Chương Chương 7 · THE ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

. THE ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

They only manage to touch the heart by wounding it.--_A

Modern_.

The children adored him, but he did not like them in the least. His

thoughts were elsewhere. But nothing which the little brats ever did

made him lose his patience. Cold, just and impassive, and none the less

liked, inasmuch his arrival had more or less driven ennui out of the

house, he was a good tutor. As for himself, he felt nothing but hate

and abhorrence for that good society into which he had been admitted;

admitted, it is true at the bottom of the table, a circumstance which

perhaps explained his hate and his abhorrence. There were certain

'full-dress' dinners at which he was scarcely able to control his

hate for everything that surrounded him. One St. Louis feast day in

particular, when M. Valenod was monopolizing the conversation of M.

de Rênal, Julien was on the point of betraying himself. He escaped

into the garden on the pretext of finding the children. "What praise

of honesty," he exclaimed. "One would say that was the only virtue,

and yet think how they respect and grovel before a man who has almost

doubled and trebled his fortune since he has administered the poor

fund. I would bet anything that he makes a profit even out of the

monies which are intended for the foundlings of these poor creatures

whose misery is even more sacred than that of others. Oh, Monsters!

Monsters! And I too, am a kind of foundling, hated as I am by my

father, my brothers, and all my family."

Some days before the feast of St. Louis, when Julien was taking a

solitary walk and reciting his breviary in the little wood called

the Belvedere, which dominates the _Cours de la Fidélité_, he had

endeavoured in vain to avoid his two brothers whom he saw coming along

in the distance by a lonely path. The jealousy of these coarse workmen

had been provoked to such a pitch by their brother's fine black suit,

by his air of extreme respectability, and by the sincere contempt which

he had for them, that they had beaten him until he had fainted and was

bleeding all over.

Madame de Rênal, who was taking a walk with M. de Rênal and the

sub-prefect, happened to arrive in the little wood. She saw Julien

lying on the ground and thought that he was dead. She was so overcome

that she made M. Valenod jealous.

His alarm was premature. Julien found Madame de Rênal very pretty, but

he hated her on account of her beauty, for that had been the first

danger which had almost stopped his career.

He talked to her as little as possible, in order to make her forget the

transport which had induced him to kiss her hand on the first day.

Madame de Rênal's housemaid, Elisa, had lost no time in falling

in love with the young tutor. She often talked about him to her

mistress. Elisa's love had earned for Julien the hatred of one of the

men-servants. One day he heard the man saying to Elisa, "You haven't

a word for me now that this dirty tutor has entered the household."

The insult was undeserved, but Julien with the instinctive vanity of a

pretty boy redoubled his care of his personal appearance. M. Valenod's

hate also increased. He said publicly, that it was not becoming for a

young abbé to be such a fop.

Madame de Rênal observed that Julien talked more frequently than usual

to Mademoiselle Elisa. She learnt that the reason of these interviews

was the poverty of Julien's extremely small wardrobe. He had so little

linen that he was obliged to have it very frequently washed outside the

house, and it was in these little matters that Elisa was useful to him.

Madame de Rênal was touched by this extreme poverty which she had never

suspected before. She was anxious to make him presents, but she did not

dare to do so. This inner conflict was the first painful emotion that

Julien had caused her. Till then Julien's name had been synonymous with

a pure and quite intellectual joy. Tormented by the idea of Julien's

poverty, Madame de Rênal spoke to her husband about giving him some

linen for a present.

"What nonsense," he answered, "the very idea of giving presents to a

man with whom we are perfectly satisfied and who is a good servant. It

will only be if he is remiss that we shall have to stimulate his zeal."

Madame de Rênal felt humiliated by this way of looking at things,

though she would never have noticed it in the days before Julien's

arrival. She never looked at the young abbé's attire, with its

combination of simplicity and absolute cleanliness, without saying to

herself, "The poor boy, how can he manage?"

Little by little, instead of being shocked by all Julien's

deficiencies, she pitied him for them.

Madame de Rênal was one of those provincial women whom one is apt

to take for fools during the first fortnight of acquaintanceship.

