enal. The lower middle class hero hesitates between his genuine enchantment with Madame de Renal's sweetness of spirit and simplicity and his merciless pursuit of his political ideals, like that social advancement. Raymond Giraut also highlighted Julien's double nature. As the critic points out, the ambiguous feelings that characterize Sorel are also specific of most of the nineteen century writers, who hesitated between a bitter disillusionment with the present, a romantic sensibility and a hope of progress and perfectibility: "Jokingly, Julien Sorel once said to himself: "In truth, man has two selves within him." 1 These words might be taken as the motif of the great nineteenth century bourgeois writers, whose subtle minds were always prey to ambiguous feelings and contradictory impul
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