Part 8
Julien, persisting in playing the role of a Don Juan—he who in all his life had never had a mistress—was deadly foolish the whole day long. He had but one sound idea: weary of himself and of Mme de Rênal, he saw with dread the evening approaching when he would be seated in the garden beside her, in the darkness. He told M. de Rênal that he was going to Verrières to see the curate; he left after dinner and did not return until night.
At Verrières, Julien found M. Chélan busy moving out; he had at last been dismissed, and the vicar Maslon was replacing him. Julien helped the good curate, and hit upon the idea of writing to Fouqué that the irresistible vocation he felt for the holy ministry had at first prevented him from accepting his kind offers, but that he had just witnessed such an example of injustice that perhaps it would be more advantageous for his salvation not to enter into sacred orders.
Julien congratulated himself on his cleverness in turning the dismissal of the curate of Verrières to account, leaving himself a door open to return to trade, should gloomy prudence prevail over heroism in his mind.
CHAPTER XV
THE COCK'S CROW
Amour in Latin maketh amor Whence cometh of love the death, And, ere that, care that biteth, Mourning, tears, snares, misdeeds, remorse...
BLASON D'AMOUR.
If Julien had possessed a little of the skill he so gratuitously attributed to himself, he might have congratulated himself the next day on the effect produced by his trip to Verrières. His absence had made his awkwardness forgotten. That day again he was rather sullen; toward evening a ridiculous idea came to him, and he communicated it to Mme de Rênal with rare intrepidity.
Scarcely were they seated in the garden when, without waiting for sufficient darkness, Julien brought his mouth close to Mme de Rênal's ear, and at the risk of compromising her horribly, said to her:
"Madame, tonight at two o'clock I shall come to your room; I must tell you something."
Julien trembled lest his request be granted—his role of seducer weighed upon him so horribly that, could he have followed his inclination, he would have withdrawn to his room for several days and seen those ladies no more. He understood that by his knowing conduct of the previous evening he had spoiled all the fair appearances of the day before, and knew not truly to what saint to vow himself.
Mme de Rênal replied with real, and by no means exaggerated, indignation to the impertinent announcement Julien dared to make her. He thought he saw contempt in her brief reply. It is certain that in this reply, spoken very low, the words "fie, then" had appeared. Under pretext of having something to say to the children, Julien went to their room, and on his return placed himself beside Mme Derville and far from Mme de Rênal. He thus removed all possibility of taking her hand. The conversation was serious, and Julien got through it very well, save for a few moments of silence during which he racked his brains. "Why can I not invent some fine maneuver," he said to himself, "to force Mme de Rênal to give me back those unequivocal marks of tenderness which made me believe, three days ago, that she was mine!"
Julien was extremely disconcerted by the almost desperate state in which he had placed his affairs. Yet nothing would have embarrassed him more than success.
When they parted at midnight, his pessimism made him believe he enjoyed the contempt of Mme Derville, and probably was little better with Mme de Rênal.
In a very bad humor and much humiliated, Julien did not sleep. He was a thousand leagues from the idea of renouncing all pretense, all planning, and of living from day to day with Mme de Rênal, content like a child with the happiness each day would bring.
He wearied his brain inventing clever maneuvers; an instant later he found them absurd; he was, in a word, most unhappy, when two o'clock struck on the château clock.
The sound awoke him as the cock's crow awoke Saint Peter. He saw himself at the moment of the most painful event. He had thought no more of his impertinent proposal since the moment he made it; it had been so ill received!
"I told her I would go to her at two o'clock," said he, rising; "I may be inexperienced and boorish as befits a peasant's son—Mme Derville made me understand that well enough—but at least I shall not be weak."
Julien was right to congratulate himself on his courage; never had he imposed on himself a more painful restraint. In opening his door, he was so trembling that his knees gave way under him, and he was forced to lean against the wall.
He was without shoes. He went to listen at M. de Rênal's door, whose snoring he could distinguish. He was in despair at it. There was then no pretext for not going to her. But good God, what would he do there? He had no plan, and had he had one, he felt so troubled he would have been incapable of following it.
At last, suffering a thousand times more than if he had marched to death, he entered the little corridor leading to Mme de Rênal's room. He opened the door with a trembling hand and making a frightful noise.
There was light; a night-lamp burned under the mantelpiece; he did not expect this new misfortune. At seeing him enter, Mme de Rênal sprang quickly out of her bed.
"Wretch!" she cried.
