finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_6_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 7
part 1, chapter 7
{"name": "Part 1, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-7", "summary": "Julien does a good job as a tutor, but he can't get over the inequality between the mayor's house and the kind of poverty he grew up with. He thinks it's unjust and harbors a secret hate for the mayor. Some days later, Julien runs into his brothers. They beat him up out of jealousy and leave him lying half-conscious on a path. Minutes later, Madame de Renal finds him while walking and thinks he's dead. Julien finds Madame so beautiful that he actually dislikes her. He assumes that a woman that beautiful could never be a good person. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal's chambermaid Elisa falls totally in love with Julien. Julien overhears her one day arguing with a male servant, who apparently used to have his eye on Elisa before she decided she liked Julien more. This just makes Julien pay even more attention to his appearance, since he's a proud kid. Madame de Renal wants to improve Julien's appearance even more by giving him clothes as gifts. Her husband thinks this is a silly idea, though. As time passes, Madame becomes more and more affectionate toward Julien. One day, Julien walks in on Madame while she bursts into tears. He asks what's wrong, but she just says she'd like him to go for a walk with her and her children. She takes his arm and leans against him. She tells him that she's like to give him some money for new clothes. She adds that she would prefer for him not to tell her husband about it. Yup, you can probably see where this relationship is headed. Julien surprises us by rejecting Madame's offer and saying that he won't dishonor his boss by taking gifts behind his back. Madame goes to her husband and tells her about what happened. He can't believe that a servant would reject an offer like hers. He meets with Julien and forces him to accept a gift of a hundred Francs. Madame takes Julien for another walk one day and leads him to the town bookstore. She buys a bunch of books that are supposed to be for her children, but she knows they're all ones that Julien wants to read. Julien convinces the mayor to take out a subscription to the bookstore through one of his servants. This will give Julien access to all the books he wants. All this time, Madame de Renal thinks constantly about Julien.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER VII

THE ELECTIVE AFFINITIES


        They only manage to touch the heart by wounding it.--_A
        Modern_.


The children adored him, but he did not like them in the least. His
thoughts were elsewhere. But nothing which the little brats ever did
made him lose his patience. Cold, just and impassive, and none the less
liked, inasmuch his arrival had more or less driven ennui out of the
house, he was a good tutor. As for himself, he felt nothing but hate
and abhorrence for that good society into which he had been admitted;
admitted, it is true at the bottom of the table, a circumstance which
perhaps explained his hate and his abhorrence. There were certain
'full-dress' dinners at which he was scarcely able to control his
hate for everything that surrounded him. One St. Louis feast day in
particular, when M. Valenod was monopolizing the conversation of M.
de Renal, Julien was on the point of betraying himself. He escaped
into the garden on the pretext of finding the children. "What praise
of honesty," he exclaimed. "One would say that was the only virtue,
and yet think how they respect and grovel before a man who has almost
doubled and trebled his fortune since he has administered the poor
fund. I would bet anything that he makes a profit even out of the
monies which are intended for the foundlings of these poor creatures
whose misery is even more sacred than that of others. Oh, Monsters!
Monsters! And I too, am a kind of foundling, hated as I am by my
father, my brothers, and all my family."

Some days before the feast of St. Louis, when Julien was taking a
solitary walk and reciting his breviary in the little wood called
the Belvedere, which dominates the _Cours de la Fidelite_, he had
endeavoured in vain to avoid his two brothers whom he saw coming along
in the distance by a lonely path. The jealousy of these coarse workmen
had been provoked to such a pitch by their brother's fine black suit,
by his air of extreme respectability, and by the sincere contempt which
he had for them, that they had beaten him until he had fainted and was
bleeding all over.

Madame de Renal, who was taking a walk with M. de Renal and the
sub-prefect, happened to arrive in the little wood. She saw Julien
lying on the ground and thought that he was dead. She was so overcome
that she made M. Valenod jealous.

His alarm was premature. Julien found Madame de Renal very pretty, but
he hated her on account of her beauty, for that had been the first
danger which had almost stopped his career.

He talked to her as little as possible, in order to make her forget the
transport which had induced him to kiss her hand on the first day.

Madame de Renal's housemaid, Elisa, had lost no time in falling
in love with the young tutor. She often talked about him to her
mistress. Elisa's love had earned for Julien the hatred of one of the
men-servants. One day he heard the man saying to Elisa, "You haven't
a word for me now that this dirty tutor has entered the household."
The insult was undeserved, but Julien with the instinctive vanity of a
pretty boy redoubled his care of his personal appearance. M. Valenod's
hate also increased. He said publicly, that it was not becoming for a
young abbe to be such a fop.

