4 Monsieur de Rênal's social clubs. In France, especially in the nineteenth century, "casino" referred not necessarily to a gambling establishment but more generally to a place designated for public entertainments, i.e., concerts, dancing, cards, etc.
Chapter Twenty-One: Conversation with the Head of the House
"My fate," she said to herself, "depends on what he'll think, listening to me. After that fatal fifteen minutes, perhaps I'll never speak to him again. He's not someone either wise or rational. With my own limited intelligence, I should be able to anticipate what he'll do or say. He will decide our shared fate; he has the power. But that fate hangs on my ability to direct such a temperamental creature's thoughts, blinded by anger, blocked from seeing half of whatever's there to be seen. Oh Lord! I'll need ability, I'll need self-control. Where will I get them?" Entering the garden, and seeing her husband in the distance, she found that calm, as if by magic. His wild hair and rumpled clothing showed he had not slept. She handed him the letter, unsealed but refolded. Without opening it, he stared at his wife with demented eyes. "Here is an abomination," she told him, "handed to me by some shabby fellow, who pretended he knew you and you would recognize him, as I went by the notary's garden. I ask only one thing of you, which is that you send this Monsieur Julien back to his father, and without any delay." Madame de Rênal hurried to say these words, perhaps speaking a bit too soon, in order to free herself of the horrible prospect of having to say them. She was thrilled, seeing the effect she'd had on her husband. From the fixed look with which he stared at her, she understood that Julien had guessed correctly. "Instead of torturing himself with so real a misfortune, what genius he showed!" she thought. "What perfect tact! And in a young man still of so little experience! Where won't he get to, later on? Alas, his successes will make him forget me." Suddenly, this small tribute to the man she adored freed her of her difficulties. She congratulated herself on this development. "I haven't been unworthy of him," she told herself, with a sweet and intimate delight. Without saying a word, for fear of committing himself, Monsieur de Rênal looked over this second anonymous letter, written—as my reader may recall—in printed words, pasted on a light blue sheet of paper. "They're making fun of me in all sorts of ways," Monsieur de Rênal said to himself, worn out by fatigue. "Still more insults to look at, and always on my wife's account!" He was at the point of shouting the most vulgar insults at her, hardly restrained by the thought of the Besançon inheritance. Consumed by the need to attack her for something, he crumpled up the second letter and set himself to walking very fast; he needed to get away from his wife. A few moments later, he came back to her, and more calmly. "It's a question of making a decision and sending Julien away," she said to him at once. "After all, he's a workman's son. You can compensate him with a handful of gold coins, and, besides, he's a scholar and he can easily place himself elsewhere—for example, with Monsieur Valenod or at Monsieur de Maugiron's house; they both have children. That way, you won't do him any harm..." "You talk like the fool you are," shouted Monsieur de Rênal, in a frightening voice. "How can anyone expect good sense from a woman? You never pay any attention to rationality: How could you know a thing? Your indifference, your laziness, require you to do no more than chase butterflies—weak beings we're cursed to have in our families!..." Madame de Rênal let him talk, and he talked for a long time. He got over his anger, as they say in the country. "Sir," she finally said to him, "I speak as a woman whose honor has been violated—in other words, the most precious thing a woman possesses." Madame de Rênal maintained unyielding self-control, all through this painful conversation, on which depended the possibility of her continuing to live under the same roof
The Red and the Black
as Julien. She groped for ideas most capable of guiding her husband's blind anger. She'd paid no attention to all the wounding comments he'd addressed to her; she did not hear them; all she thought about was Julien. "Will he be pleased with me?" "This little peasant on whom we have lavished kindness, and even gifts, may well be innocent," she finally said. "But nonetheless, he's at least been the occasion for the first insults I've ever received...Sir! When I read that awful piece of paper, I promised myself that either he left our house, or I would. "Do you propose to create a scandal, which will dishonor me, and you as well? You'll thrill the good folk of Verrières. "It's true: there is universal jealousy for the prosperity your administration, in its wisdom, has attained for you, for your family, and for the town...Well! I'll get Julien to see you about taking a month's leave, at that timber merchant's place on the mountain—a worthy friend for a little workman." "Don't get excited," replied Monsieur de Rênal, now pleasantly calm. "What I ask of you, above all, is that you do not speak to him. You'll make him angry, and get me into a quarrel with him. You know how touchy this little fellow is." "The young man has absolutely no tact," answered Madame de Rênal. "He may be a scholar: you know more about that than I do. But at bottom he's a genuine peasant. Frankly, I've never thought well of him ever since he refused to marry Elisa, which would have been a