2 In 1793, a popular uprising against the revolutionary government was brutally surpressed in Lyons.

2 In 1793, a popular uprising against the revolutionary government was brutally surpressed in Lyons.

illness, which soon became serious. And then remorse kept pushing sleep away from her bed: all she could do was lie in a grim silence, for if she opened her mouth at all, what emerged were confessions of her sins against God and man. "I beg you," said Julien, whenever they were alone, "say nothing to anyone. Let me be the sole confidant of your pain. If you still love me, don't speak: all your words can't take away our Stanislas's fever." But this was cold comfort and had no effect. He had no idea if Madame de Rênal had gotten it into her head that, to appease the anger of a jealous God, she either had to hate Julien or see her child die. Her inability to hate her lover, which she knew she could not do, was what made her so wretched. "Go away from me," she said to Julien one day. "In the name of God, leave this house. It's your presence here that is killing my son. "God is punishing me," she added in a low voice. "He is just. I worship His justice. My sins are frightful, and I have been living without remorse! All this was the first sign of God turning away from me: I need to be doubly punished." Julien was deeply moved. There was no hypocrisy in her, no exaggeration. "She believes that, in loving me, she is killing her child, and yet the miserable woman loves me more than she does the child. No question, I cannot doubt it: remorse is killing her, and thus the sublimity of her emotions. But how could I have inspired such a love—me, so poor, so badly raised, so ignorant, sometimes so clumsy and so inept?" One night, the child grew still sicker. At about two in the morning, Monsieur de Rênal came to see him. Consumed by fever, the child was severely flushed and did not recognize his father. Suddenly Madame de Rênal threw herself at her husband's feet: Julien saw that she meant to tell him everything and ruin herself forever. Luckily, her strange behavior annoyed Monsieur de Rênal. "Good-bye! Good-bye!" he said, starting to walk away. "No, listen to me," his wife cried, on her knees in front of him, trying to hold him back. "Hear the whole truth. I'm the one who's killing my son. I gave him life and I'm taking it away from him. Heaven is punishing me, in the eyes of God I am guilty of murder. I must abandon myself, I must humble myself. Perhaps this sacrifice will appease the Lord." If Monsieur de Rênal had been a man of any imagination, he would have known everything. "Romantic notions," he exclaimed, pulling away from his wife, who was trying to wrap her arms around his knees. "All that is just romantic gush. Julien, the moment it's light outside, call the doctor." And he retired to his bed. Madame de Rênal dropped back on her knees, half fainting, and pushed Julien away with a convulsive movement, when he tried to help her. Julien stood there, stunned. "So here's the adulteress!" he said to himself. "Could it be possible that these tricky priests...might be right? Those who commit a multitude of them, may earn the true comprehension of sin? How incredible!..." For twenty minutes after Monsieur de Rênal left, Julien watched the woman he loved, her head resting on the child's little bed; she was completely motionless and virtually unconscious. "Here's a woman of superior intellect reduced to a bundle of misery, and all because," he told himself, "she's come to know me." Time sped by. "What can I do for her?" He had to make up his mind. "It's not a question, anymore, just about me. What do people and their dull affectations mean to me? What can I do for her? ... leave her? But I'd be leaving her alone, and in the grip of the most dreadful grief.