Madame de Renal observed that Julien talked more frequently than usual
to Mademoiselle Elisa. She learnt that the reason of these interviews
was the poverty of Julien's extremely small wardrobe. He had so little
linen that he was obliged to have it very frequently washed outside the
house, and it was in these little matters that Elisa was useful to him.
Madame de Renal was touched by this extreme poverty which she had never
suspected before. She was anxious to make him presents, but she did not
dare to do so. This inner conflict was the first painful emotion that
Julien had caused her. Till then Julien's name had been synonymous with
a pure and quite intellectual joy. Tormented by the idea of Julien's
poverty, Madame de Renal spoke to her husband about giving him some
linen for a present.

"What nonsense," he answered, "the very idea of giving presents to a
man with whom we are perfectly satisfied and who is a good servant. It
will only be if he is remiss that we shall have to stimulate his zeal."

Madame de Renal felt humiliated by this way of looking at things,
though she would never have noticed it in the days before Julien's
arrival. She never looked at the young abbe's attire, with its
combination of simplicity and absolute cleanliness, without saying to
herself, "The poor boy, how can he manage?"

Little by little, instead of being shocked by all Julien's
deficiencies, she pitied him for them.

Madame de Renal was one of those provincial women whom one is apt
to take for fools during the first fortnight of acquaintanceship.
She had no experience of the world and never bothered to keep up the
conversation. Nature had given her a refined and fastidious soul,
while that instinct for happiness which is innate in all human beings
caused her, as a rule, to pay no attention to the acts of the coarse
persons in whose midst chance had thrown her. If she had received the
slightest education, she would have been noticeable for the spontaneity
and vivacity of her mind, but being an heiress, she had been brought
up in a Convent of Nuns, who were passionate devotees of the _Sacred
Heart of Jesus_ and animated by a violent hate for the French as being
the enemies of the Jesuits. Madame de Renal had had enough sense to
forget quickly all the nonsense which she had learned at the convent,
but had substituted nothing for it, and in the long run knew nothing.
The flatteries which had been lavished on her when still a child, by
reason of the great fortune of which she was the heiress, and a decided
tendency to passionate devotion, had given her quite an inner life of
her own. In spite of her pose of perfect affability and her elimination
of her individual will which was cited as a model example by all the
husbands in Verrieres and which made M. de Renal feel very proud, the
moods of her mind were usually dictated by a spirit of the most haughty
discontent.

Many a princess who has become a bye-word for pride has given
infinitely more attention to what her courtiers have been doing around
her than did this apparently gentle and demure woman to anything which
her husband either said or did. Up to the time of Julien's arrival she
had never really troubled about anything except her children. Their
little maladies, their troubles, their little joys, occupied all the
sensibility of that soul, who, during her whole life, had adored no one
but God, when she had been at the Sacred Heart of Besancon.

A feverish attack of one of her sons would affect her almost as deeply
as if the child had died, though she would not deign to confide
in anyone. A burst of coarse laughter, a shrug of the shoulders,
accompanied by some platitude on the folly of women, had been the only
welcome her husband had vouchsafed to those confidences about her
troubles, which the need of unburdening herself had induced her to make
during the first years of their marriage. Jokes of this kind, and above
all, when they were directed at her children's ailments, were exquisite
torture to Madame de Renal. And these jokes were all she found to take
the place of those exaggerated sugary flatteries with which she had
been regaled at the Jesuit Convent where she had passed her youth. Her
education had been given her by suffering. Too proud even to talk to
her friend, Madame Derville, about troubles of this kind, she imagined
that all men were like her husband, M. Valenod, and the sub-prefect,
M. Charcot de Maugiron. Coarseness, and the most brutal callousness to
everything except financial gain, precedence, or orders, together with
blind hate of every argument to which they objected, seemed to her as
natural to the male sex as wearing boots and felt hats.

After many years, Madame de Renal had still failed to acclimatize
herself to those monied people in whose society she had to live.

Hence the success of the little peasant Julien. She found in the
sympathy of this proud and noble soul a sweet enjoyment which had all
the glamour and fascination of novelty.

Madame de Renal soon forgave him that extreme ignorance, which
constituted but an additional charm, and the roughness of his manner
which she succeeded in correcting. She thought that he was worth
listening to, even when the conversation turned on the most ordinary
events, even in fact when it was only a question of a poor dog which
had been crushed as he crossed the street by a peasant's cart going
at a trot. The sight of the dog's pain made her husband indulge in
his coarse laugh, while she noticed Julien frown, with his fine black
eyebrows which were so beautifully arched.

