Abstract:All alone in the church, he took a seat in the finest pew.It bore M. de Renal's coat of arms.On the lectern, Julien noted a scrap of printed paper, set out there as if for him to read.He glanced at it...All alone in the church, he took a seat in the finest pew.It bore M. de Renal's coat of arms.On the lectern, Julien noted a scrap of printed paper, set out there as if for him to read.He glanced at it and saw:Details of the execution and th e last moments of Louis f enrel, executed at Besam;on, on th e-The paper was torn.On the other side were the first words of a line: Th e first step ....Who could have left this paper here?thought Julien.Poor fel low, he added with a sigh, his name has the same ending as mine ....He crumpled up the paper.As he went out, Julien imagined he saw a pool of blood by the baptismal font; it was merely some holy water which had been spilled; the red curtains covering the windows made it look like blood.At last, Julien grew ashamed of his secret terrors.Am I going to be a coward? he said.To arms!3Julien taking the place of M. de Renal, signaled by his coat of arms, then rushing from the church with the cry of "To arms!" as he executes the first step toward what will be his last mo ments in Besanc;on: the irony accumulated with each of these traits sets the scene apart, lifts it out of the successive narra tion, or rather forms a loop in that narration, a point where the two ends of its thread cross and draw up in a circle.At the center of the circle, the fate of a name, torn from its reference, frag mented, left for anyone to read, a collection of letters that submits to the arbitrary principles of resemblance, repetition, combination.The name ends in -rel, but also it ends up by ending in -rel: its fate is to end up providing a rhyming syllable for Sorel.Julien decapitates the name and appropriates what is left: "his name has the same ending as mine."The irony is that Julien recognizes a resemblance between the names as a succes sion of letters but cannot see the resemblance between the fates of the names, their ending in decapitation.The Louis Jenrel named in the fragment has ended up as the name of someone decapitated; saying his name ends like mine, Julien says also 3Stendhal, 20.Read More
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-05-26
Language: en
Type: book
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 59
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