She was returning from the village. She had gone to hear mass in the church of Vergy. A tradition of extremely doubtful value in the eyes of the cold philosopher, but one in which she believed, made out that the little church now in use had been the chapel of the castle of the Lord of Vergy. This thought obsessed Madame de Renal throughout the time which she had meant to pass in prayer in this church. She kept on picturing to herself her husband killing Julien during the chase, as though by accident, and afterwards, that evening, making her eat his heart.
‘My fate,’ she said to herself, ‘depends on what he will think when he hears me. After these terrible moments, perhaps I shall not find another opportunity to speak to him. He is not a wise creature, swayed by reason. I might, if he were, with the aid of my own feeble wits, forecast what he would do or say. But my fate lies in my cunning, in the art of directing the thoughts of this whimsical creature, who becomes blind with anger and incapable of seeing things. Great God! I require talent, coolness, where am I to find them?’
She recovered her calm as though by magic on entering the garden and seeing her husband in the distance. The disorder of his hair and clothes showed that he had not slept. She handed him a letter which, though the seal was broken, was still folded. He, without opening it, gazed at his wife with madness in his eyes.
‘Here is an abomination,’ she said to him, ‘which an evil-looking man who claims to know you and that you owe him a debt of gratitude, handed to me as I came past the back of the lawyer’s garden. One thing I must ask of you, and that is that you send back to his own people, and without delay, that Monsieur Julien.’ Madame de Renal made haste to utter this name, even beginning a little too soon perhaps, in order to rid herself of the fearful prospect of having to utter it.
She was filled with joy on beholding the joy that it gave her husband. >From the fixed stare which he directed at her she realised that Julien had guessed aright. Instead of worrying about a very present trouble, ‘what intelligence,’ she thought to herself. ‘What perfect tact! And in a young man still quite devoid of experience! To what heights will he not rise in time? Alas! Then his success will make him forget me.’
This little act of admiration of the man she adored completely restored her composure.
She congratulated herself on the step she had taken. ‘I have proved myself not unworthy of Julien,’ she said to herself, with a sweet and secret relish.
Without saying a word, for fear of committing himself, M. de Renal examined this second anonymous letter composed, as the reader may remember, of printed words gummed upon a sheet of paper of a bluish tinge. ‘They are making a fool of me in every way,’ M. de Renal said to himself, utterly worn out.
‘Fresh insults to be looked into, and all owing to my wife!’ He was on the point of deluging her with a stream of the coarsest invective; the thought of the fortune awaiting her at Besancon just stopped him. Overpowered by the necessity of venting his anger on something, he tore up the sheet on which this second anonymous letter was gummed, and strode rapidly away, feeling that he could not endure his wife’s company. A minute later, he returned to her, already more calm.
‘We must take action at once and dismiss Julien,’ she immediately began; ‘after all he is only the son of a working man. You can compensate him with a few crowns, besides, he is clever and can easily find another place, with M. Valenod, for instance, or the Sub–Prefect Maugiron; they both have families. And so you will not be doing him any harm . . . ’
‘You speak like the fool that you are,’ cried M. de Renal in a voice of thunder. ‘How can one expect common sense of a woman? You never pay attention to what is reasonable; how should you have any knowledge? Your carelessness, your laziness leave you just enough activity to chase butterflies, feeble creatures which we are so unfortunate as to have in our households . . . ’
Madame de Renal let him speak, and he spoke at length; he passed his anger, as they say in those parts.
‘Sir,’ she answered him finally, ‘I speak as a woman whose honour, that is to say her most priceless possession, has been outraged.’
Madame de Renal preserved an unalterable calm throughout the whole of this trying conversation, upon which depended the possibility of her continuing to live beneath the same roof as Julien. She sought out the ideas that seemed to her best fitted to guide her husband’s blind anger. She had remained unmoved by all the insulting remarks that he had addressed to her, she did not hear them, she was thinking all the time of Julien. ‘Will he be pleased with me?’
‘This little peasant upon whom we have lavished every attention, including presents, may be innocent,’ she said at length, ‘but he is none the less the occasion of the first insult I have ever received . . . Sir, when I read that abominable document, I vowed that either he or I should leave your roof.’
‘Do you wish to create a scandal that will dishonour me and yourself as well? You’ll be giving a fine treat to many people in Verrieres.’
‘That is true; they are all jealous of the state of prosperity to which your wise management has brought you, your family and the town . . . Very well, I shall go and bid Julien ask you for leave to spend a month with that timber merchant in the mountain, a fit companion for that little workman.’
‘Take care what you do,’ put in M. de Renal, calmly enough. ‘The one thing I must insist on is that you do not speak to him. You would show temper and make him cross with me; you know how touchy the little gentleman is.’
‘That young man has no tact,’ went on Madame de Renal; ‘he may be learned, you know about that, but at bottom he is nothing but a peasant. For my own part, I have never had any opinion of him since he refused to marry Elisa, it was a fortune ready made; and all because now and again she pays a secret visit to M. Valenod.’
‘Ah!’ said M. de Renal, raising his eyebrows as far as they would go, ‘what, did Julien tell you that?’
‘No, not exactly; he has always spoken to me of the vocation that is calling him to the sacred ministry; but believe me, the first vocation for the lower orders is to find their daily bread. He made it fairly clear to me that he was not unaware of these secret visits.’
‘And I, I, knew nothing about them!’ cried M. de Renal, all his fury returning, emphasising every word. ‘There are things going on in my house of which I know nothing . . . What! There has been something between Elisa and Valenod?’
‘Oh, that’s an old story, my dear friend,’ Madame de Renal said laughing, ‘and I daresay no harm was done. It was in the days when your good friend Valenod would not have been sorry to have it thought in Verrieres that there was a little love — of a purely platonic sort — exchanged between him and me.’
‘I had that idea at one time,’ cried M. de Renal striking his head in his fury as he advanced from one discovery to another, ‘and you never said a word to me about it?’
‘Was I to make trouble between two friends all for a little outburst of vanity on the part of our dear Governor? What woman is there in society to whom he has not addressed one or more letters, extremely witty and even a trifle gallant?’
‘Has he written to you?’
‘He writes frequently.’
‘Show me his letters this instant, I order you’; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.
‘I shall do nothing of the sort,’ the answer came in a tone so gentle as to be almost indifferent, ‘I shall let you see them some other day, when you are more yourself.’
‘This very instant, damn it!’ cried M. de Renal, blind with rage, and yet happier than he had been at any time in the last twelve hours.
‘Will you swear to me,’ said Madame de Renal solemnly, ‘never to quarrel with the Governor of the Poorhouse over these letters?’