The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
They are right. The men in the salons never get up in the morning with
this poignant thought in their minds, how am I going to get my dinner?
They boast about their honesty and when they are summoned on the jury,
they take pride in convicting the man who has stolen a silver dish
because he felt starving.
"But if there is a court, and it's a question of losing or winning a
portfolio, my worthy salon people will commit crimes exactly similar to
those, which the need of getting a dinner inspired those two felons to
perpetrate.
"There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing
more than a silly anachronism well worthy of the advocate-general who
harried me the other day, and whose grandfather was enriched by one of
the confiscations of Louis XIV. There is no such thing as right, except
when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment.
"Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the
lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it
in one word, need. No, the people whom the world honours are merely
villains who have had the good fortune not to have been caught
red-handed. The prosecutor whom society put on my track was enriched by
an infamous act. I have committed a murder, and I am justly condemned,
but the Valenod who has condemned me, is by reason alone of that very
deed, a hundred times more harmful to society.
"Well," added Julien sadly but not angrily, "in spite of his avarice,
my father is worth more than all those men. He never loved me.
The disgrace I bring upon him by an infamous death has proved the
last straw. That fear of lacking money, that distorted view of the
wickedness of mankind, which is called avarice, make him find a
tremendous consolation and sense of security in a sum of three or four
hundred louis, which I have been able to leave him. Some Sunday, after
dinner, he will shew his gold to all the envious men in Verrières.
'Which of you would not be delighted to have a son guillotined at a
price like this,' will be the message they will read in his eyes."
This philosophy might be true, but it was of such a character as to
make him wish for death. In this way five long days went by. He was
polite and gentle to Mathilde, whom he saw was exasperated by the
most violent jealousy. One evening Julien seriously thought of taking
his own life. His soul was demoralised by the deep unhappiness in
which madame de Rênal's departure had thrown him. He could no longer
find pleasure in anything, either in real life or in the sphere of
the imagination. Lack of exercise began to affect his health, and
to produce in him all the weakness and exaltation of a young German
student. He began to lose that virile disdain which repels with a
drastic oath certain undignified ideas which besiege the soul of the
unhappy.
"I loved truth.... Where is it? Hypocrisy everywhere or at any rate
charlatanism. Even in the most virtuous, even in the greatest," and his
lips assumed an expression of disgust. "No, man cannot trust man."
"Madame de ---- when she was making a collection for her poor orphans,
used to tell me that such and such a prince had just given ten louis, a
sheer lie. But what am I talking about. Napoleon at St. Helena ... Pure
charlatanism like the proclamation in favour of the king of Rome.
"Great God! If a man like that at a time when misfortune ought to
summon him sternly to his duty will sink to charlatanism, what is one
to expect from the rest of the human species?"
"Where is truth? In religion. Yes," he added, with a bitter smile
of utter contempt. "In the mouth of the Maslons, the Frilairs, the
Castanèdes--perhaps in that true Christianity whose priests were not
paid any more than were the apostles. But St. Paul was paid by the
pleasure of commanding, speaking, getting himself talked about."
"Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am. I see a Gothic
cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart
conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him,
my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair.
About as comforting as a chevalier de Beauvoisis.
"But a true priest, a Massillon, a Fénelon. Massillon sacrificed
Dubois. Saint-Simon's memoirs have spoilt the illusion of Fénelon, but
he was a true priest anyway. In those days, tender souls could have a
place in the world where they could meet together. We should not then
have been isolated. That good priest would have talked to us of God.
But what God? Not the one of the Bible, a cruel petty despot, full of
vindictiveness, but the God of Voltaire, just, good, infinite."
He was troubled by all the memories of that Bible which he knew by
heart. "But how on earth, when the deity is three people all at the
same time, is one to believe in the great name of GOD, after the
frightful way in which our priests have abused it."
"Living alone. What a torture."
"I am growing mad and unreasonable," said Julien to himself, striking
his forehead. "I am alone here in this cell, but I have not lived
alone on earth. I had the powerful idea of duty. The duty which rightly
or wrongly I laid down for myself, has been to me like the trunk of a
solid tree which I could lean on during the storm, I stumbled, I was
agitated. After all I was only a man, but I was not swept away.
"It must be the damp air of this cell which made me think of being
alone.
"Why should I still play the hypocrite by cursing hypocrisy? It is
neither death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, but madame de Rênal's
absence which prostrates me. If, in order to see her at Verrières, I
had to live whole weeks at Verrières concealed in the cellars of her
house, would I complain?"
