The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
sweetheart was rallying him on the simplicity of the meal, the door of
the room was suddenly shaken violently. It was M. de Rênal.
"Why have you shut yourself in?" he cried to her.
Julien had only just time to slip under the sofa.
On any ordinary day Madame de Rênal would have been upset by this
question which was put with true conjugal harshness; but she realised
that M. de Rênal had only to bend down a little to notice Julien, for
M. de Rênal had flung himself into the chair opposite the sofa which
Julien had been sitting in one moment before.
Her headache served as an excuse for everything. While her husband on
his side went into a long-winded account of the billiards pool which he
had won at Casino, "yes, to be sure a nineteen franc pool," he added.
She noticed Julien's hat on a chair three paces in front of them.
Her self-possession became twice as great, she began to undress, and
rapidly passing one minute behind her husband threw her dress over the
chair with the hat on it.
At last M. de Rênal left. She begged Julien to start over again his
account of his life at the Seminary. "I was not listening to you
yesterday all the time you were speaking, I was only thinking of
prevailing on myself to send you away."
She was the personification of indiscretion. They talked very loud and
about two o'clock in the morning they were interrupted by a violent
knock at the door. It was M. de Rênal again.
"Open quickly, there are thieves in the house!" he said. "Saint Jean
found their ladder this morning."
"This is the end of everything," cried Madame de Rênal, throwing
herself into Julien's arms. "He will kill both of us, he doesn't
believe there are any thieves. I will die in your arms, and be more
happy in my death than I ever was in my life." She made no attempt to
answer her husband who was beginning to lose his temper, but started
kissing Julien passionately.
"Save Stanislas's mother," he said to her with an imperious look. "I
will jump down into the courtyard through the lavatory window, and
escape in the garden; the dogs have recognised me. Make my clothes into
a parcel and throw them into the garden as soon as you can. In the
meanwhile let him break the door down. But above all, no confession, I
forbid you to confess, it is better that he should suspect rather than
be certain."
"You will kill yourself as you jump!" was her only answer and her only
anxiety.
She went with him to the lavatory window; she then took sufficient time
to hide his clothes. She finally opened the door to her husband who was
boiling with rage. He looked in the room and in the lavatory without
saying a word and disappeared. Julien's clothes were thrown down to
him; he seized them and ran rapidly towards the bottom of the garden in
the direction of the Doubs.
As he was running he heard a bullet whistle past him, and heard at the
same time the report of a gun.
"It is not M. de Rênal," he thought, "he's far too bad a shot." The
dogs ran silently at his side, the second shot apparently broke the paw
of one dog, for he began to whine piteously. Julien jumped the wall of
the terrace, did fifty paces under cover, and began to fly in another
direction. He heard voices calling and had a distinct view of his enemy
the servant firing a gun; a farmer also began to shoot away from the
other side of the garden. Julien had already reached the bank of the
Doubs where he dressed himself.
An hour later he was a league from Verrières on the Geneva road. "If
they had suspicions," thought Julien, "they will look for me on the
Paris road."
CHAPTER XXXI
THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY
O rus quando ego te aspiciam?--_Horace_
"You've no doubt come to wait for the Paris mail, Monsieur," said the
host of an inn where he had stopped to breakfast.
"To-day or to-morrow, it matters little," said Julien.
The mail arrived while he was still posing as indifferent. There were
two free places.
"Why! it's you my poor Falcoz," said the traveller who was coming from
the Geneva side to the one who was getting in at the same time as
Julien.
"I thought you were settled in the outskirts of Lyons," said Falcoz,
"in a delicious valley near the Rhône."
"Nicely settled! I am running away."
"What! you are running away? you Saint Giraud! Have you, who look so
virtuous, committed some crime?" said Falcoz with a smile.
"On my faith it comes to the same thing. I am running away from the
abominable life which one leads in the provinces. I like the freshness
of the woods and the country tranquillity, as you know. You have often
accused me of being romantic. I don't want to hear politics talked as
long as I live, and politics are hounding me out."
"But what party do you belong to?"
"To none and that's what ruins me. That's all there is to be said
about my political life--I like music and painting. A good book is
an event for me. I am going to be forty-four. How much longer have I
got to live? Fifteen--twenty--thirty years at the outside. Well, I
want the ministers in thirty years' time to be a little cleverer than
those of to-day but quite as honest. The history of England serves as
a mirror for our own future. There will always be a king who will try
to increase his prerogative. The ambition of becoming a deputy, the
fame of Mirabeau and the hundreds of thousand francs which he won for
himself will always prevent the rich people in the province from going
to sleep: they will call that being Liberal and loving the people. The
desire of becoming a peer or a gentleman of the chamber will always win
over the ultras. On the ship of state every one is anxious to take over
the steering because it is well paid. Will there be never a poor little
place for the simple passenger?"
"Is it the last elections which are forcing you out of the province?"
