5 The Baron de Besenval was a soldier and courtier at Versailles. He became an intimate and a defender of Marie-Antoinette. Stendhal had read his unreliable Mémoires, which gave a very biased view of life at the last royal court of the ancien régime.
Chapter Seven: Elective Affinities
subscription at the bookstore. Monsieur de Rênal certainly agreed that it would be sensible to give his oldest son a visual impression of books he might hear mentioned in conversation, once he was attending military school. But Julien saw that His Honor the Mayor had dug in his heels and would go no further. Julien suspected some hidden reason, but could not imagine what it might be. "I've been thinking, sir," he said to his employer one day, "that it really would be very unseemly to have an upright gentlemanly name like Rênal appear on the dirty accounts of this bookstore." Monsieur de Rênal's forehead cleared. "It would be almost as bad," continued Julien, his voice wonderfully humble, "for a poor theology student, should someone discover, one day, that his name had been on the accounts of a bookstore that rented out volumes. Liberals could accuse me of having requested the most infamous of writings. Who knows, they might even go so far as to write after my name the titles of these perverse books." But Julien let it go at that. He could see the mayor's face taking on, once again, an expression of embarrassment and irritation. Julien stayed silent. "I've hooked my fish," he said to himself. Some days later, the oldest of the boys asked Julien, in their father's presence, about a book he'd noticed in the monarchist newspaper, The Legitimist.6 "In order to avoid such subjects as the triumph of the Jacobin party," said the young tutor, "while in the meantime giving me information needed to reply to Monsieur Adolphe, perhaps we could have the very least of your people take out a bookstore subscription." "Not a bad idea," said Monsieur de Rênal, obviously very pleased. "However, it would be necessary to specify," said Julien, with a certain somber and almost miserable air that works so well with certain people, when they witness the success of some long-desired business, "it would be necessary to specify that the servant is forbidden to borrow any novel whatever. Once in the house, these dangerous volumes might corrupt madame's maids, and the servant himself." "Don't forget political pamphlets," added Monsieur de Rênal loftily. He would have liked to conceal the admiration he himself felt for this middle way, concocted by the tutor of his children. Julien's life was thus composed of a series of petty negotiations, and their success concerned him far more than the signs of special affection he could have read in Madame de Rênal's heart, if only he had bothered. The moral position he had occupied all through his life was renewed, in his post with His Honor the Mayor of Verrières. Just as in his father's sawmill, he had the most profound contempt for the people he lived among, and hated them. Every day he witnessed tales told by the deputy governor, by Monsieur Valenod, or by other friends of the house, relating events they had just seen, and realized how little their ideas resembled reality. Things that to him seemed admirable were precisely those censured by the people around him. His silent response was always: "What monsters, what fools!" He was glad, and proud, that often he understood nothing they were talking about. In his entire life, the only person to whom he had ever spoken honestly was the old surgeon-major, whose limited stock of ideas concerned either Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy, or surgery. Julien's youthful fortitude delighted in reciting the old man's most painful surgeries, assuring himself: "I've never blinked."