The Red and the Black (10 page)

exceedingly clean appearance, and his genuine disdain of them, that
they had thrashed him and left him senseless and covered in blood. M
^me
de Rênal, who was out walking with M. Valenod and the sub-prefect,
chanced to come through the wood; she saw Julien lying on the ground
and took him for dead. She was so stricken that M. Valenod became
quite jealous.

His alarm was premature. Julien thought M
^me
de Rênal exceedingly beautiful, but he hated her on account of her
beauty: it was the first reef which had almost wrecked his fortune. He
spoke to her as little as possible, so as to erase the memory of that
passionate impulse on the first day which had made him kiss her hand.

Elisa, M
^me
de Rênal's chambermaid, had lost no time in falling in love with the young tutor, and she often confided in her mistress. M
^lle
Elisa's love had earned Julien the hatred of one of the valets. One
day he overheard the man saying to Elisa: 'You won't speak to me any
more, now that this filthy tutor is in the house.' Julien did not
deserve this insult, but as a good-looking fellow he instinctively
took twice as much care as before over his personal appearance. M.
Valenod's hatred of him increased twofold as well. He declared
publicly that such vanity ill suited a young abbé. Barring the
cassock, Julien indeed wore ecclesiastical dress.

M
^me
de Rênal noticed that he spoke to M
^lle
Elisa more often than usual, and she discovered that the cause of
these exchanges was the plight Julien found himself in on account of
his very scant wardrobe. He had so little linen that he was obliged
to have it laundered very frequently elsewhere, and Elisa proved
useful to him over these small services. M
^me
de Rênal was
touched by such extreme poverty, which she had not suspected: she felt
an urge to give him presents, but didn't dare. This inner resistance
was the first painful feeling Julien caused her. Until then the name
Julien had been synonymous for her with a feeling of joy that was pure
and entirely of the mind. Tormented by the thought of Julien's
poverty, M
^me
de Rênal spoke to her husband about making him a present of some linen:

'How gullible you are!' he replied. 'The very idea of it! Why on
earth give presents to a man we are entirely satisfied with,

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and who gives us good service? If he neglected his appearance, now that would be the moment to reawaken his zeal!'

M
^me
de Rênal was humiliated by this way of looking at things; it would
never have struck her before Julien's arrival. She could not help
thinking to herself, every time she noticed how extremely clean the
young abbé's admittedly simple attire was: 'Poor boy, how does he
manage?'

Gradually she came to pity Julien for everything he lacked, rather than feeling shocked by it.

M
^me
de Rênal was one of those provincial women who may well strike you as
foolish during the first fortnight of your acquaintance. She had no
experience of life, and did not cultivate conversation. She was
sensitive and aloof by nature, and the instinct for happiness present
in all human beings made her disregard--most of the time--the actions
of the vulgar characters in whose midst chance had cast her.

She would have been noted for her spontaneity and liveliness of mind
if she had been given any kind of education. But as an heiress, she
had been brought up by nuns who were fervent worshippers of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, and were filled with violent hatred for all Frenchmen
who were enemies of the Jesuits. M
^me
de Rênal had had
enough sense to reject as absurd everything she had learnt at the
convent, and to forget it pretty rapidly; but she did not replace it
with anything, and ended up totally ignorant. The flattery which had
come her way very early on as the heiress to a large fortune, together
with a marked bent for fervent religious zeal, had set her upon a
completely inward-looking way of life. Beneath an appearance of the
most civil concern for others and total denial of her own will, which
the husbands in Verrières held up as an example to their wives, and M.
de Rênal drew great pride from, her inner frame of mind stemmed in
fact from the most haughty of temperaments. A princess renowned for
her pride takes infinitely more notice of what her noblemen are doing
round about her than this seemingly gentle and modest woman took of
all her husband's words and actions. Until Julien arrived, she had not
really taken any notice of anything except her children. Their minor
ailments, their sorrows, their little joys absorbed all the tenderness
of this soul whose only passion in

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life had been God, when she was at the Sacred Heart in Besançon.

Without her deigning to say so to anyone, if one of her sons had a
bout of fever she was reduced to virtually the same state as if the
child had been dead. A burst of coarse laughter, a shrug of the
shoulders accompanied by some trite maxim on the folly of women, had
always been the response when her need to confide in someone had led
her to share anxieties of this kind with her husband in the early
years of their marriage. Jocular reactions like these, especially
where her children's illnesses were concerned, simply turned the knife
in M
^me
de Rênal's wounded heart. This was what she found
in place of the obsequious and cloying flattery of the Jesuit convent
where she had spent her youth. She learnt about life through
suffering. Too proud to talk about this sort of misery even to her
friend M
^me
Derville, she imagined that all men were like her
husband, or M. Valenod or the sub-prefect Charcot de Maugiron.
Vulgarity and the most brutish insensitivity to anything that did not
involve money, rank or orders of knighthood; a blind hatred of any
argument that stood in their way--these seemed to her to be the
natural attributes of the other sex, like wearing boots and a felt
hat.

After all these years M
^me
de Rênal was still not accustomed to the ways of these money-driven folk in whose midst she had to live.

Hence her attraction to the young peasant Julien. She discovered
sweet pleasures, all gleaming with the charm of novelty, in the
communion of spirit with someone so noble and proud. M
^me
de
Rênal had soon forgiven him his extreme ignorance which was yet one
more source of charm to her, and the roughness of his manners which
she succeeded in tempering. She found him worth listening to, even when
the conversation was on the most trivial of subjects, even when it was
about some poor dog that had got run over crossing the road by a
peasant's cart going at a trot. The sight of such suffering caused her
husband to let out one of his loud laughs, whereas she saw Julien's
beautiful, exquisitely arched black eyebrows draw together in pain.
Little by little she formed the view that generosity, nobility of soul
and humanity only existed in this

-40-

young abbé. She felt for him all the sympathy and even the admiration
which these virtues inspire in someone of good breeding.

