for instance; but swear to me that during my absence you will reveal nothing to your husband. Remember that I can never return if you speak.’
She promised; he departed, but was recalled after two days.
‘It is impossible for me to keep my oath without you. I shall speak to my husband, if you are not constantly there to order me with your eyes to be silent. Each hour of this abominable life seems to me to last a day.’
In the end, heaven took pity on this unhappy mother. Gradually Stanislas passed out of danger. But the ice was broken, her reason had learned the magnitude of her sin, she could no more recover her equilibrium. Remorse still remained, and took the form that it was bound to take in so sincere a heart. Her life was heaven and hell; hell when she did not see Julien, heaven when she was at his feet.
‘I am no longer under any illusion,’ she told him, even at the moments when she ventured to give absolute rein to her love: ‘I am damned, irremediably damned. You are young, you have yielded to my seduction, heaven may pardon you; but as for me, I am damned. I know it by an infallible sign. I am afraid: who would not be afraid at the sight of hell? But at heart, I am not in the least repentant. I would commit my sin again, were it to be committed. Let heaven only refrain from punishing me in this world and in my children, and I shall have more than I deserve. But you, at least, my Julien,’ she cried at other moments, ‘are you happy? Do you feel that I love you enough?’
Julien’s distrust and suffering pride, which needed above all a love that made sacrifices, could not stand out against the sight of so great, so indubitable a sacrifice, and one that was made afresh every moment. He adored Madame de Renal. ‘She may well be noble, and I the son of a working man; she loves me . . . I am not to her a footman employed in the part of lover.’ Once rid of this fear, Julien fell into all the follies of love, into its mortal uncertainties.
‘At least.’ she cried when she saw that he doubted her love, ‘let me make you happy during the few days we still have to spend together! Let us make haste; tomorrow perhaps I shall be no longer yours. If heaven strikes me through my children, in vain shall I seek to live only for love of you, not to see that it is my crime that is killing them. I shall not be able to survive that blow. Even if I would, I could not; I should go mad.’
‘Ah! If I could take your sin upon my conscience, as you so generously wished that you might take Stanislas’s fever!’
This great moral crisis changed the nature of the sentiment that united Julien to his mistress. His love was no longer merely admiration of her beauty, pride in the possession of her.
Their joy was thenceforward of a far higher nature, the flame that devoured them was more intense. They underwent transports of utter madness. Their happiness would have seemed great in the eyes of other people. But they never recaptured the delicious serenity, the unclouded happiness, the spontaneous joy of the first days of their love, when Madame de Renal’s one fear was that of not being loved enough by Julien. Their happiness assumed at times the aspect of crime.
In what were their happiest, and apparently their calmest moments: ‘Oh! Great God! I see hell before me,’ Madame de Renal would suddenly exclaim, gripping Julien’s hand with a convulsive movement. ‘What fearful torments! I have well deserved them.’ She clutched him, clinging to him like the ivy to the wall.
Julien tried in vain to calm this agitated soul. She took his hand, which she covered with kisses. Then, relapsing into a sombre meditation; ‘Hell,’ she said, ‘hell would be a blessing to me; I should still have some days in this world to spend with him, but hell here on earth, the death of my children . . . Yet, at that price, perhaps my crime would be forgiven me . . . Oh! Great God! Grant me not my pardon at that price. These poor children have done nothing to offend thee; ’tis I, I, the guilt is mine alone! I love a man who is not my husband.’
Julien next saw Madame de Renal reach a state that was outwardly tranquil. She sought to take the burden upon herself, she wished not to poison the existence of him whom she loved.
In the midst of these alternations of love, remorse and pleasure, the days passed for them with lightning rapidity. Julien lost the habit of reflection.
Miss Elisa went to conduct a little lawsuit which she had at Verrieres. She found M. Valenod greatly annoyed with Julien. She hated the tutor and often spoke about him to M. Valenod.
‘You would ruin me, Sir, if I told you the truth!’ she said to him one day. ‘Employers all hang together in important things. They never forgive us poor servants for certain revelations . . . ’
After these conventional phrases, which the impatient curiosity of M. Valenod found a way of cutting short, he learned the most mortifying things in the world for his own self-esteem.
This woman, the most distinguished in the place, whom for six years he had surrounded with every attention, and, unluckily, before the eyes of all the world; this proudest of women, whose disdain had so often made him blush, had taken as her lover a little journeyman dressed up as a tutor. And that nothing might be wanting to the discomfiture of the governor of the poorhouse, Madame de Renal adored this lover.
‘And,’ the maid added with a sigh, ‘M. Julien went to no pains to make this conquest, he has never departed from his habitual coldness with Madame.’
It was only in the country that Elisa had become certain of her facts, but she thought that this intrigue dated from far earlier.
‘That, no doubt, is why,’ she continued bitterly, ‘he refused at the time to marry me. And I, like a fool, going to consult Madame de Renal, begging her to speak to the tutor!’
That same evening M. de Renal received from the town, with his newspaper, a long anonymous letter which informed him in the fullest detail of all that was going on under his roof. Julien saw him turn pale as he read this letter, which was written on blue paper, and cast angry glances at himself. For the rest of the evening the Mayor never recovered his peace of mind; it was in vain that Julien tried to flatter him by asking him to explain obscure points in the pedigrees of the best families of Burgundy.
Chapter 20
THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS
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Do not give dalliance
Too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw
To the fire i’the blood.
The Tempest
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AS THEY LEFT THE DRAWING-room about midnight, Julien found time to say to his mistress: ‘Do not let us meet tonight, your husband has suspicions; I would swear that that long letter he was reading with such displeasure is an anonymous one.’
Fortunately, Julien locked himself into his room. Madame de Renal conceived the mad idea that this warning was simply a pretext for not coming to see her. She lost her head absolutely, and at the usual hour came to his door. Julien, hearing a sound in the corridor, instantly blew out his lamp. Someone was attempting to open his door; was it Madame de Renal, was it a jealous husband?
Early the next morning, the cook, who took an interest in Julien, brought him a book on the cover of which he read these words written in Italian: Guardate alia pagina 130.
Julien shuddered at the imprudence, turned to page one hundred and thirty and found fastened to it with a pin the following letter written in haste, bedewed with tears, and without the least attempt at spelling. Ordinarily Madame de Renal spelt quite well; he was moved by this detail and began to forget the frightful imprudence.
‘So you would not let me in tonight? There are moments when I feel that I have never seen into the depths of your heart. Your