The Red and the Black (38 page)

be done with this enormous ladder?' she asked her lover; 'where are
we to hide it? I'm going to take it up to the attic,' she exclaimed
all of a sudden somewhat playfully.

'But you have to go through the manservant's room,' Julien in astonishment.

'I'll leave the ladder in the corridor, I'll call the servant and send him off on an errand.'

'Make sure you think up something to say in case the servant notices the ladder in the corridor as he goes past.'

'Yes, my angel,' said M
^me
de Rênal, giving him a kiss. 'And you make sure you hide under the
bed pretty quick if Elisa comes in here while I'm gone.'

Julien was astonished at this sudden gaiety. So, he thought, when
some material danger is at hand, far from worrying her, it restores
her gaiety because she forgets her remorse! What a truly superior
woman! All! there's a heart where it's glorious to reign! Julien was
delighted.

M
^me
de Rênal
took hold of the ladder; it was clearly too heavy for her. Julien was
making his way over to help her, admiring her elegant figure which
proclaimed the very opposite of strength, when suddenly, without any
assistance, she seized the ladder and removed it as she might have
done a chair. She carried it rapidly to the corridor on the third
floor, where she laid it on its side along the wall. She called the
servant, and to give him time to get dressed, she went up to the
dovecot. Five minutes later when she returned to the corridor she
found no ladder there. What had happened to it? If Julien had been
outside the house, this danger would scarcely have bothered her. But
as things stood, what if her husband were to see the ladder! It could
be dreadful. M
^me
de Rênal ran all over the place. At length
she discovered the ladder under the eaves where the servant had taken
and even hidden it. This circumstance was most odd; it would have
alarmed her before.

What do I care,
she thought, what happens in a twenty-four hours' time when Julien has
gone? Won't everything then be sheer horror and remorse for me?

She had a sort of vague feeling that she would have to end her life,
but what of it? After what she had taken to be an eternal separation,
he had been restored to her, she was with

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him again, and what he had done in order to reach her showed such love!

As she recounted the incident of the ladder to Julien:

'What shall I reply to my husband', she said to him, 'if the servant
tells him he's found this ladder?' She mused for a moment. 'It'll take
them twenty-four hours to track down the peasant who sold it to you.'
And flinging herself into Julien's arms and clasping him in a
convulsive embrace: 'Ah! to die, to die like this!' she cried,
smothering him with kisses; 'but you mustn't die of hunger,' she said
laughing.

'Come on; the first thing is for me to hide you in M
^me
Derville's room, which is always kept locked.' She went and stood
guard at the far end of the corridor, and Julien ran across.

'Be careful not to open if anyone knocks,' she said to him as she
locked him in; 'in any case, it would only be the children in jest
while they are playing together.'

'Bring them out into the garden, beneath this window,' said Julien,
'so I can have the pleasure of seeing them; make them talk.'

'Yes, yes,' M
^me
de Rênal called out to him as she went away. She soon returned with
some oranges, some biscuits and a bottle of Malaga wine; it hadn't
been possible for her to steal any bread.

'What's your husband doing?' asked Julien.

'He's drawing up deals with peasants.'

But eight o'clock had struck, and there was noise coming from all over the house. If no one had seen M
^me
de Rênal, they would have looked for her everywhere; she was obliged
to leave him. She was soon back, flying in the face of caution, to
bring him a cup of coffee; she was in fear and trembling lest he die
of hunger. After lunch she managed to bring the children underneath
the window of M
^me
Derville's bedroom. He found them much grown, but they had taken on a common air, or else his ideas had changed.

M
^me
de Rênal talked to them about Julien. The eldest responded warmly and
regretted his old tutor; but it appeared that the younger ones had
almost forgotten him.

M. de Rênal did not go out that morning; he was constantly going up and down stairs all over the house, busily transacting

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deals with peasants to whom he was selling his potato crop. Right up until dinner time M
^me
de Rênal did not have a moment to spare for her prisoner. Once dinner
was announced and served, she took it into her head to make off with a
plate of hot soup for him. As she was silently approaching the door
of the room he was in, carrying this plate with great care, she found
herself face to face with the servant who had hidden the ladder that
morning. At this moment, he too was moving silently along the corridor
as if listening. Julien had probably been walking about unguardedly.
The servant went off in some embarrassment. M
^me
de Rênal went boldly into Julien's room; seeing her made him tremble.