Little by little, it seemed to her that generosity, nobility of soul
and humanity were to be found in nobody else except this young abbe.
She felt for him all the sympathy and even all the admiration which
those virtues excite in well-born souls.

If the scene had been Paris, Julien's position towards Madame de Renal
would have been soon simplified. But at Paris, love is a creature of
novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would soon have found
the elucidation of their position in three or four novels, and even
in the couplets of the Gymnase Theatre. The novels which have traced
out for them the part they would play, and showed them the model which
they were to imitate, and Julien would sooner or later have been forced
by his vanity to follow that model, even though it had given him no
pleasure and had perhaps actually gone against the grain.

If the scene had been laid in a small town in Aveyron or the Pyrenees,
the slightest episode would have been rendered crucial by the fiery
condition of the atmosphere. But under our more gloomy skies, a poor
young man who is only ambitious because his natural refinement makes
him feel the necessity of some of those joys which only money can give,
can see every day a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, is
absorbed in her children, and never goes to novels for her examples of
conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens gradually, in the
provinces where there is far more naturalness.

Madame de Renal was often overcome to the point of tears when she
thought of the young tutor's poverty. Julien surprised her one day
actually crying.

"Oh Madame! has any misfortune happened to you?"

"No, my friend," she answered, "call the children, let us go for a
walk."

She took his arm and leant on it in a manner that struck Julien as
singular. It was the first time she had called Julien "My friend."

Towards the end of the walk, Julien noticed that she was blushing
violently. She slackened her pace.

"You have no doubt heard," she said, without looking at him, "that I
am the only heiress of a very rich aunt who lives at Besancon. She
loads me with presents.... My sons are getting on so wonderfully that
I should like to ask you to accept a small present as a token of my
gratitude. It is only a matter of a few louis to enable you to get
some linen. But--" she added, blushing still more, and she left off
speaking--

"But what, Madame?" said Julien.

"It is unnecessary," she went on lowering her head, "to mention this to
my husband."

"I may not be big, Madame, but I am not mean," answered Julien,
stopping, and drawing himself up to his full height, with his
eyes shining with rage, "and this is what you have not realised
sufficiently. I should be lower than a menial if I were to put myself
in the position of concealing from M de. Renal anything at all having
to do with my money."

Madame de Renal was thunderstruck.

"The Mayor," went on Julien, "has given me on five occasions sums of
thirty-six francs since I have been living in his house. I am ready
to show any account-book to M. de Renal and anyone else, even to M.
Valenod who hates me."

As the result of this outburst, Madame de Renal remained pale and
nervous, and the walk ended without either one or the other finding any
pretext for renewing the conversation. Julien's proud heart had found
it more and more impossible to love Madame de Renal.

As for her, she respected him, she admired him, and she had been
scolded by him. Under the pretext of making up for the involuntary
humiliation which she had caused him, she indulged in acts of the most
tender solicitude. The novelty of these attentions made Madame de
Renal happy for eight days. Their effect was to appease to some extent
Julien's anger. He was far from seeing anything in them in the nature
of a fancy for himself personally.

"That is just what rich people are," he said to himself--"they snub you
and then they think they can make up for everything by a few monkey
tricks."

Madame de Renal's heart was too full, and at the same time too
innocent, for her not too tell her husband, in spite of her resolutions
not to do so, about the offer she had made to Julien, and the manner in
which she had been rebuffed.

"How on earth," answered M. de Renal, keenly piqued, "could you put
up with a refusal on the part of a servant,"--and, when Madame de
Renal protested against the word "Servant," "I am using, madam, the
words of the late Prince of Conde, when he presented his Chamberlains
to his new wife. 'All these people' he said 'are servants.' I have
also read you this passage from the Memoirs of Besenval, a book which
is indispensable on all questions of etiquette. 'Every person, not
a gentleman, who lives in your house and receives a salary is your
servant.' I'll go and say a few words to M. Julien and give him a
hundred francs."

"Oh, my dear," said Madame De Renal trembling, "I hope you won't do it
before the servants!"

"Yes, they might be jealous and rightly so," said her husband as he
took his leave, thinking of the greatness of the sum.

Madame de Renal fell on a chair almost fainting in her anguish. He is
going to humiliate Julien, and it is my fault! She felt an abhorrence
for her husband and hid her face in her hands. She resolved that
henceforth she would never make any more confidences.

When she saw Julien again she was trembling all over. Her chest was so
cramped that she could not succeed in pronouncing a single word. In her
embarrassment she took his hands and pressed them.

