In Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal pays particular attention to the stories his heroes constantly tell themselves. Their conscious daytime fantasies contradict the reality perceived by the characters without conflicting with it. As Freud wrote in “Creative writers and daydreaming”, Stendhal allows two split aspects of his characters’ egos to coexist, one subject to the pleasure principle and the other to the reality principle. Moreover, their daytime fantasies allow Stendhal’s characters to satisfy their sexual impulses while claiming to obey only the demands of their superego. The stories that the unconscious ego tells itself thus manage to satisfy each of its three masters: the superego, id impulses and the outside world. It does this at the price of splitting that Gérard Bayle would no doubt have described as “functional”. Freud maintained throughout his life that the normal ego can divide itself and that ego-division is therefore specific neither to perversions nor to psychoses.