Part 12

Mme de Rênal let him speak, and he spoke for a long time; _he was working off his anger_, to use the local expression.

"Sir," she answered him at last, "I speak like a woman outraged in her honor, that is to say, in what is most precious to her."

Mme de Rênal maintained an unalterable composure throughout this painful conversation, on which depended the possibility of still living under the same roof with Julien. She sought for the ideas she thought best suited to guide her husband's blind rage. She had been insensible to all the insulting remarks he had addressed to her; she did not listen to them, she was thinking of Julien. Will he be pleased with me?

"That little peasant whom we have loaded with kindness and even with gifts may be innocent," she said at last, "but he is none the less the occasion of the first affront I have ever received... Sir! when I read that abominable paper, I promised myself that he or I should leave your house."

"Do you wish to make a scandal that will dishonor me and yourself as well? You are setting many tongues wagging in Verrières."

"It is true, people generally envy the state of prosperity to which the wisdom of your administration has known how to raise you, your family, and the town... Well then! I shall persuade Julien to ask you for leave to go and spend a month with that timber merchant in the mountains, a worthy friend of that little workman."

"Do not act, I warn you," replied M. de Rênal with considerable calm. "What I require above all is that you do not speak to him. You would put him in a rage and quarrel me with him; you know how touchy that little gentleman is."

"That young man has no tact," resumed Mme de Rênal, "he may be learned, you are the judge of that, but at bottom he is nothing but a true peasant. For my part, I have never had a good opinion of him since he refused to marry Élisa; it was a settled fortune; and that under the pretext that sometimes, in secret, she pays visits to M. Valenod."

"Ah!" said M. de Rênal, raising his eyebrow in disproportionate fashion, "what, did Julien tell you that?"

"No, not precisely; he has always spoken to me of the vocation that calls him to the holy ministry; but believe me, the first vocation for these little people is to have bread. He let me understand clearly enough that he was not ignorant of those secret visits."

"And I, I was ignorant of them!" cried M. de Rênal, recovering all his fury and weighing on the words. "Things have been going on in my house of which I know nothing... What! there has been something between Élisa and Valenod?"

"Why, that is old history, my dear friend," said Mme de Rênal, laughing, "and perhaps nothing wrong ever passed. It was at the time when your good friend Valenod would not have been displeased that people in Verrières should think a little Platonic love affair was springing up between him and me."

"I had that idea once," cried M. de Rênal, striking his head with fury, and making discovery after discovery, "and you never told me?"

"Was I to quarrel two friends for a little puff of vanity on the part of our dear director? Where is the lady of society to whom he has not addressed some extremely witty and even rather gallant letters?"

"He wrote to you?"

"He writes a great deal."

"Show me those letters this instant, I order you," and M. de Rênal towered six feet high.

"I shall take good care not to," was the answer, with a gentleness bordering on indifference, "I will show them to you one day when you are wiser."

"This instant, zounds!" cried M. de Rênal, drunk with anger, and yet happier than he had been for twelve hours.

"Do you swear to me," said Mme de Rênal very gravely, "never to have any quarrel with the director of the poorhouse on account of those letters?"

"Quarrel or not, I can take the foundlings away from him; but," he continued furiously, "I want those letters this instant; where are they?"

"In a drawer of my writing-desk; but certainly I shall not give you the key."

"I shall know how to break it open," he cried, running toward his wife's room.

He did break open, with a crowbar, a precious rosewood writing-desk brought from Paris, which he often rubbed with the skirt of his coat when he thought he saw some stain upon it.

Mme de Rênal had run up the hundred and twenty steps of the pigeon-house; she tied the corner of a white handkerchief to one of the iron bars of the little window. She was the happiest of women. Tears in her eyes, she looked toward the great woods of the mountain. No doubt, she said to herself, from beneath one of those thick beeches, Julien is watching for this happy signal. For a long time she lent her ear, then she cursed the monotonous noise of the cicadas and the song of the birds. But for that troublesome noise, a cry of joy, rising from the great rocks, might have reached her here. Her eager eye devoured that immense slope of dark and even verdure, smooth as a meadow, formed by the tops of the trees. Why has he not the wit, she said, quite melted with tenderness, to invent some signal to tell me that his happiness equals mine? She did not come down from the pigeon-house until she feared her husband might come to look for her there.

She found him furious. He was running through the insipid phrases of M. Valenod, little accustomed to being read with so much emotion.

Seizing a moment when her husband's exclamations left her the possibility of being heard:

"I keep coming back to my idea," said Mme de Rênal, "it is fitting that Julien should take a journey. However much talent he may have for Latin, he is after all nothing but a peasant, often coarse and lacking in tact; every day, thinking to be polite, he addresses to me exaggerated and tasteless compliments, which he learns by heart out of some novel..."

