Stendhal - The Red and the Black (World's Classics Series)

Madame de Rênal observed that Julien talked more frequently than usual to Mademoiselle Elisa. She learnt that the reason of these interviews was the poverty of Julien's extremely small wardrobe. He had so little linen that he was obliged to have it very frequently washed outside the house, and it was in these little matters that Elisa was useful to him. Madame de Rênal was touched by this extreme poverty which she had never suspected before. She was anxious to make him presents, but she did not dare to do so. This inner conflict was the first painful emotion that Julien had caused her. Till then Julien's name had been synonymous with a pure and quite intellectual joy. Tormented by the idea of Julien's poverty, Madame de Rênal spoke to her husband about giving him some linen for a present.

"What nonsense," he answered, "the very idea of giving presents to a man with whom we are perfectly satisfied and who is a good servant. It will only be if he is remiss that we shall have to stimulate his zeal."

Madame de Rênal felt humiliated by this way of looking at things, though she would never have noticed it in the days before Julien's arrival. She never looked at the young abbé's attire, with its combination of simplicity and absolute cleanliness, without saying to herself, "The poor boy, how can he manage?"

Little by little, instead of being shocked by all Julien's deficiencies, she pitied him for them.

Madame de Rênal was one of those provincial women whom one is apt to take for fools during the first fortnight of acquaintanceship. She had no experience of the world and never bothered to keep up the conversation. Nature had given her a refined and fastidious soul, while that instinct for happiness which is innate in all human beings caused her, as a rule, to pay no attention to the acts of the coarse persons in whose midst chance had thrown her. If she had received the slightest education, she would have been noticeable for the spontaneity and vivacity of her mind, but being an heiress, she had been brought up in a Convent of Nuns, who were passionate devotees of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and animated by a violent hate for the French as being the enemies of the Jesuits. Madame de Rênal had had enough sense to forget quickly all the nonsense which she had learned at the convent, but had substituted nothing for it, and in the long run knew nothing. The flatteries which had been lavished on her when still a child, by reason of the great fortune of which she was the heiress, and a decided tendency to passionate devotion, had given her quite an inner life of her own. In spite of her pose of perfect affability and her elimination of her individual will which was cited as a model example by all the husbands in Verrières and which made M. de Rênal feel very proud, the moods of her mind were usually dictated by a spirit of the most haughty discontent.

Many a princess who has become a bye-word for pride has given infinitely more attention to what her courtiers have been doing around her than did this apparently gentle and demure woman to anything which her husband either said or did. Up to the time of Julien's arrival she had never really troubled about anything except her children. Their little maladies, their troubles, their little joys, occupied all the sensibility of that soul, who, during her whole life, had adored no one but God, when she had been at the Sacred Heart of Besançon.

A feverish attack of one of her sons would affect her almost as deeply as if the child had died, though she would not deign to confide in anyone. A burst of coarse laughter, a shrug of the shoulders, accompanied by some platitude on the folly of women, had been the only welcome her husband had vouchsafed to those confidences about her troubles, which the need of unburdening herself had induced her to make during the first years of their marriage. Jokes of this kind, and above all, when they were directed at her children's ailments, were exquisite torture to Madame de Rênal. And these jokes were all she found to take the place of those exaggerated sugary flatteries with which she had been regaled at the Jesuit Convent where she had passed her youth. Her education had been given her by suffering. Too proud even to talk to her friend, Madame Derville, about troubles of this kind, she imagined that all men were like her husband, M. Valenod, and the sub-prefect, M. Charcot de Maugiron. Coarseness, and the most brutal callousness to everything except financial gain, precedence, or orders, together with blind hate of every argument to which they objected, seemed to her as natural to the male sex as wearing boots and felt hats.

After many years, Madame de Rênal had still failed to acclimatize herself to those monied people in whose society she had to live.

Hence the success of the little peasant Julien. She found in the sympathy of this proud and noble soul a sweet enjoyment which had all the glamour and fascination of novelty.

Madame de Rênal soon forgave him that extreme ignorance, which constituted but an additional charm, and the roughness of his manner which she succeeded in correcting. She thought that he was worth listening to, even when the conversation turned on the most ordinary events, even in fact when it was only a question of a poor dog which had been crushed as he crossed the street by a peasant's cart going at a trot. The sight of the dog's pain made her husband indulge in his coarse laugh, while she noticed Julien frown, with his fine black eyebrows which were so beautifully arched.

Little by little, it seemed to her that generosity, nobility of soul and humanity were to be found in nobody else except this young abbé. She felt for him all the sympathy and even all the admiration which those virtues excite in well-born souls.

If the scene had been Paris, Julien's position towards Madame de Rênal would have been soon simplified. But at Paris, love is a creature of novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would soon have found the elucidation of their position in three or four novels, and even in the couplets of the Gymnase Theatre. The novels which have traced out for them the part they would play, and showed them the model which they were to imitate, and Julien would sooner or later have been forced by his vanity to follow that model, even though it had given him no pleasure and had perhaps actually gone against the grain.

If the scene had been laid in a small town in Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest episode would have been rendered crucial by the fiery condition of the atmosphere. But under our more gloomy skies, a poor young man who is only ambitious because his natural refinement makes him feel the necessity of some of those joys which only money can give, can see every day a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, is absorbed in her children, and never goes to novels for her examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens gradually, in the provinces where there is far more naturalness.

Madame de Rênal was often overcome to the point of tears when she thought of the young tutor's poverty. Julien surprised her one day actually crying.

"Oh Madame! has any misfortune happened to you?"

"No, my friend," she answered, "call the children, let us go for a walk."

She took his arm and leant on it in a manner that struck Julien as singular. It was the first time she had called Julien "My friend."

Towards the end of the walk, Julien noticed that she was blushing violently. She slackened her pace.

"You have no doubt heard," she said, "without looking at him, that I am the only heiress of a very rich aunt who lives at Besançon. She loads me with presents.… My sons are getting on so wonderfully that I should like to ask you to accept a small present as a token of my gratitude. It is only a matter of a few louis to enable you to get some linen. But—" she added, blushing still more, and she left off speaking—