Part 20

--Yes, answered Julien, in a resolute tone; yes, I am abandoning a country where I am forgotten even by her whom I have loved most in my life, and I am leaving it never to see it again. I am going to Paris...

--You are going to Paris! cried Madame de Rênal, rather loudly.

Her voice was almost stifled by tears, and showed the full excess of her distress. Julien needed this encouragement; he was about to attempt a step which might decide everything against him; and before this exclamation, seeing nothing clearly, he was wholly ignorant of the effect he was managing to produce. He hesitated no longer; the fear of remorse gave him complete mastery over himself; he added coldly, rising:

--Yes, madam, I am leaving you forever, be happy, farewell.

He took a few steps toward the window; already he was opening it. Madame de Rênal sprang toward him. He felt her head upon his shoulder and that she was holding him in her arms, pressing her cheek against his own.

Thus, after three hours of conversation, Julien obtained what he had desired with such passion during the first two. Had it come earlier, the return to tender feelings, the eclipse of Madame de Rênal's remorse, would have been a divine happiness; obtained thus by artifice, it was no more than a triumph. Julien absolutely insisted, against his mistress's entreaties, on lighting the night-lamp.

--Do you wish, he said to her, that I should keep no memory of having seen you? The love that is no doubt in those charming eyes will then be lost to me? The whiteness of that pretty hand will be invisible to me? Think that I am leaving you, perhaps for a very long time!

What shame! said Madame de Rênal to herself, but she had nothing to refuse to that idea of parting forever, which melted her in tears. Dawn was beginning to trace sharply the outlines of the firs on the mountain to the east of Verrières. Instead of going away, Julien, drunk with voluptuousness, asked Madame de Rênal to spend the whole day hidden in her room, and to depart only the following night.

--And why not? she answered. This fatal relapse robs me of all self-esteem, and makes my unhappiness forever. And she pressed him to her heart with rapture. My husband is no longer the same, he has suspicions; he believes I led him into this whole affair, and shows himself quite vexed with me. If he hears the slightest noise I am lost, he will cast me off like the wretched woman that I am.

--Ah! there is a phrase from M. Chélan, said Julien; you would not have spoken to me thus before that cruel departure for the seminary; you loved me then!

Julien was rewarded for the coolness he had shown in this remark: he saw his mistress forget in the blink of an eye the danger that his presence posed to her, to think of the far greater danger of seeing Julien doubt her love. Daylight grew rapidly and brightly lit the room; Julien recovered all the voluptuousness of pride, when he could again see in his arms and almost at his feet this charming woman, the only one he had loved and who, but a few hours before, had been wholly given up to fear of a terrible God and to love of her duties. Resolutions strengthened by a year of constancy had not been able to hold before his courage.

Soon noise was heard in the house; a thing she had not thought of came to trouble Madame de Rênal.

--That wicked Élisa will come into the room! What shall we do with this enormous ladder? she said to her friend; where hide it? I will carry it to the attic, she cried suddenly, with a sort of playfulness.

--That is your look of former times! said Julien, delighted. But you must pass through the servant's room.

--I will leave the ladder in the corridor, I will call the servant and give him an errand.

--Think of preparing a note in case the servant, passing before the ladder in the corridor, notices it.

--Yes, my angel, said Madame de Rênal, giving him a kiss. You, think of hiding quickly under the bed, if, during my absence, Élisa comes in here.

Julien was astonished at this sudden gaiety. Thus, he thought, the approach of a material danger, far from troubling her, restores her gaiety, because she forgets her remorse! Truly superior woman! ah! here is a heart in which it is glorious to reign! Julien was enraptured.

Madame de Rênal took the ladder; it was evidently too heavy for her. Julien went to help her; he admired that elegant figure which was so far from suggesting strength, when all at once, without help, she seized the ladder, and lifted it as she would have a chair. She carried it rapidly into the corridor of the third floor, where she laid it along the wall. She called the servant, and to give him time to dress, went up to the dovecote. Five minutes later, on returning to the corridor, she no longer found the ladder. What had become of it? If Julien had been out of the house, this danger would hardly have touched her. But, at this moment, if her husband saw this ladder! This incident could be abominable. Madame de Rênal ran everywhere. At last she discovered the ladder under the roof, where the servant had carried it and even hidden it. This circumstance was singular; formerly it would have alarmed her.

What do I care, she thought, what may happen in twenty-four hours, when Julien shall be gone? Will not all then be horror and remorse for me?

She had a vague idea of owing it to herself to leave life, but what matter? After a separation she had believed eternal, he was restored to her, she saw him again, and what he had done to reach her showed so much love!