"Well, my friend," she said to him at last, "are you satisfied with my
husband?"

"How could I be otherwise," answered Julien, with a bitter smile, "he
has given me a hundred francs."

Madame de Renal looked at him doubtfully.

"Give me your arm," she said at last, with a courageous intonation that
Julien had not heard before.

She dared to go as far as the shop of the bookseller of Verrieres, in
spite of his awful reputation for Liberalism. In the shop she chose
ten louis worth of books for a present for her sons. But these books
were those which she knew Julien was wanting. She insisted on each
child writing his name then and there in the bookseller's shop in
those books which fell to his lot. While Madame de Renal was rejoicing
over the kind reparation which she had had the courage to make to
Julien, the latter was overwhelmed with astonishment at the quantity
of books which he saw at the bookseller's. He had never dared to enter
so profane a place. His heart was palpitating. Instead of trying to
guess what was passing in Madame de Renal's heart he pondered deeply
over the means by which a young theological student could procure
some of those books. Eventually it occurred to him that it would be
possible, with tact, to persuade M. de Renal that one of the proper
subjects of his sons' curriculum would be the history of the celebrated
gentlemen who had been born in the province. After a month of careful
preparation Julien witnessed the success of this idea. The success was
so great that he actually dared to risk mentioning to M. de Renal in
conversation, a matter which the noble mayor found disagreeable from
quite another point of view. The suggestion was to contribute to the
fortune of a Liberal by taking a subscription at the bookseller's. M.
de Renal agreed that it would be wise to give his elder son a first
hand acquaintance with many works which he would hear mentioned in
conversation when he went to the Military School.

But Julien saw that the mayor had determined to go no further. He
suspected some secret reason but could not guess it.

"I was thinking, sir," he said to him one day, "that it would be highly
undesirable for the name of so good a gentleman as a Renal to appear on
a bookseller's dirty ledger." M. de Renal's face cleared.

"It would also be a black mark," continued Julien in a more humble
tone, "against a poor theology student if it ever leaked out that his
name had been on the ledger of a bookseller who let out books. The
Liberals might go so far as to accuse me of having asked for the most
infamous books. Who knows if they will not even go so far as to write
the titles of those perverse volumes after my name?" But Julien was
getting off the track. He noticed that the Mayor's physiognomy was
re-assuming its expression of embarrassment and displeasure. Julien was
silent. "I have caught my man," he said to himself.

It so happened that a few days afterwards the elder of the children
asked Julien, in M. de Renal's presence, about a book which had been
advertised in the _Quotidienne_.

"In order to prevent the Jacobin Party having the slightest pretext for
a score," said the young tutor, "and yet give me the means of answering
M. de Adolphe's question, you can make your most menial servant take
out a subscription at the booksellers."

"That's not a bad idea," said M. de Renal, who was obviously very
delighted.

"You will have to stipulate all the same," said Julien in that solemn
and almost melancholy manner which suits some people so well when they
see the realization of matters which they have desired for a long time
past, "you will have to stipulate that the servant should not take out
any novels. Those dangerous books, once they got into the house, might
corrupt Madame de Renal's maids, and even the servant himself."

"You are forgetting the political pamphlets," went on M. de Renal with
an important air. He was anxious to conceal the admiration with which
the cunning "middle course" devised by his children's tutor had filled
him.

In this way Julien's life was made up of a series of little acts of
diplomacy, and their success gave him far more food for thought than
the marked manifestation of favouritism which he could have read at any
time in Madame de Renal's heart, had he so wished.

The psychological position in which he had found himself all his
life was renewed again in the mayor of Verrieres' house. Here in the
same way as at his father's saw-mill, he deeply despised the people
with whom he lived, and was hated by them. He saw every day in the
conversation of the sub-perfect, M. Valenod and the other friends of
the family, about things which had just taken place under their very
eyes, how little ideas corresponded to reality. If an action seemed to
Julien worthy of admiration, it was precisely that very action which
would bring down upon itself the censure of the people with whom he
lived. His inner mental reply always was, "What beasts or what fools!"
The joke was that, in spite of all his pride, he often understood
absolutely nothing what they were talking about.

Throughout his whole life he had only spoken sincerely to the old
Surgeon-Major.

The few ideas he had were about Buonaparte's Italian Campaigns or else
surgery. His youthful courage revelled in the circumstantial details of
the most terrible operations. He said to himself.

"I should not have flinched."

The first time that Madame de Renal tried to enter into conversation
independently of the children's education, he began to talk of surgical
operations. She grew pale and asked him to leave off. Julien knew
nothing beyond that.

