The Red and the Black (11 page)

what was going on in M
^me
de Rênal's heart, he was deep in thought about ways and means for a
theology student to procure himself some of these books. He eventually
came up with the idea that it would be possible with a little skill
to persuade M. de Rênal that his sons ought to be set exercises on
the history of the famous gentlefolk born in the region. After working
at it for a month, Julien saw his idea catch on; so much so that when
speaking to the mayor some time later, he was bold enough to risk
suggesting a course of action which would be altogether more onerous
for the noble mayor: it involved contributing to the wealth of a
liberal by taking out a subscription with the bookseller. M. de Rênal
was willing to agree that it was wise to acquaint his eldest son
de visu
^*
with a number of works he would hear mentioned in conversation when
he was at the Military Academy; but Julien found that the mayor drew
the line at going any further. He suspected there must be some hidden
reason, but was unable to fathom what it might be.

'I was thinking, sir,' he said to him one day, 'that it would be
highly unsuitable for the name of a worthy gentleman such as a member
of the Rênal family to appear in the sordid files of the bookseller.'

M. de Rênal brightened visibly.

'It would also be a very bad mark for a poor theology student',
Julien went on in humbler tones, 'if it could one day be discovered
that his name had been on the files of a bookseller who hired out
books. The liberals would be able to accuse me of having requested the
most infamous books. Who knows if they mightn't even go as far as
writing in after my name the titles of these wicked books.'

But Julien was losing the scent. He could see the mayor's face taking
on a look of embarrassment and ill-temper. Julien stopped talking.
I've got my man, he said to himself.

A few days later, when the eldest boy asked Julien in the presence of M. de Rênal about a book announced in
La Quatidienne
,
^*
the young tutor replied:

'To avoid giving the Jacobin party
^*
any cause for scoring a victory, and yet to enable me to answer Master Adolphe, it

-44-

would be possible to have a subscription taken out with the bookseller in the name of the lowest of your servants.'

'Now that's not a bad idea at all,' said M. de Rênal, obviously quite delighted.

'All the same, it would have to be laid down,' said Julien with that
solemn and almost sad expression which so becomes certain people when
they see the fulfilment of aspirations they have cherished the
longest, 'it would have to be laid down that the servant may not take
out any novels. Once inside the house, these dangerous books could
corrupt M
^me
de Rênal's women, and the servant himself.'

'You're forgetting political pamphlets,' added the mayor in a
superior voice. He wanted to hide his admiration for the clever
mezzo-termine
^*
devised by his children's tutor.

Julien's life was thus made up of a series of little negotiations; and
making a success of them preoccupied him much more than the feeling of
special liking which he could easily have read in M
^me
de Rênal's heart if only he had wished to.

The psychological situation in which he had found himself all his
life continued to apply in the mayor of Verrières's house. There, just
as at his father's sawmill, he deeply despised the people he lived
with, and was hated by them. Every day he could see from the way the
sub-prefect or M. Valenod or other friends of the household related
recent happenings they had witnessed, how out of touch they were with
reality. If an action struck him as admirable, it was bound to be the
one to attract the censure of the people around him. His private
response was always: What monsters or what fools! The amusing thing
is that with all his pride, it often happened that he didn't
understand a word of what was being discussed.

In all his life he had never talked sincerely to anyone except the
old army surgeon, and the few ideas he had were about Bonaparte's
campaigns in Italy, or about surgery. His youthful courage took
pleasure in detailed descriptions of the most painful operations; he
said to himself: I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

The first time M
^me
de Rênal tried to have a conversation with him that did not concern her children's upbringing, he

-45-

began to talk about surgical operations. She turned pale and begged him to stop.

Julien's knowledge went no further. And so, as he spent his days with M
^me
de Rênal, the strangest of silences fell between them as soon as they
were alone together. In the drawingroom, however humble his air, she
detected in his eyes a look of intellectual superiority towards any
and every visitor to her house. But she had only to find herself alone
with him for an instant to see him visibly embarrassed. This worried
her, for her feminine instinct told her that this embarrassment did
not spring from tenderness.