"He never reads any," cried M. de Rênal; "I have made sure of that. Do you think I am a blind master of a house who knows nothing of what goes on under his roof?"

"Well then! if he reads those ridiculous compliments nowhere, he invents them, and that is all the worse for him. He will have spoken of me in that tone in Verrières... and without going so far," said Mme de Rênal with the air of making a discovery, "he will have spoken thus before Élisa, which is much the same as if he had spoken before M. Valenod."

"Ah!" cried M. de Rênal, shaking the table and the apartment with one of the biggest blows of the fist ever given, "the printed anonymous letter and the letters of Valenod are written on the same paper."

At last!... thought Mme de Rênal; she showed herself overwhelmed by this discovery and, without the courage to add a single word, went to sit far off on the sofa, at the back of the salon.

The battle was now won; she had much ado to prevent M. de Rênal from going to speak to the supposed author of the anonymous letter.

"How can you not feel that to make a scene, without sufficient proof, with M. Valenod, is the most signal of blunders? You are envied, sir, and whose fault is it? yours, for your talents: your wise administration, your tasteful buildings, the dowry I brought you, and above all the considerable inheritance we may hope for from my good aunt, an inheritance whose importance is infinitely exaggerated, have made you the first personage in Verrières."

"You forget birth," said M. de Rênal, smiling a little.

"You are one of the most distinguished gentlemen of the province," resumed Mme de Rênal with eagerness, "if the king were free and could do justice to birth, you would no doubt figure in the House of Peers, etc. And it is in this magnificent position that you wish to give envy a fact to comment upon?"

To speak to M. Valenod of his anonymous letter is to proclaim throughout Verrières, nay, in Besançon, throughout the province, that this little bourgeois, perhaps imprudently admitted to the intimacy _of a Rênal_, has found the means to offend him. Even if these letters you have just surprised proved that I had answered M. Valenod's love, you ought to kill me, I should have deserved it a hundred times, but not show anger toward him. Think that all your neighbors are only waiting for a pretext to avenge themselves on your superiority; think that in 1816 you contributed to certain arrests. That man taking refuge on his roof..."

"I think that you have neither consideration nor friendship for me," cried M. de Rênal, with all the bitterness such a memory awakened, "and I was not a Peer!..."

"I think, my friend," resumed Mme de Rênal smiling, "that I shall be richer than you, that I have been your companion for twelve years, and that by all these titles I ought to have a voice in the matter, and above all in today's affair. If you prefer a M. Julien to me," she added with ill-disguised vexation, "I am ready to go and spend a winter with my aunt."

This was said _happily_. There was a firmness seeking to wrap itself in politeness; it decided M. de Rênal. But, according to provincial habit, he spoke at length still, returned to all the arguments, his wife let him talk, there was still anger in his tone. At last two hours of useless chatter exhausted the strength of a man who had undergone a night-long fit of rage. He fixed the line of conduct he was going to follow toward M. Valenod, Julien, and even Élisa.

Once or twice during this great scene, Mme de Rênal was on the point of feeling some sympathy for the very real unhappiness of this man who for twelve years had been her friend. But true passions are selfish. Besides, she expected every moment the avowal of the anonymous letter he had received the evening before, and that avowal never came. Mme de Rênal lacked the security of knowing the ideas that might have been suggested to the man on whom her fate depended. For, in the provinces, husbands are masters of opinion. A complaining husband covers himself with ridicule, a thing daily less dangerous in France; but his wife, if he gives her no money, falls to the state of a workwoman at fifteen sous a day; and even then good souls scruple to employ her.

An odalisque of the seraglio may by sheer force love the sultan; he is all-powerful, she has no hope of stealing his authority by a series of little artifices. The master's vengeance is terrible, bloody, but military, generous; a stab of the dagger ends all. It is with blows of public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting her out of all salons.

The sense of danger was keenly aroused in Mme de Rênal; on her return to her room, she was shocked at the disorder in which she found it. The locks of all her pretty little chests had been broken; several parquet boards were lifted. He would have been without pity for me, she said to herself! To spoil thus this inlaid parquet that he loves so much; when one of his children comes in with damp shoes, he turns red with anger. There it is spoiled forever! The sight of this violence quickly dispelled the last reproaches she had been making herself for her too rapid victory.

A little before the dinner bell, Julien came back with the children. At dessert, when the servants had withdrawn, Mme de Rênal said to him very dryly:

"You expressed to me the wish to go and spend a fortnight in Verrières; M. de Rênal is willing to grant you leave. You may depart whenever you please; but, so that the children may not lose their time, their themes shall be sent to you each day, which you will correct."