In Paris, Julien's situation with regard to M
^me
de Rênal would very soon have become more straightforward; but in
Paris, love is born of fiction. The young tutor and his shy mistress
would have found three or four novels, and even couplets from the
Théâtre de Madame,
^*
clarifying their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the
roles they had to play, and given them a model to imitate; and sooner
or later Julien would have been forced by his vanity to follow this
model, albeit without pleasure and perhaps with overt reluctance.

In a small town in the Aveyron
^*
or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been rendered
decisive by the torrid climate. Beneath our more sullen skies, a young
man without means, who is only ambitious because his delicate
sensibility makes him crave some of the pleasures afforded by money,
has daily dealings with a woman of thirty, genuinely virtuous,
absorbed by her children, and never looking to novels for examples on
which to model her conduct. Everything proceeds slowly, everything
develops gradually in the provinces; it is all more spontaneous.

Often, when she thought of how poor the young tutor was, M
^me
de Rênal would be moved to tears. One day Julien caught her actually weeping.

'Oh madam, can some misfortune have struck you?'

'No, my dear,' she replied; 'call the children, and we'll go for a walk.'

She took his arm and leant on it in a way which struck him as odd. It was the first time she had addressed him as
my dear
.

Towards the end of the walk Julien noticed that she kept blushing. She slackened her pace.

'You'll have heard', she said without looking at him, 'that I'm sole
heir to a rich aunt who lives in Besançon. She showers me with
presents... My sons are getting on so well... so remarkably well...
that I'd like to press you to accept a small gift as a token of my
gratitude. Just a few sovereigns to get you

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some linen. But...' she added, blushing still more deeply, and at this point she broke off.

'What, madam?' exclaimed Julien.

'It would serve no purpose', she went on, lowering her head, 'to mention this to my husband.'

'I am humble, madam, but I am not base,' retorted Julien, stopping in
his tracks and drawing himself up to his full height, his eyes
blazing with fury. 'That's something you should have thought about.
I'd be no better than a servant if I put myself in the position of
hiding from M. de Rênal anything whatsoever concerning
my money
.'

M
^me
de Rênal was dumbfounded.

'His worship the mayor', Julien continued, 'has paid me five times
thirty-six francs since I took up residence in his house. I'm ready to
show my accounts book to him or to anyone else--even to M. Valenod
who hates me.'

This outburst left Mme
de Rênal pale and trembling, and the walk finished without either of
them finding a pretext for starting up the conversation again. Any
thought of loving M
^me
de Rênal became more and more
impossible for a proud spirit like Julien's. As for her, she felt
fresh respect and admiration for him; she had been reprimanded by him.
Under the guise of making up for the humiliation she had
involuntarily caused him, she allowed herself to indulge him with the
most tender attentions. The novelty of these ways was a source of
happiness to M
^me
de Rênal for a week. Their effect was to
soothe Julien's anger in part; he was very far from seeing in them
anything which might resemble a personal liking.

That's what these rich people are like, he reflected, they humiliate
you, and then think they can make up for it all by a few ridiculous
gestures!

M
^me
de Rênal
took all this too much to heart and was as yet too much of an innocent
to be able to refrain from telling her husband, despite her
resolutions to the contrary, what she had offered Julien and how she
had been rebuffed.

'How on earth', replied M. de Rênal in extreme vexation, 'could you tolerate a refusal from a mere
servant
?'

And as M
^me
de Rênal protested at this term:

'I am speaking, madam, as the late Prince de Condé
^*
did

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when he presented his chamberlains to his new wife:
"All these people"
, he said to her,
"are our servants."
I have read you that passage from Besenval's Memoirs
^*
which is quite essential for an understanding of precedence. Anyone
who isn't a gentleman, and lives in your house and receives a wage, is
your servant. I shall have a word or two with this M. Julien, and
give him a hundred francs.'

'Oh, my dear!' said M
^me
de Rênal, trembling, 'Then at least don't do it in front of the servants!'

'Quite so, they might be envious and with good reason,' said her
husband as he went off, thinking about the relative size of the sum.

M
^me
de Rênal collapsed on to a chair, almost fainting with misery. He's
going to humiliate Julien, and it's all my fault! She was revolted by
her husband, and hid her face in her hands. She vowed never to go
confiding again.

When she next saw
Julien, she was trembling all over, and her chest felt so constricted
she was unable to utter a single word. In her embarrassment she took
hold of his hands and squeezed them.

'Well now, my dear,' she said at last, 'are you pleased with my husband?'

'How could I fail to be?' Julien answered with a bitter smile. 'He gave me a hundred francs.'

M
^me
de Rênal looked at him as if she did not know what to make of this.

'Give me your arm,' she said with a note of bravery in her voice that Julien had never heard before.

She was bold enough to venture as far as the bookseller's in
Verrières, in spite of his terrible reputation for liberal views.
There she chose books to the value of ten louis which she gave to her
sons. But these were books she knew Julien wanted. She insisted there
and then, in the bookseller's shop, that each of her sons write his
name in the books which fell to his share. While M
^me
de
Rênal was feeling glad that she was somehow able to make amends to
Julien in this audacious manner, he was astonished at the number of
books he saw displayed at the bookseller's. Never had he dared set
foot in so profane a spot. His heart was thumping. Far from having any
mind to guess

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