Basing
himself on some vague idea picked up from an account of high society
as seen by the old army surgeon, Julien felt humiliated as soon as
silence fell at any time when he was in the company of a woman, as if
he were to blame personally for this silence. His feeling was
infinitely more distressing when he and the woman were alone together.
His imagination, filled with the most exaggerated, the most Spanish
of notions about what a man should say when he is alone with a woman,
offered him nothing in his plight but suggestions which could not be
entertained. His soul was up in the clouds, and yet he was unable to
break the most humiliating of silences. His look of severity during
his long walks with M
^me
de Rênal and the children was thus
increased by the most cruel suffering. He despised himself horribly.
If he was unfortunate enough to force himself to speak, he found
himself saying totally ridiculous things. To crown his wretchedness, he
could see his own absurdity and magnified it to himself; but what he
could not see was the expression in his eyes: they were so beautiful,
and revealed such an ardent spirit, that like good actors they
sometimes put a charming gloss on words that scarcely deserved one. M
^me
de Rênal noticed that when he was alone with her he never succeeded
in saying anything memorable unless he was distracted by some
unforeseen event, and was not thinking about turning a nice
compliment. As the friends of the family never treated her to any new
and brilliant ideas, she revelled in Julien's bursts of wit.

Since the fall of Napoleon, any appearance of gallantry has been strictly banned from provincial mores. People are afraid

-46-

of being deprived of office. Rogues look to the Congregation for
support, and hypocrisy has made great strides even among the liberal
classes. Boredom has become acute. The only pleasures left are reading
and agriculture.

M
^me
de
Rênal, the rich heiress of a devout aunt, and married at sixteen to a
respectable gentleman, had never in her life experienced or witnessed
anything remotely resembling love. It was really only her confessor,
the worthy Father Chélan, who had talked to her about love, in
connection with M. Valenod's advances; and he had given her such a
disgusting picture of it that all the word conjured up in her mind was
the idea of the most abject debauchery. She treated as an
exception--or even as something quite outside the realm of nature-the
kind of love she had encountered in the very small number of novels
which chance had put in her path. Protected by this ignorance, M
^me
de Rênal went her way perfectly happy, with Julien constantly in her
thoughts, and it never occurred to her that she might have the
slightest cause for self-reproach.

-47-

Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression, And stolen
glances, sweeter for the theft, And burning blushes, though for no
transgression.

Don Juan
, C. I, st.
74*

THE angelic sweetness which M
^me
de Rênal's character and her present happiness bestowed upon her only
became clouded when her thoughts turned to her chambermaid Elisa. The
girl inherited some money, and went to confess to Father Chélan
that she had it in mind to marry Julien. The priest was genuinely
delighted at his friend's happiness; and he was greatly surprised when
Julien announced to him in resolute tones that M
^lle
Elisa's proposal was not acceptable to him.

'Beware, dear boy, of what your heart is up to,' said the priest with
a frown. 'I congratulate you on the strength of your vocation, if
that's the only reason why you spurn a more than adequate fortune.
I've been the priest here in Verrières these fifty-six years, and yet
all the signs are that I'm about to be dismissed from office. It
distresses me greatly, although I do have an income of eight hundred
pounds. I'm telling you this detail so that you don't have any
illusions about what awaits you if you go into the priesthood. If
you're thinking of courting men in high office, it's a sure road to
eternal damnation. You'll be able to make your fortune, but you'll
have to trample on the poor and wretched, flatter the sub-prefect, the
mayor-anyone held in esteem--and serve their passions. Such conduct,
which is known in society as worldly wisdom, need not for a layman be
totally incompatible with salvation; but with our calling, we have to
choose; you either make your fortune in this world or the next,
there's no half-way house. So think about it, my dear fellow, and come
back to me in three days' time with your final answer. I dimly
perceive in the depths of your character a smouldering ardour which
doesn't signal the sort of moderation and complete renunciation of
worldly advantages that are essential in a priest. I predict great
things

-48-

of your intellect; but if you'll allow me to say so,' the kindly
priest added with tears in his eyes, 'I shall fear for your salvation
if you go into the priesthood.'