She had no experience of the world and never bothered to keep up the

conversation. Nature had given her a refined and fastidious soul,

while that instinct for happiness which is innate in all human beings

caused her, as a rule, to pay no attention to the acts of the coarse

persons in whose midst chance had thrown her. If she had received the

slightest education, she would have been noticeable for the spontaneity

and vivacity of her mind, but being an heiress, she had been brought

up in a Convent of Nuns, who were passionate devotees of the _Sacred

Heart of Jesus_ and animated by a violent hate for the French as being

the enemies of the Jesuits. Madame de Rênal had had enough sense to

forget quickly all the nonsense which she had learned at the convent,

but had substituted nothing for it, and in the long run knew nothing.

The flatteries which had been lavished on her when still a child, by

reason of the great fortune of which she was the heiress, and a decided

tendency to passionate devotion, had given her quite an inner life of

her own. In spite of her pose of perfect affability and her elimination

of her individual will which was cited as a model example by all the

husbands in Verrières and which made M. de Rênal feel very proud, the

moods of her mind were usually dictated by a spirit of the most haughty

discontent.

Many a princess who has become a bye-word for pride has given

infinitely more attention to what her courtiers have been doing around

her than did this apparently gentle and demure woman to anything which

her husband either said or did. Up to the time of Julien's arrival she

had never really troubled about anything except her children. Their

little maladies, their troubles, their little joys, occupied all the

sensibility of that soul, who, during her whole life, had adored no one

but God, when she had been at the Sacred Heart of Besançon.

A feverish attack of one of her sons would affect her almost as deeply

as if the child had died, though she would not deign to confide

in anyone. A burst of coarse laughter, a shrug of the shoulders,

accompanied by some platitude on the folly of women, had been the only

welcome her husband had vouchsafed to those confidences about her

troubles, which the need of unburdening herself had induced her to make

during the first years of their marriage. Jokes of this kind, and above

all, when they were directed at her children's ailments, were exquisite

torture to Madame de Rênal. And these jokes were all she found to take

the place of those exaggerated sugary flatteries with which she had

been regaled at the Jesuit Convent where she had passed her youth. Her

education had been given her by suffering. Too proud even to talk to

her friend, Madame Derville, about troubles of this kind, she imagined

that all men were like her husband, M. Valenod, and the sub-prefect,

M. Charcot de Maugiron. Coarseness, and the most brutal callousness to

everything except financial gain, precedence, or orders, together with

blind hate of every argument to which they objected, seemed to her as

natural to the male sex as wearing boots and felt hats.

After many years, Madame de Rênal had still failed to acclimatize

herself to those monied people in whose society she had to live.

Hence the success of the little peasant Julien. She found in the

sympathy of this proud and noble soul a sweet enjoyment which had all

the glamour and fascination of novelty.

Madame de Rênal soon forgave him that extreme ignorance, which

constituted but an additional charm, and the roughness of his manner

which she succeeded in correcting. She thought that he was worth

listening to, even when the conversation turned on the most ordinary

events, even in fact when it was only a question of a poor dog which

had been crushed as he crossed the street by a peasant's cart going

at a trot. The sight of the dog's pain made her husband indulge in

his coarse laugh, while she noticed Julien frown, with his fine black

eyebrows which were so beautifully arched.

Little by little, it seemed to her that generosity, nobility of soul

and 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 Rênal 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 Verrières, 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 Rênal 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 Rênal's face cleared.

"It would also be a black mark," continued Julien in a more humble

tone, "against a poor theology student if it ever leaked out that his

name had been on the ledger of a bookseller who let out books. The

Liberals might go so far as to accuse me of having asked for the most

infamous books. Who knows if they will not even go so far as to write

the titles of those perverse volumes after my name?" But Julien was

getting off the track. He noticed that the Mayor's physiognomy was

re-assuming its expression of embarrassment and displeasure. Julien was

silent. "I have caught my man," he said to himself.

It so happened that a few days afterwards the elder of the children

asked Julien, in M. de Rênal's presence, about a book which had been

advertised in the _Quotidienne_.

"In order to prevent the Jacobin Party having the slightest pretext for

a score," said the young tutor, "and yet give me the means of answering

M. de Adolphe's question, you can make your most menial servant take

out a subscription at the booksellers."

"That's not a bad idea," said M. de Rênal, who was obviously very

delighted.

"You will have to stipulate all the same," said Julien in that solemn

and almost melancholy manner which suits some people so well when they

see the realization of matters which they have desired for a long time

past, "you will have to stipulate that the servant should not take out

any novels. Those dangerous books, once they got into the house, might

corrupt Madame de Rênal's maids, and even the servant himself."

