2 August 25; the feast days of Catholic saints were very important in France. Saint Louis, the canonized King Louis IX, was especially important to the French, particularly after the execution (martyrdom, for royalists) of Louis XVI in 1793.
Chapter Seven: Elective Affinities
and tripled his fortune, ever since he got to be in charge of the poor! I'd bet he even makes money on the fund for foundlings—those poor children whose misery is the most sacred of all! Ah! Monsters! Monsters! And me, I'm also a kind of foundling, detested by my father, by my brothers, by my entire family." A few days before the Feast of Saint Louis, Julien had been all alone and saying his breviary prayers, walking in a small wood called the Belvedere, which overlooked the Loyalty Walkway. He'd been trying unsuccessfully to avoid his two brothers: he had seen them from a distance, approaching along a deserted path. The jealousy of these huge workmen was so excited by his fine black clothes and eminently proper appearance, and by their brother's open contempt for them, that they'd beaten him until he was unconscious and lying prone, bloodied all over. Madame de Rênal, walking in the wood with Monsieur Valenod and the deputy governor of the district, stumbled on him, quite by accident; she saw Julien motionless on the ground and thought him dead. Her shock was so intense that it aroused Monsieur Valenod's jealousy. His alarm, however, had sounded entirely too soon. Julien found Madame de Rênal wonderfully beautiful, but because of her beauty he hated her: that loveliness was the first reef on which his fortune had almost foundered. He spoke to her as little as possible, to wipe out the memory of that ecstatic rapture which, on his first day, had led him to kiss her hand. Elisa, Madame de Rênal's chambermaid, had had no trouble falling in love with the young tutor; she spoke of him, often, to her mistress. Miss Elisa's love had earned Julien the hatred of one of the menservants. One day, Julien overheard this man saying to Elisa: "You don't want to talk to me anymore, since this filthy tutor's come to the house." Julien did not deserve this insult; nevertheless, with a handsome young fellow's instincts, he paid even more attention to his appearance. Monsieur Valenod's dislike grew in equal measure. He said publicly that so much coquetry was unsuitable for a young ecclesiastic. Aside from not wearing a cassock, this was indeed how Julien dressed. Madame de Rênal noticed that he spoke more often than usual with Elisa, and learned that these conversations were caused by the extraordinary poverty of Julien's wardrobe. He had so little underclothing that he was regularly reduced to washing it, away from the house; for these petty attentions Elisa was useful to him. This utter poverty, which she had not suspected, moved Madame de Rênal; she wanted to give him gifts, but did not dare; and that inner conflict was the first painful feeling Julien caused her. To that point, Julien's name and a feeling of chaste, completely intellectual happiness had become synonymous in her mind. Tormented by the idea of his poverty, Madame de Rênal asked her husband to give him a gift of underclothes. "What foolishness!" he replied. "How now! Give gifts to a man with whom we are perfectly satisfied, and who is serving us very well? That would make sense only if he were negligent and we needed to stimulate his zeal." This kind of perspective humiliated Madame de Rênal; she would never have so much as noticed it, before Julien's coming. Every time she saw the utter propriety of his clothing, which was also so extremely plain, she asked herself: "This poor boy, how can he possibly manage it?" Little by little, instead of being shocked she felt pity for everything Julien lacked. Madame de Rênal was one of those provincial women one might very well take for stupid, for the first fifteen days one knew her. She had no experience of life, and conversation held no interest for her. Endowed with a refined and haughty soul, the natural instinct toward happiness possessed by all creatures led her, most of the time, to pay no attention to what was done by the grosser folk in the middle of whom chance had thrown her.
The Red and the Black
She might have been distinguished for spontaneous vivacity, had she received any sort of decent education. But as an heiress, she had been raised in a convent by nuns who were passionate worshipers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and driven by violent hatred for French enemies of the Jesuits.3 Madame de Rênal had enough sense to quickly forget, as utter absurdity, everything she had learned at the convent, but she set nothing in its place and ended by knowing nothing. The flattery showered on her from an early age (as heiress to a large fortune), and a pronounced leaning toward impassioned devotion, helped shape her as someone who lived a life entirely interior. Given her perfect air of condescension, and a renunciation of self-will (which the husbands of Verrières held up to their wives, as an example, and which made Monsieur de Rênal swell with pride), she lived her life as loftily as she possibly could. A great princess, famous for her pride, devotes infinitely closer attention to what the gentlemen around her are up to than this provincial woman, so sweet, always so visibly modest, but paying absolutely no attention to whatever her husband might say or do. Until Julien's arrival, indeed, she had not truly paid attention to anyone or anything except her children. Their little hurts and ills, their sorrows, their little pleasures, filled to the brim the emotional existence of a soul which, in all her life, had adored only God—though that was when she was still at Sacred Heart, in Besançon. Although she would not admit it, not to anyone, when one of her sons had a fever she was reduced to the same state as if he had died. In the first years of their marriage, confidences about these kinds of fears and sorrow, forced out of her by immense need, had been met by her husband with a bout of coarse laughter, a shrug, and some platitude about the foolishness of women. Such displays of wit, especially when the health of their children was at issue, twisted a dagger into her heart. This was what she had gotten, in exchange for the eager, honey-sweet flattery she'd known, as a girl in the Jesuitic convent. Her education had been shaped by sadness. Too proud to speak of these afflictions, even to her friend, Madame Derville, she fancied that all men were like her husband, and Monsieur Valenod, and the deputy governor, Charcot de Maugiron. Coarseness and the most brutal insensitivity to everything not connected with money or the power of being decorated with medals; blind hatred for every argument opposing their views—these seemed to her natural attributes of the male sex, exactly like wearing boots or felt hats. Long years later, Madame de Rênal had still not gotten used to these men of money, among whom she was obliged to live. All of which explains what went on with the little peasant, Julien. She discovered sweet pleasures and all the glowing charms of novelty in the affectionate ways of this noble, fierce soul. Madame de Rênal often had to excuse his extraordinary ignorance, which was yet another charm, as well as the coarseness of his manners, which she tried to correct. She learned that he took the trouble to listen to her, even when they spoke of the most ordinary things, like a poor dog run over, as it was crossing the street, by a peasant's cart going quite fast. Seeing such small tragedies made her husband laugh his grossest laugh, whereas she could see the furrowing of Julien's handsome, beautifully arched black eyebrows. Generosity, nobility of soul, humanity, little by little appeared to her to exist nowhere but in this young ecclesiastic. It was only for him that she felt the sympathy, even the admiration, that virtue arouses in well-born souls.