Part 7

At length he reached the summit of the great mountain, which he had to pass in order to arrive, by this crossroad, at the solitary valley inhabited by Fouqué, the young timber merchant, his friend. Julien was in no hurry to see him, nor any other human being. Hidden like a bird of prey among the bare rocks that crown the great mountain, he could perceive from afar any man who might approach him. He discovered a small cave in the midst of the almost vertical slope of one of the rocks. He ran to it, and was soon installed in this retreat. "Here," he said, with eyes shining with joy, "men cannot harm me." He conceived the idea of indulging in the pleasure of writing down his thoughts, everywhere else so dangerous for him. A square stone served him as a desk. His pen flew: he saw nothing of what surrounded him. He finally noticed that the sun was setting behind the distant mountains of the Beaujolais.

Why should I not spend the night here? he said to himself; I have bread, and I am free! At the sound of that great word his soul grew exalted; his hypocrisy made it so that he was not free even at Fouqué's. His head resting on his two hands, gazing at the plain, Julien remained in that cave happier than he had ever been in his life, stirred by his reveries and by his happiness in freedom. Without thinking of it, he saw all the rays of dusk fade one after another. In the midst of that immense obscurity, his soul wandered in contemplation of what he imagined he might one day meet with in Paris. It was, first of all, a woman far more beautiful and of a genius far more elevated than anything he had been able to see in the provinces. He loved with passion, he was loved. If he parted from her for a few moments, it was to go and cover himself with glory, and deserve to be loved still more.

Even granting Julien his imagination, a young man brought up amid the sad truths of Parisian society would have been awakened from such a romance by cold irony; great deeds would have vanished with the hope of attaining them, to give place to the well-known maxim: When one leaves one's mistress, one risks, alas! being deceived two or three times a day. The young peasant saw nothing between himself and the most heroic deeds but the lack of opportunity.

But deep night had replaced day, and there were still two leagues to descend to the hamlet inhabited by Fouqué. Before leaving the little cave, Julien lit a fire and carefully burned all that he had written.

He greatly astonished his friend by knocking at his door at one in the morning. He found Fouqué occupied in writing up his accounts. He was a tall young man, rather ill-made, with harsh large features, an endless nose, and much good-nature hidden beneath that repellent aspect.

"Have you then quarreled with your M. de Rênal, that you arrive thus upon me unawares?"

Julien told him, but as he ought, the events of the previous day.

"Stay with me," said Fouqué; "I see that you know M. de Rênal, M. Valenod, the sub-prefect Maugiron, the curé Chélan; you have understood the subtleties of those people's characters; you are now in a position to appear at the auctions. You know arithmetic better than I do; you shall keep my accounts. I make large profits in my trade. The impossibility of doing everything myself, and the fear of meeting a knave in the man I might take as partner, prevent me every day from undertaking excellent ventures. It is not a month since I all but made six thousand francs from Michaud of Saint-Amand, whom I had not seen again for six years, and whom I found by chance at the Pontarlier sale. Why should not you have made those six thousand francs, or at least three thousand? for, had I had you with me that day, I should have bid for that woodcut, and everyone would soon have left it to me. Be my partner."

This offer angered Julien; it disturbed his madness. Throughout the supper, which the two friends prepared themselves like heroes of Homer, for Fouqué lived alone, he showed his accounts to Julien and proved to him how advantageous his timber trade was. Fouqué had the highest opinion of Julien's intelligence and character.

When at last the latter was alone in his little room of fir wood: "It is true," he said to himself, "I may earn here some few thousand francs, then resume with advantage the trade of soldier or that of priest, according to the fashion then reigning in France. The little sum I shall have amassed will remove all the difficulties of detail. Solitary in this mountain, I shall have dispelled a little the dreadful ignorance in which I am of so many things that occupy all those salon men. But Fouqué renounces marriage; he repeats to me that solitude renders him unhappy. It is evident that if he takes a partner who has no capital to put into his business, it is in the hope of making himself a companion who will never leave him."

"Shall I deceive my friend?" cried Julien with irritation. This being, whose hypocrisy and absence of all sympathy were his ordinary means of salvation, could not this time bear the idea of the slightest want of delicacy toward a man who loved him.

But suddenly Julien was happy; he had a reason to refuse. "What! should I basely lose seven or eight years! I should thus arrive at twenty-eight; but at that age Bonaparte had done his greatest things! When I shall have obscurely earned some money in running those wood sales, and meriting the favor of some subordinate knaves, who tells me I shall still have the sacred fire with which one makes a name?"