'You're afraid,' she said to him; 'I'm ready to brave all the dangers
in the world without turning a hair. There's only one thing I fear,
it's the moment when I'm alone after you've gone.' And she ran off
again.

'Ah!' said Julien to himself in a state of exaltation, 'remorse is the only danger dreaded by this sublime being!'

At last evening came round. M. de Rênal went to the Casino. His wife
had declared she had a frightful migraine; she withdrew to her room,
hastened to dismiss Elisa, and rapidly got up again to go and let
Julien in.

It appeared that he was genuinely starving. M
^me
de Rênal went to the larder to fetch some bread. Julien heard a loud cry. M
^me
de Rênal returned and told him how when she had gone into the unlit
larder, made her way over to a dresser where the bread was stored, and
stretched out her hand, she had touched a woman's arm. It was Elisa
who had let out the cry that Julien had heard.

'What was she doing there?'

'Stealing a few sweetmeats, or else spying on us,' said M
^me
de Rênal with total indifference. 'But luckily I found a dish of pâté and a large loaf.'

'What's that in there, then?' asked Julien, pointing to the pockets of her apron.

M
^me
de Rênal had forgotten that since dinner they had been full of bread.

Julien clasped her in his arms with the most intense passion; she had never seemed so beautiful to him. Even in Paris, the

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thought ran obscurely through his mind, I'll never manage to meet
such a noble character. She had all the awkwardness of a woman
unaccustomed to ministrations of this sort, and at the same time the
real courage of someone who only fears dangers of another order, ones
that strike an altogether different kind of terror.

While Julien was eating supper with a hearty appetite, and his
beloved was teasing him about the frugality of the meal, for she could
not bear to talk seriously, the door of the room was suddenly rattled
with great force. It was M. de Rênal. 'Why have you locked yourself
in?' he shouted to her. Julien only just had time to slip under the
sofa.

'What! you're fully dressed,
dear!' said M. de Rênal as he came in; 'you're having some supper, and
you've locked your door!'

On any ordinary day this question, uttered in the most formal of conjugal tones, would have alarmed M
^me
de Rênal, but she sensed that her husband only had to bend down a
little to catch sight of Julien; for M. de Rênal had flung himself
onto the chair where Julien had been sitting only a moment ago
opposite the sofa.

The migraine
served as an excuse for everything. While her husband in his turn was
giving her a lengthy blow-by-blow account of the pool he had won at
billiards in the Casino--'a pool of nineteen francs 'pon my word', he
added--she caught sight of Julien's hat, there on a chair right in
front of them. Her nerve strengthened, she began to undress and, at a
certain moment, moving swiftly behind her husband, she flung a dress
over the chair with the hat on it.

At last M. de Rênal left. She begged Julien to begin his account of
his life in the seminary all over again. 'Yesterday I wasn't
listening, all I was thinking about while you were speaking was
forcing myself to send you away.'

She
was recklessness itself. They were talking very loud; it might have
been two in the morning when they were interrupted by a violent thump
on the door. It was M. de Rênal again.

'Let me in right away, there are thieves in the house!' he was saying. ' Saint-Jean found their ladder this morning.'

'This is the end of everything!' cried M
^me
de Rênal, flinging

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herself into Julien's arms. 'He'll kill us both, he doesn't believe
this business about thieves; I'm going to die in your arms, happier in
death than ever I was in life.' She made no move to answer her
husband who was losing his temper; she was passionately kissing
Julien.

'You must save Stanislas's
mother,' he said to her with a look to be obeyed. 'I'm going to jump
into the courtyard from the window of your closet and escape into the
garden, the dogs know me. Fasten my clothes into a bundle and throw it
into the garden as soon as you can. Meanwhile, let your door be
broken open. Above all, don't admit to anything, I veto it; far better
for him to live with suspicions than certainties.'

'You'll be killed when you jump!' was her only reply and her only anxiety.

