by Stendhal
M. de Rênal was furious with the old man for having been more cunning than himself over this deal.
'Now, sir--for everyone here is under orders to call you "sir", and you will appreciate the advantage of entering a respectable household--now, sir, it is not appropriate for the children to see you dressed in a jacket. Have the servants seen him?' M. de Rênal asked his wife.
'No, my dear,' she replied, looking deeply pensive.
'So much the better. Put this on,' he said to the astonished
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young man, handing him one of his own frock-coats. 'And now we shall call on M. Durand, the draper.'
When, over an hour later, M. de Rênal returned home with the new tutor dressed entirely in black, he found his wife sitting in the same spot. She felt her peace of mind return in Julien's presence: studying him closely made her forget to be afraid of him. Julien had no thoughts for her; despite all his mistrust of fate and of mankind, he was at that moment still only a child at heart. It seemed to him that aeons had passed since that moment three hours ago when he had stood trembling in the church. He noticed how aloof Mme de Rênal was looking, and took it she was angry because he had dared to kiss her hand. But the sense of pride he derived from the feel of clothes so unlike the ones he was accustomed to wearing put him in such an abnormal state of excitement, and he was so anxious to hide his delight, that every movement he made seemed jerky and uncontrolled. Mme de Rênal gazed at him with astonishment in her eyes.
'A little gravity, sir,' said M. de Rênal to Julien, 'if you wish to be respected by my children and my servants.'
'Sir,' replied Julien, 'I feel uncomfortable in these new clothes. I'm only a poor peasant, and I've never worn anything but jackets. With your permission, I'll go and retire to my room.'
'What is your opinion of our new acquisition?' M. de Rênal asked his wife.
In an almost instinctive reaction--one which certainly escaped her conscious awareness--Mme de Rênal concealed the truth from her husband.
'I'm by no means as delighted as you are with this peasant lad. Your attentions will give him ideas above his station, and you'll be obliged to dismiss him before the month is up.'
'Well then! we'll dismiss him; it will have cost me a hundred francs or so at most, and Verrières will have grown used to seeing a tutor in charge of M. de Rênal's children. This end could not have been achieved if I had left Julien in workman's attire. When I dismiss him, I shall of course retain the full black suit I've just ordered from the draper. He will only keep
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what I found ready-made at the the tailor's, and had him put on.'
The hour that Julien spent in his room seemed a brief moment to Mme de Rênal. The children, who had been told of the new tutor's arrival, were besieging their mother with questions. At last Julien made his appearance. He was a changed man. It would have been incorrect to say that he was grave: he was gravity incarnate. He was introduced to the children, and spoke to them in a manner which astonished even M. de Rênal.
'I am here, young gentlemen,' he said to them as he wound up his address, 'to teach you Latin. You know what it means to say your lessons. Here is the Holy Bible,' he went on, showing them a pocket-sized volume bound in black. 'More specifically it is the story of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the part we call the New Testament. I shall often have you say your lessons, so now you take me through mine.'
Adolphe, the eldest of the three children, had taken the book.
'Open it up--at random,' Julien continued, 'and give me the first word of any verse. I shall recite the Holy Book, which we all must live by, word for word until you stop me.'
Adolphe opened the book and read out a word, and Julien recited the whole page as fluently as if he had been speaking his native tongue. M. de Rênal gazed at his wife in triumph. The children, seeing their parents' astonishment, were looking on wide-eyed. A servant came to the drawing-room door, and still Julien went on speaking Latin. The servant stood stockstill at first, and then vanished. Soon the mistress's chambermaid and the cook appeared at the door; by then Adolphe had already opened the book in eight different places, and Julien was still reciting with the same fluency.
'Bless my soul! there's a fine young priest for you!' exclaimed the cook, who was a good-hearted and very pious girl.
