Madame de Renal’s heart was too full, and as yet too innocent for her, notwithstanding the resolutions she had made, not to tell her husband of the offer she had made to Julien and the manner in which she had been repulsed.
‘What,’ M. de Renal retorted, with keen annoyance, ‘could you tolerate a refusal from a servant?’
And as Madame de Renal protested at this word:
‘I speak, Ma’am, as the late Prince de Conde spoke, when presenting his Chamberlains to his bride: “All these people,” he told her, “are our servants.” I read you the passage from Besenval’s Memoirs, it is essential in questions of precedence. Everyone who is not a gentleman, who lives in your house and receives a salary, is your servant. I shall say a few words to this Master Julien, and give him a hundred francs.’
‘Ah, my dear,’ said Madame de Renal trembling, ‘please do not say anything in front of the servants.’
‘Yes, they might be jealous, and rightly,’ said her husband as he left the room, thinking of the magnitude of the sum.
Madame de Renal sank down on a chair, almost fainting with grief. ‘He is going to humiliate Julien, and it is my fault!’ She felt a horror of her husband, and hid her face in her hands. She promised herself that she would never confide anything in him again.
When she next saw Julien, she was trembling all over, her bosom was so contracted that she could not manage to utter a single word. In her embarrassment she took his hands and wrung them.
‘Well, my friend,’ she said to him after a little, ‘are you pleased with my husband?’
‘How should I not be?’ Julien answered with a bitter smile; ‘he has given me a hundred francs.’
Madame de Renal looked at him as though uncertain what to do.
‘Give me your arm,’ she said at length with an accent of courage which Julien had never yet observed in her.
She ventured to enter the shop of the Verrieres bookseller, in spite of his terrible reputation as a Liberal. There she chose books to the value of ten louis which she gave to her sons. But these books were the ones which she knew that Julien wanted. She insisted that there, in the bookseller’s shop, each of the children should write his own name in the books that fell to his share. While Madame de Renal was rejoicing at the partial reparation which she had had the courage to make to Julien, he was lost in amazement at the quantity of books which he saw on the bookseller’s shelves. Never had he dared to set foot in so profane a place; his heart beat violently. So far from his having any thought of trying to guess what was occurring in the heart of Madame de Renal, he was plunged in meditation as to how it would be possible for a young student of divinity to procure some of these books. At length the idea came to him that it might be possible, by a skilful approach, to persuade M. de Renal that he ought to set his sons, as the subject for an essay, the lives of the celebrated gentlemen who were natives of the province. After a month of careful preliminaries, he saw his idea prove successful, so much so that, shortly afterwards, he ventured, in speaking to M. de Renal, to mention an action considerably more offensive to the noble Mayor; it was a matter of contributing to the prosperity of a Liberal, by taking out a subscription at the library. M. de Renal entirely agreed that it was wise to let his eldest son have a visual impression of various works which he would hear mentioned in conversation when he went to the Military School; but Julien found the Mayor obdurate in refusing to go any farther. He suspected a secret reason, which he was unable to guess.
‘I was thinking, Sir,’ he said to him one day, ‘that it would be highly improper for the name of a respectable gentleman like a Renal to appear on the dirty ledger of the librarian.’
M. de Renal’s face brightened.
‘It would also be a very bad mark,’ Julien went on, in a humbler tone, ‘against a poor divinity student, if it should one day be discovered that his name had been on the ledger of a bookseller who keeps a library. The Liberals might accuse me of having asked for the most scandalous books; for all one knows they might even go so far as to write in after my name the titles of those perverse works.’
But Julien was going off the track. He saw the Mayor’s features resume their expression of embarrassment and ill humour. Julien was silent. ‘I have my man hooked,’ he said to himself.
A few days later, on the eldest boy’s questioning Julien as to a book advertised in the Quotidienne, in M. de Renal’s presence:
‘To remove all occasion for triumph from the Jacobin Party,’ said the young tutor, ‘and at the same time to enable me to answer Master Adolphe, one might open a subscription at the bookshop in the name of the lowest of your servants.’
‘That is not at all a bad idea,’ said M. de Renal, obviously delighted.
‘Only it would have to be specified,’ said Julien with that grave and almost sorrowful air which becomes certain people so well, when they see the success of the projects which have been longest in their minds, ‘it would have to be specified that the servant shall not take out any novels. Once they were in the house, those dangerous works might corrupt Madame’s maids, not to speak of the servant himself.’
‘You forget the political pamphlets,’ added M. de Renal, in a haughty tone. He wished to conceal the admiration that he felt for the clever middle course discovered by his children’s tutor.
Julien’s life was thus composed of a series of petty negotiations; and their success was of far more importance to him than the evidence of a marked preference for himself which was only waiting for him to read it in the heart of Madame de Renal.
The moral environment in which he had been placed all his life was repeated in the household of the worshipful Mayor of Verrieres. There, as in his father’s sawmill, he profoundly despised the people with whom he lived, and was hated by them. He saw every day, from the remarks made by the Sub–Prefect, by M. Valenod and by the other friends of the family, with reference to the things that had just happened under their eyes, how remote their ideas were from any semblance of reality. Did an action strike him as admirable, it was precisely what called forth blame from the people round about him. His unspoken retort was always: ‘What monsters!’ or ‘What fools!’ The amusing thing was that, with all his pride, frequently he understood nothing at all of what was being discussed.
In his whole life, he had never spoken with sincerity except to the old Surgeon–Major; the few ideas that he had bore reference to Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, or to surgery. His youthful courage took delight in detailed accounts of the most painful operations; he said to himself: ‘I should not have flinched.’
The first time that Madame de Renal attempted a conversation with him on a subject other than that of the children’s education, he began to talk of surgical operations; she turned pale, and begged him to stop.
Julien knew nothing apart from these matters. And so, as he spent his time with Madame de Renal, the strangest silence grew up between them as soon as they were alone together. In her own drawing-room, humble as his bearing was, she found in his eyes an air of intellectual superiority over everyone that came to the house. Were she left alone for a moment with him, she saw him grow visibly embarrassed. This troubled her, for her womanly instinct made her realise that his embarrassment was not in the least degree amorous.
In consequence of some idea derived from a description of good society, as the old Surgeon–Major had beheld it, as soon as conversation ceased in a place where he found himself in the company of a woman, Julien felt abashed, as though he himself were specially to blame for this silence. This sensation was a hundred times more painful when they were alone. His imagination, full of the most extravagant, the most Spanish notions as to what a man ought to say, when he is alone with a woman, offered him in his agitation none but inadmissible ideas. His soul was in the clouds, and yet he was incapable of breaking the most humiliating silence. Thus his air of severity, during his long walks with Madame de Renal