The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
friends in Verrières.
The promenade in the garden calmed him a little. "No," he exclaimed,
"I shall not deprive myself of my wife, she is too useful to me." He
imagined with horror what his house would be without his wife. The only
relative he had was the Marquise of R---- old, stupid, and malicious.
A very sensible idea occurred to him, but its execution required a
strength of character considerably superior to the small amount of
character which the poor man possessed. "If I keep my wife," he said
to himself, "I know what I shall do one day; on some occasion when
she makes me lose patience, I shall reproach her with her guilt. She
is proud, we shall quarrel, and all this will happen before she has
inherited her aunt's fortune. And how they will all make fun of me
then! My wife loves her children, the result will be that everything
will go to them. But as for me, I shall be the laughing-stock of
Verrières. 'What,' they will say, 'he could not even manage to revenge
himself on his wife!' Would it not be better to leave it and verify
nothing? In that case I tie my hands, and cannot afterwards reproach
her with anything."
An instant afterwards M. de Rênal, once more a prey to wounded vanity,
set himself laboriously to recollect all the methods of procedure
mentioned in the billiard-room of the _Casino_ or the _Nobles' Club_ in
Verrières, when some fine talker interrupted the pool to divert himself
at the expense of some deceived husband. How cruel these pleasantries
appeared to him at the present moment!
"My God, why is my wife not dead! then I should be impregnable against
ridicule. Why am I not a widower? I should go and pass six months in
Paris in the best society. After this moment of happiness occasioned
by the idea of widowerhood, his imagination reverted to the means of
assuring himself of the truth. Should he put a slight layer of bran
before the door of Julien's room at midnight after everyone had gone to
bed? He would see the impression of the feet in the following morning.
"But that's no good," he suddenly exclaimed with rage. "That
inquisitive Elisa will notice it, and they will soon know all over the
house that I am jealous."
In another _Casino_ tale a husband had assured himself of his
misfortune by tying a hair with a little wax so that it shut the door
of the gallant as effectually as a seal.
After so many hours of uncertainty this means of clearing up his fate
seemed to him emphatically the best, and he was thinking of availing
himself of it when, in one of the turnings of the avenue he met the
very woman whom he would like to have seen dead. She was coming back
from the village. She had gone to hear mass in the church of Vergy.
A tradition, extremely doubtful in the eyes of the cold philosopher,
but in which she believed, alleges that the little church was once the
chapel of the château of the Lord of Vergy. This idea obsessed Madame
de Rênal all the time in the church that she had counted on spending in
prayer. She kept on imagining to herself the spectacle of her husband
killing Julien when out hunting as though by accident, and then making
her eat his heart in the evening.
"My fate," she said to herself, "depends on what he will think when
he listens to me. It may be I shall never get another opportunity
of speaking to him after this fatal quarter of an hour. He is not a
reasonable person who is governed by his intellect. In that case, with
the help of my weak intelligence, I could anticipate what he will do or
say. He will decide our common fate. He has the power. But this fate
depends on my adroitness, on my skill in directing the ideas of this
crank, who is blinded by his rage and unable to see half of what takes
place. Great God! I need talent and coolness, where shall I get it?"
She regained her calmness as though by magic, and she entered the
garden and saw her husband in the distance. His dishevelled hair and
disordered dress showed that he had not slept.
She gave him a letter with a broken seal but folded. As for him,
without opening it, he gazed at his wife with the eyes of a madman.
"Here's an abominable thing," she said to him, "which an evil-looking
man who makes out that he knows you and is under an obligation to you,
handed to me as I was passing behind the notary's garden. I insist on
one thing and that is that you send back this M. Julien to his parents
and without delay." Madame de Rênal hastened to say these words,
perhaps a little before the psychological moment, in order to free
herself from the awful prospect of having to say them.
She was seized with joy on seeing that which she was occasioning to her
husband. She realised from the fixed stare which he was rivetting on
her that Julien had surmised rightly.
"What a genius he is to be so brilliantly diplomatic instead of
succumbing to so real a misfortune," she thought. "He will go very far
in the future! Alas, his successes will only make him forget me."
This little act of admiration for the man whom she adored quite cured
her of her trouble.
She congratulated herself on her tactics. "I have not been unworthy of
Julien," she said to herself with a sweet and secret pleasure.
M. de Rênal kept examining the second anonymous letter which the
reader may remember was composed of printed words glued on to a paper
verging on blue. He did not say a word for fear of giving himself away.
"They still make fun of me in every possible way," said M. de Rênal
to himself, overwhelmed with exhaustion. "Still more new insults to
examine and all the time on account of my wife." He was on the point
of heaping on her the coarsest insults. He was barely checked by the
prospects of the Besançon legacy. Consumed by the need of venting his
feelings on something, he crumpled up the paper of the second anonymous
letter and began to walk about with huge strides. He needed to get
away from his wife. A few moments afterwards he came back to her in a
quieter frame of mind.