M. de Rênal's self-esteem was bothering him. Far from thinking of putting the tutor to the test, he was wholly engrossed in racking his brains for a few words of Latin. He eventually managed to bring out a line of Horace. Julien's only Latin was the Bible. He replied with a frown: 'The sacred
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ministry which is my calling forbids me to read so profane a poet.'
M. de Rênal quoted a fair number of lines purportedly from Horace. He told his children all about Horace, but the children were so struck with admiration that they scarcely paid any attention to what he was saying. They were gazing at Julien.
As the servants were still at the door, Julien thought it right to prolong the ordeal.
'Now,' he said to the youngest of the children, ' Master Stanislas-Xavier must also give me a passage from the Holy Book.'
Little Stanislas, bursting with pride, read out the first word of a verse as best he could, and Julien recited the whole page. To complete M. de Rênal's triumph, while Julien was in the midst of reciting, in came M. Valenod, the owner of the fine Normandy cobs, and M. Charcot de Maugiron, the subprefect * of the district. This scene earned Julien his title of sir: even the servants did not dare withhold it from him.
That evening the whole of Verrières flocked to M. de Rênal's house to see the wonder. Julien replied to everyone in gloomy tones which discouraged familiarity. His fame spread so fast through the town that a few days later M. de Rênal, fearful of losing him to someone else, invited him to sign an undertaking for two years.
'No, sir,' replied Julien coldly, 'if you wanted to dismiss me, I should be obliged to leave. An undertaking which is binding on me without putting you under any obligation is not equitable, and I cannot accept it.'
Julien handled matters so skilfully that less than a month after his arrival in the house, he was even respected by M. de Rênal himself. As the priest was on bad terms with both M. de Rênal and M. Valenod, there was no one to betray Julien's former passion for Napoleon, and he never spoke of him but with horror.
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CHAPTER 7
Elective affinities *
Their only way of touching a heart is to wound it. MODERN AUTHOR
THE children adored him, but he did not like them at all: his mind was on other things. Whatever the little rascals did, he never lost his patience. He was a good tutor to them--cold, fair, imperturbable and yet much loved, because his arrival had somehow dispelled the boredom in the house. For his part he felt nothing but hatred and loathing towards the high society he had been admitted to, right down at the bottom end of the table, it's true, which perhaps explains the hatred and the loathing. There were some ceremonial dinners where he had great difficulty in containing his hatred for everything surrounding him. On one occasion--it was the feast of St Louis * --when M. Valenod was holding forth at M. de Rênal's house, Julien was on the point of giving himself away; he escaped into the garden, saying he wanted to see what the children were up to. All this praise of honesty! he exclaimed, you'd think it was the only virtue there was. And yet what esteem, what servile respect for a man whose fortune has obviously doubled and even tripled since he's been in charge of the workhouse! I'm ready to bet he even makes a profit on the funds set aside for the foundlings, those paupers whose wretchedness gives them a more sacred claim than anyone else! Ah! what monsters! what monsters! I too am a sort of foundling, hated by my father, my brothers and my whole family.
A few days before the feast of St Louis, when Julien had been out walking alone reciting his prayer book in a little wood called the Belvedere which overlooks the Avenue de la Fidélité, he had tried in vain to avoid meeting his two brothers whom he could see from
a distance coming towards him down a lonely path. Such jealousy had been stirred up in these two coarse labourers by their brother's fine black suit, by his
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exceedingly clean appearance, and his genuine disdain of them, that they had thrashed him and left him senseless and covered in blood. Mme de Rênal, who was out walking with M. Valenod and the sub-prefect, chanced to come through the wood; she saw Julien lying on the ground and took him for dead. She was so stricken that M. Valenod became quite jealous.
His alarm was premature. Julien thought Mme de Rênal exceedingly beautiful, but he hated her on account of her beauty: it was the first reef which had almost wrecked his fortune. He spoke to her as little as possible, so as to erase the memory of that passionate impulse on the first day which had made him kiss her hand.
