The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  “Good God,” he said to himself. “This room is not occupied by Madame de Rênal. Where can she be sleeping? The family must be at Verrières since I have found the dogs here, but I might meet M. de Rênal himself, or even a stranger in this room without a light, and then what a scandal!” The most prudent course was to retreat, but this idea horrified Julien.

  “If it’s a stranger, I will run away for all I’m worth, and leave my ladder behind me, but if it is she, what a welcome awaits me! I can well imagine that she has fallen into a mood of penitence and the most exalted piety, but after all, she still has some remembrance of me, since she has written to me.” This bit of reasoning decided him.

  With a beating heart, but resolved none the less to see her or perish in the attempt, he threw some little pebbles against the shutter. No answer. He leaned his long ladder beside the window, and himself knocked on the shutter, at first softly, and then more strongly. “However dark it is, they may still shoot me,” thought Julien. This idea made the mad adventure simply a question of bravery.

  “This room is not being slept in to-night,” he thought, “or whatever person might be there would have woken up by now. So far as it is concerned, therefore, no further precautions are needed. I must only try not to be heard by the persons sleeping in the other rooms.”

  He descended, placed his ladder against one of the shutters, climbed up again, and placing his hand through the heart-shaped opening, was fortunate enough to find pretty quickly the wire which is attached to the hook which closed the shutter. He pulled this wire. It was with an ineffable joy that he felt that the shutter was no longer held back, and yielded to his effort.

  “I must open it bit by bit and let her recognise my voice. He opened the shutter enough to pass his head through it, while he repeated in a low voice, “It’s a friend.”

  He pricked up his ears and assured himself that nothing disturbed the profound silence of the room, but there could be no doubt about it, there was no light, even half-extinguished, on the mantelpiece. It was a very bad sign.

  “Look out for the gun-shot,” he reflected a little, then he ventured to knock against the window with his finger. No answer. He knocked harder. “I must finish it one way or another, even if I have to break the window.” When he was knocking very hard, he thought he could catch a glimpse through the darkness of something like a white shadow that was crossing the room. At last there was no doubt about it. He saw a shadow which appeared to advance with extreme slowness. Suddenly he saw a cheek placed against the pane to which his eye was glued.

  He shuddered and went away a little, but the night was so black that he could not, even at this distance, distinguish if it were Madame de Rênal. He was frightened of her crying out at first in alarm. He heard the dogs prowling and growling around the foot of the ladder. “It is I,” he repeated fairly loudly. “A friend.”

  No answer. The white phantom had disappeared.

  “Deign to open to me. I must speak to you. I am too unhappy.” And he knocked hard enough to break the pane.

  A crisp sound followed. The casement fastening of the window yielded. He pushed the casement and leaped lightly into the room.

  The white phantom flitted away from him. He took hold of its arms. It was a woman. All his ideas of courage vanished. “If it is she, what is she going to say?” What were his emotions when a little cry gave him to understand, that it was Madame de Rênal?

  He clasped her in his arms. She trembled and scarcely had the strength to push him away.

  “Unhappy man. What are you doing?” Her agonised voice could scarcely articulate the words.

  Julien thought that her voice rang with the most genuine indignation.

  “I have come to see you after a cruel separation of more than fourteen months.”

  “Go away, leave me at once. Oh, M. Chélan, why did you prevent me writing to him? I could then have foreseen this horror.” She pushed him away with a truly extraordinary strength. “Heaven has deigned to enlighten me,” she repeated in a broken voice. “Go away! Flee!”

  “After fourteen months of unhappiness I shall certainly not leave you without a word. I want to know all you have done. Yes, I have loved you enough to deserve this confidence. I want to know everything.” This authoritative tone dominated Madame de Rênal’s heart in spite of herself. Julien, who was hugging her passionately and resisting her efforts to get loose, left off clasping her in his arms. This reassured Madame de Rênal a little.

  “I will take away the ladder,” he said, “to prevent it compromising us in case some servant should be awakened by the noise, and go on a round.”

  “Oh leave me, leave me!” she cried with an admirable anger. “What do men matter to me! It is God who sees the awful scene you are now making. You are abusing meanly the sentiments which I had for you but have no longer. Do you hear, Monsieur Julien?”

  He took away the ladder very slowly so as not to make a noise.

  “Is your husband in town, dear?” he said to her not in order to defy her but as a sheer matter of habit.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, I beg you, or I will call my husband. I feel only too guilty in not having sent you away before. I pity you,” she said to him, trying to wound his, as she well knew, irritable pride.

  This refusal of all endearments, this abrupt way of breaking so tender a tie which he thought still subsisted, carried the transports of Julien’s love to the point of delirium.

  “What! is it possible you do not love me?” he said to her, with one of those accents that come straight from the heart and impose a severe strain on the cold equanimity of the listener.

  She did not answer. As for him, he wept bitterly.

  In fact he had no longer the strength to speak.

  “So I am completely forgotten by the one being who ever loved me; what is the good of living on henceforth?” As soon as he had no longer to fear the danger of meeting a man all his courage had left him; his heart now contained no emotion except that of love.