guaranteed fortune, and his excuse for so doing was that, in secret, she paid visits to Monsieur Valenod." "Ah!" said Monsieur de Rênal, his eyebrows raised unusually high. "What, did Julien tell you that?" "No, not exactly. He's always talked about his vocation, his call for the holy ministry. But believe me, the primary vocation for people like him is having enough to eat. He led me to understand, pretty clearly, that he couldn't ignore these secret visits." "And me, I had to be ignorant of them!" exclaimed Monsieur de Rênal, flaring up once again, and stressing every syllable. "Things go on in my house that I know nothing about...What's this? Is there something between Elisa and Monsieur Valenod?" "Ha! That's old news, my dear," said Madame de Rênal, laughing, "and maybe nothing wrong happened. It was when your good friend Valenod wouldn't have been sorry if it were thought, in Verrières, that he and I were having—purely platonically, mind you—a bit of a love affair." "Which is what I thought, once," cried Monsieur de Rênal, angrily slapping his head, proceeding from one discovery to another. "And you never said anything to me about it?" "Is there any point to making two friends quarrel, just because of our dear Valenod's little flush of vanity? Show me the woman in society who hasn't received letters that were witty, and even a touch gallant?" "He wrote to you?" "He wrote a lot." "Show me those letters—immediately. I command it." And Monsieur de Rênal grew six feet taller. "I've kept them, indeed," she answered, with a sweetness verging on indifference. "I'll show them to you someday, when you're more sensible." "Right now, by all that's holy!" Monsieur de Rênal shouted, made drunk with anger—and yet happier than he had been in the last twelve hours. "Promise me," said Madame de Rênal seriously, "that you won't quarrel with Monsieur Valenod about these letters?"
Chapter Twenty-One: Conversation with the Head of the House
"Quarrel or no quarrel, I can take the foundling home away from him. But," he went on, furious, "I want those letters right now. Where are they?" "In a drawer in my writing desk. But you may be sure I won't give you the key." "I'll damn well break it," he shouted, running to his wife's room. He broke it, in fact, with an iron bar—a precious carved mahogany writing desk, brought from Paris, which he used to polish, often, with his coattail, whenever he thought he'd seen a little spot. Madame de Rênal went running up the hundred and twenty steps to the pigeon house; she tied the corner of a white handkerchief to the little window's iron bars. She was the very happiest of women. With tears in her eyes, she looked out toward the great woods of the mountain. "Surely," she told herself, "from under one of those shaggy birches, Julien can make out this happy signal." She listened for a long time, then cursed the noisy monotone of crickets and birdsongs. Without these insistent sounds, a cry of joy, sent from the high rocks, would have reached exactly where she stood. Her greedy eyes devoured the huge, dark green slope, smooth as a meadow, shaped by the treetops. "Why hasn't he got the wit," she asked herself, waiting all expectant, "to think of some signal, so he can tell me his happiness is as great as mine?" She did not come down until she began to be afraid her husband might come looking for her. She found him wildly angry. He tore through Monsieur Valenod's bland phrases, not meant to be read with so much emotion. Seizing a moment when her husband's emphatic performance gave her a chance to be understood: "I keep coming back to my idea," Madame de Rênal declared, "that Julien really ought to go on a trip. Whatever skill he may have at Latin, he remains, after all, only a peasant, frequently coarse and deficient in tact: every day, thinking himself terribly polite, he makes me exaggerated compliments, in poor taste, that he's learned by heart from some novel..." "He never reads them," Monsieur de Rênal exclaimed. "I guarantee that. Do you fancy I run this house like a blind man, who has no awareness of what's going on?" "All right! If he hasn't read these silly compliments, then he makes them up, and all the worse for him. In Verrières, too, he must have spoken to me like that...and though I can't quite be sure," said Madame de Rênal, "he must have spoken to Elisa that way: it's how she must sometimes have talked to Monsieur Valenod." "Ah!" shouted Monsieur de Rênal, shaking the table and the entire room by one of the fiercest fist-pounding blows ever struck. "The anonymous letter, with those cut-out words, is written on the same paper as Valenod's letters to you." "At last!..." thought Madame de Rênal. She made herself seem thunderstruck by this discovery, and, not having the courage to add a single word, went to the sofa, far away at the other end of the drawing room, and sat down. But the battle was already won. She had her hands full, stopping Monsieur de Rênal from going to the anonymous letter's supposed author. "Why don't you see that making a scene, without full and sufficient proof, would be to give Monsieur Valenod a signal of the greatest possible clumsiness? You are envied, sir, and who is to blame? Your own abilities: your wise administration, the tasteful construction work you've had done, the fine dowry I brought you, and above all the large inheritance we can expect from my aunt—an inheritance which is made to seem far more important than it is— have made you Verrières's leading man." "You forget my birth," said Monsieur de Rênal, smiling a bit.
