The Red and the Black (World's Classics Series). Stendhal

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СКАЧАТЬ humanity were to be found in nobody else except this young abbé. She felt for him all the sympathy and even all the admiration which those virtues excite in well-born souls.

      If the scene had been Paris, Julien's position towards Madame de Rênal would have been soon simplified. But at Paris, love is a creature of novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would soon have found the elucidation of their position in three or four novels, and even in the couplets of the Gymnase Theatre. The novels which have traced out for them the part they would play, and showed them the model which they were to imitate, and Julien would sooner or later have been forced by his vanity to follow that model, even though it had given him no pleasure and had perhaps actually gone against the grain.

      If the scene had been laid in a small town in Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest episode would have been rendered crucial by the fiery condition of the atmosphere. But under our more gloomy skies, a poor young man who is only ambitious because his natural refinement makes him feel the necessity of some of those joys which only money can give, can see every day a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, is absorbed in her children, and never goes to novels for her examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens gradually, in the provinces where there is far more naturalness.

      Madame de Rênal was often overcome to the point of tears when she thought of the young tutor's poverty. Julien surprised her one day actually crying.

      "Oh Madame! has any misfortune happened to you?"

      "No, my friend," she answered, "call the children, let us go for a walk."

      She took his arm and leant on it in a manner that struck Julien as singular. It was the first time she had called Julien "My friend."

      Towards the end of the walk, Julien noticed that she was blushing violently. She slackened her pace.

      "You have no doubt heard," she said, "without looking at him, that I am the only heiress of a very rich aunt who lives at Besançon. She loads me with presents.… My sons are getting on so wonderfully that I should like to ask you to accept a small present as a token of my gratitude. It is only a matter of a few louis to enable you to get some linen. But—" she added, blushing still more, and she left off speaking—

      "But what, Madame?" said Julien.

      "It is unnecessary," she went on lowering her head, "to mention this to my husband."

      "I may not be big, Madame, but I am not mean," answered Julien, stopping, and drawing himself up to his full height, with his eyes shining with rage, "and this is what you have not realised sufficiently. I should be lower than a menial if I were to put myself in the position of concealing from M de. Rênal anything at all having to do with my money."

      Madame de Rênal was thunderstruck.

      "The Mayor," went on Julien, "has given me on five occasions sums of thirty-six francs since I have been living in his house. I am ready to show any account-book to M. de Rênal and anyone else, even to M. Valenod who hates me."

      As the result of this outburst, Madame de Renal remained pale and nervous, and the walk ended without either one or the other finding any pretext for renewing the conversation. Julien's proud heart had found it more and more impossible to love Madame de Rênal.

      As for her, she respected him, she admired him, and she had been scolded by him. Under the pretext of making up for the involuntary humiliation which she had caused him, she indulged in acts of the most tender solicitude. The novelty of these attentions made Madame de Rênal happy for eight days. Their effect was to appease to some extent Julien's anger. He was far from seeing anything in them in the nature of a fancy for himself personally.

      "That is just what rich people are," he said to himself—"they snub you and then they think they can make up for everything by a few monkey tricks."

      Madame de Rênal's heart was too full, and at the same time too innocent, for her not too tell her husband, in spite of her resolutions not to do so, about the offer she had made to Julien, and the manner in which she had been rebuffed.

      "How on earth," answered M. de Rênal, keenly piqued, "could you put up with a refusal on the part of a servant,"—and, when Madame de Rênal protested against the word "Servant," "I am using, madam, the words of the late Prince of Condé, when he presented his Chamberlains to his new wife. 'All these people' he said 'are servants.' I have also read you this passage from the Memoirs of Besenval, a book which is indispensable on all questions of etiquette. 'Every person, not a gentleman, who lives in your house and receives a salary is your servant.' I'll go and say a few words to M. Julien and give him a hundred francs."

      "Oh, my dear," said Madame De Rênal trembling, "I hope you won't do it before the servants!"

      "Yes, they might be jealous and rightly so," said her husband as he took his leave, thinking of the greatness of the sum.

      Madame de Rênal fell on a chair almost fainting in her anguish. He is going to humiliate Julien, and it is my fault! She felt an abhorrence for her husband and hid her face in her hands. She resolved that henceforth she would never make any more confidences.

      When she saw Julien again she was trembling all over. Her chest was so cramped that she could not succeed in pronouncing a single word. In her embarrassment she took his hands and pressed them.

      "Well, my friend," she said to him at last, "are you satisfied with my husband?"

      "How could I be otherwise," answered Julien, with a bitter smile, "he has given me a hundred francs."

      Madame de Rênal looked at him doubtfully.

      "Give me your arm," she said at last, with a courageous intonation that Julien had not heard before.

      She dared to go as far as the shop of the bookseller of Verrieres, in spite of his awful reputation for Liberalism. In the shop she chose ten louis worth of books for a present for her sons. But these books were those which she knew Julien was wanting. She insisted on each child writing his name then and there in the bookseller's shop in those books which fell to his lot. While Madame de Rênal was rejoicing over the kind reparation which she had had the courage to make to Julien, the latter was overwhelmed with astonishment at the quantity of books which he saw at the bookseller's. He had never dared to enter so profane a place. His heart was palpitating. Instead of trying to guess what was passing in Madame de Rênal's heart he pondered deeply over the means by which a young theological student could procure some of those books. Eventually it occurred to him that it would be possible, with tact, to persuade M. de Rênal that one of the proper subjects of his sons' curriculum would be the history of the celebrated gentlemen who had been born in the province. After a month of careful preparation Julien witnessed the success of this idea. The success was so great that he actually dared to risk mentioning to M. de Rênal in conversation, a matter which the noble mayor found disagreeable from quite another point of view. The suggestion was to contribute to the fortune of a Liberal by taking a subscription at the bookseller's. M. de Renal agreed that it would be wise to give his elder son a first hand acquaintance with many works which he would hear mentioned in conversation when he went to the Military School.

      But Julien saw that the mayor had determined to go no further. He suspected some secret reason but could not guess it.

      "I was thinking, sir," he said to him one day, "that it would be highly undesirable for the name of so good a gentleman as a Rênal to appear on a bookseller's dirty ledger." M. de Renal's face cleared.

      "It would also be a black mark," continued Julien in a more humble tone, "against a poor theology СКАЧАТЬ