3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy
Among the houses that would have to be moved back, nine belonged to the very best people in Verrieres.
In Julien’s eyes, this intrigue was far more important than the history of the battle of Fontenoy, a name which he saw for the first time in one of the books that Fouque had sent him. Many things had astonished Julien during the five years since he had begun to spend his evenings with the cure. But discretion and a humble spirit being the chief qualities required in a divinity student, it had always been impossible for him to ask any questions.
One day, Madame de Renal had given an order to her husband’s valet, Julien’s enemy.
‘But, Ma’am, today is the last Friday of the month,’ the man answered her with a curious expression.
‘Go,’ said Madame de Renal.
‘Well,’ said Julien, ‘he is going to that hay store, which used to be a church, and was recently restored to the faith; but why? That is one of the mysteries which I have never been able to penetrate.’
‘It is a most beneficial, but a very strange institution,’ replied Madame de Renal. ‘Women are not admitted; all that I know of it is that they all address one another as tu. For instance, this servant will find M. Valenod there, and that conceited fool will not be in the least annoyed at hearing himself called tu by Saint–Jean, and will answer him in the same tone. If you really want to know what they do there, I can ask M. de Maugiron and M. Valenod for details. We pay twenty francs for each servant so that they do not cut our throats.’
The time flew. The memory of his mistress’s charms distracted Julien from his black ambition. The necessity to refrain from speaking to her of serious, reasonable matters, since they were on opposite sides, added, without his suspecting it, to the happiness that he owed to her and to the power which she was acquiring over him.
At those moments when the presence of quick-eared children confined them to the language of cold reason, it was with a perfect docility that Julien, gazing at her with eyes that burned with love, listened to her explanations of the world as it really was. Often, in the middle of an account of some clever piece of roguery, in connection with the laying out of a road, or of some astounding contract, Madame de Renal’s mind would suddenly wander to the point of delirium; Julien was obliged to scold her, she allowed herself to caress him in the same way as she caressed her children. This was because there were days on which she imagined that she loved him like a child of her own. Had she not to reply incessantly to his artless questions about a thousand simple matters of which a child of good family is not ignorant at fifteen? A moment later, she was admiring him as her master. His intelligence positively frightened her; she thought she could perceive more clearly every day the future great man in this young cleric. She saw him as Pope, she saw him as First Minister, like Richelieu.
‘Shall I live long enough to see you in your glory?’ she said to Julien; ‘there is a place waiting for a great man; the Monarchy, the Church need one; these gentlemen say so every day. If some Richelieu does not stem the torrent of private judgment, all is lost.’
Chapter 18
A KING AT VERRIERES
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Are you fit only to be flung down like the corpse of a nation, its soul gone and its veins emptied of blood?
(From the Bishop’s address,
delivered in the Chapel of Saint Clement)
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ON THE THIRD OF SEPTEMBER, at ten o’clock in the evening, a mounted constable aroused the whole of Verrieres by galloping up the main street; he brought the news that His Majesty the King of — was coming the following Sunday, and it was now Tuesday. The Prefect authorised, that is to say ordered, the formation of a Guard of Honour; he must be received with all the pomp possible. A courier was sent to Vergy. M. de Renal arrived during the night and found the whole town in a ferment. Everybody was claiming a right to something; those who had no other duty were engaging balconies to see the King enter the town.
Who was to command the Guard of Honour? M. de Renal saw at once how important it was, in the interest of the houses that would have to be moved back, that M. de Moirod should fill this post. It might be held to constitute a claim to the place of Principal Deputy. There was nothing to be said against M. de Moirod’s devotion; it went beyond all comparison, but he had never ridden a horse in his life. He was a man of six and thirty, timid in every way, and equally afraid of falls and of being laughed at.
The Mayor sent for him at five o’clock in the morning.
‘You see, Sir, that I am asking your advice, as though you already occupied the post in which all right-minded people would gladly see you. In this unfortunate town the manufacturers prosper, the Liberal Party are becoming millionaires, they aspire to power, they will forge themselves weapons out of everything. We must consider the King’s interests, those of the Monarchy, and above all those of our holy religion. To whom do you think, Sir, that we ought to entrust the command of the Guard of Honour?’
In spite of the horrible fear that a horse inspired in him, M. de Moirod ended by accepting this honour like a martyr. ‘I shall manage to adopt the right manner,’ he told the Mayor. There was barely time to overhaul the uniforms which had been used seven years before on the passage of a Prince of the Blood.
At seven, Madame de Renal arrived from Vergy with Julien and the children. She found her drawing-room full of Liberal ladies who were preaching the union of parties, and had come to implore her to make her husband find room in the Guard of Honour for theirs. One of them asserted that if her husband were not chosen he would go bankrupt from grief. Madame de Renal sent them all packing at once. She seemed greatly occupied.
Julien was surprised and even more annoyed by her making a mystery to him of what was disturbing her. ‘I thought as much,’ he told himself bitterly, ‘her love is eclipsed by the joy of receiving a King in her house. All this excitement dazzles her. She will begin to love me again when her brain is no longer troubled by ideas of caste.’
The surprising thing was that he loved her all the more for this.
The upholsterers began to invade the whole house, he long watched in vain for an opportunity of saying a word to her. At length he found her coming out of his own room, carrying one of his coats. They were alone. He tried to speak to her. She made off, declining to listen to him. ‘What a fool I am to be in love with a woman like that, ambition makes her just as stupid as her husband.’
She was even more so: one of her great wishes, which she had never confessed to Julien, for fear of shocking him, was to see him discard, if only for a day, his gloomy black coat. With an ingenuity truly admirable in so natural a woman, she secured, first from M. de Moirod, and then from the Sub–Prefect M. de Maugiron, that Julien should be appointed to the Guard of Honour in preference to five or six young men, sons of manufacturers in easy circumstances, at least two of whom were of an exemplary piety. M. Valenod, who was reckoning on lending his carriage to the prettiest women of the town, in order to have his fine Norman horses admired, agreed to let Julien, the person he hated most, have one of them. But each of the members of the Guard of Honour possessed or had borrowed one of those sky-blue coats with a pair of colonel’s epaulettes in silver, which had shone in public seven years before. Madame de Renal wanted a new coat, and she had but four days in which to send to Besancon, and to procure from there the uniform, the weapons, the hat, and all the other requisites for a Guard of Honour. What is rather amusing is that she thought it imprudent to have Julien’s coat made at Verrieres. She wished to take him by surprise, him and the town.
The work of organising the Guard of Honour and popular feeling finished, the Mayor had next to deal with a great religious ceremony; the King of —— refused to pass through Verrieres without