The Red and the Black (26 page)

M. de Rênal did not go out that morning; he was going up and downstairs incessantly engaged in bargaining with some peasants to whom he was selling potatoes.

Madame de Rênal did not have an instant to give to her prisoner until dinner-time. When the bell had been rung and dinner had been served, it occurred to her to steal a plate of warm soup for him. As she noiselessly approached the door of the room which he occupied, she found herself face to face with the servant who had hidden the ladder in the morning. At the time he too was going noiselessly along the corridor, as though listening for something. The servant took himself off in some confusion.

Madame de Rênal boldly entered Julien's room. The news of this encounter made him shudder.

“You are frightened,” she said to him, “but I would brave all the dangers in the world without flinching. There is only one thing I fear, and that is the moment when I shall be alone after you have left,” and she left him and ran downstairs.

“Ah,” thought Julien ecstatically, “remorse is the only danger which this sublime soul is afraid of.”

At last evening came. Monsieur de Rênal went to the Casino.

His wife had given out that she was suffering from an awful headache. She went to her room, hastened to dismiss Elisa, and quickly got up in order to let Julien out.

He was literally starving. Madame de Rênal went to the pantry to fetch some bread. Julien heard a loud cry. Madame de Rênal came back and told him that when she went to the dark pantry and got near the cupboard where they kept the bread, she had touched a woman's arm as she stretched out her hand. It was Elisa who had uttered the cry Julien had heard.

“What was she doing there?”

“Stealing some sweets or else spying on us,” said Madame de Rênal with complete indifference, “but luckily I found a pie and a big loaf of bread.”

“But what have you got there?” said Julien pointing to the pockets of her apron.

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

Julien clasped her in his arms with the most lively passion. She had never seemed to him so beautiful. “I could not meet a woman of greater character even at Paris,” he said confusedly to himself. She combined all the clumsiness of a woman who was but little accustomed to paying attentions of this kind, with all the genuine courage of a person who is only afraid of dangers of quite a different sphere and quite a different kind of awfulness.

While Julien was enjoying his supper with a hearty appetite and his sweetheart was rallying him on the simplicity of the meal, the door of the room was suddenly shaken violently. It was M. de Rênal.

“Why have you shut yourself in?” he cried to her.

Julien had only just time to slip under the sofa.

On any ordinary day Madame de Rênal would have been upset by this question which was put with true conjugal harshness; but she realised that M. de Rênal had only to bend down a little to notice Julien, for M. de Rênal had flung himself into the chair opposite the sofa which Julien had been sitting in one moment before.

Her headache served as an excuse for everything. While her husband on his side went into a long-winded account of the billiards pool which he had won at Casino, “yes, to be sure a nineteen-franc pool,” he added. She noticed Julien's hat on a chair three paces in front of them. Her self-possession became twice as great, she began to undress, and rapidly passing one minute behind her husband threw her dress over the chair with the hat on it.

At last M. de Rênal left. She begged Julien to start over again his account of his life at the Seminary. “I was not listening to you yesterday all the time you were speaking, I was only thinking of prevailing on myself to send you away.”

She was the personification of indiscretion. They talked very loud and about two o'clock in the morning they were interrupted by a violent knock at the door. It was M. de Rênal again.

“Open quickly, there are thieves in the house!” he said. “Saint Jean found their ladder this morning.”

“This is the end of everything,” cried Madame de Rênal, throwing herself into Julien's arms. “He will kill both of us, he doesn't believe there are any thieves. I will die in your arms, and be more happy in my death than I ever was in my life.” She made no attempt to answer her husband who was beginning to lose his temper, but started kissing Julien passionately.

“Save Stanislas's mother,” he said to her with an imperious look. “I will jump down into the courtyard through the lavatory window, and escape in the garden; the dogs have recognised me. Make my clothes into a parcel and throw them into the garden as soon as you can. In the meanwhile let him break the door down. But above all, no confession, I forbid you to confess, it is better that he should suspect rather than be certain.”

“You will kill yourself as you jump!” was her only answer and her only anxiety.

