Scarlet and Black Author:Stendhal To Stendhal (1783-1842) the novel was a mirror of the reflecting "the blue of the skies and the mire of the road below." Scarlet and Black, his greatest novel, reflects without distortion the France of the decades after Waterloo, its haves and have-nots, its Royalists and Liberals, its Jesuits and Jansenists. Against this crowded backcloth moves... more » the figure of Julien Soret, a clever, ambitious, up-from-nothing hero whose tragic weakness is to lose his head in a crisis. Margaret Shaw's translation keeps intact the plain, colloquial style of a writer who, in an age of Romantics, set the pattern for later realists such as Flaubert and Zola.« less