In telling Julien the adventure of the ladder:

--What shall I answer my husband, she said to him, if the servant tells him he found this ladder? She dreamed an instant. They will need twenty-four hours to discover the peasant who sold it to you; and throwing herself into Julien's arms, pressing him with a convulsive movement: Ah! to die, to die thus! she cried, covering him with kisses; but you must not die of hunger, she said laughing.

Come; first I will hide you in Mme Derville's room, which is always kept locked. She went to keep watch at the end of the corridor, and Julien passed running. Do not open, if anyone knocks, she said, locking him in; in any case, it would be only the children jesting among themselves.

--Bring them into the garden, under the window, said Julien, that I may have the pleasure of seeing them, make them talk.

--Yes, yes, cried Madame de Rênal as she went away.

She soon returned with oranges, biscuits, a bottle of Malaga wine; it had been impossible for her to steal any bread.

--What is your husband doing? said Julien.

--He is writing up contracts with peasants.

But eight o'clock had struck, there was much noise in the house. Had Madame de Rênal not been seen, she would have been sought everywhere; she was obliged to leave him.

Soon she returned, against all prudence, bringing him a cup of coffee; she trembled lest he die of hunger. After breakfast, she succeeded in bringing the children under the window of Mme Derville's room. He found them much grown, but they had taken on a common air, or else his ideas had changed. Madame de Rênal spoke to them of Julien. The eldest answered with friendship and regret for the former tutor; but it turned out that the younger ones had almost forgotten him.

M. de Rênal did not go out that morning; he went up and down ceaselessly in the house, busy making bargains with peasants, to whom he was selling his potato crop. Until dinner, Madame de Rênal had not a moment to give to her prisoner. Dinner was announced and served; she had the idea of stealing a plate of hot soup for him. As she approached without noise the door of the room he occupied, carrying the plate carefully, she found herself face to face with the servant who had hidden the ladder that morning. At that moment he too was advancing silently in the corridor and as if listening. Probably Julien had walked imprudently. The servant moved away somewhat confused. Madame de Rênal entered boldly where Julien was; this encounter made him shudder.

--You are afraid! she said to him; I would brave all the dangers of the world without flinching. I fear but one thing, it is the moment when I shall be alone after your departure.

And she left him running.

--Ah! said Julien, exalted, remorse is the only danger this sublime soul fears!

At last evening came. M. de Rênal went to the Casino. His wife had announced a terrible migraine; she retired to her room, hastened to dismiss Élisa, and got up again very quickly to go open to Julien.

It turned out that he was really dying of hunger. Madame de Rênal went to the kitchen to fetch bread. Julien heard a great cry. Madame de Rênal returned, and told him that, entering the kitchen without a light, approaching a sideboard where bread was kept, and stretching out her hand, she had touched a woman's arm. It was Élisa, who had uttered the cry heard by Julien.

--What was she doing there?

--She was stealing some sweetmeats, or else she was spying on us, said Madame de Rênal with complete indifference. But happily I found a pie and a large loaf.

--What is there? said Julien, showing her the pockets of her apron.

Madame de Rênal had forgotten that, since dinner, they had been filled with bread.

Julien clasped her in his arms with the liveliest passion; never had she seemed so beautiful to him. Even in Paris, he thought confusedly, I shall not meet a greater character. She had all the awkwardness of a woman little accustomed to such cares, and at the same time the true courage of a being who fears only dangers of another order and far more terrible.

While Julien supped with great appetite, and his mistress teased him about the simplicity of this meal, for she had a horror of speaking seriously, the door of the room was suddenly shaken violently. It was M. de Rênal.

--Why have you locked yourself in? he cried to her.

Julien had only time to slip under the sofa.

--What! you are fully dressed, said M. de Rênal entering; you are supping, and you locked your door!

On ordinary days, this question, put with all conjugal dryness, would have troubled Madame de Rênal, but she felt that her husband had only to stoop a little to perceive Julien; for M. de Rênal had thrown himself on the chair that Julien had occupied a moment before opposite the sofa.

The migraine served as excuse for all. While in his turn her husband told her at length the incident of the hen he had won at the billiard table of the Casino, a hen of nineteen francs, faith! he added, she noticed on a chair, three steps before them, Julien's hat. Her coolness redoubled; she began to undress, and, at a certain moment, passing rapidly behind her husband, threw a gown over the chair with the hat.

M. de Rênal departed at last. She begged Julien to begin again the account of his life at the seminary.

--Yesterday I did not listen to you; while you spoke, I thought only of obtaining from myself the courage to send you away.

She was imprudence itself. They spoke very loud and it might be two in the morning, when they were interrupted by a violent blow on the door. It was M. de Rênal again.