"My misfortune goes further back. Four years ago I was forty and
possessed 500,000 francs. I am four years older to-day and probably
50,000 francs to the bad, as I shall lose that sum on the sale of my
château of Monfleury in a superb position near the Rhône.
"At Paris I was tired of that perpetual comedy which is rendered
obligatory by what you call nineteenth-century civilisation. I thirsted
for good nature and simplicity. I bought an estate in the mountains
near the Rhine, there was no more beautiful place under the heavens.
"The village clergyman and the gentry of the locality pay me court for
six months; I invite them to dinner; I have left Paris, I tell them, so
as to avoid talking politics or hearing politics talked for the rest of
my life. As you know I do not subscribe to any paper, the less letters
the postman brought me the happier I was.
"That did not suit the vicar's book. I was soon the victim of a
thousand unreasonable requests, annoyances, etc. I wished to give two
or three hundred francs a year to the poor, I was asked to give it
to the Paris associations, that of Saint Joseph, that of the Virgin,
etc. I refused. I was then insulted in a hundred ways. I was foolish
enough to be upset by it. I could not go out in the morning to enjoy
the beauty of our mountain without finding some annoyance which
distracted me from my reveries and recalled unpleasantly both men and
their wickedness. On the Rogation processions, for instance whose
chanting I enjoy (it is probably a Greek melody) they will not bless
my fields because, says the clergyman, they belong to an infidel. A
cow dies belonging to a devout old peasant woman. She says the reason
is the neighbourhood of a pond which belongs to my infidel self, a
philosopher coming from Paris, and eight days afterwards I find my
fish in agonies poisoned by lime. Intrigue in all its forms envelops
me. The justice of the peace, who is an honest man, but frightened of
losing his place, always decides against me. The peace of the country
proved a hell for me. Once they saw that I was abandoned by the vicar,
the head of the village congregation, and that I was not supported by
the retired captain who was the head of the Liberals they all fell upon
me, down to the mason whom I had supported for a year, down to the very
wheel-wright who wanted to cheat me with impunity over the repairing of
my ploughs.
"In order to find some support, and to win at any rate some of my law
suits I became a Liberal, but, as you say, those damned elections come
along. They asked me for my vote."
"For an unknown man?"
"Not at all, for a man whom I knew only too well. I refused. It was
terribly imprudent. From that moment I had the Liberals on my hands as
well, and my position became intolerable. I believe that if the vicar
had got it into his head to accuse me of assassinating my servant,
there would be twenty witnesses of the two parties who would swear that
they had seen me committing the crime."
"You mean to say you want to live in the country without pandering
to the passions of your neighbours, without even listening to their
gossip. What a mistake!"
"It is rectified at last. Monfleury is for sale. I will lose 50,000
francs if necessary, but I am over-joyed I am leaving that hell of
hypocrisy and annoyance. I am going to look for solitude and rustic
peace in the only place where those things are to be found in France,
on a fourth storey looking on to the Champs-Elysées; and, moreover, I
am actually deliberating if I shall not commence my political career by
giving consecrated bread to the parish in the Roule quarter."
"All this would not have happened under Bonaparte," said Falcoz with
eyes shining with rage and sorrow.
"Very good, but why didn't your Bonaparte manage to keep his position?
Everything which I suffer to-day is his work."
At this point Julien's attention was redoubled. He had realised from
the first word that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the old boyhood friend
of M. de Rênal, who had been repudiated by him in 1816, and that the
philosopher Saint-Giraud must be the brother of that chief of the
prefecture of----who managed to get the houses of the municipality
knocked down to him at a cheap price.
"And all this is the work of your Bonaparte. An honest man, aged forty,
and possessed of five hundred thousand francs however inoffensive he
is, cannot settle in the provinces and find peace there; those priests
and nobles of his will turn him out."
"Oh don't talk evil of him," exclaimed Falcoz. "France was never so
high in the esteem of the nations as during the thirteen years of his
reign; then every single act was great."
"Your emperor, devil take him," replied the man of forty-four, "was
only great on his battle fields and when he reorganised the finances
about 1802. What is the meaning of all his conduct since then? What
with his chamberlains, his pomp, and his receptions in the Tuileries,
he has simply provided a new edition of all the monarchical tomfoolery.
It was a revised edition and might possibly have lasted for a century
or two. The nobles and the priests wish to go back to the old one, but
they did not have the iron hand necessary to impose it on the public."
"Yes, that's just how an old printer would talk."
"Who has turned me out of my estate?" continued the printer, angrily.
"The priests, whom Napoleon called back by his Concordat instead
of treating them like the State treats doctors, barristers, and
astronomers, simply seeing in them ordinary citizens, and not bothering
about the particular calling by which they are trying to earn their
livelihood. Should we be saddled with these insolent gentlemen today,
if your Bonaparte had not created barons and counts? No, they were out
of fashion. Next to the priests, it's the little country nobility who
have annoyed me the most, and compelled me to become a Liberal."
The conversation was endless. The theme will occupy France for another