There was a little disorder. Julien forgot his vain projects and returned to his natural role: not to please so charming a woman seemed to him the greatest of misfortunes. He answered her reproaches only by throwing himself at her feet and kissing her knees. As she spoke to him with extreme harshness, he melted into tears.
Some hours later, when Julien left Mme de Rênal's room, one might have said, in novelistic style, that he had nothing left to desire. Indeed, he owed to the love he had inspired, and to the unforeseen impression made upon him by seductive charms, a victory to which all his clumsy cleverness would never have led him.
But, in the sweetest moments, victim of a bizarre pride, he still pretended to play the role of a man accustomed to subjugating women: he made incredible efforts of attention to spoil what was amiable in him. Instead of attending to the transports he called forth, and to the remorse that heightened their liveliness, the idea of duty never ceased to be present before his eyes. He feared a dreadful remorse and eternal ridicule, should he stray from the ideal model he proposed to follow. In a word, what made Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from tasting the happiness placed at his feet. It is a sixteen-year-old girl, with charming complexion, who, to go to a ball, has the folly to put on rouge.
Mortally frightened by Julien's appearance, Mme de Rênal was soon prey to the cruellest alarms. Julien's tears and despair troubled her deeply.
Even when she had nothing left to refuse him, she pushed Julien far from her with real indignation, and then threw herself into his arms. No plan appeared in all this conduct. She believed herself damned without remission, and sought to hide from herself the sight of hell by overwhelming Julien with the warmest caresses. In a word, nothing would have been lacking to our hero's happiness, not even a burning sensibility in the woman he had just won, had he known how to enjoy it. Julien's departure did not cease the transports that agitated her despite herself, and her struggles with the remorse that tore her.
"My God! to be happy, to be loved, is that all?" Such was Julien's first thought on returning to his room. He was in that state of astonishment and uneasy turmoil into which the soul falls that has just obtained what it has long desired. It is used to desiring, finds no more to desire, and yet has not yet any memories. Like the soldier returned from parade, Julien was attentively occupied in reviewing all the details of his conduct. "Have I failed in anything I owe to myself? Have I played my role well?"
And what role? That of a man accustomed to shine with women.
CHAPTER XVI
THE NEXT DAY
He turn'd his lip to hers, and with his hand Call'd back the tangles of her wandering hair.
_Don Juan_. C. I, st. 170.
Happily, for Julien's glory, Mme de Rênal had been too agitated, too astonished, to perceive the foolishness of the man who, in an instant, had become all the world to her.
As she urged him to withdraw, seeing day break:
"Oh, my God," said she, "if my husband heard any noise, I am lost."
Julien, who had time to make phrases, remembered this one:
"Would you regret life?"
"Ah! greatly at this moment! but I would not regret having known you."
Julien found it dignified to return expressly in broad daylight and with imprudence.
The continual attention with which he studied his slightest actions, in the mad idea of appearing a man of experience, had but one advantage; when he saw Mme de Rênal again at breakfast, his conduct was a masterpiece of prudence.
As for her, she could not look at him without blushing to her eyes, and could not live an instant without looking at him; she perceived her confusion, and her efforts to hide it redoubled it. Julien raised his eyes to her but once. At first Mme de Rênal admired his prudence. Soon, seeing that this single glance was not repeated, she was alarmed: "Does he no longer love me?" said she to herself; "alas! I am too old for him, I am ten years older than he."
In passing from the dining room to the garden, she pressed Julien's hand. In the surprise caused him by so extraordinary a mark of love, he looked at her with passion. For she had seemed very pretty at breakfast; and, while lowering his eyes, he had spent his time detailing her charms. This glance consoled Mme de Rênal; it did not remove all her anxieties, but her anxieties almost entirely removed her remorse toward her husband.
At breakfast, the husband noticed nothing; it was not so with Mme Derville: she believed Mme de Rênal on the point of succumbing. Throughout the day, her bold and incisive friendship spared her not the half-words meant to paint, in hideous colors, the danger she ran.
Mme de Rênal burned to find herself alone with Julien; she wanted to ask him if he still loved her. Despite the unalterable sweetness of her character, she was several times on the point of making her friend understand how importunate she was.
In the evening, in the garden, Mme Derville so arranged matters that she found herself placed between Mme de Rênal and Julien. Mme de Rênal, who had formed a delicious image of the pleasure of pressing Julien's hand and bearing it to her lips, could not even address a word to him.