Elisa, Mme de Rênal's chambermaid, had lost no time in falling in love with the young tutor, and she often confided in her mistress. Mlle Elisa's love had earned Julien the hatred of one of the valets. One day he overheard the man saying to Elisa: 'You won't speak to me any more, now that this filthy tutor is in the house.' Julien did not deserve this insult, but as a good-looking fellow he instinctively took twice as much care as before over his personal appearance. M. Valenod's hatred of him increased twofold as well. He declared publicly that such vanity ill suited a young abbé. Barring the cassock, Julien indeed wore ecclesiastical dress.
Mme de Rênal noticed that he spoke to Mlle Elisa more often than usual, and she discovered that the cause of these exchanges was the plight Julien found himself in on account of his very scant wardrobe. He had so little linen that he was obliged to have it laundered very frequently elsewhere, and Elisa proved useful to him over these small services. Mme de Rênal was touched by such extreme poverty, which she had not suspected: she felt an urge to give him presents, but didn't dare. This inner resistance was the first painful feeling Julien caused her. Until then the name Julien had been synonymous for her with a feeling of joy that was pure and entirely of the mind. Tormented by the thought of Julien's poverty, Mme de Rênal spoke to her husband about making him a present of some linen:
'How gullible you are!' he replied. 'The very idea of it! Why on earth give presents to a man we are entirely satisfied with,
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and who gives us good service? If he neglected his appearance, now that would be the moment to reawaken his zeal!'
Mme de Rênal was humiliated by this way of looking at things; it would never have struck her before Julien's arrival. She could not help thinking to herself, every time she noticed how extremely clean the young abbé's admittedly simple attire was: 'Poor boy, how does he manage?'
Gradually she came to pity Julien for everything he lacked, rather than feeling shocked by it.
Mme de Rênal was one of those provincial women who may well strike you as foolish during the first fortnight of your acquaintance. She had no experience of life, and did not cultivate conversation. She was sensitive and aloof by nature, and the instinct for happiness present in all human beings made her disregard--most of the time--the actions of the vulgar characters in whose midst chance had cast her.
She would have been noted for her spontaneity and liveliness of mind if she had been given any kind of education. But as an heiress, she had been brought up by nuns who were fervent worshippers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and were filled with violent hatred for all Frenchmen who were enemies of the Jesuits. Mme de Rênal had had enough sense to reject as absurd everything she had learnt at the convent, and to forget it pretty rapidly; but she did not replace it with anything, and ended up totally ignorant. The flattery which had come her way very early on as the heiress to a large fortune, together with a marked bent for fervent religious zeal, had set her upon a completely inward-looking way of life. Beneath an appearance of the most civil concern for others and total denial of her own will, which the husbands in Verrières held up as an example to their wives, and M. de Rênal drew great pride from, her inner frame of mind stemmed in fact from the most haughty of temperaments. A princess renowned for her pride takes infinitely more notice of what her noblemen are doing round about her than this seemingly gentle and modest woman took of all her husband's words and actions. Until Julien arrived, she had not really taken any notice of anything except her children. Their minor ailments, their sorrows, their little joys absorbed all the tenderness of this soul whose only passion in
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life had been God, when she was at the Sacred Heart in Besançon.
Without her deigning to say so to anyone, if one of her sons had a bout of fever she was reduced to virtually the same state as if the child had been dead. A burst of coarse laughter, a shrug of the shoulders accompanied by some trite maxim on the folly of women, had always been the response when her need to confide in someone had led her to share anxieties of this kind with her husband in the early years of their marriage. Jocular reactions like these, especially where her children's illnesses were concerned, simply turned the knife in Mme de Rênal's wounded heart. This was what she found in place of the obsequious and cloying flattery of the Jesuit convent where she had spent her youth. She learnt about life through suffering. Too proud to talk about this sort of misery even to her friend Mme Derville, she imagined that all men were like her husband, or M. Valenod or the sub-prefect Charcot de Maugiron. Vulgarity and the most brutish insensitivity to anything that did not involve money, rank or orders of knighthood; a blind hatred of any argument that stood in their way--these seemed to her to be the natural attributes of the other sex, like wearing boots and a felt hat.
