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Stendhal
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"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!"
lol
[...] As for Mme. de Renal, her hand in Julien's, she hadn't a thought in the world; she was letting herself live. For her the hours they spent beneath that great lime tree, which, as local tradition would have it, had been planted by Charles the Bold,* were a time of bliss. She listened delightedly to the wind moaning in the tree's thick foliage and to the sound of the first few scattered drops that were beginning to fall on its lowest leaves. Julien failed to remark one detail that might well have reassured him; Mme. de Renal, who had been forced to take her hand out of his so she could get up to help her cousin right a pot of flowers the wind had knocked over at their feet, was scarcely seated again when she gave him back her hand with almost no fuss, as if it were already a thing understood between them.
Midnight had struck long ago; it was high time to leave the garden; they separated. Mme. de Renal, transported by the joys of love, was so ignorant that she hardly blamed herself at all. Happiness robbed her of sleep. Julien, tired to death by the pitched battle between timidity and pride that had been raging in his heart all day long, was carried off by a leaden sleep.
"What! can this be love!" she kept asking herself, "could I have fallen in love! I, a married woman, in love! But," she said to herself, "I have never felt this somber passion for my husband that makes it impossible for me to take my mind off Julien. Really, he's nothing but a child full of respect for me! This madness will pass. Whatever my feelings about this young man may be, what dif- ference does it make to my husband! M. de Renal would be bored with the conversations I have with Julien about things of the imagination. He has nothing on his mind but business. I'm not taking anything from him to give to Julien."
No hypocritical thought came to debase the purity of this simple soul, led astray by a passion it had never known before. She was deluding herself, though unawares, and yet a virtuous instinct had been startled. [...]
All of a sudden the dreadful word "adultress" occurred to her. Everything disgusting that the vilest lewdness might impart to the idea of sensual love came crowding into her imagination. Ideas of this sort were doing their worst to tarnish the tender and divine image she had made of Julien and of her happiness in loving him. The future loomed before her in terrible shapes. She saw herself as a despicable woman.
It was a ghastly moment; her soul had crossed into alien territory. That evening she had tasted a happiness unknown to her; now she was plunged into the most atro- cious agony. She had no idea of such suffering; it affected her reason. For an instant she thought of confessing to her husband that she was afraid of falling in love with Julien. It would give her a chance to talk about him. Fortunately, she happened to remember a precept her aunt had once given her, on the eve of her marriage. It had to do with the dangers of confiding in a husband, who is, after all, one's master. Out of unbearable suffering, she kept wringing her hands.
She was being dragged this way and that by painful and conflicting visions. One minute she was afraid of not being loved; the next minute, the horrible idea of crime tormented her as much as if she were slated to be pilloried the next day in the public square with a placard around her neck proclaiming adultery to the whole populace. Mme. de Renal had no experience of life; even fully awake and in full possession of her faculties, she would not have seen any real distinction between being guilty in the sight of God and in being publicly harassed by the noisiest manifestation of popular scorn.
"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.
lol
"Only a fool," he told himself, "gets angry with others: a stone falls because it is heavy. Will I always behave like a child? When will I ever acquire the good habit of giving those people only as much of my heart as they pay for? If I want to be esteemed by them as well as by myself, I will have to show them that though my poverty may do business with their wealth, my heart is a thousand leagues removed from their insolence, and set in too high a sphere to be reached by their petty marks of disdain or favor."
pigeons lol
When Julien left Mme. de RSnal's bedroom some hours later, it might be said, in the style of the novel, that he had nothing more to desire. He was, in fact, obliged to the love he had inspired, and to the unexpected impression her seductive charms had made on him, for a conquest that all his clumsy maneuvering could never have brought off.
Yet, victim of a bizarre pride, even in the sweetest moments he still aspired to the role of a man who is used to subjugating women. He applied himself with incredible effort to spoil whatever was likable about him. Instead of being attentive to the raptures he had awakened and to the remorse that only heightened their intensity, he could think of nothing but his duty. He dreaded the terrible regret and sense of everlasting ridicule that must follow, should he lose sight of the model he had proposed for himself.
In a word, what made Julien a superior person was precisely what kept him from relishing the happiness that lay at his feet. He was like the sixteen-year-old girl with a lovely complexion who, when she goes to a ball, has the crazy notion of putting rouge on her face.
"My God! to be happy, to be loved, is that all there is to it?" Such was Julien's first thought when he got back to his room. He was in that state of astonishment and uneasiness into which a man who has just obtained what he has long desired may lapse. He is used to desiring, has nothing more to desire, and hasn't, as yet, any memories. Like the soldier who comes back from a parade, Julien was busy reviewing every detail of his conduct.
"Have I failed in any way with respect to what I owe myself? Have I played my part well?"
Which part? That of a man who is used to having his way with women.