The Red and the Black ( Le Rouge et le noir), read as a “life story”, can be compared with the different memoirs published in Stendhal’s time, among others with Jean-François Marmontel’s Memoirs (Mémoires d’un père), a work which the beginning of the novel uses as a counter-model. Stendhal’s novel attacks, through the description of places and peoples, the clichés and the idealisation so present in Marmontel’s Memoirs as in so many edifying works of the 18th and 19th centuries. In confronting these autobiographical models, the novel puts the biographical form into question even as it adopts it, in order to reflect upon the “lessons” that a life story can teach. Stendhal structures his novel against the paternal gesture proper to so many memoirs of his time, based on the idea of transmitting a moral and a body of knowledge, and puts forward an alternate poetical and critical program.