Leo Tolstoy - 3 books to know Napoleonic Wars

‘From the rocks above, you can see the tower of the dovecote. If all goes well, I shall place a white handkerchief there; if not, you will see nothing.

‘Ungrateful wretch, will not your heart find out some way of telling me that you love me, before starting on this walk? Whatever may befall me, be certain of one thing: I should not survive for a day a final parting. Ah! bad mother! These are two idle words that I have written, dear Julien. I do not feel them; I can think only of you at this moment, I have written them only so as not to be blamed by you. Now that I find myself brought to the point of losing you, what use is there in pretence? Yes, let my heart seem black as night to you, but let me not lie to the man whom I adore! I have been all too deceitful already in my life. Go to, I forgive you if you love me no longer. I have not time to read my letter through. It is a small thing in my eyes to pay with my life for the happy days which I have spent in your arms. You know that they will cost me more than life.’

CONVERSATION WITH A Lord and Master

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Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we! For such as we are made of, such we be.

Twelfth Night

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IT WAS WITH A CHILDISH pleasure that Julien spent an hour in pasting words together. As he left his room he came upon his pupils and their mother; she took the letter with a simplicity and courage, the calmness of which terrified him.

‘Is the gum quite dry?’ she asked him.

‘Can this be the woman who was being driven mad by remorse?’ he thought. ‘What are her plans at this moment?’ He was too proud to ask her; but never, perhaps, had she appealed to him more strongly.

‘If things go amiss,’ she went on with the same coolness, ‘I shall be stripped of everything. Bury this store somewhere in the mountains; it may some day be my last resource.’

She handed him a glass-topped case, in red morocco, filled with gold and a few diamonds.

‘Go now,’ she said to him.

She embraced her children, the youngest of them twice over. Julien stood spellbound. She left him at a rapid pace and without looking at him again.

>From the moment of his opening the anonymous letter, M. de Renal’s life had been a burden to him. He had not been so agitated since a duel that he had nearly had to fight in 1816, and, to do him justice, the prospect of receiving a bullet in his person would now have distressed him less. He examined the letter from every angle. ‘Is not this a woman’s hand?’ he asked himself. ‘In that case, what woman can have written it?’ He considered in turn all the women he knew at Verrieres, without finding a definite object for his suspicions. Could a man have dictated the letter? If so, what man? Here again, a similar uncertainty; he had earned the jealousy and no doubt the hatred of the majority of the men he knew. ‘I must consult my wife,’ he said to himself, from force of habit, as he rose from the armchair in which he had collapsed.

No sooner had he risen than ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, clapping his hand to his head, ‘she is the one person whom I cannot trust; from this moment she is my enemy.’ And tears of anger welled into his eyes.

It was a fitting reward for that barrenness of heart in which practical wisdom in the provinces is rooted, that the two men whom, at that moment, M. de Renal most dreaded were his two most intimate friends.

‘Apart from them, I have ten friends perhaps,’ and he turned them over in his mind, calculating the exact amount of comfort that he would be able to derive from each. ‘To all of them, to all of them,’ he cried in his rage, ‘my appalling misfortune will give the most intense pleasure.’ Happily for him, he supposed himself to be greatly envied, and not without reason. Apart from his superb house in town on which the King of —— had just conferred everlasting honour by sleeping beneath its roof, he had made an admirable piece of work of his country house at Vergy. The front was painted white, and the windows adorned with handsome green shutters. He was comforted for a moment by the thought of this magnificence. The fact of the matter was that this mansion was visible from a distance of three or four leagues, to the great detriment of all the country houses or so-called chateaux of the neighbourhood, which had been allowed to retain the humble grey tones imparted to them by time.

M. de Renal could reckon upon the tears and pity of one of his friends, the churchwarden of the parish; but he was an imbecile who shed tears at everything. This man was nevertheless his sole resource.

‘What misfortune is comparable to mine?’ he exclaimed angrily. ‘What isolation!

‘Is it possible,’ this truly pitiable man asked himself, ‘is it possible that, in my distress, I have not a single friend of whom to ask advice? For my mind is becoming unhinged, I can feel it! Ah, Falcoz! Ah, Ducros!’ he cried bitterly. These were the names of two of his boyhood’s friends whom he had alienated by his arrogance in 1814. They were not noble, and he had tried to alter the terms of equality on which they had been living all their lives.

One of them, Falcoz, a man of spirit and heart, a paper merchant at Verrieres, had purchased a printing press in the chief town of the Department and had started a newspaper. The Congregation had determined to ruin him: his paper had been condemned, his printer’s licence had been taken from him. In these unfortunate circumstances he ventured to write to M. de Renal for the first time in ten years. The Mayor of Verrieres felt it incumbent on him to reply in the Ancient Roman style: ‘If the King’s Minister did me the honour to consult me, I should say to him: “Ruin without compunction all provincial printers, and make printing a monopoly like the sale of tobacco.”’ This letter to an intimate friend which had set the whole of Verrieres marvelling at the time, M. de Renal now recalled, word for word, with horror. ‘Who would have said that with my rank, my fortune, my Crosses, I should one day regret it?’ It was in such transports of anger, now against himself, now against all around him, that he passed a night of anguish; but, fortunately, it did not occur to him to spy upon his wife.

‘I am used to Louise,’ he said to himself, ‘she knows all my affairs; were I free to marry again tomorrow I could find no one fit to take her place.’ Next, he sought relief in the idea that his wife was innocent; this point of view made it unnecessary for him to show his strength of character, and was far more convenient; how many slandered wives have we not all seen!

‘But what!’ he suddenly exclaimed, pacing the floor with a convulsive step, ‘am I to allow her, as though I were a man of straw, a mere ragamuffin, to make a mock of me with her lover? Is the whole of Verrieres to be allowed to sneer at my complacency? What have they not said about Charmier?’ (a notorious local cuckold). ‘When he is mentioned, is there not a smile on every face? He is a good pleader, who is there that ever mentions his talent for public speaking? “Ah! Charmier!” is what they say; “Bernard’s Charmier.” They actually give him the name of the man that has disgraced him.

‘Thank heaven,’ said M. de Renal at other moments, ‘I have no daughter, and the manner in which I am going to punish their mother will not damage the careers of my children; I can surprise that young peasant with my wife, and kill the pair of them; in that event, the tragic outcome of my misfortune may perhaps make it less absurd.’ This idea appealed to him: he worked it out in the fullest detail. ‘The Penal Code is on my side, and, whatever happens, our Congregation and my friends on the jury will save me.’ He examined his hunting knife, which had a keen blade; but the thought of bloodshed frightened him.