." Discussion of
this "ideal plan" belongs to a later section of this paper. But it
must now be pointed out that realization of his duty is for Julien
never more than a momentary source of self-satisfaction. The
primary struggle is not with Madame de Renal or with society hut
in himself, between the unacknowledged promptings of the heart
and the dictates of the intellectual will. His confusion is betrayed
in the paradoxical antithesis: "I ought to he stirred by her beauty;
I owe it to myself to be her lover." The whole pathos of his situa–
tion is summed up in Stendal's comment on the incident of the
hand-holding: "The idea of a duty to be performed, and of making
himself ridiculous, or rather being left with a sense of inferiority
if he did not succeed in performing it, at once took all the pleasure
from his heart."
What constitutes the source of Julien's ordeal may be more ap–
parent if one recalls what has been said of Henri Beyle's child–
hood. It is not without significance that to Julien Madame de