"Certainly," added M. de Rênal, in a very sharp tone, "I shall not grant you more than a week."

Julien found upon his face the uneasiness of a man deeply tormented.

"He has not yet settled on a course," he said to his friend, during a moment of solitude they had in the salon.

Mme de Rênal rapidly told him all she had done since the morning.

"The details tonight," she added, laughing.

Woman's perversity! thought Julien. What pleasure, what instinct leads them to deceive us!

"I find you at once enlightened and blinded by your love," he said to her with some coldness; "your conduct today is admirable; but is it prudent to try to see each other this evening? This house is paved with enemies; think of the passionate hatred Élisa has for me."

"That hatred much resembles the passionate indifference you would feel for me."

"Even indifferent, I must save you from a peril into which I have plunged you. If chance wills that M. de Rênal speak to Élisa, one word can tell him all. Why should she not hide near my room, well armed..."

"What! not even courage," said Mme de Rênal, with all the pride of a noble daughter.

"I shall never lower myself to speak of my courage," said Julien coldly, "that is baseness. Let the world judge by facts. But," he added, taking her hand, "you cannot conceive how attached I am to you, and what is my joy at being able to take leave of you before this cruel absence."

CHAPTER XXII

WAYS OF ACTING IN 1830

Speech was given to man to conceal his thought.

R. P. MAMAGRIDA

Scarcely arrived at Verrières, Julien reproached himself for his injustice toward Mme de Rênal. I should have despised her as a weak woman, if, through feebleness, she had failed in her scene with M. de Rênal! She gets out of it like a diplomat, and I sympathize with the vanquished who is my enemy. There is bourgeois pettiness in my conduct; my vanity is wounded, because M. de Rênal is a man! illustrious and vast corporation to which I have the honor to belong, I am nothing but a fool.

M. Chélan had refused the lodgings that the most considerable liberals of the country had vied in offering him when his dismissal drove him from the presbytery. The two rooms he had rented were encumbered with his books. Julien, wishing to show Verrières what a priest was, went to get from his father a dozen pine boards, which he carried himself on his back the whole length of the high street. He borrowed tools from an old comrade, and soon had built a sort of bookcase in which he arranged M. Chélan's books.

"I thought you corrupted by the vanity of the world," the old man said to him, weeping with joy, "this well redeems the childishness of that brilliant uniform of honor guard which made you so many enemies."

M. de Rênal had ordered Julien to lodge at his house. No one suspected what had passed. The third day after his arrival, Julien saw mount up to his very room no less a personage than M. the sub-prefect of Maugiron. It was only after two great hours of insipid chat and great jeremiads on the wickedness of men, on the little probity of those charged with the administration of public funds, on the dangers of this poor France, etc., etc., that Julien at last saw the subject of the visit dawn. They were already on the stair landing, and the half-disgraced poor tutor was seeing off with due respect the future prefect of some fortunate department, when it pleased the latter to occupy himself with Julien's fortune, to praise his moderation in matters of interest, etc., etc. Finally M. de Maugiron, clasping him in his arms with the most paternal air, proposed to him to leave M. de Rênal and enter the service of a functional who had children to _educate_, and who, like King Philippe, would thank heaven, not so much for having given them to him as for having caused them to be born in the neighborhood of M. Julien. Their tutor would enjoy eight hundred francs in salary paid not month by month, which is not noble, said M. de Maugiron, but by the quarter, and always in advance.

It was Julien's turn, who for an hour and a half had been waiting for the word with annoyance. His answer was perfect, and above all long as a pastoral letter; it hinted at everything, and yet said nothing distinctly. One would have found in it at once respect for M. de Rênal, veneration for the public of Verrières, and gratitude toward the illustrious sub-prefect. This sub-prefect, astonished at finding a greater Jesuit than himself, tried in vain to obtain something precise. Julien, delighted, seized the occasion to exercise himself, and began his answer again in other terms. Never did an eloquent minister, wishing to use up the end of a session where the Chamber seems about to wake up, say less in more words. Scarcely had M. de Maugiron gone out, than Julien began to laugh like a madman. To profit by his Jesuitical vein, he wrote a nine-page letter to M. de Rênal, in which he gave him an account of all that had been said to him, and humbly asked his advice. Yet this scoundrel did not tell me the name of the person who makes the offer! It will be M. Valenod, who sees in my exile to Verrières the effect of his anonymous letter.

