The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Ambition learns to perform where every path upward demands hypocrisy.
Julien Sorel
A carpenter’s son in black clothes, carrying Napoleon in secret and ambition in every gesture.
Verrières
A pretty mountain town where every kindness has a price and everyone is watching.
In Verrières, beauty matters only until someone asks what it earns.
Read →Bringing In Profit
"I like the shade," answered M. de Rênal, with just a tinge of that hauteur which becomes a mayor when he is talking to a surgeon, who is a member of the Legion of Honour. "I like the shade, I have _my_ trees clipped in order to give shade, and I cannot conceive that a tree can have any other purpose, provided of course _it is not bringing in any profit_, like the useful walnut tree."
This is the great word which is all decisive at Verrières. "BRINGING IN PROFIT," this word alone sums up the habitual trend of thought of more than three-quarters of the inhabitants.
_Bringing in profit_ is the consideration which decides everything in this little town which you thought so pretty. The stranger who arrives in the town is fascinated by the beauty of the fresh deep valleys which surround it, and he imagines at first that the inhabitants have an appreciation of the beautiful.
M. de Rênal cannot even praise his own shade trees without insisting they earn their keep. He starts out sounding like a man who values beauty, admitting he clips his trees for the pleasure of shade, but he can't leave it there: he has to add the exception for the walnut, the tree that pays. This is the mayor of Verrières near the start of the novel, and the narrator uses him to expose the whole town. What looks to a visitor like an appreciation for the pretty valleys is really nothing of the kind. Beauty is tolerated in Verrières only when it costs nothing, and the moment a thing can make money, that settles the matter.
Verrières and the Rênals
Julien Sorel is a carpenter's son who has memorized the whole of the New Testament in Latin - and he is going to use that talent to escape the sawmill, even if it kills him.
Napoleon Portrait
The hero he worships is the one thing he can never be caught admiring.
Mme. de Rênal
A mayor’s wife whose quiet feeling becomes the novel’s deepest moral force.
The Red and the Black
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