At the sight of him all hats are quickly raised. His hair is graying and he is dressed in gray. He is a knight of several orders. He has a high forehead, an aquiline nose and, on the whole, his face is rather well proportioned; on first impression, it even seems to combine the dignity of a small-town mayor with the kind of charm that one may still find in a man of forty-eight or fifty. But the visitor from Paris is soon taken aback by his smug and conceited air, compounded with a hint of narrowness and lack of imagination. One senses before long that this man's chief talent is to make his debtors pay him exactly on time and to pay his own debts as late as possible.

"I like shade," replied M. de Renal, with the hint of arrogance that is appropriate when one is speaking to a surgeon, member of the Legion of Honor. "I like shade. I have my trees clipped so they will give shade. And I cannot imagine what else a tree was made for if, unlike the useful walnut, it doesn't bring in anything."

There you have the catchword that settles everything in Verrieres: bring in something. It sums up the thinking of three quarters of the population.

Bring in something is the logic that determines every move in this small town, which struck you as being so The stranger who comes here, charmed by the pretty. deep, cool valleys that surround it, imagines at first that the inhabitants must be sensitive to the beautiful. How they go on about the beauty of their province! There's no denying that they think a great deal of it, but only because it attracts a number of tourists whose money enriches the innkeepers, and so, through the machinery of the tax system, brings in something for the town.

She was a naive soul who had never presumed so far as to judge her husband, or admit to herself that he bored her. She supposed, without saying so, that there could be no tenderer relationship between husband and wife. She especially liked M. de Renal when he told her about his plans for their children, one of whom he had slated for the army, the second for the bench, and the third for the church. In short, she found M. de Renal far less tiresome than all the other men of her acquaintance.

his horror of eating with the servants was not instinctive with Julien; in order to make his fortune, he would have done far more disagreeable things than that. He had borrowed this aversion from Rousseau's Confessions. It was the only book by which his imagination had formed any idea of society. collection of the bulletins of the Grand Army and the Memorial de Sainte-Helene completed his Koran. He would have died for those three works. He had no faith in any other. Following the old surgeon major's lead, he regarded all the other books in the world as lies, written by cheats for the sake of getting ahead. Besides a fiery soul, Julien had one of those amazing memories that so often go hand in hand with foolish- ness. To win over old Father Chelan, on whom he saw clearly that his whole future depended, he had memorized the whole New Testament in Latin. He also knew the book Du Pape, by M. de Maistre,* and believed as little in the one as in the other.

"That was your offer. I won't deny it," said old Sorel, speaking even more slowly; then, with the inspiration of genius something that will astonish only those who do not know the peasants of Franche-Comte he added, looking M. de Renal straight in the eye: "We can do better."

At these words the mayor's face dropped. He recovered and after a weighty conversation, two good hours long, in which not a word was left to chance, the peasant's shrewdness won out over that of a rich man, who had no need of it to live. All the numerous articles that were to regulate Julien's new life had been given final shape; not only was his salary set at four hundred francs, but it was to be paid in advance, on the first of each month.

In Paris, Julien's relationship with Mme. de Renal would have been simplified very quickly; but in Paris, love is the child of fiction. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found their position clarified for them in three or four novels, even in the couplets sung at the Gymnase.* The novels would have outlined the parts they should play, have shown the model to be imitated; and sooner or later, vanity would have compelled Julien to imitate this model, although with no pleasure and perhaps boggling.

In a small town in the Aveyron or in the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the torrid climate. But as matters stand, under our duller kies, a poor young man, ambitious only because his refined nature requires some of the pleasures money can buy, is coming into daily contact with a thirty-year-old woman, one who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and who does not take the novels for a model of conduct in any respect. Things go slowly; things happen gradually in the provinces; people are more natural there.

Mme. de Renal, wealthy heiress of a pious aunt and married at sixteen to a fine gentleman, had never experienced or seen anything that bore the least resemblance to love. Scarcely anyone had ever spoken to her about love except good Father Chelan, and then only in connection with Valenod's advances; yet he had painted such a disgusting picture of it that to her mind the word stood for nothing but debauchery of the lowest sort. She regarded such as she had found it in the few novels chance had put in her way, as exceptional, or even extra-natural. Thanks to her ignorance, Mme. de Renal was perfectly happy, incessantly concerned about Julien, and far from love, blaming herself the least bit.

"Beware, my child, of what is going on in your heart," said the cure with a frown. "I congratulate you on your vocation if it is that alone to which you owe your contempt for a more than adequate income. I have been the cure of Verrieres for fifty-six years all told, and yet, to judge from the way things look, I am about to be dismissed. This grieves me. However, I have a private income of eight hundred francs. I mention this detail so you will have no illusions about what to expect when you enter the priesthood. If you have any thought of currying favor with men in power, your eternal damnation is assured. You may make your fortune, but you will be obliged to do it at the expense of the indigent, flatter the subprefect, the mayor, the man of consequence, and serve his interests. This course, which is called knowing how to get along in the world, may not be absolutely incompatible with salvation for a layman, but in our profession one is forced to make a choice: either to lay up treasure in this world or the next. There is no middle way. Go now, my dear friend; think it over, and come back in three days with your final answer. To my sorrow, I have caught a glimpse in the depths of your character of a dark passion, which does not promise the moderation and complete abnegation of things worldly that are essential in a priest; I predict good things of your mind, but, if you will allow me to say so," added the good father, with tears in his eyes, "once you became a priest, I would tremble for your salvation."

Mme. de Renal intended to do some work but fell into a deep sleep; when she woke, she was not so alarmed as she should have been. She was too happy to think ill of anything. Artless and innocent, this good provincial woman had never tortured her soul with trying to squeeze a bit of sensibility from it for some novel shade of feeling or of distress. Entirely occupied, before Julien's arrival, with that pile of work which is the lot of any good mother when she lives far from Paris, Mme. de Renal had the same opinion of the passions that we have of the lottery: a cheat certainly and a happiness pursued only by fools.

The dinner bell rang; Mme. de Renal blushed a great deal when she heard Julien bringing back the children. bit more resourceful now that she was in love, she complained of a terrible headache to explain away her flushed face.

"Just like a woman," M. de Renal answered her with his big laugh. "Something's always going wrong with those machines!"