The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
not been for that importunate noise, a cry of joy starting from the big
rocks could have arrived here." Her greedy eye devoured that immense
slope of dark verdure which was as level as a meadow.
"Why isn't he clever enough," she said to herself, quite overcome, "to
invent some signal to tell me that his happiness is equal to mine?" She
only came down from the dovecot when she was frightened of her husband
coming there to look for her.
She found him furious. He was perusing the soothing phrases of M. de
Valenod and reading them with an emotion to which they were but little
used.
"I always come back to the same idea," said Madame de Rênal seizing
a moment when a pause in her husband's ejaculations gave her the
possibility of getting heard. "It is necessary for Julien to travel.
Whatever talent he may have for Latin, he is only a peasant after all,
often coarse and lacking in tact. Thinking to be polite, he addresses
inflated compliments to me every day, which are in bad taste. He learns
them by heart out of some novel or other."
"He never reads one," exclaimed M. de Rênal. "I am assured of it. Do
you think that I am the master of a house who is so blind as to be
ignorant of what takes place in his own home."
"Well, if he doesn't read these droll compliments anywhere, he invents
them, and that's all the worse so far as he is concerned. He must have
talked about me in this tone in Verrières and perhaps without going so
far," said Madame Rênal with the idea of making a discovery, "he may
have talked in the same strain to Elisa, which is almost the same as if
he had said it to M. Valenod."
"Ah," exclaimed M. de Rênal, shaking the table and the room with one of
the most violent raps ever made by a human fist. "The anonymous printed
letter and Valenod's letters are written on the same paper."
"At last," thought Madame de Rênal. She pretended to be overwhelmed
at this discovery, and without having the courage to add a single
word, went and sat down some way off on the divan at the bottom of the
drawing-room.
From this point the battle was won. She had a great deal of trouble in
preventing M. de Rênal from going to speak to the supposed author of
the anonymous letter. "What, can't you see that making a scene with M.
Valenod without sufficient proof would be the most signal mistake? You
are envied, Monsieur, and who is responsible? Your talents: your wise
management, your tasteful buildings, the dowry which I have brought
you, and above all, the substantial legacy which we are entitled to
hope for from my good aunt, a legacy, the importance of which is
inordinately exaggerated, have made you into the first person in
Verrières."
"You are forgetting my birth," said M. de Rênal, smiling a little.
"You are one of the most distinguished gentlemen in the province,"
replied Madame de Rênal emphatically. "If the king were free and could
give birth its proper due, you would no doubt figure in the Chamber of
Peers, etc. And being in this magnificent position, you yet wish to
give the envious a fact to take hold of."
"To speak about this anonymous letter to M. Valenod is equivalent
to proclaiming over the whole of Verrières, nay, over the whole of
Besançon, over the whole province that this little bourgeois who has
been admitted perhaps imprudently to intimacy _with a Rênal_, has
managed to offend him. At the time when those letters which you have
just taken prove that I have reciprocated M. Valenod's love, you ought
to kill me. I should have deserved it a hundred times over, but not to
show him your anger. Remember that all our neighbours are only waiting
for an excuse to revenge themselves for your superiority. Remember that
in 1816 you had a hand in certain arrests.
"I think that you show neither consideration nor love for me,"
exclaimed M. de Rênal with all the bitterness evoked by such a memory,
"and I was not made a peer."
"I am thinking, my dear," resumed Madame de Rênal with a smile, "that
I shall be richer than you are, that I have been your companion for
twelve years, and that by virtue of those qualifications I am entitled
to have a voice in the council and, above all, in to-day's business. If
you prefer M. Julien to me," she added, with a touch of temper which
was but thinly disguised, "I am ready to go and pass a winter with my
aunt." These words proved a lucky shot. They possessed a firmness which
endeavoured to clothe itself with courtesy. It decided M. de Rênal, but
following the provincial custom, he still thought for a long time, and
went again over all his arguments; his wife let him speak. There was
still a touch of anger in his intonation. Finally two hours of futile
rant exhausted the strength of a man who had been subject during the
whole night to a continuous fit of anger. He determined on the line of
conduct he was going to follow with regard to M. Valenod, Julien and
even Elisa.
Madame de Rênal was on the point once or twice during this great scene
of feeling some sympathy for the very real unhappiness of the man
who had been so dear to her for twelve years. But true passions are
selfish. Besides she was expecting him every instant to mention the
anonymous letter which he had received the day before and he did not
mention it. In order to feel quite safe, Madame de Rênal wanted to know
the ideas which the letter had succeeding in suggesting to the man on
whom her fate depended, for, in the provinces the husbands are the
masters of public opinion. A husband who complains covers himself with
ridicule, an inconvenience which becomes no less dangerous in France
with each succeeding year; but if he refuses to provide his wife with
money, she falls to the status of a labouring woman at fifteen sous a
day, while the virtuous souls have scruples about employing her.
