finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_20_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 21
part 1, chapter 21
{"name": "Part 1, Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-21", "summary": "Julien finishes putting together the anonymous letter for Madame de Renal and hands it to her. In return, she hands him a box with gold and diamonds in it and asks him to bury it in the mountains. She's afraid that someday she might need it if she's kicked out of her home. Meanwhile, Monsieur Renal stresses about how to bring up the letter he has received with his wife. It's clear that the letter has told him about his wife's affair. The whole thing makes de Renal think about how many men dislike him and how few like him. He even thinks about friends whom he cut ties with when he was younger because they weren't upper class enough. He thinks about beating up Julien and throwing him out of the house. But he knows that this would eventually cause the scandal to become known to everyone in town. He can't stand the thought of having the newspapers drag his name through the mud. Madame de Renal comes up to him with a devastated look on her face. She hands him a letter and says someone from town she didn't recognize just gave it to her. She asks Monsieur to send Julien back to his father as quickly as possible. Monsieur de Renal tells her to stop being an idiot. She waits patiently for him to get all his anger out of his system. Madame plants the suspicion in her husband's head that it is actually the servant Elisa and Valenod who are having an affair. She also tells him that Mr. Valenod has written her many love letters over the years. She shows them to her husband, and this proves that Valenod has a motive for trying to ruin Madame's reputation. The next step is for Madame to convince Monsieur never to confront Valenod about the letters . Madame demands that her husband send Julien away for at least a couple of weeks. He agrees. With all that's happened, Madame still asks Julien to come to her room that night. He thinks she's insane. But of course he comes.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER XXI

DIALOGUE WITH A MASTER


     Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we;
     For such as we are made of, such we be.--_Twelfth Night_.


It was with a childish pleasure that for a whole hour Julien put the
words together. As he came out of his room, he met his pupils with
their mother. She took the letter with a simplicity and a courage whose
calmness terrified him.

"Is the mouth-glue dry enough yet?" she asked him.

"And is this the woman who was so maddened by remorse?" he thought.
"What are her plans at this moment?" He was too proud to ask her, but
she had never perhaps pleased him more.

"If this turns out badly," she added with the same coolness, "I shall
be deprived of everything. Take charge of this, and bury it in some
place of the mountain. It will perhaps one day be my only resource."

She gave him a glass case in red morocco filled with gold and some
diamonds.

"Now go," she said to him.

She kissed the children, embracing the youngest twice. Julien remained
motionless. She left him at a rapid pace without looking at him.

From the moment that M. de Renal had opened the anonymous letter his
life had been awful. He had not been so agitated since a duel which he
had just missed having in 1816, and to do him justice, the prospect of
receiving a bullet would have made him less unhappy. He scrutinised the
letter from every standpoint. "Is that not a woman's handwriting?" he
said to himself. In that case, what woman had written it? He reviewed
all those whom he knew at Verrieres without being able to fix his
suspicions on any one. Could a man have dictated that letter? Who
was that man? Equal uncertainty on this point. The majority of his
acquaintances were jealous of him, and, no doubt, hated him. "I must
consult my wife," he said to himself through habit, as he got up from
the arm-chair in which he had collapsed.

"Great God!" he said aloud before he got up, striking his head, "it is
she above all of whom I must be distrustful. At the present moment she
is my enemy," and tears came into his eyes through sheer anger.

By a poetic justice for that hardness of heart which constitutes the
provincial idea of shrewdness, the two men whom M. de Renal feared the
most at the present moment were his two most intimate friends.

"I have ten friends perhaps after those," and he passed them in review,
gauging the degree of consolation which he could get from each one.
"All of them, all of them," he exclaimed in a rage, "will derive the
most supreme pleasure from my awful experience."

As luck would have it, he thought himself envied, and not without
reason. Apart from his superb town mansion in which the king of ----
had recently spent the night, and thus conferred on it an enduring
honour, he had decorated his chateau at Vergy extremely well. The
facade was painted white and the windows adorned with fine green
shutters. He was consoled for a moment by the thought of this
magnificence. The fact was that this chateau was seen from three or
four leagues off, to the great prejudice of all the country houses or
so-called chateaux of the neighbourhood, which had been left in the
humble grey colour given them by time.

There was one of his friends on whose pity and whose tears M. de Renal
could count, the churchwarden of the parish; but he was an idiot who
cried at everything. This man, however, was his only resource. "What
unhappiness is comparable to mine," he exclaimed with rage. "What
isolation!"