His dispatch sent off, Julien, happy as a hunter who, at six in the morning, on a fine autumn day, emerges into a plain abounding in game, went out to ask advice of M. Chélan. But before reaching the good curate's house, heaven, wishing to spare him enjoyments, cast M. Valenod in his path, to whom he hid not that his heart was torn; a poor lad like him owed himself wholly to the vocation which heaven had placed in his heart, but vocation was not all in this lower world. To work worthily in the vineyard of the Lord, and be not quite unworthy of so many learned fellow-workers, instruction was needed; it was necessary to spend two quite expensive years at the seminary of Besançon; it became therefore indispensable and one might say it was in some sort a duty to economize, which was much easier on a salary of eight hundred francs paid by the quarter than with six hundred francs eaten month by month. On the other hand, had not heaven, in placing him near the young de Rênals, and above all in inspiring him with a special attachment for them, seemed to indicate that it was not proper to abandon this education for another...

Julien attained such a degree of perfection in this kind of eloquence which has replaced the rapidity of action of the Empire, that he ended by wearying himself with the sound of his own words.

On returning, he found a footman of M. Valenod, in full livery, who had been seeking him all over town, with a dinner invitation for the same day.

Never had Julien been to this man's house; only a few days before he had thought of nothing but means of giving him a thrashing with a cudgel without getting into a police-court affair. Although dinner was set for only one o'clock, Julien thought it more respectful to present himself as early as half past twelve in the study of M. the director of the poorhouse. He found him displaying his importance amid a crowd of cartons. His big black side-whiskers, his enormous quantity of hair, his Greek cap set askew on the top of his head, his immense pipe, his embroidered slippers, the heavy gold chains crossed in all directions on his chest, and all this apparatus of a provincial financier who thinks himself a man of gallantry, imposed nothing on Julien; he only thought the more of the cudgel blows he owed him.

He asked the honor of being presented to Mme Valenod; she was at her toilet and could not receive him. By way of compensation, he had the advantage of assisting at that of M. the director of the poorhouse. They then passed into Mme Valenod's room, who presented her children to him with tears in her eyes. This lady, one of the most considerable in Verrières, had a big man-like face, to which she had applied rouge for this great ceremony. She displayed there all the maternal pathos.

Julien thought of Mme de Rênal. His distrust left him susceptible chiefly to that kind of memory which is called up by contrasts, but then he was seized by it to the point of tenderness. This disposition was increased by the aspect of the director's house. He was shown over it. Everything there was magnificent and new, and he was told the price of each piece of furniture. But Julien found something ignoble there, something that smelled of stolen money. From the servants to the master, everyone seemed to be holding themselves against contempt.

The collector of taxes, the man of indirect impositions, the gendarmerie officer, and two or three other public functionaries arrived with their wives. They were followed by some rich liberals. Dinner was announced. Julien, already very ill-disposed, came to think that on the other side of the dining-room wall were poor detainees, on whose portion of meat one had perhaps saved to buy all this tasteless luxury with which they wished to stun him.

They are hungry perhaps at this moment, he said to himself; his throat tightened, he could not eat and scarcely speak. It was much worse a quarter of an hour later, on hearing from time to time a few accents of a popular, and, it must be owned, rather ignoble song, sung by one of the recluses. M. Valenod looked at one of his men in grand livery, who disappeared, and soon the singing was no longer heard. At this moment a valet offered Julien some Rhine wine in a green glass, and Mme Valenod took care to point out to him that this wine cost nine francs the bottle at the place. Julien, holding his green glass, said to M. Valenod:

"They no longer sing that ugly song."

"Egad! I should think not," answered the director triumphantly; "I silenced the rascals."

This word was too much for Julien; he had the manners, but not yet the heart of his station. Despite all his oft-practiced hypocrisy, he felt a big tear roll down his cheek.

He tried to hide it with the green glass, but it was absolutely impossible for him to do honor to the Rhine wine. _To prevent him from singing!_ he said to himself, oh my God! and you suffer it.

Happily, no one noticed his ill-bred emotion. The collector of taxes had struck up a royalist song. During the uproar of the refrain, sung in chorus: So this, said Julien's conscience, is the foul fortune you will attain, and you will enjoy it only on this condition and in such company! You may have a post of twenty thousand francs, but you must, while you stuff yourself with meat, prevent the poor prisoner from singing; you will give dinners with the money stolen from his wretched pittance, and during your dinner he will be still more unhappy!—O Napoleon! how sweet it was in your time to rise to fortune through the dangers of a battle; but to cowardly increase the suffering of the wretched!

I confess that the weakness Julien shows in this monologue gives me a poor opinion of him. He would be worthy of being the colleague of those gloved conspirators who pretend to change the whole manner of being of a great country, and will not have to reproach themselves with the smallest scratch.

Julien was violently recalled to his role. It was not to dream and say nothing that he had been invited to dinner in such good company.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”