She went in with him to the lavatory window; she then took sufficient time to hide his clothes. She finally opened the door to her husband, who was boiling with rage. He looked in the room and in the lavatory without saying a word and disappeared. Julien's clothes were thrown down to him; he seized them and ran rapidly towards the bottom of the garden in the direction of the Doubs.

As he was running he heard a bullet whistle past him, and heard at the same time the report of a gun.

“It is not M. de Rênal,” he thought, “he's far too bad a shot.” The dogs ran silently at his side, the second shot apparently broke the paw of one dog, for he began to whine piteously. Julien jumped the wall of the terrace, did fifty paces under cover, and began to fly in another direction. He heard voices calling and had a distinct view of his enemy the servant firing a gun; a farmer also began to shoot away from the other side of the garden. Julien had already reached the bank of the Doubs where he dressed himself.

An hour later he was a league from Verrières on the Geneva road. “If they had suspicions,” thought Julien, “they will look for me on the Paris road.”

“You've no doubt come to wait for the Paris mail, Monsieur,” said the host of an inn where he had stopped to breakfast.

“To-day or to-morrow, it matters little,” said Julien.

The mail arrived while he was still posing as indifferent. There were two free places.

“Why! it's you my poor Falcoz,” said the traveller who was coming from the Geneva side to the one who was getting in at the same time as Julien.

“I thought you were settled in the outskirts of Lyons,” said Falcoz, “in a delicious valley near the Rhône.”

“Nicely settled! I am running away.”

“What! you are running away? you, Saint Giraud! Have you, who look so virtuous, committed some crime?” said Falcoz with a smile.

“On my faith it comes to the same thing. I am running away from the abominable life which one leads in the provinces. I like the freshness of the woods and the country tranquillity, as you know. You have often accused me of being romantic. I don't want to hear politics talked as long as I live, and politics are hounding me out.”

“But what party do you belong to?”

“To none and that's what ruins me. That's all there is to be said about my political life—I like music and painting. A good book is an event for me. I am going to be forty-four. How much longer have I got to live? Fifteen—twenty—thirty years at the outside. Well, I want the ministers in thirty years' time to be a little cleverer than those of to-day but quite as honest. The history of England serves as a mirror for our own future. There will always be a king who will try to increase his prerogative. The ambition of becoming a deputy, the fame of Mirabeau and the hundreds of thousand francs which he won for himself will always prevent the rich people in the province from going to sleep; they will call that being Liberal and loving the people. The desire of becoming a peer or a gentleman of the chamber will always win over the ultras. On the ship of state every one is anxious to take over the steering because it is well paid. Will there be never a poor little place for the simple passenger?”

“Is it the last elections which are forcing you out of the province?”

“My misfortune goes further back. Four years ago I was forty and possessed 500,000 francs. I am four years older to-day and probably 50,000 francs to the bad, as I shall lose that sum on the sale of my château of Monfleury in a superb position near the Rhône.

“At Paris I was tired of that perpetual comedy which is rendered obligatory by what you call nineteenth-century civilisation. I thirsted for good nature and simplicity. I bought an estate in the mountains near the Rhône; there was no more beautiful place under the heavens.

“The village clergyman and the gentry of the locality pay me court for six months; I invite them to dinner; I have left Paris, I tell them, so as to avoid talking politics or hearing politics talked for the rest of my life. As you know, I do not subscribe to any paper, the less letters the postman brought me the happier I was.

“That did not suit the vicar's book. I was soon the victim of a thousand unreasonable requests, annoyances, etc. I wished to give two or three hundred francs a year to the poor; I was asked to give it to the Paris associations, that of Saint Joseph, that of the Virgin, etc. I refused. I was then insulted in a hundred ways. I was foolish enough to be upset by it. I could not go out in the morning to enjoy the beauty of our mountain without finding some annoyance which distracted me from my reveries and recalled unpleasantly both men and their wickedness. On the Rogation processions, for instance, whose chanting I enjoy (it is probably a Greek melody) they will not bless my fields because, says the clergyman, they belong to an infidel. A cow dies belonging to a devout old peasant woman. She says the reason is the neighbourhood of a pond which belongs to my infidel self, a philosopher coming from Paris, and eight days afterwards I find my fish in agonies, poisoned by lime. Intrigue in all its forms envelops me. The justice of the peace, who is an honest man, but frightened of losing his place, always decides against me. The peace of the country proved a hell for me. Once they saw that I was abandoned by the vicar, the head of the village congregation, and that I was not supported by the retired captain who was the head of the Liberals, they all fell upon me, down to the mason whom I had supported for a year, down to the very wheel-wright who wanted to cheat me with impunity over the repairing of my ploughs.