Chapter Nineteen: Thinking Leads to Suffering

This automaton of a husband does her more harm than good. He'll speak harsh words to her, because he's a clod. She might go mad, throw herself out a window. "If I leave her, if I stop watching over her, she'll tell him everything. And who knows? Maybe, for all the wealth she's brought him, he could turn her into a slave. She's capable of telling the whole thing, good Lord! to that son of a...that priest, Father Maslon, who'll use the death of a six-year-old child as an excuse for moving into this house, and never leaving, nor will that be an accident. In her grief and her fear of God, she'll forget everything she knows about the man, and all she'll see will be the priest." "Go away," Madame de Rênal suddenly said to him, opening her eyes. "I'd give my life a thousand times over," answered Julien, "if I knew what would be best for you. I have never been so loved, my dear angel, and perhaps only at this very moment have I begun, as never before, to adore you as you deserve. Should I go away from you, knowing you're miserable because of me! But my pain shouldn't matter. Yes, my love: I'll leave. But if I do leave you, if I stop watching over you, always putting myself between you and your husband, you'll tell him everything, you'll ruin yourself. Think: He'll drive you from the house, in disgrace; all Verrières, all Besançon, will be chattering about the scandal. All sorts of horrible things will be laid at your door; you'll never recover from the shame..." "This is what I'm asking for," she cried, standing up. "I'll suffer: so much the better." "But what you'll do, if you create that kind of scandal, is spread your misery to him, too!" "But I'll humble myself, I'll throw myself down in the mud—and maybe, doing that, I'll save my son. Humiliation like that, completely in the public eye—maybe that's public penance? Even more than having my weakness publicly judged, isn't that the greatest sacrifice I can offer to God?. .. Maybe He'll look down and accept my humiliation, and leave me my son! Show me a more painful sacrifice, and I'll hurry toward it." "Let me be punished. I'm as guilty as you are. Do you want me to shut myself up in a Trappist monastery? The strict severity of a life like that might appease your God...Ah, heaven! Why can't I take Stanislas's sickness on myself?" "Oh, you love him, you do," said Madame de Rênal, standing once more and throwing herself into his arms. And even as she did so, she pushed him away in horror. "I believe you! I believe you!" she went on, after dropping onto her knees. "Oh, my one and only love! Oh, why aren't you Stanislas's father! Then this wouldn't be the horrible sin of loving you better than I'd love your child." "May I stay here, if I love you only like a brother? That's the only rational atonement; it might appease the Almighty's anger." "And me," she cried, standing up and taking Julien's head in her hands, holding it not too far from her eyes. "And me, will I love you as if you were my brother? Could I ever love you like a brother?" Julien began to weep. "I'll obey you," he said, falling at her feet. "I'll obey you no matter what you order me to do. That's all I'm capable of. My soul is crooked with pride; I see no other way. If I leave you, you'll tell your husband everything; you'll be ruined, and so will he. He'll never be in the Chamber of Deputies, not after such shame. If I stay, you'll think I caused your son's death, and you'll die of grief. Do you want to see what happens, if I do leave? If you like, I'll go and punish myself for our sins, leaving you for a week. I'll spend that week in a retreat—anywhere you like. At the church in Upper Bray, perhaps. Just promise me you'll confess nothing to your husband when I'm away. Consider: If you said I shouldn't, I'd never return." She promised, he left, but after two days was called back.

Chapter Twenty: Anonymous Letters

Julien observed how, after this, Madame de Rênal would reach moments of apparent tranquillity. She was groping for her inner self: she loved him, she had no desire to poison his life. Amid these fluctuating times of love, of remorse, and of pleasure, the days went by, for them, at the speed of light. Julien lost the habit of reflecting, of pondering. Miss Elisa went to Verrières, having some small legal matter to deal with. She found Monsieur Valenod deeply annoyed at Julien. She hated the tutor, and spoke of him often. "You'll ruin me, sir, if I told you the truth!..." she said to Monsieur Valenod one day. "When it comes to really important things, employers always take the same position...None of you ever forgives a poor servant who tells you certain things..." Starting from such conventional phrases, which Monsieur Valenod's impatient curiosity knew how to compress and shorten, he learned things infinitely mortifying to his self-esteem. This woman, the most distinguished in the entire region, around whom he had so carefully and solicitously hovered for six years, unfortunately in the full sight, and the full knowledge, of the whole world—this woman, so proud, whose contempt had so often made him redden all over, had just taken as her lover a petty laborer disguised as a tutor. And to complete his vexation, the director of the Pauper's Bureau also learned that Madame de Rênal adored her lover. "And," the lady's maid added, sighing, "Monsieur Julien scarcely had to lift a finger to achieve this conquest. She's had no effect at all on that fixed coldness of his." Elisa had not known for sure, till they'd gone to the country, but she suspected the affair dated back a good deal further. "That's got to be the reason," she added spitefully, "for his refusing to marry me. And I, like an idiot, I went to Madame de Rênal for advice, begging her to speak to the tutor." That very evening, along with his newspaper, Monsieur de Rênal received a long anonymous letter, informing him in great detail of what had been going on under his roof. Julien saw him turn pale, reading this letter, written on bluish paper, and looking up at the tutor with malevolent glances. And the whole evening, His Honor the Mayor never let go of what was bothering him; Julien wasted his breath, trying to please him, asking about various genealogical details concerning the best families in Burgundy. Chapter Twenty: Anonymous Letters Do not give dalliance Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw To the fire i' the blood. —SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST At midnight, as they were leaving the drawing room, Julien was able to say to his beloved: "We can't see each other, tonight. Your husband is suspicious. I could swear that long communication he was reading, sighing the whole time, was an anonymous letter." Luckily, Julien locked himself in his room. Madame de Rênal had the crazy idea that his warning was just a pretense, that he did not want to see her. She absolutely lost her head, appearing in front of his door at the usual time. Having heard sounds in the corridor, Julien immediately snuffed out his candle. Someone tried to open the door: Was this Madame de Rênal, or was it a jealous husband? Quite early the next day, the cook, who had always watched over Julien, brought him a book, on the cover of which he read the following, written in Italian: "Look at page 130."