"The influence of my contemporaries wins the day," he said aloud, with
a bitter laugh. "Though I am talking to myself and within an ace of
death, I still play the hypocrite. Oh you nineteenth century! A hunter
fires a gun shot in the forest, his quarry falls, he hastens forward
to seize it. His foot knocks against a two-foot anthill, knocks down
the dwelling place of the ants, and scatters the ants and their eggs
far and wide. The most philosophic among the ants will never be able to
understand that black, gigantic and terrifying body, the hunter's boot,
which suddenly invaded their home with incredible rapidity, preceded by
a frightful noise, and accompanied by flashes of reddish fire."
"In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for
anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral
fly is born at nine o'clock in the morning in the long summer days, to
die at five o'clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word
'night'?"
"Give it five more hours of existence, and it will see night, and
understand its meaning."
"So, in my case, I shall die at the age of twenty-three. Give me five
more years of life in order to live with madame de Rênal."
He began to laugh like Mephistopheles. How foolish to debate these
great problems.
"(1). I am as hypocritical as though there were someone there to listen
to me.
"(2). I am forgetting to live and to love when I have so few days left
to live. Alas, madame de Rênal is absent; perhaps her husband will
not let her come back to Besançon any more, to go on compromising her
honour."
"That is what makes me lonely, and not the absence of a God who is
just, good and omnipotent, devoid of malice, and in no wise greedy of
vengeance."
"Oh, if He did exist. Alas I should fall at His feet. I have deserved
death, I should say to Him, but oh Thou great God, good God, indulgent
God, give me back her whom I love!"
By this time the night was far advanced. After an hour or two of
peaceful sleep, Fouqué arrived.
Julien felt strongly resolute, like a man who sees to the bottom of his
soul.
CHAPTER LXXV
"I cannot play such a trick on that poor abbé Chas-Bernard, as to
summon him," he said to Fouqué: "it would prevent him from dining for
three whole days.--But try and find some Jansenist who is a friend of
M. Pirard."
Fouqué was impatiently waiting for this suggestion. Julien acquitted
himself becomingly of all the duty a man owes to provincial opinion.
Thanks to M. the abbé de Frilair, and in spite of his bad choice of a
confessor, Julien enjoyed in his cell the protection of the priestly
congregation; with a little more diplomacy he might have managed to
escape. But the bad air of the cell produced its effect, and his
strength of mind diminished. But this only intensified his happiness at
madame de Rênal's return.
"My first duty is towards you, my dear," she said as she embraced him;
"I have run away from Verrières."
Julien felt no petty vanity in his relations with her, and told her all
his weaknesses. She was good and charming to him.
In the evening she had scarcely left the prison before she made the
priest, who had clung on to Julien like a veritable prey, go to her
aunt's: as his only object was to win prestige among the young women
who belonged to good Besançon society, madame de Rênal easily prevailed
upon him to go and perform a novena at the abbey of Bray-le-Haut.
No words can do justice to the madness and extravagance of Julien's
love.
By means of gold, and by using and abusing the influence of her aunt,
who was devout, rich and well-known, madame de Rênal managed to see him
twice a day.
At this news, Mathilde's jealousy reached a pitch of positive madness.
M. de Frilair had confessed to her that all his influence did not go
so far as to admit of flouting the conventions by allowing her to
see her sweetheart more than once every day. Mathilde had madame de
Rênal followed so as to know the smallest thing she did. M. de Frilair
exhausted all the resources of an extremely clever intellect in order
to prove to her that Julien was unworthy of her.
Plunged though she was in all these torments, she only loved him the
more, and made a horrible scene nearly every day.
Julien wished, with all his might, to behave to the very end like an
honourable man towards this poor young girl whom he had so strangely
compromised, but the reckless love which he felt for madame de Rênal
swept him away at every single minute. When he could not manage to
persuade Mathilde of the innocence of her rival's visits by all his
thin excuses, he would say to himself: "at any rate the end of the
drama ought to be quite near. The very fact of not being able to lie
better will be an excuse for me."
Mademoiselle de La Mole learnt of the death of the marquis de
Croisenois. The rich M. de Thaler had indulged in some unpleasant
remarks concerning Mathilde's disappearance: M. de Croisenois went
and asked him to recant them: M. de Thaler showed him some anonymous
letters which had been sent to him, and which were full of details so
artfully put together that the poor marquis could not help catching a
glimpse of the truth.
M. de Thaler indulged in some jests which were devoid of all taste.
Maddened by anger and unhappiness, M. de Croisenois demanded such
unqualified satisfaction, that the millionaire preferred to fight a
duel. Stupidity triumphed, and one of the most lovable of men met with
his death before he was twenty-four.
This death produced a strange and morbid impression on Julien's
demoralised soul.
"Poor Croisenois," he said to Mathilde, "really behaved very reasonably
and very honourably towards us; he had ample ground for hating me and
picking a quarrel with me, by reason of your indiscretion in your
mother's salon; for the hatred which follows on contempt is usually
frenzied."
M. de Croisenois' death changed all Julien's ideas concerning
Mathilde's future. He spent several days in proving to her that she