After all these years Mme de Rênal was still not accustomed to the ways of these money-driven folk in whose midst she had to live.
Hence her attraction to the young peasant Julien. She discovered sweet pleasures, all gleaming with the charm of novelty, in the communion of spirit with someone so noble and proud. Mme de Rênal had soon forgiven him his extreme ignorance which was yet one more source of charm to her, and the roughness of his manners which she succeeded in tempering. She found him worth listening to, even when the conversation was on the most trivial of subjects, even when it was about some poor dog that had got run over crossing the road by a peasant's cart going at a trot. The sight of such suffering caused her husband to let out one of his loud laughs, whereas she saw Julien's beautiful, exquisitely arched black eyebrows draw together in pain. Little by little she formed the view that generosity, nobility of soul and humanity only existed in this
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young abbé. She felt for him all the sympathy and even the admiration which these virtues inspire in someone of good breeding.
In Paris, Julien's situation with regard to Mme de Rênal would very soon have become more straightforward; but in Paris, love is born of fiction. The young tutor and his shy mistress would have found three or four novels, and even couplets from the Théâtre de Madame, * clarifying their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the roles they had to play, and given them a model to imitate; and sooner or later Julien would have been forced by his vanity to follow this model, albeit without pleasure and perhaps with overt reluctance.
In a small town in the Aveyron * or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been rendered decisive by the torrid climate. Beneath our more sullen skies, a young man without means, who is only ambitious because his delicate sensibility makes him crave some of the pleasures afforded by money, has daily dealings with a woman of thirty, genuinely virtuous, absorbed by her children, and never looking to novels for examples on which to model her conduct. Everything proceeds slowly, everything develops gradually in the provinces; it is all more spontaneous.
Often, when she thought of how poor the young tutor was, Mme de Rênal would be moved to tears. One day Julien caught her actually weeping.
'Oh madam, can some misfortune have struck you?'
'No, my dear,' she replied; 'call the children, and we'll go for a walk.'
She took his arm and leant on it in a way w
hich struck him as odd. It was the first time she had addressed him as my dear.
Towards the end of the walk Julien noticed that she kept blushing. She slackened her pace.
'You'll have heard', she said without looking at him, 'that I'm sole heir to a rich aunt who lives in Besançon. She showers me with presents... My sons are getting on so well... so remarkably well... that I'd like to press you to accept a small gift as a token of my gratitude. Just a few sovereigns to get you
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some linen. But...' she added, blushing still more deeply, and at this point she broke off.
'What, madam?' exclaimed Julien.
'It would serve no purpose', she went on, lowering her head, 'to mention this to my husband.'
'I am humble, madam, but I am not base,' retorted Julien, stopping in his tracks and drawing himself up to his full height, his eyes blazing with fury. 'That's something you should have thought about. I'd be no better than a servant if I put myself in the position of hiding from M. de Rênal anything whatsoever concerning my money.'
Mme de Rênal was dumbfounded.
'His worship the mayor', Julien continued, 'has paid me five times thirty-six francs since I took up residence in his house. I'm ready to show my accounts book to him or to anyone else--even to M. Valenod who hates me.'
This outburst left Mme de Rênal pale and trembling, and the walk finished without either of them finding a pretext for starting up the conversation again. Any thought of loving Mme de Rênal became more and more impossible for a proud spirit like Julien's. As for her, she felt fresh respect and admiration for him; she had been reprimanded by him. Under the guise of making up for the humiliation she had involuntarily caused him, she allowed herself to indulge him with the most tender attentions. The novelty of these ways was a source of happiness to Mme de Rênal for a week. Their effect was to soothe Julien's anger in part; he was very far from seeing in them anything which might resemble a personal liking.
