10 Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833), a popular and successful painter during the Empire. His Aeneas Telling Dido of the Disasters of Troy (1817) hangs in the Louvre. Dido was the Carthaginian queen who killed herself when deserted by Aeneas in Virgil's epic The Aeneid. Strombeck: a German friend of Stendhal.
The Red and the Black
late. Everything they did on this night struck Julien as bizarre. They toyed with time: for certain sensitive souls, this appears to magnify the pleasures of love. They sat down, finally, Madame de Rênal next to Julien, and Madame Derville beside her friend. Caught up in what he was planning to attempt, Julien had nothing to say. Conversation faltered. "Will I be trembling and miserable like this, when I face the first duel I have to fight?" Julien asked himself, having too much contempt both for himself and for others not to be aware of the state of his soul. In this mortal anguish, any perils seemed to him preferable. He kept wishing that something would come up and Madame de Rênal would be compelled to go back into the house, and abandon the garden! So powerful was the violence he was forcing upon himself that, inevitably, his voice became profoundly different. Soon Madame de Rênal's voice began to tremble, too, but he was totally unaware: the frightful battle he had to wage against timidity was far too painful for him to notice anything outside himself. After a final anxiously hesitating moment, during which flooding emotion seemed to set Julien somewhere out of his own body, ten o'clock sounded on the clock above his head. Each fatal stroke reverberated in his breast like some physical force. At last, while the sound of the final stroke had still not died away, he put out his hand and grasped Madame de Rênal's, which was immediately withdrawn. Without knowing quite how he did it, Julien took her hand again. Although shaken inside, he looked down, with a glacially frozen glance, at the hand he had seized, pressing it with convulsive power. She made a last effort to pull it away, but in the end her hand stayed in his. Happiness flooded across his heart: it was not that he loved Madame de Rênal, but the horrible torture was over. Madame Derville saw nothing, so he felt obliged to go on talking; his voice became bright and strong. Madame de Rênal's, on the other hand, shook with such emotion that her friend thought she was ill and suggested she return to the house. Julien sensed the danger: "If Madame de Rênal goes back to the drawing room, I'm going to tumble into the frightful position I've been in all day. I haven't held this hand captive long enough for the victory to count." Just as Madame Derville was again proposing a return to the drawing room, Julien gave a hard squeeze to the hand that had surrendered to him. Madame de Rênal, who was already starting to stand up, sat down once more and said, in a faint voice: "I do really feel a bit ill, but the open air does me good." Her words confirmed Julien's happiness, which right then was extraordinarily full: he talked, he forgot to forge and counterfeit; both listening ladies found him the most amiable of men. But still, in the midst of his eloquence, he felt a sudden sinking fear. He was mortally afraid that Madame Derville, tired of the wind, which in advance of the storm was growing stronger, might want to go back to the drawing room by herself. And then he would be left face-to-face with Madame de Rênal. Almost accidentally, he had had enough blind courage to do what he'd meant to do, but he felt it was utterly out of his power to say the simplest word to Madame de Rênal. No matter how gently she might reprove him, he was going to be beaten in battle, and the advantage he had just won would be annihilated. That night, luckily for him, his forceful, affecting words found favor with Madame Derville, who quite often had thought him as boorish as a child, and not at all amusing. As for Madame de Rênal, with her hand in Julien's she did not think anything, she simply gave herself over to being alive. The hours spent under the great lime tree, which local legend said
Chapter Nine: An Evening in the Country
had been planted by Charles the Bold,11 were for her a veritable epoch of happiness. She listened with delight to the wind wailing in the tree's dense foliage, and the sound of occasional drops falling on leaves in the lower branches. Julien had not noticed something that might have reassured him: Madame de Rênal, obliged to withdraw her hand when she stood up, helping her cousin restore a flower vase the wind had blown over, right at their feet, had barely seated herself again when, almost without any objection, she gave him her hand once more, rather as if this were something they had already agreed upon. Midnight had been tolled long before; it was finally necessary to leave the garden; they separated. Carried away by love's happiness, Madame de Rênal was so uneducated in love's ways that she said virtually nothing reproachful. Happiness kept her from sleeping. A leaden sleep seized Julien, mortally exhausted by the struggle in his heart, all day long, between shyness and pride. He woke at five the next day, and it would have been painfully cruel for Madame de Rênal, had she known it, but he barely gave her a thought. He had done his duty, performed a heroic act. This made him exceedingly happy, and he proceeded to shut himself in his room, where he read about his heroes' exploits with a new pleasure. By the time the bell for lunch sounded, he had forgotten, absorbed in the bulletins of Napoleon's Grand Army, all the gains of the night before. As he descended the stairs, he told himself, casually: "I have to tell this woman I love her." Instead of loving looks, which he had expected to encounter, he met with the severe face of Monsieur de Rênal, who had arrived from Verrières at ten that morning, and was not hiding his displeasure, finding that Julien had spent the whole morning without paying any attention to the children. Nothing could be as ugly as this important man in a foul mood and thinking himself empowered to display it. Her husband's every bitter word pierced Madame de Rênal's heart. As for Julien, for the last few hours he had been so deeply immersed in ecstasy, and was still so absorbed in the Great Things that had been passing in front of his eyes, that at first he could barely descend far enough down even to hear the harsh questions Monsieur de Rênal was asking him. He replied at last, rather crisply: "I was ill." The tone of this response would have annoyed a less vulnerable man than the mayor of Verrières; he thought about an instant reply, chastising Julien then and there. The only thing that stopped him was his rule that, in business, he should never hurry himself. "This young fool," he said to himself after a moment, "has after a fashion earned himself a reputation, here in my house, and Valenod might take him into his, or else he might well marry Elisa, and in both cases, deep down in his heart, he might scoff at me." Despite his prudent reflections, Monsieur de Rênal's dissatisfaction did not blaze any the less brightly in the stream of vulgar comments that followed; they gradually began to irritate Julien. Madame de Rênal was at the point of dissolving in tears. Lunch was barely over when she asked Julien to give her his arm for a walk, and she leaned on him, affectionately. But to everything she said, he was only able to reply, half muttering: "That's what rich people are!"