As these samples show, Stendhal the narrator is rarely absent for long. He is glad to tell us what he thinks and what we should think about many subjects: the weaknesses of the French, notably the bourgeoisie, provincials and Parisians alike; the desiccating oppressiveness of the Restoration; and, above all, about his protagonists: what they feel, why they feel so, and why they are acting well generation or badly, wisely or- more often foolishly. later, Flaubert's reaction against Romantic effusiveness will lead him to seek not too successfully to keep himself out of his books. Stendhal's reaction is found not in self-exclusion but in his dry ironic tone. He likes to talk to his reader, quietly, urbanely, as a man of the world. Again and again, as in the seduction scene just quoted, he comments on the actions of his heroes: "How fine and how foolish!" His admirers, the ''happy few" who are now legion, enjoy him as one of the wittiest and most perceptive of moralists.

As many critics have noted, Stendhal is the founder of the modern realism that shows man working out his destiny amid the economic, political, and social forces that shape his time. The France of 1830 is always there in all these aspects, both as a whole and in its two parts, Paris and la province. Much of that France is symbolized in Valenod, the man on the make, one-time would-be lover of Mme. de Renal and would-be employer of Julien, who by cheating the poor and affecting the right politicoreligious attitudes rises from his position as director of the poorhouse to supplant Renal as mayor of Verrieres and become a baron and future prefect. Julien is shown (11:13) as "the unhappy man at war with all society"; and it is his disgust with society, as represented by Valenod, that leads him at his trial to make the bitter speech that transforms his sentence, as one critic has put it, from a condemnation into a stoic suicide.