by Stendhal
What do I care, she thought, what happens in a twenty-four hours' time when Julien has gone? Won't everything then be sheer horror and remorse for me?
She had a sort of vague feeling that she would have to end her life, but what of it? After what she had taken to be an eternal separation, he had been restored to her, she was with
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him again, and what he had done in order to reach her showed such love!
As she recounted the incident of the ladder to Julien:
'What shall I reply to my husband', she said to him, 'if the servant tells him he's found this ladder?' She mused for a moment. 'It'll take them twenty-four hours to track down the peasant who sold it to you.' And flinging herself into Julien's arms and clasping him in a convulsive embrace: 'Ah! to die, to die like this!' she cried, smothering him with kisses; 'but you mustn't die of hunger,' she said laughing.
'Come on; the first thing is for me to hide you in Mme Derville's room, which is always kept locked.' She went and stood guard at the far end of the corridor, and Julien ran across.
'Be careful not to open if anyone knocks,' she said to him as she locked him in; 'in any case, it would only be the children in jest while they are playing together.'
'Bring them out into the garden, beneath this window,' said Julien, 'so I can have the pleasure of seeing them; make them talk.'
'Yes, yes,' Mme de Rênal called out to him as she went away. She soon returned with some oranges, some biscuits and a bottle of Malaga wine; it hadn't been possible for her to steal any bread.
'What's your husband doing?' asked Julien.
'He's drawing up deals with peasants.'
But eight o'clock had struck, and there was noise coming from all over the house. If no one had seen Mme de Rênal, they would have looked for her everywhere; she was obliged to leave him. She was soon back, flying in the face of caution, to bring him a cup of coffee; she was in fear and trembling lest he die of hunger. After lunch she managed to bring the children underneath the window of Mme Derville's bedroom. He found them much grown, but they had taken on a common air, or else his ideas had changed.
Mme de Rênal talked to them about Julien. The eldest responded warmly and regretted his old tutor; but it appeared that the younger ones had almost forgotten him.
M. de Rênal did not go out that morning; he was constantly going up and down stairs all over the house, busily transacting
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deals with peasants to whom he was selling his potato crop. Right up until dinner time Mme de Rênal did not have a moment to spare for her prisoner. Once dinner was announced and served, she took it into her head to make off with a plate of hot soup for him. As she was silently approaching the door of the room he was in, carrying this plate with great care, she found herself face to face with the servant who had hidden the ladder that morning. At this moment, he too was moving silently along the corridor as if listening. Julien had probably been walking about unguardedly. The servant went off in some embarrassment. Mme de Rênal went boldly into Julien's room; seeing her made him tremble.
'You're afraid,' she said to him; 'I'm ready to brave all the dangers in the world without turning a hair. There's only one thing I fear, it's the moment when I'm alone after you've gone.' And she ran off again.
'Ah!' said Julien to himself in a state of exaltation, 'remorse is the only danger dreaded by this sublime being!'
At last evening came round. M. de Rênal went to the Casino. His wife had declared she had a frightful migraine; she withdrew to her room, hastened to dismiss Elisa, and rapidly got up again to go and let Julien in.
It appeared that he was genuinely starving. Mme de Rênal went to the larder to fetch some bread. Julien heard a loud cry. Mme de Rênal returned and told him how when she had gone into the unlit larder, made her way over to a dresser where the bread was stored, and stretched out her hand, she had touched a woman's arm. It was Elisa who had let out the cry that Julien had heard.
'What was she doing there?'
'Stealing a few sweetmeats, or else spying on us,' said Mme de Rênal with total indifference. 'But luckily I found a dish of pâté and a large loaf.'
'What's that in there, then?' asked Julien, pointing to the pockets of her apron.
Mme de Rênal had forgotten that since dinner they had been full of bread.
Julien clasped her in his arms with the most intense passion; she had never seemed so beautiful to him. Even in Paris, the
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thought ran obscurely through his mind, I'll never manage to meet such a noble character. She had all the awkwardness of a woman unaccustomed to ministrations of this sort, and at the same time the real courage of someone who only fears dangers of another order, ones that strike an altogether different kind of terror.
While Julien was eating supper with a hearty appetite, and his beloved was teasing him about the frugality of the meal, for she could not bear to talk seriously, the door of the room was suddenly rattled with great force. It was M. de Rênal. 'Why have you locked yourself in?' he shouted to her. Julien only just had time to slip under the sofa.
'What! you're fully dressed, dear!' said M. de Rênal as he came in; 'you're having some supper, and you've locked your door!'
On any ordinary day this question, uttered in the most formal of conjugal tones, would have alarmed Mme de Rênal, but she sensed that her husband only had to bend down a little to catch sight of Julien; for M. de Rênal had flung himself onto the chair where Julien had been sitting only a moment ago opposite the sofa.