--Open to me quickly, there are thieves in the house! he said; Saint-Jean found their ladder this morning.

--Here is the end of all, cried Madame de Rênal, throwing herself into Julien's arms. He will kill us both, he does not believe in thieves, I shall die in your arms, happier in my death than I was in life.

She made no answer to her husband, who was growing angry; she kissed Julien passionately.

--Save the mother of Stanislas, he said to her with the look of command. I am going to leap into the courtyard by the cabinet window, and escape into the garden; the dogs have recognized me. Make a bundle of my clothes, and throw it into the garden as soon as you can. Meanwhile, let him break the door down. Above all, no confessions, I forbid them; it is better he have suspicions than certainties.

--You will kill yourself jumping! was her only answer and her only anxiety.

She went with him to the cabinet window; she then took time to hide his clothes. She opened at last to her husband, boiling with anger. He looked into the bedroom, into the cabinet, without a word, and disappeared. Julien's clothes were thrown to him; he seized them, and ran rapidly toward the bottom of the garden on the side of the Doubs.

As he ran, he heard a bullet whistle, and immediately the noise of a gunshot.

It is not M. de Rênal, he thought; he shoots too badly for that. The dogs ran silently at his side; a second shot apparently broke a dog's paw, for it began to utter lamentable cries. Julien jumped the wall of a terrace, made some fifty paces under cover, and set to fleeing in another direction. He heard voices calling to each other, and distinctly saw his enemy the servant fire a gun; a farmer also came to fire from the other side of the garden, but already Julien had gained the bank of the Doubs, where he dressed.

An hour later, he was a league from Verrières, on the road to Geneva; if they have suspicions, he thought, it is on the road to Paris that they will look for me.

End of the First Volume

SECOND VOLUME

She is not pretty, she has no color.

SAINTE-BEUVE

CHAPTER ONE

THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY

_O rus quando ego te adspiciam!_

VIRGIL.

--Monsieur no doubt comes to wait for the Paris mail-coach? said the master of an inn where he stopped to breakfast.

--Today's or tomorrow's, it matters little to me, said Julien.

The mail-coach arrived as he was affecting indifference. There were two free places.

--What! is it you, my poor Falcoz, said the traveler arriving from the direction of Geneva to the one who got into the coach at the same time as Julien.

--I thought you were settled near Lyon, said Falcoz, in a delightful valley near the Rhône?

--Nicely settled. I am fleeing.

--How! you flee? you Saint-Giraud! with that sage look, you have committed some crime? said Falcoz laughing.

--Faith, it would be as much. I flee the abominable life led in the provinces. I love the freshness of the woods and rural tranquility, as you know; you have often accused me of being romantic. I wanted from life to hear no talk of politics, and politics drives me away.

--But of what party are you?

--Of none, and that is what ruins me. Here is all my politics: I love music, painting, a good book is an event for me; I am going to be forty-four. What have I left to live? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Well! I hold that in thirty years, the ministers will be a little more skillful, but just as honest men as those of today. The history of England serves me as a mirror for our future. There will always be a king who wants to increase his prerogative; always the ambition to become a deputy, the glory and the hundreds of thousands of francs earned by Mirabeau will keep the rich of the province from sleeping: they will call that being liberal and loving the people. Always the desire to become a peer or gentleman of the Chamber will gallop the ultras. On the ship of State, everyone will want to occupy himself with the maneuver, for it is well paid. Will there never be a poor little place for the simple passenger?

--Come to the point, come to the point, which must be quite amusing with your tranquil character. Is it the last elections that drive you from your province?

--My ill comes from farther off. I had, four years ago, forty years and five hundred thousand francs. I am four years older today, and probably fifty thousand francs less that I am going to lose on the sale of my château of Monfleury, near the Rhône, superb position.

In Paris, I was weary of that perpetual comedy, to which what you call the civilization of the nineteenth century obliges. I thirsted for homeliness and simplicity. I buy an estate in the mountains near the Rhône, nothing fairer under heaven.

The village vicar and the squires of the neighborhood court me for six months; I give them dinner; I have left Paris, I tell them, never in my life to speak or hear spoken of politics. As you see, I subscribe to no newspaper. The less the postmaster brings me letters, the happier I am.

