de Rjnal soon falls for the pretty young peasant, who plots his passive-aggressive seduction with the sang-froid of his idol, Napoleon, on the eve of a battle. It goes without saying that the voluptuous and rather naive Mme. ("The children adored him, but he didn't like them at all his mind was elsewhere.") de Rjnal, whose children he has been hired to tutor for Julien, it's a big opportunity to bury his low past, and he seizes it with an alacrity that is, typically, unalloyed with warm and/or fuzzy emotions.
In the novel's first part, Julien manages to get away from his crude woodcutter father and insinuate his way into the affections of the local bigwig, M. "The Red and the Black" follows the career of one Julien Sorel, a French peasant boy who has a sharp mind, a cute face and a talent for worming his way into the affections of powerful men and into the boudoirs of their voluptuous female relatives. Bush's spoken English continues to improve at an impressive rate, so far his literary ambitions seem limited to stylistic tours de force that rarely exceed two syllables - "rats," say, or "asshole." And yet if Gore's enthusiasm for one of the great classics of Western lit seems of a piece with his and his wife's much-touted cultural high-mindedness, a quick look at the book - a sex- and violence-filled potboiler about an affectless social climber who schemes and sleeps his way to the top of Parisian society - suggests that it would never pass the presidential candidate's "not till after prime time" criterion for clean art. The former, after all, have had little cause to find the present campaign of interest: Although George W. Al Gore's recent announcement on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that his favorite novel is Stendhal's 1830 classic "The Red and the Black" comes as a gratifying vindication for aficionados of high literature and for amoral sociopaths everywhere.
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