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—After what he did, and he learned only through her suffering, Stephen brought out more loudly, —Now . . . If she comes to him carrying lilies that turn to fire? And the fire, what do you think it is? If that was the only way he could learn? So now do you see why he sends me on? If somewhere I’ve . . . done the same thing? And something’s come out of it, something . . . like . . . he has. While I’ve been crowding the work alone. To end there, or almost end running up to the doors there, to pound on the doors of the church, do you see why he sent me on? Look back, if once you’re started in living, you’re born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it’s possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder, how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? . . . how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it’s possible and pretend to avoid it? Or . . . or to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.
But he had already paused to make his notation, “What mean?” before he saw it, when it fluttered across the room to the other picture, and though he tried frantically to chase it toward the front, toward the windows and out, it fluttered the more frantically from one picture to the other, and back across the room and back, as he passed the mirror himself in both directions, where he might have glimpsed the face of a man having, or about to have, or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience.
—And then he told me he spent two days in bed with this real high-class whore he picked up in the Café de la Paix, after he told her he couldn’t pay in francs, all he had was dollars, and he flashes this roll of tens and twenties and fifties, so she paid all the bills at the George Sank and gave him a terrific time for a couple of days and then rolled him, he said he’d like to see her trying to change Confederate States money in the Banque de France. What’s this, a review of his book?
When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil’s interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.
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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.
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.
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"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.
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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.