So it came about that, though he passed his life in Madame de Renal's
company, the most singular silence would reign between them as soon as
they were alone.

When he was in the salon, she noticed in his eyes, in spite of all the
humbleness of his demeanour, an air of intellectual superiority towards
everyone who came to visit her. If she found herself alone with him for
a single moment, she saw that he was palpably embarrassed. This made
her feel uneasy, for her woman's instinct caused her to realise that
this embarrassment was not inspired by any tenderness.

Owing to some mysterious idea, derived from some tale of good society,
such as the old Surgeon-Major had seen it, Julien felt humiliated
whenever the conversation languished on any occasion when he found
himself in a woman's society, as though the particular pause were his
own special fault. This sensation was a hundred times more painful in
_tete-a-tete_. His imagination, full as it was of the most extravagant
and most Spanish ideas of what a man ought to say when he is alone
with a woman, only suggested to the troubled youth things which were
absolutely impossible. His soul was in the clouds. Nevertheless he was
unable to emerge from this most humiliating silence. Consequently,
during his long walks with Madame de Renal and the children, the
severity of his manner was accentuated by the poignancy of his
sufferings. He despised himself terribly. If, by any luck, he made
himself speak, he came out with the most absurd things. To put the
finishing touch on his misery, he saw his own absurdity and exaggerated
its extent, but what he did not see was the expression in his eyes,
which were so beautiful and betokened so ardent a soul, that like good
actors, they sometimes gave charm to something which is really devoid
of it.

Madame de Renal noticed that when he was alone with her he never
chanced to say a good thing except when he was taken out of himself
by some unexpected event, and consequently forgot to try and turn a
compliment. As the friends of the house did not spoil her by regaling
her with new and brilliant ideas, she enjoyed with delight all the
flashes of Julien's intellect.

After the fall of Napoleon, every appearance of gallantry has been
severely exiled from provincial etiquette. People are frightened of
losing their jobs. All rascals look to the religious order for support,
and hypocrisy has made firm progress even among the Liberal classes.
One's ennui is doubled. The only pleasures left are reading and
agriculture.

Madame de Renal, the rich heiress of a devout aunt, and married at
sixteen to a respectable gentleman, had never felt or seen in her whole
life anything that had the slightest resemblance in the whole world
to love. Her confessor, the good cure Chelan, had once mentioned love
to her, in discussing the advances of M. de Valenod, and had drawn so
loathsome a picture of the passion that the word now stood to her for
nothing but the most abject debauchery. She had regarded love, such
as she had come across it, in the very small number of novels with
which chance had made her acquainted, as an exception if not indeed as
something absolutely abnormal. It was, thanks to this ignorance, that
Madame de Renal, although incessantly absorbed in Julien, was perfectly
happy, and never thought of reproaching herself in the slightest.






Part 1, Chapter 7
Julien does a good job as a tutor, but he can't get over the inequality between the mayor's house and the kind of poverty he grew up with. He thinks it's unjust and harbors a secret hate for the mayor. Some days later, Julien runs into his brothers. They beat him up out of jealousy and leave him lying half-conscious on a path. Minutes later, Madame de Renal finds him while walking and thinks he's dead. Julien finds Madame so beautiful that he actually dislikes her. He assumes that a woman that beautiful could never be a good person. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal's chambermaid Elisa falls totally in love with Julien. Julien overhears her one day arguing with a male servant, who apparently used to have his eye on Elisa before she decided she liked Julien more. This just makes Julien pay even more attention to his appearance, since he's a proud kid. Madame de Renal wants to improve Julien's appearance even more by giving him clothes as gifts. Her husband thinks this is a silly idea, though. As time passes, Madame becomes more and more affectionate toward Julien. One day, Julien walks in on Madame while she bursts into tears. He asks what's wrong, but she just says she'd like him to go for a walk with her and her children. She takes his arm and leans against him. She tells him that she's like to give him some money for new clothes. She adds that she would prefer for him not to tell her husband about it. Yup, you can probably see where this relationship is headed. Julien surprises us by rejecting Madame's offer and saying that he won't dishonor his boss by taking gifts behind his back. Madame goes to her husband and tells her about what happened. He can't believe that a servant would reject an offer like hers. He meets with Julien and forces him to accept a gift of a hundred Francs. Madame takes Julien for another walk one day and leads him to the town bookstore. She buys a bunch of books that are supposed to be for her children, but she knows they're all ones that Julien wants to read. Julien convinces the mayor to take out a subscription to the bookstore through one of his servants. This will give Julien access to all the books he wants. All this time, Madame de Renal thinks constantly about Julien.