She went with him to the window of the closet; then she took the time
to hide his clothes. At last she opened the door to her husband who
was seething with rage. Without uttering a word he looked round the
room, looked round the closet and left abruptly. Julien's clothes were
flung down to him, he grabbed them and raced down to the bottom of
the garden in the direction of the river Doubs. As he ran, he heard a
bullet whistle past, and at the same time the sound of a shot.

That's not M. de Rênal, he thought, he's not a good enough shot. The
dogs were running along silently at his side, a second shot must have
shattered the leg of one of them for it began to howl piteously.
Julien leaped over a terrace wall, did fifty yards or so under cover,
and then set off in flight again in a different direction. He heard
voices calling to one another, and was quite certain he saw the
servant his enemy firing a shot; a farmer came out too and fired some
random shots from the other side of the garden, but by then Julien had
reached the bank of the Doubs and was putting on his clothes.

An hour later he was a league away from Verrières on the road to
Geneva; if they have any suspicions, thought Julien, the Paris road is
where they'll look for me.

End of Book One

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She isn't pretty, she has no rouge on.

SAINTE-BEUVE
^*

O rus quando ego te adspiciam

VIRGIL
^*

'THE gentleman must be here to catch the mail-coach to Paris?' asked the keeper of an inn where he stopped to cat.

'Either today's or tomorrow's, it hardly matters to me,' Julien replied.

The mail-coach arrived while he was feigning indifference. There were two empty seats.

'Well I never! if it isn't my old friend Falcoz!' said a passenger
travelling from the Geneva direction to the traveller who was boarding
the coach at the same time as Julien.

'I thought you were settled in the neighbourhood of Lyon,' said Falcoz, 'in a delightful valley near the Rhône.'

'Settled my foot! I'm running away.'

'What! running away? You of all people, Saint-Giraud, with your air
of respectability, have you committed some crime or other?' asked
Falcoz with a laugh.

'Might as well
have done, I'm telling you! I'm running away from the abominable life
of the provinces. I love the freshness of the woods and rustic peace
and quiet, as you know; you've often accused me of being a romantic. I
could never stand any talk of politics, and now politics is driving
me out.'

'Which party do you support?'

'None, and that's my undoing. This is the sum total of my politics: I like music and painting; a good book is an event in

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my life; I'm about to be forty-four. How much longer have I got to
live? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at the very most? Well now! I
maintain that in thirty years' time, ministers will be a bit more
skilled, but just as honest as they are today. The history of England
offers me a mirror for our future. There'll always be a king trying to
increase his prerogative; the wealthy inhabitants of the provinces
will always be kept awake at night by ambition to be elected to the
Chamber of Deputies and by the fame and hundreds of thousands of
francs earned by Mirabeau:
^*
they'll call this being liberal and caring about the people. The wish
to become a peer or a gentleman of the Chamber will always spur on
the Ultras. On the ship of State, everyone will want to turn a hand to
the sails, for the work is well paid. So will there never be even the
tiniest bit of room for a mere passenger?'

'Quite so, quite so, that must be great fun with your calm temperament. Is it the last election
^*
that's driving you out of your province?'

'My misfortune dates from further back. Four years ago, I was forty
years old and in possession of five hundred thousand francs; I'm four
years older today, and probably fifty thousand francs the poorer,
which I'm going to lose on the sale of my château at Monfleury near
the Rhône--a superb site. In Paris I was weary of this perpetual
role-playing one is forced into by what you call nineteenth-century
civilization. I yearned for good-natured simplicity. So I went and
bought a piece of land in the mountains near the Rhône. Nothing could
be as beautiful in the whole wide world.

'For six months the village curate and the local landowners sought me
out; I invited them to dinner; "I've left Paris", I told them, "so as
never again in all my life to talk politics or hear it talked of. As
you see, I don't subscribe to any newspaper. The fewer the letters the
postman brings me, the happier I am."

'The curate didn't see things this way; I soon became the target for
innumerable forms of harassment, indiscreet requests, etc. I wanted to
donate two or three hundred francs a year to the poor, and I'm asked
to give the money to pious associations:
^*
the Brotherhood of St Joseph, the Association of

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