"Is it possible?" said this truly pitiable man to himself. "Is it
possible that I have no friend in my misfortune of whom I can ask
advice? for my mind is wandering, I feel it. Oh, Falcoz! oh, Ducros!"
he exclaimed with bitterness. Those were the names of two friends of
his childhood whom he had dropped owing to his snobbery in 1814. They
were not noble, and he had wished to change the footing of equality on
which they had been living with him since their childhood.

One of them, Falcoz, a paper-merchant of Verrieres, and a man of
intellect and spirit, had bought a printing press in the chief town of
the department and undertaken the production of a journal. The priestly
congregation had resolved to ruin him; his journal had been condemned,
and he had been deprived of his printer's diploma. In these sad
circumstances he ventured to write to M. de Renal for the first time
for ten years. The mayor of Verrieres thought it his duty to answer
in the old Roman style: "If the King's Minister were to do me the
honour of consulting me, I should say to him, ruin ruthlessly all the
provincial printers, and make printing a monopoly like tobacco." M. de
Renal was horrified to remember the terms of this letter to an intimate
friend whom all Verrieres had once admired, "Who would have said that
I, with my rank, my fortune, my decorations, would ever come to regret
it?" It was in these transports of rage, directed now against himself,
now against all his surroundings, that he passed an awful night; but,
fortunately, it never occurred to him to spy on his wife.

"I am accustomed to Louise," he said to himself, "she knows all my
affairs. If I were free to marry to-morrow, I should not find anyone to
take her place." Then he began to plume himself on the idea that his
wife was innocent. This point of view did not require any manifestation
of character, and suited him much better. "How many calumniated women
has one not seen?"

"But," he suddenly exclaimed, as he walked about feverishly, "shall I
put up with her making a fool of me with her lover as though I were
a man of no account, some mere ragamuffin? Is all Verrieres to make
merry over my complaisance? What have they not said about Charmier
(he was a husband in the district who was notoriously deceived)? Was
there not a smile on every lip at the mention of his name? He is a good
advocate, but whoever said anything about his talent for speaking? 'Oh,
Charmier,' they say, 'Bernard's Charmier,' he is thus designated by the
name of the man who disgraces him."

"I have no daughter, thank heaven," M. de Renal would say at other
times, "and the way in which I am going to punish the mother will
consequently not be so harmful to my children's household. I could
surprise this little peasant with my wife and kill them both; in that
case the tragedy of the situation would perhaps do away with the
grotesque element." This idea appealed to him. He followed it up in all
its details. "The penal code is on my side, and whatever happens our
congregation and my friends on the jury will save me." He examined his
hunting-knife which was quite sharp, but the idea of blood frightened
him.

"I could thrash this insolent tutor within an inch of his life and
hound him out of the house; but what a sensation that would make in
Verrieres and even over the whole department! After Falcoz' journal had
been condemned, and when its chief editor left prison, I had a hand
in making him lose his place of six hundred francs a year. They say
that this scribbler has dared to show himself again in Besancon. He
may lampoon me adroitly and in such a way that it will be impossible
to bring him up before the courts. Bring him up before the courts!
The insolent wretch will insinuate in a thousand and one ways that he
has spoken the truth. A well-born man who keeps his place like I do,
is hated by all the plebeians. I shall see my name in all those awful
Paris papers. Oh, my God, what depths. To see the ancient name of
Renal plunged in the mire of ridicule. If I ever travel I shall have
to change my name. What! abandon that name which is my glory and my
strength. Could anything be worse than that?

"If I do not kill my wife but turn her out in disgrace, she has her
aunt in Besancon who is going to hand all her fortune over to her.
My wife will go and live in Paris with Julien. It will be known at
Verrieres, and I shall be taken for a dupe." The unhappy man then
noticed from the paleness of the lamplight that the dawn was beginning
to appear. He went to get a little fresh air in the garden. At this
moment he had almost determined to make no scandal, particularly in
view of the fact that a scandal would overwhelm with joy all his good
friends in Verrieres.

The promenade in the garden calmed him a little. "No," he exclaimed,
"I shall not deprive myself of my wife, she is too useful to me." He
imagined with horror what his house would be without his wife. The only
relative he had was the Marquise of R---- old, stupid, and malicious.

