The Red and the Black by Stendahl

Yet another classic 19th century French novel! Young Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter who is inspired by stories of Napoleon told to him by a retired army surgeon and taught Latin by a local curate, enjoys a meteoric rise in life, only to be followed by an even more rapid fall. Julien first becomes tutor to the mayor's children in a small town in the Alps. He has to negotiate the social and political rivalries of the status-obsessed mayor, his grasping commercial rivals, and various other dignitaries — while engaging in a love affair with the mayor's wife, Madame de Renal. Escaping from there as he careens towards being found out, Julien he stepping stones from another village on to Paris, where he becomes confidential secretary to a nobleman and has to learn yet another set of social conventions as he integrates himself into the household and its circle of aristocratic hangers-on. He enters into an affair with his patron's daughter, Mathilde, which he expedites by pretending to love another woman. Julien's story provides a base from which Stendhal satirizes French society, from small town bourgeoisie to clerics and feckless aristocrats, and probes the psychology of love and honor.