The Red and the Black
"You are one of the most distinguished gentlemen in the province," Madame de Rênal emphatically reaffirmed. "If the king were entirely free, and able to do justice to high breeding, you could imagine yourself, without any doubt whatever, in the House of Lords, etc. And being in so magnificent a position, you propose to give jealousy an occasion for comment? "To speak to Monsieur Valenod is to proclaim to all Verrières—no, what am I saying? to Besançon, to the whole province—that this minor shopkeeper, who has been admitted, perhaps unwisely, to intimacy with a Rênal, has found a way of insulting you. If these letters, which you've now obtained, were to prove I'd responded to Monsieur Valenod's lovemaking, you'd be obliged to kill me, and I'd deserve it a hundred times over—but not to confront him in anger. Think: All your neighbors need no more than an excuse, they've been waiting for revenge on your superiority. Think: In 18165 you played a part in certain people's arrest. That man who was hiding on his roof—" "What I think is that you feel neither respect nor goodwill toward me," exclaimed Monsieur de Rênal, with all the bitterness that such a memory revived. "And I was never made a peer!"6 "What I think, my dear," Madame de Rênal responded, laughing, "is that I will be richer than you, that I've been your companion for twelve years, and that on all these matters I'm entitled to have a voice, and above all in today's business. If you'd rather have Monsieur Julien than me," she added with poorly masked displeasure, "I'm prepared to spend the winter with my aunt." She phrased it masterfully, displaying a steadiness that was acting as if it were struggling to wrap itself in politeness. It was decisive for Monsieur de Rênal. Still, observing country procedures, he went on talking for a long time, reviewing all the arguments; his wife allowed him to talk: there was still anger in his voice. In the end, two hours of pointless jabbering exhausted the strength of a man who had been dealing with anger the whole night. He settled the approach he would take to Monsieur Valenod, to Julien, and even to Elisa. Once or twice, during this great scene, Madame de Rênal was close to some degree of compassion, on account of the man's very real misery: he had been close to her for twelve years. But genuine passion is egotistic. Besides, from minute to minute she'd been waiting for him to acknowledge last night's anonymous letter, and there had been no such acknowledgment. Madame de Rênal's safety was not certain, lacking information about what ideas might have been suggested to this man, on whom her fate depended. In the countryside, of course, husbands are in charge of opinion. A moaning and groaning husband covers himself with ridicule (though from day to day this becomes less of a risk, in France), but his wife, if he refuses her money, lapses into the condition of a workman making fifteen cents a day, and respectable people are not always willing to hire her. A harem slave can surely love her sultan; he is all-powerful; she has no hope of stealing his authority by a series of small subtleties. The household sultan can wreak terrible, bloody vengeance, but soldierlike, gracious: one dagger thrust, and it's all over. But in this nineteenth century, husbands kill their wives with public scorn—that is, by having all drawing rooms closed to them. Madame de Rênal's awareness of danger was vividly heightened as soon as she returned to her room. She was shocked by how chaotic everything had become. The locks on every single one of her pretty little boxes had been broken; several of the thin parquet floorboards had