"You are forgetting the political pamphlets," went on M. de Rênal with

an important air. He was anxious to conceal the admiration with which

the cunning "middle course" devised by his children's tutor had filled

him.

In this way Julien's life was made up of a series of little acts of

diplomacy, and their success gave him far more food for thought than

the marked manifestation of favouritism which he could have read at any

time in Madame de Rênal's heart, had he so wished.

The psychological position in which he had found himself all his

life was renewed again in the mayor of Verrières' house. Here in the

same way as at his father's saw-mill, he deeply despised the people

with whom he lived, and was hated by them. He saw every day in the

conversation of the sub-perfect, M. Valenod and the other friends of

the family, about things which had just taken place under their very

eyes, how little ideas corresponded to reality. If an action seemed to

Julien worthy of admiration, it was precisely that very action which

would bring down upon itself the censure of the people with whom he

lived. His inner mental reply always was, "What beasts or what fools!"

The joke was that, in spite of all his pride, he often understood

absolutely nothing what they were talking about.

Throughout his whole life he had only spoken sincerely to the old

Surgeon-Major.

The few ideas he had were about Buonaparte's Italian Campaigns or else

surgery. His youthful courage revelled in the circumstantial details of

the most terrible operations. He said to himself.

"I should not have flinched."

The first time that Madame de Rênal tried to enter into conversation

independently of the children's education, he began to talk of surgical

operations. She grew pale and asked him to leave off. Julien knew

nothing beyond that.

So it came about that, though he passed his life in Madame de Rênal's

company, the most singular silence would reign between them as soon as

they were alone.

When he was in the salon, she noticed in his eyes, in spite of all the

humbleness of his demeanour, an air of intellectual superiority towards

everyone who came to visit her. If she found herself alone with him for

a single moment, she saw that he was palpably embarrassed. This made

her feel uneasy, for her woman's instinct caused her to realise that

this embarrassment was not inspired by any tenderness.

Owing to some mysterious idea, derived from some tale of good society,

such as the old Surgeon-Major had seen it, Julien felt humiliated

whenever the conversation languished on any occasion when he found

himself in a woman's society, as though the particular pause were his

own special fault. This sensation was a hundred times more painful in

_tête-à-tête_. His imagination, full as it was of the most extravagant

and most Spanish ideas of what a man ought to say when he is alone

with a woman, only suggested to the troubled youth things which were

absolutely impossible. His soul was in the clouds. Nevertheless he was

unable to emerge from this most humiliating silence. Consequently,

during his long walks with Madame de Rênal and the children, the

severity of his manner was accentuated by the poignancy of his

sufferings. He despised himself terribly. If, by any luck, he made

himself speak, he came out with the most absurd things. To put the

finishing touch on his misery, he saw his own absurdity and exaggerated

its extent, but what he did not see was the expression in his eyes,

which were so beautiful and betokened so ardent a soul, that like good

actors, they sometimes gave charm to something which is really devoid

of it.

Madame de Rênal noticed that when he was alone with her he never

chanced to say a good thing except when he was taken out of himself

by some unexpected event, and consequently forgot to try and turn a

compliment. As the friends of the house did not spoil her by regaling

her with new and brilliant ideas, she enjoyed with delight all the

flashes of Julien's intellect.

After the fall of Napoleon, every appearance of gallantry has been

severely exiled from provincial etiquette. People are frightened of

losing their jobs. All rascals look to the religious order for support,

and hypocrisy has made firm progress even among the Liberal classes.

One's ennui is doubled. The only pleasures left are reading and

agriculture.

Madame de Rênal, the rich heiress of a devout aunt, and married at

sixteen to a respectable gentleman, had never felt or seen in her whole

life anything that had the slightest resemblance in the whole world

to love. Her confessor, the good curé Chélan, had once mentioned love

to her, in discussing the advances of M. de Valenod, and had drawn so

loathsome a picture of the passion that the word now stood to her for

nothing but the most abject debauchery. She had regarded love, such

as she had come across it, in the very small number of novels with

which chance had made her acquainted, as an exception if not indeed as

something absolutely abnormal. It was, thanks to this ignorance, that

Madame de Rênal, although incessantly absorbed in Julien, was perfectly

happy, and never thought of reproaching herself in the slightest.