“In order to find some support, and to win at any rate some of my law-suits, I became a Liberal, but, as you say, those damned elections come along. They asked me for my vote.”

“For an unknown man?”

“Not at all, for a man whom I knew only too well. I refused. It was terribly imprudent. From that moment I had the Liberals on my hands as well, and my position became intolerable. I believe that if the vicar had got it into his head to accuse me of assassinating my servant, there would be twenty witnesses of the two parties who would swear that they had seen me committing the crime.”

“You mean to say you want to live in the country without pandering to the passions of your neighbours, without even listening to their gossip? What a mistake!”

“It is rectified at last. Monfleury is for sale. I will lose 50,000 francs if necessary, but I am over-joyed I am leaving that hell of hypocrisy and annoyance. I am going to look for solitude and rustic peace in the only place where those things are to be found in France, on a fourth storey looking on to the Champs-Elysées; and, moreover, I am actually deliberating if I shall not commence my political career by giving consecrated bread to the parish in the Roule quarter.”

“All this would not have happened under Bonaparte,” said Falcoz, with eyes shining with rage and sorrow.

“Very good, but why didn't your Bonaparte manage to keep his position? Everything which I suffer to-day is his work.”

At this point Julien's attention was redoubled. He had realised from the first word that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the old boyhood friend of M. de Rênal, who had been repudiated by him in 1816, and that the philosopher Saint-Giraud must be the brother of that chief of the prefecture of——who managed to get the houses of the municipality knocked down to him at a cheap price.

“And all this is the work of your Bonaparte. An honest man, aged forty, and possessed of five hundred thousand francs, however inoffensive he is, cannot settle in the provinces and find peace there; those priests and nobles of his will turn him out.”

“Oh don't talk evil of him,” exclaimed Falcoz. “France was never so high in the esteem of the nations as during the thirteen years of his reign; then every single act was great.”

“Your emperor, devil take him,” replied the man of forty-four, “was only great on his battlefields and when he reorganised the finances about 1802. What is the meaning of all his conduct since then? What with his chamberlains, his pomp, and his receptions in the Tuileries, he simply provided a new edition of all the monarchical tomfoolery. It was a revised edition and might possibly have lasted for a century or two. The nobles and the priests wish to go back to the old one, but they did not have the iron hand necessary to impose it on the public.”

“Yes, that's just how an old printer would talk.”

“Who has turned me out of my estate?” continued the printer, angrily. “The priests, whom Napoleon called back by his Concordat, instead of treating them like the State treats doctors, barristers, and astronomers, simply seeing in them ordinary citizens, and not bothering about the particular calling by which they are trying to earn their livelihood. Should we be saddled with these insolent gentlemen today, if your Bonaparte had not created barons and counts? No, they were out of fashion. Next to the priests, it's the little country nobility who have annoyed me the most, and compelled me to become a Liberal.”

The conversation was endless. The theme will occupy France for another half-century. As Saint-Giraud kept always repeating that it was impossible to live in the provinces, Julien timidly suggested the case of M. de Rênal.

“Zounds, young man, you're a nice one,” exclaimed Falcoz. “He turned spider so as not to be fly, and a terrible spider into the bargain. But I see that he is beaten by that man Valenod. Do you know that scoundrel? He's the villain of the piece. What will your M. de Rênal say if he sees himself turned out one of these fine days, and Valenod put in his place?”

“He will be left to brood over his crimes,” said Saint-Giraud. “Do you know Verrières, young man? Well, Bonaparte, heaven confound him! Bonaparte and his monarchical tomfoolery rendered possible the reign of the Rênals and the Chélans, which brought about the reign of the Valenods and the Maslons.”

This conversation, with its gloomy politics, astonished Julien and distracted him from his delicious reveries.