This untimeliness increased her agitation. She was devoured by remorse. She had scolded Julien so much for the imprudence he had committed in coming to her the previous night, that she trembled lest he not come this one. She left the garden early, and went to establish herself in her room. But unable to contain her impatience, she came to press her ear against Julien's door. Despite the uncertainty and passion that devoured her, she dared not enter. This action seemed to her the last of basenesses, for it serves as the text of a provincial saying.
The servants were not all abed. Prudence at last obliged her to return to her own room. Two hours of waiting were two centuries of torment.
But Julien was too faithful to what he called duty, to fail to execute point by point what he had prescribed himself.
As one o'clock struck, he slipped gently from his room, assured himself that the master of the house was fast asleep, and appeared at Mme de Rênal's. That day he found more happiness with his friend, for he thought less constantly of the role to play. He had eyes to see and ears to hear. What Mme de Rênal told him of her age contributed to give him some assurance.
"Alas! I am ten years older than you; how can you love me?" she repeated to him, without design and because the idea oppressed her.
Julien could not conceive this misfortune, but he saw it was real, and he almost forgot all his fear of being ridiculous.
The foolish idea of being regarded as a subordinate lover, because of his obscure birth, also disappeared. As Julien's transports reassured his timid mistress, she recovered a little happiness and the faculty of judging her lover. Happily he had almost none that day of that borrowed air which had made the previous rendezvous a victory, but not a pleasure. Had she noticed his attention to playing a role, this sad discovery would have forever taken from her all happiness. She could have seen in it nothing but a sad effect of the disproportion of ages.
Though Mme de Rênal had never thought of the theories of love, the difference of age is, after that of fortune, one of the great commonplaces of provincial jesting, whenever love is in question.
In a few days, Julien, returned to all the ardor of his age, was desperately in love.
"One must admit," said he to himself, "that she has an angelic goodness of soul, and one is not prettier."
He had almost entirely lost the idea of the role to play. In a moment of abandon, he even confessed to her all his anxieties. This confidence carried to its height the passion he inspired. "I have then had no happy rival," said Mme de Rênal with delight; she dared question him about the portrait in which he took such interest; Julien swore to her it was that of a man.
When Mme de Rênal had enough presence of mind to reflect, she could not get over her astonishment that such happiness existed, and that she had never suspected it.
"Ah!" said she to herself, "if I had known Julien ten years ago when I might still pass for pretty!"
Julien was far from such thoughts. His love was still ambition: it was the joy of possessing, he a poor being so unhappy and so despised, a woman so noble and so beautiful. His acts of adoration, his transports at the sight of his friend's charms, ended by reassuring her a little as to the difference of age. Had she possessed a little of that worldly wisdom which a woman of thirty has long enjoyed in more civilized lands, she would have shuddered for the duration of a love that seemed to live only on surprise and rapture of self-love.
In his moments of forgetfulness of ambition, Julien admired with transport even the hats, even the dresses of Mme de Rênal. He could not satiate himself with the pleasure of feeling their perfume. He opened her glass-fronted wardrobe and remained whole hours, admiring the beauty and arrangement of all he found there. His friend, leaning on him, watched him; he looked at those jewels, those trifles which, on the eve of a marriage, fill a bridal basket.
"I might have married such a man!" sometimes thought Mme de Rênal; "what a fiery soul! what a ravishing life with him!"
As for Julien, never had he found himself so near these terrible instruments of feminine artillery. "It is impossible," said he to himself, "that at Paris there should be anything more beautiful!" Then he found no objection to his happiness. Often the sincere admiration and transports of his mistress made him forget the vain theory which had rendered him so stiff and almost so ridiculous in the first moments of this liaison. There were moments when, despite his habits of hypocrisy, he found an extreme sweetness in confessing to this great lady who admired him his ignorance of a host of little usages. His mistress's rank seemed to raise him above himself. Mme de Rênal, for her part, found the sweetest of moral voluptuousness in thus instructing, in a host of little things, this young man full of genius, and whom everyone regarded as destined one day to go far. Even the sub-prefect and M. Valenod could not help admiring him: they seemed to her less foolish for it. As for Mme Derville, she was far from expressing the same sentiments. In despair at what she believed she guessed, and seeing that wise counsels became odious to a woman who, literally, had lost her head, she left Vergy, without giving an explanation that no one took care to ask of her. Mme de Rênal shed a few tears, and soon it seemed to her that her felicity redoubled. By this departure, she found herself almost all day alone with her lover.