Shuddering at her rashness, he found page 130, and there discovered, attached by a pin, the following hastily scribbled letter, bathed in tears and badly written: You didn't want to see me tonight? It's times like this when I think I've never read your soul down to the bottom. Your glances frighten me. I'm afraid of you. My God! Haven't I loved you enough? If that's the way it is, let my husband learn all about our love, and let him shut me up forever in some country prison, far away from my children. Maybe that's what God wants, too. I'll die quickly enough. But you'll be a monster. Don't you love me? Are you tired of my craziness, my confessions, and my guilt, you who utterly lack faith? Would you like to destroy me? Here, I've given you an easy way to do it. Go on, show this letter to everyone in Verrières, or better yet just show it to Monsieur Valenod. Tell him I love you—but no, don't say anything so blasphemous. Tell him I adore you, that my life never began until the day I saw you, that in the wildest moments of my childhood I never so much as dreamed of the happiness I owe you, that I've sacrificed my life for you, that I sacrifice my soul for you. You know that I'm sacrificing much, much more for you. But what does that man understand about sacrifice? Tell him—tell him, just to make him angry, that I defy all the wicked, and there's no longer any ill fortune left in the world, for me, except to see changes in the only person who's keeping me alive. What happiness it would be to lose that life, to offer it as a sacrifice, and never again have to fear for my children! Surely, my dear, if there is an anonymous letter, it comes from that disgusting being who, for six years, has pursued me with his awful voice, his stories about how well he jumps, on horseback, his conceit, and the unending enumeration of all the money he makes. Was there an anonymous letter? My naughty one, that's what I'd like to discuss with you—but no, you did the right thing. Holding you in my arms, perhaps for the last time, I could never have been able to talk sensibly, as I do when I'm alone. From now on, happiness won't be so easy for us. Will that bother you? Yes—on days when you won't get any amusing books from Monsieur Fouqué. It's now all settled: tomorrow—whether there was or wasn't an anonymous letter—I'm going to tell my husband that I've received an anonymous letter, too, and he has to immediately offer you some fantastic sum, and figure out a decent excuse, and send you, at once, back to your father. Alas, my dear! We'll have to be apart for two weeks, perhaps a month! But see? I'll do you justice, you'll suffer as much as I will. But in the end, it's the only way to counterbalance the effect of that anonymous letter. It's not the first my husband's received, and always about me. Alas, how I used to laugh at all that! My sole objective will be to persuade my husband the letter came from Monsieur Valenod. I don't have any doubt he was in fact its author. If you leave the house, be careful to find yourself a place in Verrières. I'll make sure, somehow, that my husband plans to spend two weeks there, to prove to all the fools that there's no coldness between us, he and I. Once you're in Verrières, be sure to be friendly to everyone, even the liberals. I know all the ladies will be after you. Don't be angry at Monsieur Valenod. Don't cut off his ears, as you said you would, one day. On the contrary, be terribly nice to him. The important thing they have to believe, in Verrières, is that you're going to work for him, or for someone else, as a children's tutor. Now there's what my husband will never allow. And suppose he does? Fine! At least you'll live in Verrières, and sometimes I'll see you. Oh Lord! I think I love my children more, just because they love you. What a blow! How will all this end? ... I'm wandering. Anyway, you know what you have to do. Be sweet, be polite, don't be nasty even to the most vulgar