The migraine served as an excuse for everything. While her husband in his turn was giving her a lengthy blow-by-blow account of the pool he had won at billiards in the Casino--'a pool of nineteen francs 'pon my word', he added--she caught sight of Julien's hat, there on a chair right in front of them. Her nerve strengthened, she began to undress and, at a certain moment, moving swiftly behind her husband, she flung a dress over the chair with the hat on it.
At last M. de Rênal left. She begged Julien to begin his account of his life in the seminary all over again. 'Yesterday I wasn't listening, all I was thinking about while you were speaking was forcing myself to send you away.'
She was recklessness itself. They were talking very loud; it might have been two in the morning when they were interrupted by a violent thump on the door. It was M. de Rênal again.
'Let me in right away, there are thieves in the house!' he was saying. ' Saint-Jean found their ladder this morning.'
'This is the end of everything!' cried Mme de Rênal, flinging
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herself into Julien's arms. 'He'll kill us both, he doesn't believe this business about thieves; I'm going to die in your arms, happier in death than ever I was in life.' She made no move to answer her husband who was losing his temper; she was passionately kissing Julien.
'You must save Stanislas's mother,' he said to her with a look to be obeyed. 'I'm going to jump into the courtyard from the window of your closet and escape into the garden, the dogs know me. Fasten my clothes into a bundle and throw it into the garden as soon as you can. Meanwhile, let your door be broken open. Above all, don't admit to anything, I veto it; far better for him to live with suspicions than certainties.'
'You'll be killed when you jump!' was her only reply and her only anxiety.
She went with him to the window of the closet; then she took the time to hide his clothes. At last she opened the door to her husband who was seething with rage. Without uttering a word he looked round the room, looked round the closet and left abruptly. Julien's clothes were flung down to him, he grabbed them and raced down to the bottom of the garden in the direction of the river Doubs. As he ran, he heard a bullet whistle past, and at the same time the sound of a shot.
That's not M. de Rênal, he thought, he's not a good enough shot. The dogs were running along silently at his side, a second shot must have shattered the leg of one of them for it began to howl piteously. Julien leaped over a terrace wall, did fifty
yards or so under cover, and then set off in flight again in a different direction. He heard voices calling to one another, and was quite certain he saw the servant his enemy firing a shot; a farmer came out too and fired some random shots from the other side of the garden, but by then Julien had reached the bank of the Doubs and was putting on his clothes.
An hour later he was a league away from Verrières on the road to Geneva; if they have any suspicions, thought Julien, the Paris road is where they'll look for me.
End of Book One
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BOOK TWO
She isn't pretty, she has no rouge on.
SAINTE-BEUVE *
CHAPTER 1
Pleasures of the countryside
O rus quando ego te adspiciam
VIRGIL *
'THE gentleman must be here to catch the mail-coach to Paris?' asked the keeper of an inn where he stopped to cat.
'Either today's or tomorrow's, it hardly matters to me,' Julien replied.
The mail-coach arrived while he was feigning indifference. There were two empty seats.
'Well I never! if it isn't my old friend Falcoz!' said a passenger travelling from the Geneva direction to the traveller who was boarding the coach at the same time as Julien.
'I thought you were settled in the neighbourhood of Lyon,' said Falcoz, 'in a delightful valley near the Rhône.'
'Settled my foot! I'm running away.'
'What! running away? You of all people, Saint-Giraud, with your air of respectability, have you committed some crime or other?' asked Falcoz with a laugh.
'Might as well have done, I'm telling you! I'm running away from the abominable life of the provinces. I love the freshness of the woods and rustic peace and quiet, as you know; you've often accused me of being a romantic. I could never stand any talk of politics, and now politics is driving me out.'
'Which party do you support?'
'None, and that's my undoing. This is the sum total of my politics: I like music and painting; a good book is an event in
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my life; I'm about to be forty-four. How much longer have I got to live? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at the very most? Well now! I maintain that in thirty years' time, ministers will be a bit more skilled, but just as honest as they are today. The history of England offers me a mirror for our future. There'll always be a king trying to increase his prerogative; the wealthy inhabitants of the provinces will always be kept awake at night by ambition to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies and by the fame and hundreds of thousands of francs earned by Mirabeau: * they'll call this being liberal and caring about the people. The wish to become a peer or a gentleman of the Chamber will always spur on the Ultras. On the ship of State, everyone will want to turn a hand to the sails, for the work is well paid. So will there never be even the tiniest bit of room for a mere passenger?'
'Quite so, quite so, that must be great fun with your calm temperament. Is it the last election * that's driving you out of your province?'
'My misfortune dates from further back. Four years ago, I was forty years old and in possession of five hundred thousand francs; I'm four years older today, and probably fifty thousand francs the poorer, which I'm going to lose on the sale of my château at Monfleury near the Rhône--a superb site. In Paris I was weary of this perpetual role-playing one is forced into by what you call nineteenth-century civilization. I yearned for good-natured simplicity. So I went and bought a piece of land in the mountains near the Rhône. Nothing could be as beautiful in the whole wide world.