"The thing is to take some definite line and send Julien away," she
said immediately, "after all it is only a labourer's son. You will
compensate him by a few crowns and besides he is clever and will easily
manage to find a place, with M. Valenod for example, or with the
sub-prefect De Maugiron who both have children. In that way you will
not be doing him any wrong...." "There you go talking like the fool
that you are," exclaimed M. de Rênal in a terrible voice. "How can one
hope that a woman will show any good sense? You never bother yourself
about common sense. How can you ever get to know anything? Your
indifference and your idleness give you no energy except for hunting
those miserable butterflies, which we are unfortunate to have in our
houses."
Madame de Rênal let him speak and he spoke for a long time. _He was
working off his anger_, to use the local expression.
"Monsieur," she answered him at last, "I speak as a woman who has
been outraged in her honour, that is to say, in what she holds most
precious."
Madame de Rênal preserved an unalterable sang-froid during all this
painful conversation on the result of which depended the possibility of
still living under the same roof as Julien. She sought for the ideas
which she thought most adapted to guide her husband's blind anger
into a safe channel. She had been insensible to all the insulting
imputations which he had addressed to her. She was not listening to
them, she was then thinking about Julien. "Will he be pleased with me?"
"This little peasant whom we have loaded with attentions, and even with
presents, may be innocent," she said to him at last, "but he is none
the less the occasion of the first affront that I have ever received.
Monsieur, when I read this abominable paper, I vowed to myself that
either he or I should leave your house."
"Do you want to make a scandal so as to dishonour me and yourself as
well? You will make things hum in Verrières I can assure you."
"It is true, the degree of prosperity in which your prudent management
has succeeded in placing you yourself, your family and the town is the
subject of general envy.... Well, I will urge Julien to ask you for
a holiday to go and spend the month with that wood-merchant of the
mountains, a fit friend to be sure for this little labourer."
"Mind you do nothing at all," resumed M. de Rênal with a fair amount of
tranquillity. "I particularly insist on your not speaking to him. You
will put him into a temper and make him quarrel with me. You know to
what extent this little gentleman is always spoiling for a quarrel."
"That young man has no tact," resumed Madame de Rênal. "He may be
learned, you know all about that, but at bottom he is only a peasant.
For my own part I never thought much of him since he refused to
marry Elisa. It was an assured fortune; and that on the pretext that
sometimes she had made secret visits to M. Valenod."
"Ah," said M. de Rênal, lifting up his eyebrows inordinately. "What,
did Julien tell you that?"
"Not exactly, he always talked of the vocation which calls him to the
holy ministry, but believe me, the first vocation for those lower-class
people is getting their bread and butter. He gave me to understand that
he was quite aware of her secret visits."
"And I--I was ignorant," exclaimed M. de Rênal, growing as angry as
before and accentuating his words. "Things take place in my house which
I know nothing about.... What! has there been anything between Elisa
and Valenod?"
"Oh, that's old history, my dear," said Madame de Rênal with a smile,
"and perhaps no harm has come of it. It was at the time when your good
friend Valenod would not have minded their thinking at Verrières that a
perfectly platonic little affection was growing up between him and me."
"I had that idea once myself," exclaimed M. de Rênal, furiously
striking his head as he progressed from discovery to discovery, "and
you told me nothing about it."
"Should one set two friends by the ears on account of a little fit of
vanity on the part of our dear director? What society woman has not had
addressed to her a few letters which were both extremely witty and even
a little gallant?"
"He has written to you?"
"He writes a great deal."
"Show me those letters at once, I order you," and M. de Rênal pulled
himself up to his six feet.
"I will do nothing of the kind," he was answered with a sweetness
verging on indifference. "I will show you them one day when you are in
a better frame of mind."
"This very instant, odds life," exclaimed M. de Rênal, transported with
rage and yet happier than he had been for twelve hours.
"Will you swear to me," said Madame de Rênal quite gravely, "never to
quarrel with the director of the workhouse about these letters?"
"Quarrel or no quarrel, I can take those foundlings away from him,
but," he continued furiously, "I want those letters at once. Where are
they?"
"In a drawer in my secretary, but I shall certainly not give you the
key."
"I'll manage to break it," he cried, running towards his wife's room.
He did break in fact with a bar of iron a costly secretary of veined
mahogany which came from Paris and which he had often been accustomed
to wipe with the nap of his coat, when he thought he had detected a
spot.
Madame de Rênal had climbed up at a run the hundred and twenty steps
of the dovecot. She tied the corner of a white handkerchief to one of
the bars of iron of the little window. She was the happiest of women.
With tears in her eyes she looked towards the great mountain forest.
"Doubtless," she said to herself, "Julien is watching for this happy
signal."
She listened attentively for a long time and then she cursed the
monotonous noise of the grasshopper and the song of the birds. "Had it