The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
blind hate of every argument to which they objected, seemed to her as
natural to the male sex as wearing boots and felt hats.
After many years, Madame de Rênal had still failed to acclimatize
herself to those monied people in whose society she had to live.
Hence the success of the little peasant Julien. She found in the
sympathy of this proud and noble soul a sweet enjoyment which had all
the glamour and fascination of novelty.
Madame de Rênal soon forgave him that extreme ignorance, which
constituted but an additional charm, and the roughness of his manner
which she succeeded in correcting. She thought that he was worth
listening to, even when the conversation turned on the most ordinary
events, even in fact when it was only a question of a poor dog which
had been crushed as he crossed the street by a peasant's cart going
at a trot. The sight of the dog's pain made her husband indulge in
his coarse laugh, while she noticed Julien frown, with his fine black
eyebrows which were so beautifully arched.
Little by little, it seemed to her that generosity, nobility of soul
and humanity were to be found in nobody else except this young abbé.
She felt for him all the sympathy and even all the admiration which
those virtues excite in well-born souls.
If the scene had been Paris, Julien's position towards Madame de Rênal
would have been soon simplified. But at Paris, love is a creature of
novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would soon have found
the elucidation of their position in three or four novels, and even
in the couplets of the Gymnase Theatre. The novels which have traced
out for them the part they would play, and showed them the model which
they were to imitate, and Julien would sooner or later have been forced
by his vanity to follow that model, even though it had given him no
pleasure and had perhaps actually gone against the grain.
If the scene had been laid in a small town in Aveyron or the Pyrenees,
the slightest episode would have been rendered crucial by the fiery
condition of the atmosphere. But under our more gloomy skies, a poor
young man who is only ambitious because his natural refinement makes
him feel the necessity of some of those joys which only money can give,
can see every day a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, is
absorbed in her children, and never goes to novels for her examples of
conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens gradually, in the
provinces where there is far more naturalness.
Madame de Rênal was often overcome to the point of tears when she
thought of the young tutor's poverty. Julien surprised her one day
actually crying.
"Oh Madame! has any misfortune happened to you?"
"No, my friend," she answered, "call the children, let us go for a
walk."
She took his arm and leant on it in a manner that struck Julien as
singular. It was the first time she had called Julien "My friend."
Towards the end of the walk, Julien noticed that she was blushing
violently. She slackened her pace.
"You have no doubt heard," she said, without looking at him, "that I
am the only heiress of a very rich aunt who lives at Besançon. She
loads me with presents.... My sons are getting on so wonderfully that
I should like to ask you to accept a small present as a token of my
gratitude. It is only a matter of a few louis to enable you to get
some linen. But--" she added, blushing still more, and she left off
speaking--
"But what, Madame?" said Julien.
"It is unnecessary," she went on lowering her head, "to mention this to
my husband."
"I may not be big, Madame, but I am not mean," answered Julien,
stopping, and drawing himself up to his full height, with his
eyes shining with rage, "and this is what you have not realised
sufficiently. I should be lower than a menial if I were to put myself
in the position of concealing from M de. Rênal anything at all having
to do with my money."
Madame de Rênal was thunderstruck.
"The Mayor," went on Julien, "has given me on five occasions sums of
thirty-six francs since I have been living in his house. I am ready
to show any account-book to M. de Rênal and anyone else, even to M.
Valenod who hates me."
As the result of this outburst, Madame de Rênal remained pale and
nervous, and the walk ended without either one or the other finding any
pretext for renewing the conversation. Julien's proud heart had found
it more and more impossible to love Madame de Rênal.
As for her, she respected him, she admired him, and she had been
scolded by him. Under the pretext of making up for the involuntary
humiliation which she had caused him, she indulged in acts of the most
tender solicitude. The novelty of these attentions made Madame de
Rênal happy for eight days. Their effect was to appease to some extent
Julien's anger. He was far from seeing anything in them in the nature
of a fancy for himself personally.
"That is just what rich people are," he said to himself--"they snub you
and then they think they can make up for everything by a few monkey
tricks."
Madame de Rênal's heart was too full, and at the same time too
innocent, for her not too tell her husband, in spite of her resolutions
not to do so, about the offer she had made to Julien, and the manner in
which she had been rebuffed.
"How on earth," answered M. de Rênal, keenly piqued, "could you put
up with a refusal on the part of a servant,"--and, when Madame de
Rênal protested against the word "Servant," "I am using, madam, the
words of the late Prince of Condé, when he presented his Chamberlains
to his new wife. 'All these people' he said 'are servants.' I have
also read you this passage from the Memoirs of Besenval, a book which
is indispensable on all questions of etiquette. 'Every person, not
a gentleman, who lives in your house and receives a salary is your
servant.' I'll go and say a few words to M. Julien and give him a
hundred francs."
