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

"What do you think of this 'acquisition?'" said M. de Rênal to his wife.

Madame de Rênal concealed the truth from her husband, obeying an almost instinctive impulse which she certainly did not own to herself.

"I am not as fascinated as you are by this little peasant. Your favours will result in his not being able to keep his place, and you will have to send him back before the month is out."

"Oh, well! we'll send him back then, he cannot run me into more than a hundred francs, and Verrières will have got used to seeing M. de Rênal's children with a tutor. That result would not have been achieved if I had allowed Julien to wear a workman's clothes. If I do send him back, I shall of course keep the complete black suit which I have just ordered at the draper's. All he will keep is the ready-made suit which I have just put him into at the the tailor's."

The hour that Julien spent in his room seemed only a minute to Madame de Rênal. The children who had been told about their new tutor began to overwhelm their mother with questions. Eventually Julien appeared. He was quite another man. It would be incorrect to say that he was grave—he was the very incarnation of gravity. He was introduced to the children and spoke to them in a manner that astonished M. de Rênal himself.

"I am here, gentlemen, he said, as he finished his speech, to teach you Latin. You know what it means to recite a lesson. Here is the Holy Bible, he said, showing them a small volume in thirty-two mo., bound in black. It deals especially with the history of our Lord Jesus Christ and is the part which is called the New Testament. I shall often make you recite your lesson, but do you make me now recite mine."

Adolphe, the eldest of the children, had taken up the book. "Open it anywhere you like," went on Julien and tell me the first word of any verse, "I will then recite by heart that sacred book which governs our conduct towards the whole world, until you stop me."

Adolphe opened the book and read a word, and Julien recited the whole of the page as easily as though he had been talking French. M. de Rênal looked at his wife with an air of triumph The children, seeing the astonishment of their parents, opened their eyes wide. A servant came to the door of the drawing-room; Julien went on talking Latin. The servant first remained motionless, and then disappeared. Soon Madame's house-maid, together with the cook, arrived at the door. Adolphe had already opened the book at eight different places, while Julien went on reciting all the time with the same facility. "Great heavens!" said the cook, a good and devout girl, quite aloud, "what a pretty little priest!" M. de Rênal's self-esteem became uneasy. Instead of thinking of examining the tutor, his mind was concentrated in racking his memory for some other Latin words. Eventully he managed to spout a phrase of Horace. Julien knew no other Latin except his Bible. He answered with a frown. "The holy ministry to which I destine myself has forbidden me to read so profane a poet."

M. de Rênal quoted quite a large number of alleged verses from Horace. He explained to his children who Horace was, but the admiring children, scarcely attended to what he was saying: they were looking at Julien.

The servants were still at the door. Julien thought that he ought to prolong the test—"M. Stanislas-Xavier also," he said to the youngest of the children, "must give me a passage from the holy book."

Little Stanislas, who was quite flattered, read indifferently the first word of a verse, and Julien said the whole page.

To put the finishing touch on M. de Rênal's triumph, M. Valenod, the owner of the fine Norman horses, and M. Charcot de Maugiron, the sub-prefect of the district came in when Julien was reciting. This scene earned for Julien the title of Monsieur; even the servants did not dare to refuse it to him.

That evening all Verrières flocked to M. de Rênal's to see the prodigy. Julien answered everybody in a gloomy manner and kept his own distance. His fame spread so rapidly in the town that a few hours afterwards M. de Rênal, fearing that he would be taken away by somebody else, proposed to hint that he should sign an engagement for two years.

"No, Monsieur," Julien answered coldly, "if you wished to dismiss me, I should have to go. An engagement which binds me without involving you in any obligation is not an equal one and I refuse it."

Julien played his cards so well, that in less than a month of his arrival at the house, M. de Rênal himself respected him. As the curé had quarrelled with both M. de Rênal and M. Valenod, there was no one who could betray Julien's old passion for Napoleon. He always spoke of Napoleon with abhorrence.

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They only manage to touch the heart by wounding it.— A Modern.

The children adored him, but he did not like them in the least. His thoughts were elsewhere. But nothing which the little brats ever did made him lose his patience. Cold, just and impassive, and none the less liked, inasmuch his arrival had more or less driven ennui out of the house, he was a good tutor. As for himself, he felt nothing but hate and abhorrence for that good society into which he had been admitted; admitted, it is true at the bottom of the table, a circumstance which perhaps explained his hate and his abhorrence. There were certain 'full-dress' dinners at which he was scarcely able to control his hate for everything that surrounded him. One St. Louis feast day in particular, when M. Valenod was monopolizing the conversation of M. de Rênal, Julien was on the point of betraying himself. He escaped into the garden on the pretext of finding the children. "What praise of honesty," he exclaimed. "One would say that was the only virtue, and yet think how they respect and grovel before a man who has almost doubled and trebled his fortune since he has administered the poor fund. I would bet anything that he makes a profit even out of the monies which are intended for the foundlings of these poor creatures whose misery is even more sacred than that of others. Oh, Monsters! Monsters! And I too, am a kind of foundling, hated as I am by my father, my brothers, and all my family."

Some days before the feast of St. Louis, when Julien was taking a solitary walk and reciting his breviary in the little wood called the Belvedere, which dominates the Cours de la Fidelité , he had endeavoured in vain to avoid his two brothers whom he saw coming along in the distance by a lonely path. The jealousy of these coarse workmen had been provoked to such a pitch by their brother's fine black suit, by his air of extreme respectability, and by the sincere contempt which he had for them, that they had beaten him until he had fainted and was bleeding all over.

Madame de Rênal, who was taking a walk with M. de Rênal and the sub-prefect, happened to arrive in the little wood. She saw Julien lying on the ground and thought that he was dead. She was so overcome that she made M. Valenod jealous.

His alarm was premature. Julien found Madame de Rênal very pretty, but he hated her on account of her beauty, for that had been the first danger which had almost stopped his career.

He talked to her as little as possible, in order to make her forget the transport which had induced him to kiss her hand on the first day.

Madame de Rênal's housemaid, Elisa, had lost no time in falling in love with the young tutor. She often talked about him to her mistress. Elisa's love had earned for Julien the hatred of one of the men-servants. One day he heard the man saying to Elisa, "You haven't a word for me now that this dirty tutor has entered the household." The insult was undeserved, but Julien with the instinctive vanity of a pretty boy redoubled his care of his personal appearance. M. Valenod's hate also increased. He said publicly, that it was not becoming for a young abbé to be such a fop.