people—I beg you on my knees. They're going to decide our fate. Never forget for a moment that my husband doesn't in any way agree with you, when it comes to what he likes to call public opinion. You're going to supply me with the anonymous letter. Arm yourself with patience, and a pair of scissors. Take a book and cut out the words you need. Then use light glue and stick them on the sheet of bluish paper I've enclosed: it came to me from Monsieur Valenod. Expect that your room will be searched, so burn the pages from which you've cut words. If you can't find the words you want, be patient and put them together, letter by letter. To save you trouble, I've made the anonymous letter very short. Alas! If you don't love me anymore, as I fear, this letter will seem to you very long! ANONYMOUS LETTER MADAME, All your petty intrigues are known, but those who have an interest in curbing them have been notified. Because of a lingering regard for you, I pledge to totally separate you from the little peasant. If you are sufficiently prudent for this, your husband will be given to believe that the notice he received was a deception, and its erroneous nature will be made plain to him. Consider: I have your secret; tremble, wretched woman. From here on you have to walk the straight and narrow: I will be watching you. When you've finished pasting up the words that compose this letter (did you recognize Monsieur Valenod's way of speaking?), go out of the house: I'll meet you. I'll go to the village, and I'll return with a mournful face, which is indeed how I will feel. Good Lord! What am I risking, and all because you thought you'd guessed there was an anonymous letter. In any case, with a hangdog look, I'll give my husband the letter, which someone I didn't recognize will have delivered to me. And you, you go walking under the tall trees, with the children, and don't come back till dinnertime. From up on the rocks, you can see the roof of the pigeon house. If everything went well for us, I'll set out a white handkerchief. If not, there won't be anything. You ingrate: Won't your heart compel you to find some way of telling me you love me before you go for that walk? Whatever may come, be sure of one thing: if we are forever separated, I won't survive for a single day. Ah, you wicked mother! I've just written two empty words, dear Julien. I can't feel them: right now, all I can think of is you. I only wrote them because I don't want you to scold me. Now that I can imagine losing you, what's the point to pretending? Yes! I'd rather you think my soul horrid, than lie to the man I adore! I've done only too much deceiving, in this life of mine. All right: if you don't love me anymore, I forgive you. There's no time for rereading my letter. To me it seems a trivial matter, paying with my life for the joyous days I've spent in your arms. You know that's not all I'll have to pay for. Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we: For such as we are made of, such we be. —Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Julien spent an hour putting together the words, enjoying himself like a child. As he was leaving his room, he met his pupils and their mother. She took the letter with simple naturalness and courage, so calmly that it frightened him. "Is the glue sufficiently dry?" she asked him. "Is this the woman that remorse made so wild?" he thought. "What is she planning right now?" He was too proud to ask her, but—and quite possibly, never—had she been more attractive to him. "If this goes badly," she added with the same cool self-mastery, "they'll take everything I have. Bury this box somewhere on the mountain: one day it may be all I have." She handed him a glass box, covered in red morocco leather, filled with gold and diamonds. "Now go," she told him. She hugged the children, the youngest one twice. Julien did not move. She walked rapidly away, without glancing at him. Ever since opening the anonymous letter, Monsieur de Rênal had suffered frightful agonies. He had not been so agitated since a duel he had just managed to avoid in 1816, and, to do him justice, the thought of being shot had made him less miserable. He scrutinized the letter in every possible way: "Isn't this a woman's handwriting?" he said to himself. "And if it is, what woman wrote it?" He reviewed every woman he knew in Verrières, without being able to settle on any suspect. "Could a man have dictated the letter? Who?" The unknowable factors remained the same. He was a jealous man, and certainly hated by most of those he knew. "I must ask for my wife's advice," he said to himself, out of pure habit, rising from the armchair into which he had sunk. And, barely on his feet: "Good Lord!" he said, slapping himself on the head. "More than anyone, it's she I have to watch out for. Right now, she's my enemy." And anger brought tears to his eyes. An appropriate reward for his flinty-heartedness, regarded by country people as wisdom's only practical path, was that the two men he most keenly mistrusted, at the moment, were also his two most intimate friends. "And then, I have perhaps ten friends," and he thought about them, calculating what sort of consolation he could count on from each. "For all of them! For all of them!" he exclaimed furiously, "my ghastly luck will be an intense delight!" Luckily, he believed he was just as intensely envied, and with good reason. In addition to his superb town house, which the King of ———, by sleeping there, had just forever honored, he had built up, and most handsomely, his château in Vergy. It had been painted white in front, and the windows decorated with lovely green shutters. For a moment, he felt comforted by the very thought of this magnificence. Indeed, this château was visible from a distance of ten miles or more, thus eclipsing all the country houses, or would-be châteaux, in the neighborhood, the humble hues of which had been allowed to go gray with age and weather. Monsieur de Rênal could count on the tears, and the pity, of one of his friends, the parish churchwarden, but he was an imbecile who would cry about anything. Yet this man was his one and only resource. "No one's as miserable as I am!" he cried angrily. "What horrible loneliness! "Can it really be," the man actually started to whine, "can it really be that, with all my woes, I haven't got a single friend I can turn to for advice? Because my brain's unhinged, I know it is! Ah, Falcoz! Ah, Ducros!" he cried bitterly. These were two childhood friends his