A very sensible idea occurred to him, but its execution required a
strength of character considerably superior to the small amount of
character which the poor man possessed. "If I keep my wife," he said
to himself, "I know what I shall do one day; on some occasion when
she makes me lose patience, I shall reproach her with her guilt. She
is proud, we shall quarrel, and all this will happen before she has
inherited her aunt's fortune. And how they will all make fun of me
then! My wife loves her children, the result will be that everything
will go to them. But as for me, I shall be the laughing-stock of
Verrieres. 'What,' they will say, 'he could not even manage to revenge
himself on his wife!' Would it not be better to leave it and verify
nothing? In that case I tie my hands, and cannot afterwards reproach
her with anything."

An instant afterwards M. de Renal, once more a prey to wounded vanity,
set himself laboriously to recollect all the methods of procedure
mentioned in the billiard-room of the _Casino_ or the _Nobles' Club_ in
Verrieres, when some fine talker interrupted the pool to divert himself
at the expense of some deceived husband. How cruel these pleasantries
appeared to him at the present moment!

"My God, why is my wife not dead! then I should be impregnable against
ridicule. Why am I not a widower? I should go and pass six months in
Paris in the best society. After this moment of happiness occasioned
by the idea of widowerhood, his imagination reverted to the means of
assuring himself of the truth. Should he put a slight layer of bran
before the door of Julien's room at midnight after everyone had gone to
bed? He would see the impression of the feet in the following morning.

"But that's no good," he suddenly exclaimed with rage. "That
inquisitive Elisa will notice it, and they will soon know all over the
house that I am jealous."

In another _Casino_ tale a husband had assured himself of his
misfortune by tying a hair with a little wax so that it shut the door
of the gallant as effectually as a seal.

After so many hours of uncertainty this means of clearing up his fate
seemed to him emphatically the best, and he was thinking of availing
himself of it when, in one of the turnings of the avenue he met the
very woman whom he would like to have seen dead. She was coming back
from the village. She had gone to hear mass in the church of Vergy.
A tradition, extremely doubtful in the eyes of the cold philosopher,
but in which she believed, alleges that the little church was once the
chapel of the chateau of the Lord of Vergy. This idea obsessed Madame
de Renal all the time in the church that she had counted on spending in
prayer. She kept on imagining to herself the spectacle of her husband
killing Julien when out hunting as though by accident, and then making
her eat his heart in the evening.

"My fate," she said to herself, "depends on what he will think when
he listens to me. It may be I shall never get another opportunity
of speaking to him after this fatal quarter of an hour. He is not a
reasonable person who is governed by his intellect. In that case, with
the help of my weak intelligence, I could anticipate what he will do or
say. He will decide our common fate. He has the power. But this fate
depends on my adroitness, on my skill in directing the ideas of this
crank, who is blinded by his rage and unable to see half of what takes
place. Great God! I need talent and coolness, where shall I get it?"

She regained her calmness as though by magic, and she entered the
garden and saw her husband in the distance. His dishevelled hair and
disordered dress showed that he had not slept.

She gave him a letter with a broken seal but folded. As for him,
without opening it, he gazed at his wife with the eyes of a madman.

"Here's an abominable thing," she said to him, "which an evil-looking
man who makes out that he knows you and is under an obligation to you,
handed to me as I was passing behind the notary's garden. I insist on
one thing and that is that you send back this M. Julien to his parents
and without delay." Madame de Renal hastened to say these words,
perhaps a little before the psychological moment, in order to free
herself from the awful prospect of having to say them.

She was seized with joy on seeing that which she was occasioning to her
husband. She realised from the fixed stare which he was rivetting on
her that Julien had surmised rightly.

"What a genius he is to be so brilliantly diplomatic instead of
succumbing to so real a misfortune," she thought. "He will go very far
in the future! Alas, his successes will only make him forget me."

This little act of admiration for the man whom she adored quite cured
her of her trouble.

She congratulated herself on her tactics. "I have not been unworthy of
Julien," she said to herself with a sweet and secret pleasure.

M. de Renal kept examining the second anonymous letter which the
reader may remember was composed of printed words glued on to a paper
verging on blue. He did not say a word for fear of giving himself away.
"They still make fun of me in every possible way," said M. de Renal
to himself, overwhelmed with exhaustion. "Still more new insults to
examine and all the time on account of my wife." He was on the point
of heaping on her the coarsest insults. He was barely checked by the
prospects of the Besancon legacy. Consumed by the need of venting his
feelings on something, he crumpled up the paper of the second anonymous
letter and began to walk about with huge strides. He needed to get
away from his wife. A few moments afterwards he came back to her in a
quieter frame of mind.