The next morning Julien answered with great coolness the good Fouqué, who regarded the partnership affair as settled, that his vocation for the holy ministry of the altars did not permit him to accept. Fouqué could not get over it.

"But do you consider," he repeated, "that I take you as partner, or, if you prefer, that I give you four thousand francs a year? and you wish to return to your M. Rênal who despises you like the mud on his shoes! When you have two hundred louis before you, what prevents you from entering the seminary? I shall tell you more, I undertake to procure you the best living in the country. For," added Fouqué, lowering his voice, "I supply firewood to M. the... M. the... M.... I deliver them first-quality oak logs which they pay me for only as white wood, but never was money better laid out."

Nothing could overcome Julien's vocation; Fouqué ended by believing him a little mad. On the third day, at early morn, Julien left his friend to spend the day amid the rocks of the great mountain. He found again his little cave, but he no longer had peace of soul; his friend's offers had taken it from him. Like Hercules he found himself not between vice and virtue, but between mediocrity followed by assured comfort and all the heroic dreams of his youth. "I have then no true firmness," he said to himself; and that was the doubt which hurt him most. "I am not of the stuff of which great men are made, since I fear that eight years passed in procuring myself bread may take from me that sublime energy which makes one do extraordinary things."

CHAPTER XIII

THE OPENWORK STOCKINGS

A novel is a mirror walked along a road.

SAINT RÉAL

When Julien caught sight of the picturesque ruins of the old church of Vergy, he remarked that, since the day before yesterday, he had not thought once of Mme de Rênal. "The other day on leaving, that woman reminded me of the infinite distance that separates us; she treated me like a workman's son. No doubt she wished to mark her repentance for having given me her hand the evening before... Yet that hand is very pretty! what charm! what nobility in this woman's glances!"

The possibility of making a fortune with Fouqué gave a certain ease to Julien's reasonings; they were no longer so often spoiled by irritation, and the keen sense of his poverty and lowliness in the world's eyes. Placed as on a lofty promontory, he could judge and dominated, so to speak, extreme poverty and ease which he still called wealth. He was far from judging his position as a philosopher, but he had enough clear-sightedness to feel himself changed after this little journey in the mountain.

He was struck by the extreme agitation with which Mme de Rênal listened to the little account of his trip, which she had asked of him.

Fouqué had had matrimonial projects, unhappy loves; long confidences on that subject had filled the conversations of the two friends. Having found happiness too soon, Fouqué had perceived that he was not alone in being loved. All those tales had astonished Julien; he had learned many new things. His solitary life, all of imagination and mistrust, had kept him away from all that might have enlightened him.

During his absence, life for Mme de Rênal had been but a succession of different torments, but all intolerable; she was really ill.

"Above all," said Mme Derville, when she saw Julien arrive, "indisposed as you are, you shall not go to the garden this evening; the damp air would increase your uneasiness."

Mme Derville saw with astonishment that her friend, always scolded by M. de Rênal because of the excessive plainness of her dress, had just put on openwork stockings and charming little shoes arrived from Paris. For three days the only distraction of Mme de Rênal had been to cut out, and have hastily made by Élisa, a summer dress of a pretty little fabric much in fashion. Scarcely could this dress be finished, a few moments after Julien's arrival; Mme de Rênal put it on at once. Her friend no longer doubted. "She loves, the unfortunate woman!" said Mme Derville to herself. She understood all the singular appearances of her illness.

She saw her speak to Julien. Pallor succeeded the liveliest redness. Anxiety was painted in her eyes fixed on those of the young tutor. Mme de Rênal expected every moment that he would explain himself, and announce that he was leaving the house or staying. Julien had no thought of saying anything on this subject, which he was not thinking of. After frightful struggles Mme de Rênal at last dared to say to him, in a trembling voice, where all her passion was painted:

"Will you leave your pupils to place yourself elsewhere?"

Julien was struck by the uncertain voice and the look of Mme de Rênal! "That woman loves me," he said to himself; "but after this passing moment of weakness which her pride reproaches her, and as soon as she no longer fears my departure, she will resume her pride." This view of the respective positions was, in Julien, rapid as lightning; he answered hesitatingly:

"I should have much pain in leaving children so amiable and so well born, but perhaps it must be. One also has duties toward oneself."

In pronouncing the word well born (it was one of those aristocratic words Julien had lately learned), he was animated by a deep sentiment of anti-sympathy.

"In the eyes of this woman, I," he said to himself, "am not well born."

