ut, after all, they
furnish forth the action, and are necessary in their various ways to set
forth the character of that hero and his second love, almost in the
mediaeval sense his wife and his widow, Mathilde de la Mole, heiress,
great lady, _fille folle de son corps_, and, in a kind of way, Queen
Whims.

Julien Sorel, allowance being made for his date, is one of the most
remarkable heroes of fiction. He is physically handsome, in fact
beautiful,[135] intellectually very clever, and possessed, in especial,
of a marvellous memory; also, though not well educated early, capable of
learning anything in a very short time--but presented in these
favourable lights without any exaggeration. A distinguished Lord Justice
was said by his admirers, at the beginning of his manhood, to have
obtained more marks in examinations than any youthful person in the
United Kingdom: and Julien, with equal opportunities, would probably
have done the same in France. Morally, in no limited sense of the word,
he does not possess a single good quality, and does possess most bad
ones, with the possible exceptions of gluttony and avarice. That, being
in each case a family tutor or _employe_ under trust, he seduces the
wife of his first employer and the daughter of the second, cannot, in
the peculiar circumstances, be said to count. This is, as it were, the
starting-point, the necessary handicap, in the competition of this kind
of novel. It is as he is, and in reference to what he does, after this
is put aside, that he has to be considered. He is not a stage villain,
though he has the peculiar, and in the circumstances important, if
highly-to-be-deprecated habit of carrying pocket-pistols. He is not a
Byronic hero with a terrible but misty past. He is not like Valmont of
the _Liaisons Dangereuses_,[136] a professional and passionless
lady-killer. He is not a swindler nor (though he sometimes comes near to
this also) a conspirator like Count Fosco of _The Woman in White_. One
might make a long list of such negatives if it were worth while. He is
only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally
bad-blooded[137] young man, whom circumstances partly, and his own
misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never
sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be
noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor
quite disgusts you. _Homo est_, and it is Beyle's having made him so
that makes Be