arrogance had forever alienated, in 1814.3 They were not aristocrats, and he'd wanted to break away from the spirit of equality in which they had lived since childhood. One, Falcoz, a warmhearted, spirited man, a paper merchant in Verrières, had bought a printing house in the province's largest town and launched a newspaper. The Congregation of the Holy Virgin decided to ruin him: his newspaper had been closed up, his printing license had been revoked. In these difficult circumstances, he tried writing, for the first time in ten years, to Monsieur de Rênal. The mayor of Verrières felt it his duty to respond like an old Roman: "Had the king's minister done me the honor of asking for my advice, I would have told him: 'Have no pity on the printers in this province, ruin them all, and turn printing into a monopoly, exactly like tobacco.' " Monsieur de Rênal remembered the language of this letter to his old friend—which at the time had earned the admiration of all Verrières—with horror. "Who would have said that, for all my social standing, my wealth, my awards and decorations, I'd one day regret it?" He was in the midst of an angry frenzy, directed equally against himself and everything around him, since he'd spent a dreadful night. Luckily, however, he had not thought of spying on his wife. "I'm used to Louise," he told himself. "She knows all my business: if I were free to marry tomorrow, I couldn't replace her." So he soothed himself with the notion that his wife was innocent. This way of looking at things did not require of him any demonstration of character, and it set everything in good order. "After all, how many slandered women have we seen! "What's going on here?" he suddenly exclaimed, while walking wildly up and down. "Why should I let her, and her lover, laugh at me as if I were a nobody, some barefoot beggar? Should everyone in Verrières be gloating at how good-natured I am? What haven't they said about Charmier (who was a local fellow, a notorious cuckold)? As soon as they hear his name, doesn't everybody start grinning? He's a fine lawyer: Whoever says anything about the speeches he makes? 'Ho, Charmier!' they say, ' Barnard's Charmier'—which is what they call him, since that's the name of the other fellow, the man who's disgracing him." "God be praised," said Monsieur de Rênal, at other moments, "that I don't have a daughter: however I decide to punish the children's mother, that won't interfere with any doweries. Maybe I can catch the little peasant with my wife, and kill them both. That way, the tragedy might wipe away all the ridicule." This idea made him smile; he worked it out in full detail. "The penal code is on my side and, no matter what happens, the Congregation of the Holy Virgin and my friends on the jury will save me." He examined his hunting knife, which was very sharp. But the idea of blood frightened him. "I could beat up this arrogant tutor, and run him off. But what a scandal in Verrières, and even in the whole province! After Falcoz's newspaper was shut down, and his editor in chief got out of prison, I was one of those who kept him from getting a job worth six hundred francs. They say this scribbler has had the nerve to show up in Besançon: he could thoroughly thump me, in print, and do it so skillfully I could not sue him. Sue him! ... The arrogant fellow would find a thousand ways of hinting that everything he'd said was true. A well-born man who preserves his social standing is universally hated by the lower classes. I can just see my name in those ghastly Parisian newspapers. Oh God! What a bottomless pit! To see the ancient name of Rênal muddied with the muck of ridicule...If I ever traveled, I'd have to change my name. Ha! Give up this name, which has created my glory and my power! What a heap of wretchedness!