  He wept for a long time in silence.

  He took her hand; she tried to take it away, and after a few almost convulsive moments, surrendered it to him. It was extremely dark; they were both sitting on Madame de Rênal’s bed.

  “What a change from fourteen months ago,” thought Julien, and his tears redoubled. “So absence is really bound to destroy all human sentiments.”

  “Deign to tell me what has happened to you?” Julien said at last.

  “My follies,” answered Madame de Rênal in a hard voice whose frigid intonation contained in it a certain element of reproach, “were no doubt known in the town when you left, your conduct was so imprudent. Some time afterwards when I was in despair the venerable Chélan came to see me. He tried in vain for a long time to obtain a confession. One day he took me to that church at Dijon where I made my first communion. In that place he ventured to speak himself——“Madame de Rênal was interrupted by her tears. “What a moment of shame. I confessed everything. The good man was gracious enough not to overwhelm me with the weight of his indignation. He grieved with me. During that time I used to write letters to you every day which I never ventured to send. I hid them carefully and when I was more than usually unhappy I shut myself up in my room and read over my letters.”

  “At last M. Chélan induced me to hand them over to him, some of them written a little more discreetly were sent to you, you never answered.”

  “I never received any letters from you, I swear!”

  “Great heavens! Who can have intercepted them? Imagine my grief until the day I saw you in the cathedral. I did not know if you were still alive.”

  “God granted me the grace of understanding how much I was sinning towards Him, towards my children, towards my husband,” went on Madame de Rênal. “He never loved me in the way that I then thought that you had loved me.”

  Julien rushed into her arms, as a matter of fact without any particular purpose, and feeling quite beside himself. But Madame de Rênal repel
led him and continued fairly firmly.

  “My venerable friend, M. Chélan, made me understand that in marrying I had plighted all my affections, even those which I did not then know, and which I had never felt before a certain fatal attachment . . . after the great sacrifice of the letters that were so dear to me, my life has flowed on, if not happily, at any rate calmly. Do not disturb it. Be a friend to me, my best friend.” Julien covered her hand with kisses. She perceived he was still crying. “Do not cry, you pain me so much. Tell me, in your turn, what you have been doing,” Julien was unable to speak. “I want to know the life you lead at the seminary,” she repeated. “And then you will go.”

  Without thinking about what he was saying Julien spoke of the numberless intrigues and jealousies which he had first encountered, and then of the great serenity of his life after he had been made a tutor.

  “It was then,” he added, “that after a long silence which was no doubt intended to make me realise what I see only too clearly to-day, that you no longer loved me and that I had become a matter of indifference to you. . . .”

  Madame de Rênal wrung her hands.

  “It was then that you sent me the sum of five hundred francs.”

  “Never,” said Madame de Rênal.

  “It was a letter stamped Paris and signed Paul Sorel so as to avert suspicion.”

  There was a little discussion about how the letter could possibly have originated.

  The psychological situation was altered. Without knowing it Julien had abandoned his solemn tone; they were now once more on the footing of a tender affection. It was so dark that they did not see each other, but the tone of their voices was eloquent of everything. Julien clasped his arm round his love’s waist. This movement had its dangers. She tried to put Julien’s arms away from her; at this juncture he cleverly diverted her attention by an interesting detail in his story. The arm was practically forgotten and remained in its present position.

  After many conjectures as to the origin of the five hundred francs letter, Julien took up his story. He regained a little of his self-control as he spoke of his past life, which compared with what he was now experiencing interested him so little. His attention was now concentrated on the final outcome of his visit. “You will have to go,” were the curt words he heard from time to time.

  “What a disgrace for me if I am dismissed. My remorse will embitter all my life,” he said to himself, “she will never write to me. God knows when I shall come back to this part of the country.” From this moment Julien’s heart became rapidly oblivious of all the heavenly delights of his present position.

  Seated as he was close to a woman whom he adored and practically clasping her in his arms in this room, the scene of his former happiness, amid a deep obscurity, seeing quite clearly as he did that she had just started crying, and feeling that she was sobbing from the heaving of her chest, he was unfortunate enough to turn into a cold diplomatist, nearly as cold as in those days when in the courtyard of the seminary he found himself the butt of some malicious joke on the part of one of his comrades who was stronger than he was. Julien protracted his story by talking of his unhappy life since his departure from Verrières.

  “So,” said Madame de Rênal to herself, “after a year’s absence and deprived almost entirely of all tokens of memory while I myself was forgetting him, he only thought of the happy days that he had had in Verrières.” Her sobs redoubled. Julien saw the success of his story. He realised that he must play his last card. He abruptly mentioned a letter he had just received from Paris.

  “I have taken leave of my Lord Bishop.”

  “What! you are not going back to Besançon? You are leaving us forever?”

  “Yes,” answered Julien resolutely, “yes, I am leaving a country where I have been forgotten even by the woman whom I loved more than anyone in my life; I am leaving it and I shall never see it again. I am going to Paris.”