'For six months the village curate and the local landowners sought me out; I invited them to dinner; "I've left Paris", I told them, "so as never again in all my life to talk politics or hear it talked of. As you see, I don't subscribe to any newspaper. The fewer the letters the postman brings me, the happier I am."
'The curate didn't see things this way; I soon became the target for innumerable forms of harassment, indiscreet requests, etc. I wanted to donate two or three hundred francs a year to the poor, and I'm asked to give the money to pious associations: * the Brotherhood of St Joseph, the Association of
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the Blessed Virgin, etc. I refuse, and I'm then insulted over and over again. I'm stupid enough to take offence. I can no longer leave home in the morning to go and enjoy the beauty of our local mountains without coming across some trouble which drags me away from my contemplations and is an unpleasant reminder of human beings and their wickedness. During Rogation Day processions, for instance, with their chanting that I enjoy (it's probably a Greek melody), my fields are no longer blessed "because", says the curate, "they belong to one of the ungodly." Some cow belonging to a pious old peasant woman dies, and she says it's because there's a pond nearby owned by me the infidel, a philosopher from Paris; and a week later I find all my fish floating belly up, poisoned with lime. I'm harassed on all sides, in all sorts of ways. The magistrate, who's a decent fellow, but fears for his post, always passes judgement against me. The peace of the countryside is hell to me. Once everyone saw that I had been dropped by the curate, who leads the Congregation in the village, and that I wasn't backed by the retired captain, who leads the liberals, they all got their knives into me, right down to the stonemason I'd kept in business for the past year, and the cartwright who tried to get away with diddling me when he repaired my ploughs.
'In order to have some support and to win at any rate some of my lawsuits, I became a liberal; but as you say, along came those wretched elections, my vote was solicited...'
'For a stranger?'
'Not at all, for a man I know only too well. I refused--how dreadfully rash! From then on, I had all the liberals to cope with as well, and my position became intolerable. I think if it had occurred to the curate to accuse me of murdering my housekeeper, there would have been twenty witnesses from both parties who would have sworn they saw the crime committed.'
'You want to live in the country without furthering the passions of your neighbours, without even listening to their gossip: what a blunder!...'
'Well anyway, I've put things right. Monfleury is up for sale, I stand to lose fifty thousand francs if need be, but I'm
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full of joy, I'm leaving this hellhole of hypocrisy and hassle. I'm going to seek solitude and rustic peace in the only place they are to be found in France, in a fourth-floor flat in Paris overlooking the Champs-Elysées. And what's more, I've even reached the point of considering whether I shan't begin my political career, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Philippe du Roule, * by handing back the consecrated bread to the parish.'
'None of this would have happened to you under Bonaparte,' said Falcoz, his eyes glinting with anger and regret.
'That's all very well, but why didn't he manage to stay put, this Bonaparte of yours? Everything I suffer from today is his work.'
At this point Julien became doubly attentive. He had realized from his first words that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the former friend of M. de Rênal whom the latter had repudiated in 1816; and that the philosopher Saint-Giraud must be a brother of the chief clerk at the prefecture of ----who was adept at getting himself allocated houses belonging to local communes for very reasonable sums.
'And all that is the work of your friend Bonaparte,' went on Saint-Giraud. 'A gentleman, as harmless as they come, with forty years and five hundred thousand francs to his credit, can't settle in the provinces and find peace there; Bonaparte's priests and nobles drive him out.'
'Ah! don't speak ill of him,' exclaimed Falcoz. 'Never has France risen so high in the esteem of nations as during the thirteen years of his reign. That was a time when there was greatness in everything ever done.'
'Your emperor--the devil take him--', went on the man of forty-four, 'was only great on his battlefields, and when he restored the finances around 1802. What's to be made of all his later actions? With his chamberlains, his pomp and his official functions at
the Tuileries, he gave us a new edition of all the silly trappings of the monarchy. It had been revised, and would have done for another century or two. The nobles and the priests preferred to go back to the old edition, but they haven't got the iron hand you need to sell it to the public.'
'There speaks a former printer!'
'Who's driving me off my land?' continued the printer in
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anger. 'The clergy, whom Napoleon recalled with his Concordat * instead of treating them as the State treats doctors, barristers or astronomers, simply seeing them as citizens, without worrying about what business they engage in to try to earn their living. Would there be impertinent gentlemen around today, if your Bonaparte hadn't created barons and counts? No, the fashion for them had gone out. Next in line after the clergy, it was the minor country noblemen who vexed me most, and forced me to become a liberal.'
The conversation was endless; the text of it was something France will ponder for the next half-century. As Saint-Giraud repeated over and over again that it was impossible to live in the provinces, Julien timidly volunteered the example of M. de Rênal.
'Goodness me, young man, that's a good one!' exclaimed Falcoz; 'he's turned himself into a hammer in order not to be an anvil, and a terrible hammer at that. But I see old Valenod is more than a match for him. Do you know that scoundrel? He's the real one. What'll your M. de Rênal say when he finds himself stripped of his office one of these fine mornings, and old Valenod put in his place?'