本书是英文原版小说。这部小说是十九世纪法国杰出的批判现实主义作家司汤达的代表作。叙述一个木匠的儿子于连·黑索尔短暂一生的遭遇，反映了法国十九世纪二十年代上层社会生活和阶级矛盾，谴责了当时法国社会中贵族和僧侣的反动和专横，资产阶级的庸俗和卑劣。

The Red and the Black has been hailed as the first great ‘realist’novel of the nineteenth century, offering a lively and detailed picture of social and political life in the provinces and in Paris towards the end of the 1820s, the close of the stifling reactionary period of the Bourbon Restoration. Stendhal himseff claimed that no one before him had ventured to portray with such verisimilitude the ‘moral and morose" France of 1830. However, ‘moral and morose’ his novel is definitely not. Ironic, fast-moving, entertaining and incisive in its social criticism, it is a novel of ambition and passion, of indignation and tenderness, of polemic and poetry, which speaks to us today, as clearly as it did to the author’s contemporaries, of the heights, depths and idiocies of which our human nature is capable or culpable.

INTRODUCTION

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

CHRONOLOGY

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

    THE RED AND THE BLACK

A Small Town

A Mayor

The Bread of the Poor

Father and Son

Driving a Bargain

Dullness

Elective Affinities

Minor Events

An Evening in the Country

A Large Heart and a Small Fortune

Night Thoughts

A Journey

Open-work Stockings

The English Scissors

Cock- Crow

The Day After

The Principal Deputy

A King at Verrieres

To Think is to be Full of Sorrow

The Anonymous Letters

Conversation with a Lord and Master

Manners and Customs in 1830

The Sorrows of an Official

A Capital

The Seminary

The World, or What the Rich Lack

First Experience of Life

A Procession

The First Step

Ambition

Country Pleasures

First Appearance in Society

First Steps

The Hotel de La Mole

Sensibility and a Pious Lady

Pronunciation

An Attack of Gout

What is the Decoration that Confers Distinction?

The Ball

Queen Marguerite

The Tyranny of a Girl

Another Danton

A Plot

A Girl"s Thoughts

Is it a Plot?

One o"Clock in the Morning

An Old Sword

Painful Moments

The Opera Boule

The Japanese Vase

The Secret Note

The Discussion

The Clergy, their Forests, Liberty

Strasbourg

The Office of Virtue

Moral Love

The Best Positions in the Church

Manon Lescaut

Boredom

A Box at the Bouffes

Making Her Afraid

The Tiger

The Torment of the Weak

A Man of Spirit

A Storm

Painful Details

A Castle Keep

A Man of Power

Intrigue

Tranquillity

The Trial

In the Prison

Last Adieux

The Shadow of the Guillotine

Exit Julien