Julien gave himself all the more to the sweet society of his friend, that, whenever he was too long alone with himself, Fouqué's fatal proposal came again to agitate him. In the first days of this new life, there were moments when he who had never loved, who had never been loved by anyone, found so delicious a pleasure in being sincere, that he was on the point of confessing to Mme de Rênal the ambition which until then had been the very essence of his life. He would have liked to consult her on the strange temptation Fouqué's proposal offered him, but a small event prevented all frankness.
CHAPTER XVII
THE FIRST DEPUTY
O, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all the beauty of the sun And by and by a cloud takes all away!
TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.
One evening at sunset, seated near his friend, at the foot of the orchard, far from intruders, he dreamed profoundly. "Will such sweet moments always last?" thought he. His soul was wholly occupied with the difficulty and necessity of choosing a profession; he deplored that great access of misfortune which ends childhood and spoils the first years of youth that is not rich. "Ah!" cried he, "how Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God for young Frenchmen! Who shall replace him? what shall they do without him, the unhappy even richer than I, who have just the few crowns needful to procure a good education, and who then have not enough money to buy a man at twenty and push themselves in a career! Whatever one does," added he with a deep sigh, "this fatal memory will forever prevent us from being happy!"
He suddenly saw Mme de Rênal frown; she took a cold and disdainful air; this way of thinking seemed to her to befit a servant. Brought up in the idea that she was very rich, it seemed conceded to her that Julien was so too. She loved him a thousand times more than life; she would have loved him even ungrateful and faithless and made no account of money.
Julien was far from guessing these ideas. This frown recalled him to earth. He had presence of mind enough to arrange his phrase and let the noble lady, seated so near him on the green bench, understand that the words he had just repeated he had heard during his trip to his friend the timber merchant. It was the reasoning of the impious.
"Well! mix no more with those people," said Mme de Rênal, still keeping a little of that icy air which, all at once, had succeeded the expression of the sweetest and most intimate tenderness.
This frown, or rather the remorse for his imprudence, was the first check given to the illusion that carried Julien away. He said to himself: "She is good and gentle, her taste for me is keen, but she was brought up in the enemy camp. They must above all fear that class of men of heart who, after a good education, have not enough money to enter a career. What would become of these nobles, if we were given to combat them on equal terms! I, for example, mayor of Verrières, well-intentioned, honest as M. de Rênal is at bottom! how I would carry off the vicar, M. Valenod and all their rogueries! how justice would triumph in Verrières! It is not their talents that would obstruct me. They grope continually."
Julien's happiness was, that day, on the point of becoming lasting. Our hero lacked the daring to be sincere. He needed the courage to give battle, but at once; Mme de Rênal had been astonished at Julien's word because the men of her society repeated that the return of Robespierre was especially possible because of those young men of the lower classes, too well educated. Mme de Rênal's cold air lasted rather long and seemed marked to Julien; it was that the fear of having indirectly said something disagreeable to him succeeded in her the repugnance for the ill-chosen remark. This unhappiness was vividly reflected in her features, so pure and naive when she was happy and far from bores.
Julien dared no more dream with abandon. Calmer and less in love, he found it imprudent to go see Mme de Rênal in her room. It was better that she come to him; if a servant saw her running about the house, twenty different pretexts could explain the step.
But this arrangement had also its inconveniences. Julien had received from Fouqué books that a student in theology would never have dared ask of a bookseller. He dared open them only at night. Often he would have been glad not to be interrupted by a visit, whose anticipation, the day before the little scene in the orchard, would have put him out of a state to read.
He owed it to Mme de Rênal to understand books in a wholly new way. He had dared ask her about a host of little things, whose ignorance stops short the intelligence of a young man born outside society, whatever natural genius one may suppose in him.
This education of love, given by a woman extremely ignorant, was a happiness. Julien arrived directly at seeing society as it is today. His mind was not obscured by the account of what it has been formerly, two thousand years ago or only sixty years ago, in the time of Voltaire and Louis XV. To his inexpressible joy, a veil fell from before his eyes; he understood at last the things passing at Verrières.
In the foreground appeared very complicated intrigues woven, for two years past, near the prefect of Besançon. They were supported by letters come from Paris, and written by what is most illustrious there. It was a question of making M. de Moirod—he was the most devout man of the country—the first, and not the second, deputy of the mayor of Verrières.
He had as competitor a very rich manufacturer whom it was absolutely necessary to thrust back to the place of second deputy.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”