"The thing is to take some definite line and send Julien away," she
said immediately, "after all it is only a labourer's son. You will
compensate him by a few crowns and besides he is clever and will easily
manage to find a place, with M. Valenod for example, or with the
sub-prefect De Maugiron who both have children. In that way you will
not be doing him any wrong...." "There you go talking like the fool
that you are," exclaimed M. de Renal in a terrible voice. "How can one
hope that a woman will show any good sense? You never bother yourself
about common sense. How can you ever get to know anything? Your
indifference and your idleness give you no energy except for hunting
those miserable butterflies, which we are unfortunate to have in our
houses."

Madame de Renal let him speak and he spoke for a long time. _He was
working off his anger_, to use the local expression.

"Monsieur," she answered him at last, "I speak as a woman who has
been outraged in her honour, that is to say, in what she holds most
precious."

Madame de Renal preserved an unalterable sang-froid during all this
painful conversation on the result of which depended the possibility of
still living under the same roof as Julien. She sought for the ideas
which she thought most adapted to guide her husband's blind anger
into a safe channel. She had been insensible to all the insulting
imputations which he had addressed to her. She was not listening to
them, she was then thinking about Julien. "Will he be pleased with me?"

"This little peasant whom we have loaded with attentions, and even with
presents, may be innocent," she said to him at last, "but he is none
the less the occasion of the first affront that I have ever received.
Monsieur, when I read this abominable paper, I vowed to myself that
either he or I should leave your house."

"Do you want to make a scandal so as to dishonour me and yourself as
well? You will make things hum in Verrieres I can assure you."

"It is true, the degree of prosperity in which your prudent management
has succeeded in placing you yourself, your family and the town is the
subject of general envy.... Well, I will urge Julien to ask you for
a holiday to go and spend the month with that wood-merchant of the
mountains, a fit friend to be sure for this little labourer."

"Mind you do nothing at all," resumed M. de Renal with a fair amount of
tranquillity. "I particularly insist on your not speaking to him. You
will put him into a temper and make him quarrel with me. You know to
what extent this little gentleman is always spoiling for a quarrel."

"That young man has no tact," resumed Madame de Renal. "He may be
learned, you know all about that, but at bottom he is only a peasant.
For my own part I never thought much of him since he refused to
marry Elisa. It was an assured fortune; and that on the pretext that
sometimes she had made secret visits to M. Valenod."

"Ah," said M. de Renal, lifting up his eyebrows inordinately. "What,
did Julien tell you that?"

"Not exactly, he always talked of the vocation which calls him to the
holy ministry, but believe me, the first vocation for those lower-class
people is getting their bread and butter. He gave me to understand that
he was quite aware of her secret visits."

"And I--I was ignorant," exclaimed M. de Renal, growing as angry as
before and accentuating his words. "Things take place in my house which
I know nothing about.... What! has there been anything between Elisa
and Valenod?"

"Oh, that's old history, my dear," said Madame de Renal with a smile,
"and perhaps no harm has come of it. It was at the time when your good
friend Valenod would not have minded their thinking at Verrieres that a
perfectly platonic little affection was growing up between him and me."

"I had that idea once myself," exclaimed M. de Renal, furiously
striking his head as he progressed from discovery to discovery, "and
you told me nothing about it."

"Should one set two friends by the ears on account of a little fit of
vanity on the part of our dear director? What society woman has not had
addressed to her a few letters which were both extremely witty and even
a little gallant?"

"He has written to you?"

"He writes a great deal."

"Show me those letters at once, I order you," and M. de Renal pulled
himself up to his six feet.

"I will do nothing of the kind," he was answered with a sweetness
verging on indifference. "I will show you them one day when you are in
a better frame of mind."

"This very instant, odds life," exclaimed M. de Renal, transported with
rage and yet happier than he had been for twelve hours.

"Will you swear to me," said Madame de Renal quite gravely, "never to
quarrel with the director of the workhouse about these letters?"

"Quarrel or no quarrel, I can take those foundlings away from him,
but," he continued furiously, "I want those letters at once. Where are
they?"

"In a drawer in my secretary, but I shall certainly not give you the
key."

"I'll manage to break it," he cried, running towards his wife's room.

He did break in fact with a bar of iron a costly secretary of veined
mahogany which came from Paris and which he had often been accustomed
to wipe with the nap of his coat, when he thought he had detected a
spot.

Madame de Renal had climbed up at a run the hundred and twenty steps
of the dovecot. She tied the corner of a white handkerchief to one of
the bars of iron of the little window. She was the happiest of women.
With tears in her eyes she looked towards the great mountain forest.
"Doubtless," she said to herself, "Julien is watching for this happy
signal."

