18 John Polidori was physician and secretary to Lord Byron, whom Stendhal had met in Milan in 1816. A very similar quote is also attributed to Sainte-Beuve at the beginning of part 2 (see note for p. 217, Epigraph).
The Red and the Black
He was inept, and then exaggerated just how inept he was. Madame de Rênal was quick to forgive him. She took his bungling for charming candor. And to her eyes, what was particularly lacking in this young man, possessed of such genius, was precisely a lack of candor. "Your little tutor makes me seriously distrust him," Madame Derville sometimes told her. "It seems to me he's always thinking, and all he thinks about is clever maneuvering. He's a sneak." Julien could not shake his profound humiliation, remaining quite miserable at not having known how to reply to Madame de Rênal. "A man like me has got to reverse this defeat"—and seizing a moment when they were going from one room to another, he fancied himself obliged to give Madame de Rênal a kiss. Nothing could have been less productive, nothing less agreeable and, for him as for her, nothing more reckless. They were very nearly seen. Madame de Rênal thought he'd gone crazy. She was frightened and, above all, shocked. Such clumsy stupidity reminded her of Monsieur Valenod. "What would have happened to me," she asked herself, "had I been alone with him?" Her sense of virtue was fully restored, because love was fading. She was careful to see to it that one of her children was always nearby. The day turned boring for Julien: he spent it trying, clumsily, to carry out his battle plan for seduction. He never looked at Madame de Rênal—not once—without question marks in his eyes. However, fool that he was, he could not help seeing that he was not doing well, trying to be agreeable, and even less well, trying to be seductive. Madame de Rênal could not recover from her astonishment, finding him so clumsy and at the same time so bold. "It's the natural shyness of love, for a man of such spirit!" she finally concluded, rejoicing exceedingly. "Can it be that my rival never loved him!" After lunch, Madame de Rênal returned to the drawing room, where she was being visited by Monsieur Charcot de Maugiron, deputy governor of the Bray district. She was working at a small tapestry loom, raised to a good height. Madame Derville was beside her. Which is how things stood, in the bright light of day, when our hero deemed it appropriate to set his boot in motion and press it against Madame de Rênal's pretty foot, whose fishnet stockings and pretty Paris shoes had obviously made an impression on the gallant deputy governor of the district. Madame de Rênal was absolutely terrified. She let her scissors drop, and her ball of woolen yarn, and her needle, and the forward movement of Julien's boot was able to pass for a clumsy attempt at breaking the scissors' fall, since he'd seen them sliding down. Luckily, the scissors, made of English steel, managed to shatter, and Madame de Rênal kept voicing her regret that Julien had not been standing closer. "You saw them falling before I did: you could have stopped them. Instead, all your eagerness did was give me a really good kick in the foot." All this quite deceived the deputy governor of the district. But not Madame Derville. "This pretty boy has awfully stupid manners!" she thought. "Even the sophistication of a provincial capital would not tolerate such mistakes." Madame de Rênal found an opportunity to say to Julien: "Be careful. I command you." He saw how clumsy he had been and was in a surly mood. He considered for some while whether or not he ought to be angry about those words: I command you. He was enough of a fool to think: "She's entitled to say 'I order you,' if it's something about the children's education. But in dealing with my love, she's got to treat me as an equal. How can I love without equality ...?" And then his mind got busy, trying to track down commonplaces about
Chapter Fifteen: Cockcrow
equality. He repeated, angrily, a line from Corneille19 that Madame Derville had taught him a few days earlier: Love creates equalities, it doesn't search for them. Stubbornly, he went on playing Don Juan—he who in all his life had never had a mistress. All day long, he was a ridiculous fool. He had only one good idea: bored by himself, as well as by Madame de Rênal, he was frightened at the prospect of sitting next to her in the garden that evening, in the darkness. He told Monsieur de Rênal he was going to Verrières, to see his confessor; he left after dinner, nor did he return that night. At Verrières, he found Father Chélan in the process of moving. He'd finally been forced out of office, and Father Maslon had replaced him. Julien helped the old priest, and had the notion of writing to Fouqué that the irresistible vocation he'd felt for the sacred ministry kept him, at first, from accepting his friend's considerate offer, but that he'd just witnessed such an act of injustice that, perhaps, it would be better for his own salvation not to take holy orders. Julien congratulated himself on the dexterity with which he would make use of the old priest's dismissal, leaving a door open through which he might return to a life of commerce, should melancholy prudence prevail, in his heart, over deeds of heroism. Chapter Fifteen: Cockcrow Latin's spelling turns amour to death: amor, à mort—since love will stifle breath, informing us of what our death can cause: pain, tears and losses, hell, profound remorse. —Blason D'Amour20 Had Julien been capable of just a bit of the shrewdness which, for no good reason, he was sure he possessed, he could have congratulated himself the next day on the effect produced by his trip to Verrières. Absence had wiped away his ineptitudes. He was abundantly moody all that day, and that night a ridiculous idea came to him, with which unusual daring he communicated to Madame de Rênal. Hardly had they seated themselves in the garden, and without waiting for darkness to truly settle in, Julien put his mouth to Madame de Rênal's ear and, at the risk of horribly compromising her, said: "Madame, at two o'clock I will come to your room. I have something I need to tell you." Julien was very afraid that his request would not be agreed to. His seducer role weighed on him so horribly that, had he been free to do as he wished, he would have locked himself in his room for days and never looked at these ladies. He understood that his heavy-handed behavior, the night before, had ruined all the promising signs of the previous days. Really, he had no idea to what saint he ought to be praying. Madame de Rênal responded to Julien's rude announcement with genuine indignation, not in the least exaggerated. He thought he could hear a certain scorn in her brief reply. He was positive that, though she spoke very softly, he could make out the words don't be a fool. Pretending he had something to tell the children, he rose and went to their room, and on his return seated himself next to Madame Derville, as far away from Madame de Rênal as he could