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the extent to which, despite its ending, it is not like a conventional Tragedy. In its outward form it is much more like a Rags to Riches story which only switches abruptly to Tragedy in its closing scenes. Right from the start, Sorel is thoroughly ego-centred. He does not show any of the qualities necessary to bring the hero to a happy ending. He is a completely two-dimensional character, defined almost solely by his ruthless ambition. The only reason we are ever shown for his success is the mechanical party trick of his memory, which is wheeled on again and again to manoeuvre him up every step of the ladder (highly implausibly, since within a very short time his fellow dinner-party guests would surely have found these vainglorious recitals infinitely wearisome). Not for a moment is there any sign of that gradual inner transformation which marks out a proper Rags to Riches hero. Yet equally we do not see him going through the dark inner transformation of a truly tragic figure either. For nine-tenths of the story we see this cardboard creation going through all the outward motions of a successful climb from Rags to Riches: until suddenly the whole thing falls apart and, like Icarus, he plunges to destruction.

What we may then also observe is the remarkable fact that Stendhal himself did not see his hero in this dark and negative fashion at all. He took the germ of his story from the court reports of a celebrated real-life tragedy in the France of the 1820s. A humble blacksmith's son had left home to become tutor to a wealthy middle-class family, and had gone on to a seminary to become a priest. His previous employer's wife had then written a vindictive letter to the head of the seminary, as a result of which he had been expelled. He tried to take his revenge by shooting her at Mass, and had been sent to the guillotine. Many people at the time, including Stendhal, saw the young man as the unfortunate victim of social hypocrisy and a rigid class system, driven into the position of an outcast only because of his lowly social origins.

Far from seeing his hero as a monster of egotism, in fact, Stendhal viewed him with the utmost sympathy. He saw him as the new, post-Napoleonic hero of humble birth, defying an oppressive class structure to battle his way upwards, in a world in which there were only the strong and the weak, and in which everyone was, fundamentally, equally egotistical. A fervent admirer of Napoleon, Stendhal did not see egotism in itself as anything to be ashamed of. He proudly called one of his volumes of autobiography Souvenirs d'Egotisme. He admiringly hailed Chateaubriand as `le roi des egotistes. And when he came to create his favourite hero, Sorel, he told people `Julien is myself'. Nor did this identification apply only to Sorel's outward social ambitions. Consciously or unconsciously, there was also a close correspondence between Sorel and his creator in terms of their inner state, as expressed in their attitudes to the opposite sex. Stendhal fantasised endlessly about his `conquests' of women, in a way which is reflected in Sorel's sadomasochistic `conquest' and humiliation of Mathilde. But in real life, his love affairs were usually short-lived and embarrassing, and the key to his inadequacy was reflected in his saying that he felt towards his mother, who had died when he was only a boy, `like a lover'.

In all these respects, The Scarlet and the Black represented something almost entirely new in storytelling. Whereas earlier storytellers down the ages had imagined their stories in accordance with the values of the Self, here was an author quite consciously creating a hero to defy those values. Sorel was a projection of Stendhal's own egocentricity, as he identified with his hero's rivalry with all the world, and with his effortless climb up the social and sexual ladder.

Yet in the end this rise from humble obscurity to social success turns inexorably to tragedy, just as it had done in the real life version which originally drew Stendhal as the inspiration for his novel. And it does so precisely in