She listened attentively for a long time and then she cursed the
monotonous noise of the grasshopper and the song of the birds. "Had it
not been for that importunate noise, a cry of joy starting from the big
rocks could have arrived here." Her greedy eye devoured that immense
slope of dark verdure which was as level as a meadow.

"Why isn't he clever enough," she said to herself, quite overcome, "to
invent some signal to tell me that his happiness is equal to mine?" She
only came down from the dovecot when she was frightened of her husband
coming there to look for her.

She found him furious. He was perusing the soothing phrases of M. de
Valenod and reading them with an emotion to which they were but little
used.

"I always come back to the same idea," said Madame de Renal seizing
a moment when a pause in her husband's ejaculations gave her the
possibility of getting heard. "It is necessary for Julien to travel.
Whatever talent he may have for Latin, he is only a peasant after all,
often coarse and lacking in tact. Thinking to be polite, he addresses
inflated compliments to me every day, which are in bad taste. He learns
them by heart out of some novel or other."

"He never reads one," exclaimed M. de Renal. "I am assured of it. Do
you think that I am the master of a house who is so blind as to be
ignorant of what takes place in his own home."

"Well, if he doesn't read these droll compliments anywhere, he invents
them, and that's all the worse so far as he is concerned. He must have
talked about me in this tone in Verrieres and perhaps without going so
far," said Madame Renal with the idea of making a discovery, "he may
have talked in the same strain to Elisa, which is almost the same as if
he had said it to M. Valenod."

"Ah," exclaimed M. de Renal, shaking the table and the room with one of
the most violent raps ever made by a human fist. "The anonymous printed
letter and Valenod's letters are written on the same paper."

"At last," thought Madame de Renal. She pretended to be overwhelmed
at this discovery, and without having the courage to add a single
word, went and sat down some way off on the divan at the bottom of the
drawing-room.

From this point the battle was won. She had a great deal of trouble in
preventing M. de Renal from going to speak to the supposed author of
the anonymous letter. "What, can't you see that making a scene with M.
Valenod without sufficient proof would be the most signal mistake? You
are envied, Monsieur, and who is responsible? Your talents: your wise
management, your tasteful buildings, the dowry which I have brought
you, and above all, the substantial legacy which we are entitled to
hope for from my good aunt, a legacy, the importance of which is
inordinately exaggerated, have made you into the first person in
Verrieres."

"You are forgetting my birth," said M. de Renal, smiling a little.

"You are one of the most distinguished gentlemen in the province,"
replied Madame de Renal emphatically. "If the king were free and could
give birth its proper due, you would no doubt figure in the Chamber of
Peers, etc. And being in this magnificent position, you yet wish to
give the envious a fact to take hold of."

"To speak about this anonymous letter to M. Valenod is equivalent
to proclaiming over the whole of Verrieres, nay, over the whole of
Besancon, over the whole province that this little bourgeois who has
been admitted perhaps imprudently to intimacy _with a Renal_, has
managed to offend him. At the time when those letters which you have
just taken prove that I have reciprocated M. Valenod's love, you ought
to kill me. I should have deserved it a hundred times over, but not to
show him your anger. Remember that all our neighbours are only waiting
for an excuse to revenge themselves for your superiority. Remember that
in 1816 you had a hand in certain arrests.

"I think that you show neither consideration nor love for me,"
exclaimed M. de Renal with all the bitterness evoked by such a memory,
"and I was not made a peer."

"I am thinking, my dear," resumed Madame de Renal with a smile, "that
I shall be richer than you are, that I have been your companion for
twelve years, and that by virtue of those qualifications I am entitled
to have a voice in the council and, above all, in to-day's business. If
you prefer M. Julien to me," she added, with a touch of temper which
was but thinly disguised, "I am ready to go and pass a winter with my
aunt." These words proved a lucky shot. They possessed a firmness which
endeavoured to clothe itself with courtesy. It decided M. de Renal, but
following the provincial custom, he still thought for a long time, and
went again over all his arguments; his wife let him speak. There was
still a touch of anger in his intonation. Finally two hours of futile
rant exhausted the strength of a man who had been subject during the
whole night to a continuous fit of anger. He determined on the line of
conduct he was going to follow with regard to M. Valenod, Julien and
even Elisa.