Mme de Rênal, listening to him, admired his genius, his beauty; her heart was pierced by the possibility of departure he made her foresee. All her friends of Verrières, who, during Julien's absence, had come to dine at Vergy, had complimented her, as if in rivalry, on the astonishing man her husband had had the happiness to unearth. It is not that anyone understood the children's progress. The feat of knowing the Bible by heart, and in Latin moreover, had struck the inhabitants of Verrières with an admiration that may perhaps last a century.

Julien, speaking to no one, knew nothing of all this. If Mme de Rênal had had the least composure, she would have complimented him on the reputation he had won, and Julien's pride reassured, he would have been sweet and amiable toward her, all the more since the new dress seemed charming to him. Mme de Rênal, pleased also with her pretty dress, and with what Julien said of it, had wished to take a turn in the garden; soon she confessed she was unable to walk. She had taken the traveler's arm, and far from increasing her strength, the contact of that arm took it from her entirely.

It was night; scarcely were they seated than Julien, using his old privilege, dared to bring his lips near the arm of his pretty neighbor, and take her hand. He was thinking of the boldness Fouqué had shown with his mistresses, and not of Mme de Rênal; the word well born still weighed on his heart. His hand was pressed, which gave him no pleasure. Far from being proud, or at least grateful for the sentiment Mme de Rênal betrayed that evening by signs too evident, her beauty, her elegance, her freshness found him almost insensible. Purity of soul, absence of all hateful emotion, no doubt prolong the duration of youth. It is the countenance that ages first in most pretty women.

Julien was sullen all the evening; hitherto he had been angry only with the hazard of society; since Fouqué had offered him an ignoble means of arriving at ease, he had been out of humor with himself. Absorbed in his thoughts, though from time to time he said a few words to the ladies, Julien ended, without noticing it, by abandoning Mme de Rênal's hand. This reaction overturned the soul of the poor woman; she saw in it the manifestation of her fate.

Certain of Julien's affection, perhaps her virtue would have found strength against him. Trembling to lose him forever, her passion led her so astray as to take again the hand of Julien which, in his distraction, he had left resting on the back of a chair. This action awoke the young ambitious man: he would have wished all those proud nobles who, at table, when he was at the lower end with the children, looked at him with so patronizing a smile, to be witnesses of it. "This woman can no longer despise me; in that case," he said to himself, "I must be sensible to her beauty; I owe it to myself to be her lover!" Such an idea would not have come to him before the naive confidences made by his friend.

The sudden determination he had just taken formed an agreeable distraction. He said to himself: "I must have one of those two women"; he perceived he would have much preferred paying court to Mme Derville; not that she was more agreeable, but she had always seen him as a tutor honored for his learning, and not as a carpenter workman, with a fustian jacket folded under his arm, as he had appeared to Mme de Rênal.

It was precisely as a young workman, blushing to the whites of his eyes, stopped at the house door and not daring to ring, that Mme de Rênal pictured him with the most charm. This woman, whom the bourgeois of the country called so haughty, rarely thought of rank, and the least certainty outweighed in her mind by far the promise of character given by a man's station. A carter who had shown bravery would have been braver in her mind than a terrible hussar captain furnished with his mustache and his pipe. She believed Julien's soul nobler than that of all her cousins, all gentlemen of breed and several of them titled.

In pursuing the review of his position, Julien saw that he must not think of the conquest of Mme Derville, who probably perceived the taste Mme de Rênal showed for him. Forced to return to the latter: "What do I know of this woman's character?" said Julien. "Only this: before my trip I took her hand, she withdrew it; today I withdraw my hand, she seizes it and presses it. Fine opportunity to repay her all the contempt she has had for me. God knows how many lovers she has had; she decides perhaps in my favor only because of the ease of meetings."

Such is, alas! the misfortune of excessive civilization! At twenty, the education of a young man, if he has any education, is a thousand leagues from the careless abandon, without which love is often but the most tiresome of duties.

"I owe it all the more," continued the little vanity of Julien, "to succeed with this woman, for if ever I make a fortune and someone reproaches me with the low employment of tutor, I may let it be understood that love had thrown me into that place." Julien removed his hand again from Mme de Rênal's, then took it back pressing it. As they went back to the salon, toward midnight, Mme de Rênal said to him in a half-voice:

"You will leave us, you will go away?"

Julien answered with a sigh:

"I must go, for I love you with passion; that is a fault... and what a fault for a young priest!"

Mme de Rênal leaned on his arm, and with such abandon that her cheek felt the warmth of Julien's.

