Julien Sorel and the Liar-in-Chief

My this point - nearly half-way through Stendahl's The Read and the Black (1830) - I have to wonder whether there are any redeeming qualities for the protagonist, Julien Sorel, who has proven himself to be a heartless opportunist who gets by on his extreme intelligence (ability to memorize vast tracts of Latin - whether he understand what he can recite like a parrot and whether he has on social or analytic intelligence is another matter entirely) and exceptional good looks. He comes across the woman w/ whom he'd had a passionate affair under the eyes of her husband (his employer and benefactor), leaving her distraught and ashamed, and he doesn't say a word to her - to give just one example. He's now set on rising to wealth and stature through the church, despite his complete lack of faith and morals. He has no interest in the church aside from its potential as a ladder he can climb (unlike most of the others in the seminary w/ him, he's from a prosperous though untitled family and has developed good manners and social graces). Yes, perhaps by the end of the novel he will be redeemed in some manner - I know there are famous chapters at the end about what he learns as a condemned man - but at this point what most strikes me is his constant fantasy that he is a heroic soldier in the service of Napoleon when he's nothing more that a tutor of Latin and a young man in a seminary doing favors for those who could advance his career and contemptuous of everyone else. In his laments about the few opportunities to serve in the miliarty and the past glories of the Napoleonic age, Julien reminds me of our own current liar-in-chief who puffs up his chest and acts tough when surrounded by bodyguards (typical tyrant behavior) and who boasts of the heroic acts he would have done had he only had the opportunity (e.g., said he'd have gone after the gunman and the Parkland High shooting - tough words from a coward).