Madame de Renal was on the point once or twice during this great scene
of feeling some sympathy for the very real unhappiness of the man
who had been so dear to her for twelve years. But true passions are
selfish. Besides she was expecting him every instant to mention the
anonymous letter which he had received the day before and he did not
mention it. In order to feel quite safe, Madame de Renal wanted to know
the ideas which the letter had succeeding in suggesting to the man on
whom her fate depended, for, in the provinces the husbands are the
masters of public opinion. A husband who complains covers himself with
ridicule, an inconvenience which becomes no less dangerous in France
with each succeeding year; but if he refuses to provide his wife with
money, she falls to the status of a labouring woman at fifteen sous a
day, while the virtuous souls have scruples about employing her.

An odalisque in the seraglio can love the Sultan with all her might.
He is all-powerful and she has no hope of stealing his authority by
a series of little subtleties. The master's vengeance is terrible
and bloody but martial and generous; a dagger thrust finishes
everything. But it is by stabbing her with public contempt that a
nineteenth-century husband kills his wife. It is by shutting against
her the doors of all the drawing-rooms.

When Madame de Renal returned to her room, her feeling of danger was
vividly awakened. She was shocked by the disorder in which she found
it. The locks of all the pretty little boxes had been broken. Many
planks in the floor had been lifted up. "He would have no pity on me,"
she said to herself. "To think of his spoiling like this, this coloured
wood floor which he likes so much; he gets red with rage whenever one
of his children comes into it with wet shoes, and now it is spoilt for
ever." The spectacle of this violence immediately banished the last
scruples which she was entertaining with respect to that victory which
she had won only too rapidly.

Julien came back with the children a little before the dinner-bell.
Madame de Renal said to him very drily at dessert when the servant had
left the room:

"You have told me about your wish to go and spend a fortnight at
Verrieres. M. de Renal is kind enough to give you a holiday. You can
leave as soon as you like, but the childrens' exercises will be sent to
you every day so that they do not waste their time."

"I shall certainly not allow you more than a week," said M. de Renal in
a very bitter tone. Julien thought his visage betrayed the anxiety of a
man who was seriously harassed.

"He has not yet decided what line to take," he said to his love during
a moment when they were alone together in the drawing-room.

Madame de Renal rapidly recounted to him all she had done since the
morning.

"The details are for to-night," she added with a smile.

"Feminine perversity," thought Julien, "What can be the pleasure, what
can be the instinct which induces them to deceive us."

"I think you are both enlightened and at the same time blinded by your
love," he said to her with some coldness. "Your conduct to-day has been
admirable, but is it prudent for us to try and see each other to-night?
This house is paved with enemies. Just think of Elisa's passionate
hatred for me."

"That hate is very like the passionate indifference which you no doubt
have for me."

"Even if I were indifferent I ought to save you from the peril in which
I have plunged you. If chance so wills it that M. de Renal should speak
to Elisa, she can acquaint him with everything in a single word. What
is to prevent him from hiding near my room fully armed?"

"What, not even courage?" said Madame de Renal, with all the
haughtiness of a scion of nobility.

"I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien,
coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts.
But," he added, taking her hand, "you have no idea how devoted I am to
you and how over-joyed I am of being able to say good-bye to you before
this cruel separation."







Part 1, Chapter 21
Julien finishes putting together the anonymous letter for Madame de Renal and hands it to her. In return, she hands him a box with gold and diamonds in it and asks him to bury it in the mountains. She's afraid that someday she might need it if she's kicked out of her home. Meanwhile, Monsieur Renal stresses about how to bring up the letter he has received with his wife. It's clear that the letter has told him about his wife's affair. The whole thing makes de Renal think about how many men dislike him and how few like him. He even thinks about friends whom he cut ties with when he was younger because they weren't upper class enough. He thinks about beating up Julien and throwing him out of the house. But he knows that this would eventually cause the scandal to become known to everyone in town. He can't stand the thought of having the newspapers drag his name through the mud. Madame de Renal comes up to him with a devastated look on her face. She hands him a letter and says someone from town she didn't recognize just gave it to her. She asks Monsieur to send Julien back to his father as quickly as possible. Monsieur de Renal tells her to stop being an idiot. She waits patiently for him to get all his anger out of his system. Madame plants the suspicion in her husband's head that it is actually the servant Elisa and Valenod who are having an affair. She also tells him that Mr. Valenod has written her many love letters over the years. She shows them to her husband, and this proves that Valenod has a motive for trying to ruin Madame's reputation. The next step is for Madame to convince Monsieur never to confront Valenod about the letters . Madame demands that her husband send Julien away for at least a couple of weeks. He agrees. With all that's happened, Madame still asks Julien to come to her room that night. He thinks she's insane. But of course he comes.