He appreciated but little the first sight of Paris as perceived in the distance. The castles in the air he had built about his future had to struggle with the still-present memory of the twenty-four hours that he had just passed in Verrières. He vowed that he would never abandon his mistress's children, and that he would leave everything in order to protect them, if the impertinence of the priests brought about a republic and the persecution of the nobles.

What would have happened on the night of his arrival in Verrières if, at the moment when he had leant 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?

But how delicious, too, had been those first two hours when his sweetheart had been sincerely anxious to send him away and he had pleaded his cause, sitting down by her in the darkness! A soul like Julien's is haunted by such memories for a lifetime. The rest of the interview was already becoming merged in the first period of their love, fourteen months previous.

Julien was awakened from his deep meditation by the stopping of the coach. They had just entered the courtyard of the Post in the Rue Rousseau. “I want to go to La Malmaison,” he said to a cabriolet which approached.

“At this time, Monsieur—what for?”

“What's that got to do with you? Get on.”

Every real passion only thinks about itself. That is why, in my view, passions are ridiculous at Paris, where one's neighbour always insists on one's considering him a great deal. I shall refrain from recounting Julien's ecstasy at La Malmaison. He wept. What! in spite of those wretched white walls, but this very year, which cut the path up into bits? Yes, monsieur, for Julien, as for posterity, there was nothing to choose between Arcole, Saint Helena, and La Malmaison.

In the evening, Julien hesitated a great deal before going to the theatre. He had strange ideas about that place of perdition.

A deep distrust prevented him from admiring actual Paris. He was only affected by the monuments left behind by his hero.

“So here I am in the centre of intrigue and hypocrisy. Here reign the protectors of the Abbé de Frilair.” On the evening of the third day his curiosity got the better of his plan of seeing everything before presenting himself to the Abbé Pirard. The Abbé explained to him coldly the kind of life which he was to expect at M. de la Mole's.

“If you do not prove useful to him at the end of some months you will go back to the seminary, but not in disgrace. You will live in the house of the marquis, who is one of the greatest seigneurs of France. You will wear black, but like a man who is in mourning, and not like an ecclesiastic. I insist on your following your theological studies three days a week in a seminary where I will introduce you. Every day at twelve o'clock you will establish yourself in the marquis's library; he counts on making use of you in drafting letters concerning his lawsuits and other matters. The marquis will scribble on the margin of each letter he gets, the kind of answer which is required. I have assured him that at the end of three months you will be so competent to draft the answers, that out of every dozen you hand to the marquis for signature, he will be able to sign eight or nine. In the evening, at eight o'clock, you will tidy up his bureau, and at ten you will be free.

“It may be,” continued the Abbé Pirard, “that some old lady or some smooth-voiced man will hint at immense advantages, or will crudely offer you gold, to show him the letters which the marquis has received.”

“Ah, Monsieur,” exclaimed Julien, blushing.

“It is singular,” said the Abbé with a bitter smile, “that poor as you are, and after a year at a seminary, you still have any of this virtuous indignation left. You must have been very blind.”

“Can it be that blood will tell?” muttered the Abbé in a whisper, as though speaking to himself. “The singular thing is,” he added, looking at Julien, “that the marquis knows you—I don't know how. He will give you a salary of a hundred louis to commence with. He is a man who only acts by his whim. That is his weakness. He will quarrel with you about the most childish matters. If he is satisfied, your wages may rise in consequence up to eight thousand francs.

“But you realise,” went on the Abbé, sourly, “that he is not giving you all this money simply on account of your personal charm. The thing is to prove yourself useful. If I were in your place I would talk very little, and I would never talk about what I know nothing about.

“Oh, yes,” said the Abbé, “I have made some enquiries for you. I was forgetting M. de la Mole's family. He has two children—a daughter and a son of nineteen, eminently elegant—the kind of madman who never knows to-day what he will do to-morrow. He has spirit and valour; he has been through the Spanish war. The marquis hopes, I don't know why, that you will become a friend of the young count Norbert. I told him that you were a great classic, and possibly he reckons on your teaching his son some ready-made phrases about Cicero and Virgil.