While in Marseille on travels in 1829, Stendhal wrote in the margins of his Promenades dans Rome that the ‘idea of Julien’ came to him in the night of October 25/26.  He returned to Paris at the end of November with a manuscript that he judged to be too short, and spent most of 1830 expanding and editing. The work was given its present title of Le Rouge et le Noir in May 1830 and was published by Levavasseur in the following November.

Usually translated as The Red and the Black or Scarlet and Black, it is the most celebrated work of Stendhal.