"Oh, my dear," said Madame De Rênal trembling, "I hope you won't do it
before the servants!"
"Yes, they might be jealous and rightly so," said her husband as he
took his leave, thinking of the greatness of the sum.
Madame de Rênal fell on a chair almost fainting in her anguish. He is
going to humiliate Julien, and it is my fault! She felt an abhorrence
for her husband and hid her face in her hands. She resolved that
henceforth she would never make any more confidences.
When she saw Julien again she was trembling all over. Her chest was so
cramped that she could not succeed in pronouncing a single word. In her
embarrassment she took his hands and pressed them.
"Well, my friend," she said to him at last, "are you satisfied with my
husband?"
"How could I be otherwise," answered Julien, with a bitter smile, "he
has given me a hundred francs."
Madame de Rênal looked at him doubtfully.
"Give me your arm," she said at last, with a courageous intonation that
Julien had not heard before.
She dared to go as far as the shop of the bookseller of Verrières, in
spite of his awful reputation for Liberalism. In the shop she chose
ten louis worth of books for a present for her sons. But these books
were those which she knew Julien was wanting. She insisted on each
child writing his name then and there in the bookseller's shop in
those books which fell to his lot. While Madame de Rênal was rejoicing
over the kind reparation which she had had the courage to make to
Julien, the latter was overwhelmed with astonishment at the quantity
of books which he saw at the bookseller's. He had never dared to enter
so profane a place. His heart was palpitating. Instead of trying to
guess what was passing in Madame de Rênal's heart he pondered deeply
over the means by which a young theological student could procure
some of those books. Eventually it occurred to him that it would be
possible, with tact, to persuade M. de Rênal that one of the proper
subjects of his sons' curriculum would be the history of the celebrated
gentlemen who had been born in the province. After a month of careful
preparation Julien witnessed the success of this idea. The success was
so great that he actually dared to risk mentioning to M. de Rênal in
conversation, a matter which the noble mayor found disagreeable from
quite another point of view. The suggestion was to contribute to the
fortune of a Liberal by taking a subscription at the bookseller's. M.
de Rênal agreed that it would be wise to give his elder son a first
hand acquaintance with many works which he would hear mentioned in
conversation when he went to the Military School.
But Julien saw that the mayor had determined to go no further. He
suspected some secret reason but could not guess it.
"I was thinking, sir," he said to him one day, "that it would be highly
undesirable for the name of so good a gentleman as a Rênal to appear on
a bookseller's dirty ledger." M. de Rênal's face cleared.
"It would also be a black mark," continued Julien in a more humble
tone, "against a poor theology student if it ever leaked out that his
name had been on the ledger of a bookseller who let out books. The
Liberals might go so far as to accuse me of having asked for the most
infamous books. Who knows if they will not even go so far as to write
the titles of those perverse volumes after my name?" But Julien was
getting off the track. He noticed that the Mayor's physiognomy was
re-assuming its expression of embarrassment and displeasure. Julien was
silent. "I have caught my man," he said to himself.
It so happened that a few days afterwards the elder of the children
asked Julien, in M. de Rênal's presence, about a book which had been
advertised in the _Quotidienne_.
"In order to prevent the Jacobin Party having the slightest pretext for
a score," said the young tutor, "and yet give me the means of answering
M. de Adolphe's question, you can make your most menial servant take
out a subscription at the booksellers."
"That's not a bad idea," said M. de Rênal, who was obviously very
delighted.
"You will have to stipulate all the same," said Julien in that solemn
and almost melancholy manner which suits some people so well when they
see the realization of matters which they have desired for a long time
past, "you will have to stipulate that the servant should not take out
any novels. Those dangerous books, once they got into the house, might
corrupt Madame de Rênal's maids, and even the servant himself."
"You are forgetting the political pamphlets," went on M. de Rênal with
an important air. He was anxious to conceal the admiration with which
the cunning "middle course" devised by his children's tutor had filled
him.
In this way Julien's life was made up of a series of little acts of
diplomacy, and their success gave him far more food for thought than
the marked manifestation of favouritism which he could have read at any
time in Madame de Rênal's heart, had he so wished.
The psychological position in which he had found himself all his
life was renewed again in the mayor of Verrières' house. Here in the
same way as at his father's saw-mill, he deeply despised the people
with whom he lived, and was hated by them. He saw every day in the
conversation of the sub-perfect, M. Valenod and the other friends of
the family, about things which had just taken place under their very
eyes, how little ideas corresponded to reality. If an action seemed to
Julien worthy of admiration, it was precisely that very action which
would bring down upon itself the censure of the people with whom he
lived. His inner mental reply always was, "What beasts or what fools!"
The joke was that, in spite of all his pride, he often understood
absolutely nothing what they were talking about.
Throughout his whole life he had only spoken sincerely to the old
Surgeon-Major.