An odalisque in the seraglio can love the Sultan with all her might.
He is all-powerful and she has no hope of stealing his authority by
a series of little subtleties. The master's vengeance is terrible
and bloody but martial and generous; a dagger thrust finishes
everything. But it is by stabbing her with public contempt that a
nineteenth-century husband kills his wife. It is by shutting against
her the doors of all the drawing-rooms.
When Madame de Rênal returned to her room, her feeling of danger was
vividly awakened. She was shocked by the disorder in which she found
it. The locks of all the pretty little boxes had been broken. Many
planks in the floor had been lifted up. "He would have no pity on me,"
she said to herself. "To think of his spoiling like this, this coloured
wood floor which he likes so much; he gets red with rage whenever one
of his children comes into it with wet shoes, and now it is spoilt for
ever." The spectacle of this violence immediately banished the last
scruples which she was entertaining with respect to that victory which
she had won only too rapidly.
Julien came back with the children a little before the dinner-bell.
Madame de Rênal said to him very drily at dessert when the servant had
left the room:
"You have told me about your wish to go and spend a fortnight at
Verrières. M. de Rênal is kind enough to give you a holiday. You can
leave as soon as you like, but the childrens' exercises will be sent to
you every day so that they do not waste their time."
"I shall certainly not allow you more than a week," said M. de Rênal in
a very bitter tone. Julien thought his visage betrayed the anxiety of a
man who was seriously harassed.
"He has not yet decided what line to take," he said to his love during
a moment when they were alone together in the drawing-room.
Madame de Rênal rapidly recounted to him all she had done since the
morning.
"The details are for to-night," she added with a smile.
"Feminine perversity," thought Julien, "What can be the pleasure, what
can be the instinct which induces them to deceive us."
"I think you are both enlightened and at the same time blinded by your
love," he said to her with some coldness. "Your conduct to-day has been
admirable, but is it prudent for us to try and see each other to-night?
This house is paved with enemies. Just think of Elisa's passionate
hatred for me."
"That hate is very like the passionate indifference which you no doubt
have for me."
"Even if I were indifferent I ought to save you from the peril in which
I have plunged you. If chance so wills it that M. de Rênal should speak
to Elisa, she can acquaint him with everything in a single word. What
is to prevent him from hiding near my room fully armed?"
"What, not even courage?" said Madame de Rênal, with all the
haughtiness of a scion of nobility.
"I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien,
coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts.
But," he added, taking her hand, "you have no idea how devoted I am to
you and how over-joyed I am of being able to say good-bye to you before
this cruel separation."
CHAPTER XXII
MANNERS OF PROCEDURE IN 1830
Speech has been given to man to conceal his thought.
_R.P. Malagrida_.
Julien had scarcely arrived at Verrières before he reproached himself
with his injustice towards Madame de Rênal. "I should have despised
her for a weakling of a woman if she had not had the strength to go
through with her scene with M. de Rênal. But she has acquitted herself
like a diplomatist and I sympathise with the defeat of the man who is
my enemy. There is a bourgeois prejudice in my action; my vanity is
offended because M. de Rênal is a man. Men form a vast and illustrious
body to which I have the honour to belong. I am nothing but a fool." M.
Chélan had refused the magnificent apartments which the most important
Liberals in the district had offered him, when his loss of his living
had necessitated his leaving the parsonage. The two rooms which he had
rented were littered with his books. Julien, wishing to show Verrières
what a priest could do, went and fetched a dozen pinewood planks from
his father, carried them on his back all along the Grande-Rue, borrowed
some tools from an old comrade and soon built a kind of book-case in
which he arranged M. Chélan's books.
"I thought you were corrupted by the vanity of the world," said the
old man to him as he cried with joy, "but this is something which well
redeems all the childishness of that brilliant Guard of Honour uniform
which has made you so many enemies."
M. de Rênal had ordered Julien to stay at his house. No one suspected
what had taken place. The third day after his arrival Julien saw no
less a personage than M. the sub-prefect de Maugiron come all the way
up the stairs to his room. It was only after two long hours of fatuous
gossip and long-winded lamentations about the wickedness of man, the
lack of honesty among the people entrusted with the administration
of the public funds, the dangers of his poor France, etc. etc., that
Julien was at last vouchsafed a glimpse of the object of the visit.
They were already on the landing of the staircase and the poor half
disgraced tutor was escorting with all proper deference the future
prefect of some prosperous department, when the latter was pleased to
take an interest in Julien's fortune, to praise his moderation in money
matters, etc., etc. Finally M. de Maugiron, embracing him in the most
paternal way, proposed that he should leave M. de Rênal and enter the
household of an official who had children to educate and who, like King
Philippe, thanked Heaven not so much that they had been granted to him,
but for the fact that they had been born in the same neighbourhood as
M. Julien. Their tutor would enjoy a salary of 800 francs, payable
not from month to month, which is not at all aristocratic, said M. de