  “You are going to Paris, dear?” exclaimed Madame de Rênal.

  Her voice was almost choked by her tears and showed the extremity of her trouble. Julien had need of this encouragement. He was on the point of executing a manœuvre which might decide everything against him; and up to the time of this exclamation he could not tell what effect he was producing as he was unable to see. He no longer hesitated. The fear of remorse gave him complete control over himself. He coldly added, as he got up,

  “Yes, madame, I leave you forever. May you be happy. Adieu.”

  He moved some steps towards the window. He began to open it. Madame de Rênal rushed to him and threw herself into his arms. So it was in this way that, after a dialogue lasting three hours, Julien obtained what he desired so passionately during the first two hours.

  Madame de Rênal’s return to her tender feelings and this overshadowing of her remorse would have been a divine happiness had they come a little earlier; but, as they had been obtained by artifice, they were simply a pleasure. Julien insisted on lighting the nightlight in spite of his mistress’s opposition.

  “Do you wish me then,” he said to her, “to have no recollection of having seen you?” Is the love in those charming eyes to be lost to me forever? Is the whiteness of that pretty hand to remain invisible? Remember that perhaps I am leaving you for a very long time.”

  Madame de Rênal could refuse him nothing. His argument made her melt into tears. But the dawn was beginning to throw into sharp relief the outlines of the pine trees on the mountain east of Verrières. Instead of going away, Julien, drunk with pleasure, asked Madame de Rênal to let him pass the day in her room and leave the following night.

  “And why not?” she answered. “This fatal relapse robs me of all my respect and will mar all my life,” and she pressed him to her heart. “My husband is no longer the same; he has suspicions, he believes I led him the way I wanted in all this business, and shows great irritation against me. If he hears the slightest noise I shall be ruined; he will hound me out like the unhappy woman that I am.”

  “Ah here we have a phrase of M. Chélan’s,” said Julien, “you would not have talked like that before my cruel departure to the seminary; in those days you used to love me.”

  Julien was rewarded for the frigidity which he put into those words. He saw his love suddenly forget the danger which her husband’s presence compelled her to run, in thinking of the much greater danger of seeing Julien doubt her love. The daylight grew rapidly brighter and vividly illuminated the room. Julien savoured once more all the deliciousness of pride, when he saw this charming woman in his arms and almost at his feet, the only woman whom he had ever loved, and who had been entirely absorbed, only a few hours before, by her fear of a terrible God and her devotion to her duties. Resolutions, fortified by a year’s persuasion, had failed to hold out against his courage.

  They soon heard a noise in the house. A matter that Madame de Rênal had not thought of began to trouble her.

  “That wicked Elisa will come into the room. What are we to do with this enormous ladder?” she said to her sweetheart, “where are we to hide it? I will take it to the loft,” she exclaimed suddenly half playfully.

  “But you will have to pass through the servants’ room,” said Julien in astonishment.

  “I will leave the ladder in the corridor and will call the servant and send him on an errand.”

  “Think of some explanation to have ready in the event of a servant passing the ladder and noticing it in the corridor.”

  “Yes, my angel,” said Madame de Rênal, giving him a kiss. “As for you, dear, remember to hide under the bed pretty quickly if Elisa enters here during my absence.”

  Julien was astonished by this sudden gaiety—“So” he thought, “the approach of a real danger instead of troubling her gives her back her spirits before she forgets her remorse. Truly a superior woman. Yes, that’s a heart over which it is glorious to reign.” Julien was transported with delight.

  Madame de Rênal took the ladder, which was obviously too heavy for her. Julien went to he
r aid. He was admiring that elegant figure which was so far from betokening any strength when she suddenly seized the ladder without assistance and took it up as if it had been a chair. She took it rapidly into the corridor of the third storey where she laid it alongside the wall. She called a servant, and in order to give him time to dress himself, went up into the dovecot.

  Five minutes later, when she came back to the corridor, she found no signs of the ladder. What had happened to it? If Julien had been out of the house she would not have minded the danger in the least. But supposing her husband were to see the ladder just now, the incident might be awful. Madame de Rênal ran all over the house.

  Madame de Rênal finally discovered the ladder under the roof where the servant had carried it and even hid it.

  “What does it matter what happens in twenty-four hours,” she thought, “when Julien will be gone?”

  She had a vague idea that she ought to take leave of life but what mattered her duty? He was restored to her after a separation which she had thought eternal. She was seeing him again and the efforts he had made to reach her showed the extent of his love.

  “What shall I say to my husband,” she said to him, “if the servant tells him he found this ladder?” She was pensive for a moment. “They will need twenty-four hours to discover the peasant who sold it to you.” And she threw herself into Julien’s arms and clasped him convulsively.

  “Oh, if I could only die like this,” she cried, covering him with kisses. “But you mustn’t die of starvation,” she said with a smile.

  “Come, I will first hide you in Madame Derville’s room which is always locked.” She went and watched at the other end of the corridor and Julien ran in. “Mind you don’t try and open if any one knocks,” she said as she locked him in. “Anyway it would only be a frolic of the children as they play together.”