That was not the vicar's reckoning; soon I am exposed to a thousand indiscreet requests, annoyances, etc. I wanted to give two or three hundred francs a year to the poor, they ask them of me for pious associations: that of Saint-Joseph, that of the Virgin, etc.; I refuse: then they heap a hundred insults on me. I have the folly to be piqued by them. I can no longer go out in the morning to enjoy the beauty of our mountains, without finding some vexation that draws me from my reveries, and unpleasantly recalls men and their malice. At the Rogation processions, for example, whose chant pleases me (it is probably a Greek melody), my fields are no longer blessed, because, says the vicar, they belong to an impious man. The cow of a devout old peasant dies, she says it is because of the neighborhood of a pond which belongs to me, an impious philosopher come from Paris, and a week later I find all my fish belly-up, poisoned with lime. Vexation surrounds me in all forms. The justice of the peace, an honest man, but who fears for his post, always gives judgment against me. The peace of the countryside is for me a hell. Once it was seen that I was abandoned by the vicar, head of the village congregation, and not supported by the retired captain, head of the liberals, all fell upon me, down to the mason whom I had kept alive for a year, down to the wheelwright who wanted to cheat me with impunity in repairing my plows.

In order to have support and yet win some of my lawsuits, I make myself liberal, but as you say, those devilish elections arrive, they ask me for my vote...

--For a stranger?

--Not at all, for a man I know only too well. I refuse, frightful imprudence! from that moment, there are the liberals on my back too, my position becomes intolerable. I believe that if it had entered the vicar's head to accuse me of having assassinated my servant, there would have been twenty witnesses of both parties, who would have sworn to having seen the crime committed.

--You want to live in the country without serving the passions of your neighbors, without even listening to their gossip. What a fault!...

--At last, it is repaired. Monfleury is for sale, I lose fifty thousand francs, if need be, but I am all joyous, I leave this hell of hypocrisy and annoyances. I go to seek solitude and rural peace in the only place where they exist in France, in a fourth floor overlooking the Champs-Élysées. And yet I am deliberating whether I shall not begin my political career, in the Roule district, by returning the blessed bread to the parish.

--None of that would have happened to you under Bonaparte, said Falcoz with eyes shining with anger and regret.

--Come now, but why did he not know how to keep his place, your Bonaparte? All that I suffer today, it is he who made it.

Here Julien's attention redoubled. He had understood from the first word that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the former childhood friend of M. de Rênal, repudiated by him in 1816, and the philosopher Saint-Giraud must be brother of that chief clerk at the prefecture of..., who knew how to get the communes' houses adjudged to him cheaply.

--And all that is your Bonaparte who made it, continued Saint-Giraud: an honest man, inoffensive if ever there was, with forty years and five hundred thousand francs, cannot settle in the province and find peace there, its priests and its nobles drive him out.

--Ah! do not speak ill of him, cried Falcoz; never was France so high in the esteem of peoples as during the thirteen years he reigned. Then, there was greatness in all that was done.

--Your Emperor, the devil take him, resumed the man of forty-four was great only on his battlefields, and when he restored the finances around 1802. What does all his conduct since mean? With his chamberlains, his pomp and his receptions at the Tuileries, he gave a new edition of all the monarchical fooleries. It was corrected, it might have passed another century or two. The nobles and the priests wanted to return to the old, but they have not the iron hand needed to sell it to the public.

--That is indeed the language of a former printer!

--Who drives me from my land? continued the printer angrily. The priests, whom Napoleon recalled by his concordat, instead of treating them as the State treats physicians, lawyers, astronomers, of seeing in them only citizens, without concerning himself with the industry by which they seek to earn their living. Would there be insolent gentlemen today, if your Bonaparte had not made barons and counts? No, the fashion had passed. After the priests, it is the little country nobles who gave me most spleen, and forced me to make myself liberal.

The conversation was endless; this subject will occupy France for another half-century. As Saint-Giraud kept repeating that it was impossible to live in the province, Julien timidly proposed the example of M. de Rênal.

--Bless me, young man, you are good! cried Falcoz; he has made himself the hammer so as not to be the anvil, and a terrible hammer too. But I see him overrun by Valenod. Do you know that scoundrel? there is the true one. What will your M. de Rênal say when he sees himself dismissed one of these fine mornings, and Valenod put in his place?

--He will remain alone with his crimes, said Saint-Giraud. You know Verrières then, young man? Well! Bonaparte, confound him and his monarchical fripperies, made possible the reign of the Rênals and the Chélans, which brought on the reign of the Valenods and the Maslons.

This conversation of gloomy politics astonished Julien, and distracted him from his voluptuous reveries.

He was little moved by the first aspect of Paris, seen in the distance. The castles in Spain upon his coming fate had to struggle with the still present memory of the twenty-four hours he had just spent at Verrières. He swore to himself never to abandon his friend's children, and to give up all to protect them, if the impertinences of the priests give us the republic and persecutions against the nobles.

What would have happened on the night of his arrival at Verrières if, at the moment he leaned his ladder against the casement of Madame de Rênal's bedroom, he had found that room occupied by a stranger, or by M. de Rênal?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”