The nights of these two beings were very different. Mme de Rênal was exalted by the transports of the most elevated moral voluptuousness. A coquettish young girl who loves early accustoms herself to the trouble of love; when she arrives at the age of true passion, the charm of novelty is lacking. As Mme de Rênal had never read novels, all the shades of her happiness were new to her. No sad truth came to chill her, not even the specter of the future. She saw herself as happy in ten years as she was at that moment. The very idea of virtue and of fidelity sworn to M. de Rênal, which had agitated her a few days before, presented itself in vain; it was sent away like an importunate guest. "Never will I grant anything to Julien," said Mme de Rênal; "we shall live in future as we have lived for a month. He shall be a friend."

CHAPTER XIV

THE ENGLISH SCISSORS

A sixteen-year-old girl had a rose complexion, and she put on rouge.

POLIDORI

For Julien, Fouqué's offer had indeed taken away all happiness; he could settle on no course.

"Alas! perhaps I lack character; I should have been a poor soldier of Napoleon. At least," he added, "my little intrigue with the mistress of the house will distract me for a moment."

Fortunately for him, even in this subordinate little incident, the interior of his soul answered poorly to his cavalier language. He was afraid of Mme de Rênal because of her so pretty dress. That dress was in his eyes the advance guard of Paris. His pride would leave nothing to chance and to the inspiration of the moment. From Fouqué's confidences and the little he had read about love in his bible, he made himself a very detailed plan of campaign. As, without admitting it to himself, he was much troubled, he wrote down this plan.

The next morning in the salon, Mme de Rênal was alone with him for an instant:

"Have you no other name than Julien?" she said to him.

At this so flattering demand, our hero knew not what to answer. This circumstance was not foreseen in his plan. Without that folly of making a plan, the quick mind of Julien would have served him well; surprise would only have added to the liveliness of his perceptions.

He was awkward and exaggerated his awkwardness to himself. Mme de Rênal very quickly pardoned him for it. She saw in it the effect of a charming candor. And what precisely this man, to whom so much genius was attributed, lacked in her eyes was the air of candor.

"Your little tutor inspires me with much mistrust," Mme Derville would sometimes say to her; "I find him with the air of always thinking and acting only with policy. He is a sly one."

Julien remained profoundly humiliated by the misfortune of not having known what to answer Mme de Rênal.

"A man like me owes it to himself to repair this failure," and seizing the moment when they were passing from one room to another, he believed it his duty to give Mme de Rênal a kiss.

Nothing less led up to it, nothing less agreeable, for him and for her, nothing more imprudent. They were on the point of being noticed. Mme de Rênal thought him mad. She was frightened and above all shocked. This folly recalled M. Valenod to her.

"What would happen to me," she said to herself, "if I were alone with him?" All her virtue returned, because love eclipsed.

She arranged matters so that one of her children always remained near her.

The day was tedious for Julien; he spent it entirely executing his plan of seduction with awkwardness. He did not look once at Mme de Rênal without that look having a why; however, he was not foolish enough not to see that he did not succeed in being amiable and still less seductive.

Mme de Rênal could not get over her astonishment at finding him so awkward and at the same time so bold. "It is the timidity of love, in a man of spirit!" she said to herself at last, with an inexpressible joy. "Would it be possible that he had never been loved by my rival?"

After breakfast, Mme de Rênal went back into the salon to receive the visit of M. Charcot de Maugiron, the sub-prefect of Bray. She was working at a little tapestry frame set rather high. Mme Derville was at her side. It was in such a position, and in broad daylight, that our hero found it fitting to advance his boot and press the pretty foot of Mme de Rênal, whose openwork stocking and pretty Paris shoe evidently attracted the looks of the gallant sub-prefect.

Mme de Rênal was extremely frightened; she let fall her scissors, her ball of wool, her needles, and Julien's movement could pass for a clumsy attempt meant to prevent the fall of the scissors he had seen slip. Happily these little English steel scissors broke, and Mme de Rênal did not cease regretting that Julien had not been closer to her.

"You perceived the fall before me; you would have prevented it; instead, your zeal only succeeded in giving me a very hard kick."

All this deceived the sub-prefect, but not Mme Derville. "This pretty fellow has very silly manners!" she thought; "the propriety of a provincial capital forgives not such faults." Mme de Rênal found the moment to say to Julien:

"Be prudent, I order you to."

Julien saw his awkwardness; he was out of humor. He deliberated long with himself, to know whether he should be angry at those words: "I order you to." He was foolish enough to think: "She might say 'I order it' to me, if it were a matter of something relative to the children's education; but in answering my love, she supposes equality. One cannot love without equality..."; and all his mind was lost in making commonplaces on equality. He repeated to himself angrily this verse of Corneille, which Mme Derville had taught him a few days before:

"... Love Makes equalities and seeks them not."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”