6 Or La Quotidienne, a highly conservative daily newspaper (see note for p. 65, l. 20).
The Red and the Black
The first time Madame de Rênal tried having a conversation with him, having nothing to do with the children's education, he began to talk about surgical procedures; she turned pale and asked him to stop. Julien knew nothing about anything else. Accordingly, living in the same house as Madame de Rênal, the most peculiar silence developed when they were alone together. In the drawing room, no matter with what humility he behaved, she saw in his eyes how intellectually superior he felt to everything he encountered in her house. If she found herself alone with him, even for an instant, it was not hard to see how embarrassed he became. This troubled her, because her woman's instinct told her that there was no tenderness in this embarrassment. Based on some idea or other, formed by a tale of high society narrated by the old surgeon- major, as soon as Julien was anywhere with a woman, and no one was speaking, he felt himself humiliated, exactly as if the silence was his fault. This feeling was a hundred times more painful when they were alone. His imagination sprouted the wildest Spanish-style notions as to what a man ought to say, finding himself alone with a woman: all the ideas presented him by his troubled mind were utterly impossible. No matter that his soul soared in the clouds, he was unable to break the humiliating silence. And so his severe bearing, on the long walks he took with Madame de Rênal and her children, was intensified by the cruelest kind of inner suffering. He found himself disgusting. If some ill luck forced him to speak, he managed to say the most ridiculous things. Worse yet, he saw how absurdly he was behaving, and then exaggerated it still further, but what he did not see was the expression in her eyes, so lovely and revealing so ardent a heart that, just as a good actor does, it gave meaning to words that had no meaning. She noticed how, alone with her, he never said anything worth saying except when, distracted by something unforeseen, he wasn't trying to turn a well-phrased compliment. Since the friends of the house did not spoil her with new and brilliant ideas, she found Julien's flashes of insight thoroughly delightful. Ever since Napoleon's fall, provincial manners rigidly suppress anything that smacked of gallantry. People are afraid of being dismissed from office. Rogues turn to the Congregation of the Holy Virgin for support, and hypocrisy has made excellent progress, even among the liberal classes. Boredom grows and grows. The only pleasures left are reading and farming. At sixteen, Madame de Rênal, rich heiress of a devoted aunt, was married to a well-bred gentleman, having neither experienced nor witnessed, at any time in her life, anything that resembled in the slightest the world of love. Her confessor, the good parish priest, Father Chélan, had barely mentioned love to her, and then only in connection with Monsieur Valenod's attempts, and had created in her mind a picture so disgusting that the very word had come to represent nothing but the most wretched debauchery. What she saw in the very small number of novels chance had placed in front of her eyes seemed purely exceptional, even completely unnatural. Thanks to this state of ignorance, Madame de Rênal was able, perfectly happily, to think constantly about Julien and yet remain quite remote from anything worthy of even the slightest censure. Chapter Eight: Minor Occasions Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression, And stolen glances, sweeter for the theft, And burning blushes, though for no transgression.
Chapter Eight: Minor Occasions
—Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, Stanza 747 The angelic sweetness that came from Madame de Rênal's very nature, and from her genuine goodness, was not in the least affected when she thought about her chambermaid, Elisa. Coming into some money, the girl admitted to her confessor, the parish priest, that she hoped to marry Julien. Monsieur Chélan was delighted by his young friend's good fortune, but was extremely startled when Julien told him, most determinedly, that Mademoiselle Elisa's offer did not suit him. "Be careful, my son, of what's happening in your heart," said the old priest, knitting his brows. "I congratulate you on your religious vocation, if it is that and that alone to which you owe this contempt for a more-than-sufficient fortune. Fifty-six years have tolled since I came to officiate in Verrières, but so far as I can see, I am going to be deprived of my parish. This grieves me, even though I have an income of eight hundred francs a year. I want to share these details with you, so you have no illusions as to what awaits you as a priest. If you dream of paying court to men of power, your eternal damnation is guaranteed. You could make a fortune, but you'd have to tread on the poor, flatter the deputy governor of the district, and the mayor, and all other men of substance, and assist them in their passions. For a layman, such conduct, which the world calls knowing how to live, is not incompatible with salvation. But with the likes of us, a choice has to be made: it's a question of making your fortune in this world, or in the next. There's no middle ground. Go now, my dear friend; consider; and come back in three days to tell me what you've decided. I have a troubled glimpse, deep down, of a dark ambition which does not speak to me of the temperance, the perfect surrender of worldly advantages, which a priest must have. I see good things in your spirit—but permit me to tell you," added the good old man, tears in his eyes, "for you as a priest, ah, I tremble for your salvation." Julien was embarrassed by his own emotions: for the first time in his life, he felt himself loved, and he wept with delight as he went away, hiding his tears under the great trees high above Verrières. "Why am I in this state?" he finally asked himself. "I know I'd give my life, and a hundred times over, for this good Father Chélan, even if he's just proved to me that I'm nothing but a fool. He above all is the person I need to deceive, and he sees right through me. The secret ambition he senses is my plan to make my fortune. He doesn't think I'm worthy of becoming a priest—and that at the very moment when sacrificing an income of a thousand francs ought to have given him the highest opinion of my piety and my vocation. "From now on," Julien continued, "I'll only depend on tested aspects of my character. Who could have known that I'd be glad to shed tears! That I'd love the person who proves me nothing but a fool!" Three days later, Julien invented the excuse he should have found the very first day: it was slanderous, but what did that matter? He swore to the old priest, with much pretense of hesitation, that there was something he could not explain, because it would be damaging to a third party, which had from the first dissuaded him from agreeing to the marriage. It was as good as an accusation against Elisa. Monsieur Chélan felt a certain worldly warmth underlying his behavior—not what ought to be inspiring a prospective priest. "My friend," he told Julien once again, "become a good rural bourgeois, worthy and well educated, rather than a priest without a vocation."