3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

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      M. de Renal, seeing the imminence of a pecuniary sacrifice, was in greater despair than his wife. For her part, after this conversation, she was in the position of a man of feeling who, weary of life, has taken a dose ofstramonium; he ceases to act, save, so to speak, automatically, and no longer takes an interest in anything. Thus Louis XIV on his deathbed was led to say: ‘When I was king.’ An admirable speech!

      On the morrow, at break of day, M. de Renal received an anonymous letter. It was couched in the most insulting style. The coarsest words applicable to his position stared from every line. It was the work of some envious subordinate. This letter brought him back to the thought of fighting a duel with M. Valenod. Soon his courage had risen to the idea of an immediate execution of his design. He left the house unaccompanied, and went to the gunsmith’s to procure a brace of pistols, which he told the man to load.

      ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘should the drastic rule of the Emperor Napoleon be restored, I myself could not be charged with the misappropriation of a halfpenny. At the most I have shut my eyes; but I have plenty of letters in my desk authorising me to do so.’

      Madame de Renal was frightened by her husband’s cold anger, it brought back to her mind the fatal thought of widowhood, which she found it so hard to banish. She shut herself up with him. For hours on end she pleaded with him in vain, the latest anonymous letter had determined him. At length she succeeded in transforming the courage required to strike M. Valenod into that required to offer Julien six hundred francs for his maintenance for one year in a Seminary. M. de Renal, heaping a thousand curses on the day on which he had conceived the fatal idea of taking a tutor into his household, forgot the anonymous letter.

      He found a grain of comfort in an idea which he did not communicate to his wife: by skilful handling, and by taking advantage of the young man’s romantic ideas, he hoped to bind him, for a smaller sum, to refuse M. Valenod’s offers.

      Madame de Renal found it far harder to prove to Julien that, if he sacrificed to her husband’s convenience a post worth eight hundred francs, publicly offered him by the Governor of the Poorhouse, he might without blushing accept some compensation.

      ‘But,’ Julien continued to object, ‘I have never had, even for a moment, the slightest thought of accepting that offer. You have made me too familiar with a life of refinement, the vulgarity of those people would kill me.’

      Cruel necessity, with its hand of iron, bent Julien’s will. His pride offered him the self-deception of accepting only as a loan the sum offered by the Mayor of Verrieres, and giving him a note of hand promising repayment with interest after five years.

      Madame de Renal had still some thousands of francs hidden in the little cave in the mountains.

      She offered him these, trembling, and feeling only too sure that they would be rejected with fury.

      ‘Do you wish,’ Julien asked her, ‘to make the memory of our love abominable?’

      At length Julien left Verrieres. M. de Renal was overjoyed; at the decisive moment of accepting money from him, this sacrifice proved to be too great for Julien. He refused point-blank. M. de Renal fell upon his neck, with tears in his eyes. Julien having asked him for a testimonial to his character, he could not in his enthusiasm find terms laudatory enough to extol the young man’s conduct. Our hero had saved up five louis and intended to ask Fouque for a similar amount.

      He was greatly moved. But when he had gone a league from Verrieres, where he was leaving such a treasure of love behind him, he thought only of the pleasure of seeing a capital, a great military centre like Besancon.

      During this short parting of three days, Madame de Renal was duped by one of love’s most cruel illusions. Her life was tolerable enough, there was between her and the last extremes of misery this final meeting that she was still to have with Julien.

      She counted the hours, the minutes that divided her from it. Finally, during the night that followed the third day, she heard in the distance the signal arranged between them. Having surmounted a thousand perils, Julien appeared before her.

      >From that moment, she had but a single thought: ‘I am looking at you now for the last time.’ Far from responding to her lover’s eagerness, she was like a barely animated corpse. If she forced herself to tell him that she loved him, it was with an awkward air that was almost a proof to the contrary. Nothing could take her mind from the cruel thought of eternal separation. The suspicious Julien fancied for a moment that she had already forgotten him. His hints at such a possibility were received only with huge tears that flowed in silence, and with a convulsive pressure of his hand.

      ‘But, Great God! How do you expect me to believe you?’ was Julien’s reply to his mistress’s chill protestations. ‘You would show a hundred times more of sincere affection to Madame Derville, to a mere acquaintance.’

      Madame de Renal, petrified, did not know how to answer.

      ‘It would be impossible for a woman to be more wretched . . . I hope I am going to die . . . I feel my heart freezing . . . ’

      Such were the longest answers he was able to extract from her.

      When the approach of day made his departure necessary, Madame de Renal’s tears ceased all at once. She saw him fasten a knotted cord to the window without saying a word, without returning his kisses. In vain might Julien say to her:

      ‘At last we have reached the state for which you so longed. Henceforward you will live without remorse. At the slightest indisposition of one of your children, you will no longer see them already in the grave.’

      ‘I am sorry you could not say good-bye to Stanislas,’ she said to him coldly.

      In the end, Julien was deeply impressed by the embraces, in which there was no warmth, of this living corpse; he could think of nothing else for some leagues. His spirit was crushed, and before crossing the pass, so long as he was able to see the steeple of Verrieres church, he turned round often.

      Chapter 24

      A CAPITAL

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      So much noise, so many busy people! So many ideas in the head of a man of twenty! So many distractions for love!

      BARNAVE

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      AT LENGTH HE MADE OUT, on a distant mountain, a line of dark walls; it was the citadel of Besancon. ‘How different for me,’ he said with a sigh, ‘if I were arriving in this noble fortress to be a sublieutenant in one of the regiments entrusted with its defence!’

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