‘I want those letters this instant; where are they?’
‘In a drawer in my desk; but you may be certain, I shall not give you the key of it.’
‘I shall be able to force it,’ he cried as he made off in the direction of his wife’s room.
He did indeed break open with an iron bar a valuable mahogany writing desk, imported from Paris, which he used often to polish with the tail of his coat when he thought he detected a spot on its surface.
Madame de Renal meanwhile had run up the hundred and twenty steps of the dovecote; she knotted the corner of a white handkerchief to one of the iron bars of the little window. She was the happiest of women. With tears in her eyes she gazed out at the wooded slopes of the mountain. ‘Doubtless,’ she said to herself, ‘beneath one of those spreading beeches, Julien is watching for this glad signal.’ For long she strained her ears, then cursed the monotonous drone of the grasshoppers and the twitter of the birds. But for those tiresome sounds, a cry of joy, issuing from among the rocks, might have reached her in her tower. Her ravening gaze devoured that immense slope of dusky verdure, unbroken as the surface of a meadow, that was formed by the treetops. ‘How is it he has not the sense,’ she asked herself with deep emotion, ‘to think of some signal to tell me that his happiness is no less than mine?’ She came down from the dovecote only when she began to be afraid that her husband might come up in search of her.
She found him foaming with rage. He was running through M. Valenod’s anodyne sentences, that were little used to being read with such emotion.
Seizing a moment in which a lull in her husband’s exclamations gave her a chance to make herself heard:
‘I cannot get away from my original idea,’ said Madame de Renal, ‘Julien ought to go for a holiday. Whatever talent he may have for Latin, he is nothing more, after all, than a peasant who is often coarse and wanting in tact; every day, thinking he is being polite, he plies me with extravagant compliments in the worst of taste, which he learns by heart from some novel . . . ’
‘He never reads any,’ cried M. de Renal; ‘I am positive as to that. Do you suppose that I am a blind master who knows nothing of what goes on under his roof?’
‘Very well, if he doesn’t read those absurd compliments anywhere, he invents them, which is even worse. He will have spoken of me in that tone in Verrieres; and, without going so far,’ said Madame de Renal, with the air of one making a discovery, ‘he will have spoken like that before Elisa, which is just as though he had spoken to M. Valenod.’
‘Ah!’ cried M. de Renal, making the table and the whole room shake with one of the stoutest blows that human fist ever gave, ‘the anonymous letter in print and Valenod’s letters were all on the same paper.’
‘At last!’ thought Madame de Renal; she appeared thunderstruck by this discovery, and without having the courage to add a single word went and sat down on the divan, at the farther end of the room.
The battle was now won; she had her work cut out to prevent M. de Renal from going and talking to the supposed author of the anonymous letter.
‘How is it you do not feel that to make a scene, without sufficient proof, with M. Valenod would be the most deplorable error? If you are envied, Sir, who is to blame? Your own talents: your wise administration, the buildings you have erected with such good taste, the dowry I brought you, and above all the considerable fortune we may expect to inherit from my worthy aunt, a fortune the extent of which is vastly exaggerated, have made you the principal person in Verrieres.’
‘You forget my birth,’ said M. de Renal, with a faint smile.
‘You are one of the most distinguished gentlemen in the province,’ Madame de Renal hastily added; ‘if the King were free and could do justice to birth, you would doubtless be figuring in the House of Peers,’ and so forth. ‘And in this magnificent position do you seek to provide jealousy with food for comment?
‘To speak to M. Valenod of his anonymous letter is to proclaim throughout Verrieres, or rather in Besancon, throughout the Province, that this petty cit, admitted perhaps imprudently to the friendship of a Renal, has found out a way to insult him. Did these letters which you have just discovered prove that I had responded to M. Valenod’s overtures, then it would be for you to kill me, I should have deserved it a hundred times, but not to show anger with him. Think that all your neighbours only await a pretext to be avenged for your superiority; think that in 1816 you were instrumental in securing certain arrests. That man who took refuge on your roof . . . ’
‘What I think is that you have neither respect nor affection for me,’ shouted M. de Renal with all the bitterness that such a memory aroused, ‘and I have not been made a Peer!’
‘I think, my friend,’ put in Madame de Renal with a smile, ‘that I shall one day be richer than you, that I have been your companion for twelve years, and that on all these counts I ought to have a voice in your councils, especially in this business today. If you prefer Monsieur Julien to me,’ she added with ill-concealed scorn, ‘I am prepared to go and spend the winter with my aunt.’
This threat was uttered with gladness. It contained the firmness which seeks to cloak itself in courtesy; it determined M. de Renal. But, obeying the provincial custom, he continued to speak for a long time, harked back to every argument in turn; his wife allowed him to speak, there was still anger in his tone. At length, two hours of futile discourse wore out the strength of a man who had been helpless with rage all night. He determined upon the line of conduct which he was going to adopt towards M. Valenod, Julien, and even Elisa.
Once or twice, during this great scene, Madame de Renal came within an ace of feeling a certain sympathy for the very real distress of this man who for ten years had been her friend. But our true passions are selfish. Moreover she was expecting every moment an avowal of the anonymous letter which he had received overnight, and this avowal never came. To gain complete confidence, Madame de Renal required to know what ideas might have been suggested to the man upon whom her fate depended. For, in the country, husbands control public opinion. A husband who denounces his wife covers himself with ridicule, a thing that every day is becoming less dangerous in France; but his wife, if he does not supply her with money, declines to the position of a working woman at fifteen sous daily, and even then the virtuous souls have scruples about employing her.
An odalisque in the seraglio may love the Sultan with all her heart; he is all powerful, she has no hope of evading his authority by a succession of clever little tricks. The master’s vengeance is terrible, bloody, but martial and noble: a dagger blow ends everything. It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face.
The sense of danger was keenly aroused in Madame de Renal on her return to her own room; she was horrified by the disorder in which she found it. The locks of all her pretty little boxes had been broken; several planks in the floor had been torn up. ‘He would have been without pity for me!’ she told herself. ‘To spoil so this floor of coloured parquet, of which he is so proud; when one of his children comes in with muddy shoes, he flushes with rage. And now it is ruined for ever!’ The sight of this violence rapidly silenced the last reproaches with which she had been blaming herself for her too rapid victory.
Shortly before the dinner bell sounded, Julien returned with the children. At dessert, when the servants had left the room, Madame de Renal said to him very drily:
‘You expressed the desire to me to go and spend a fortnight at Verrieres; M. de Renal is kind enough to grant you leave. You can go as soon as you please. But, so that the children shall not waste any time, their lessons will be sent to you every day, for you to correct.’
‘Certainly,’ M. de Renal added in a most bitter tone, ‘I shall not allow you more than a week.’
Julien read in his features the uneasiness of a man in cruel torment.
‘He has not yet come to a decision,’ he said to his mistress, during a moment of solitude in the drawing-room.