Julien was ashamed of the emotion he felt; for the first time in his
life, he could see that someone cared for him; he savoured his tears,
and went off to hide them in the deep woods above Verrières.

Why am I in this state? he wondered to himself at last; I feel I
would willingly give my life a hundred times over for kind old Father
Chélan, and yet he's just proved to me that I'm a mere idiot. He's the
crucial one I have to deceive, and he sees straight through me. This
secret ardour he was talking about is my ambition to make my fortune.
He thinks I'm unworthy to be a priest, at the very moment when I
imagined that by sacrificing an income of fifty louis I would give him
the highest opinion of my piety and my vocation.

In future, Julien went on, I shall only count on the parts of my
character that I've put to the test. Whoever would have predicted that
I'd get any pleasure from shedding tears! Or that I should feel
affection for someone who proves to me that I'm a mere idiot!

Three days later Julien had found the pretext he should have been
armed with right from the start: it was a piece of slander, but does
that matter? He admitted to the priest with much hesitation that he
had been put off the proposed marriage from the outset by a
consideration which he could not go into because it would be damaging
to a third party. This was tantamount to impugning Elisa's conduct.
Father Chélan detected in Julien's attitude a sort of vehemence that
was entirely worldly, and altogether different from the kind which
should have inspired a young Levite.

'Dear fellow,' he said to him, pursuing the matter, 'you'd do better
to become an honest country squire, learned and worthy of respect,
than be a priest without a calling.'

Julien replied very ably to these fresh admonishments as far as
language went: he was able to produce the words that a fervent young
seminarist would have used. But his tone of voice in uttering them,
and the ill-disguised vehemence which shone in his eyes, caused great
alarm to Father Chélan.

-49-

You mustn't take too dim a view of Julien's future prospects. He
could come up with just the phrases required by a cautious and wily
hypocrisy. That's not bad at his age. As far as tone and gesture were
concerned, he lived among country folk, and had been deprived of great
models to imitate. Later on, he had only to be given the opportunity
to associate with such gentlemen and he at once became admirable in
gesture as well as in word.

M
^me
de Rênal was astonished that her chambermaid's new fortune did not
make her any happier; she noticed how the girl was constantly visiting
the priest, and coming back with tears in her eyes. At last Elisa
spoke to her of her marriage.

M
^me
de Rênal felt as though she had fallen ill; a kind of fever prevented
her from sleeping; she only revived when she had her maid or Julien
with her. She could think of nothing but the two of them, and the
happiness they would experience in their married life. The little
house where they would have to live in poverty on an income of fifty
louis imprinted itself on her imagination in the most charming
colours. Julien could very easily become a barrister in Bray, the
sub-prefecture two leagues
^*
away from Verrières; in which case she would see him from time to time.

M
^me
de Rênal genuinely believed that she was going to go mad; she told
her husband, and eventually fell ill. That very evening, while her
maid was attending to her, she noticed that the girl was crying. She
loathed Elisa at the time, and had just been short with her; she
apologized for it. Elisa's tears only increased; she said that if her
mistress would allow it, she would tell her all her troubles.

'Go on,' replied M
^me
de Rênal.

'Well you see, madam, he's turned me down; people must have said
nasty things to him about me out of spite, and he believes them.'

'Who's turned you down?' M
^me
de Rênal asked, hardly able to breathe.

'Who do you think, madam?' replied the maid, sobbing. 'Mr Julien, of
course. Father Chélan couldn't overcome his reluctance; because, you
see, Father Chélan thinks he shouldn't refuse an honest girl on the
grounds she's been a

-50-