A carpenter's son with a good memory and no prospects decides the church is the only ladder left, and climbs it through two households and one scaffold. Stendhal took the plot from a newspaper report of a seminarian who shot his former mistress in church. He predicted he would be read in 1935, and was almost exactly right. Fifty-eight plates of trees, parks and river views by Corot and Hubert Robert carry the novel's green shade and its glimpses of the city, 1780 to 1875.
