finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_7_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 8
part 1, chapter 8
{"name": "Part 1, Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-8", "summary": "The chambermaid Elisa finds out that she's going to inherit some money. She hopes that this money will give her the freedom she needs to marry Julien. Her local priest, Father Chelan is happy about this. But he's sad to find out that Julien isn't interested. Father sits Julien down and tells him that he needs to think carefully about becoming a priest. He knows Julien is ambitious and he's worried that Julien will do whatever it takes to become rich. That's why he's worried that Julien is going to compromise on his holy values in order to flatter and make friends with powerful men. Father Chelan can see through Julien's phony belief in the church. He wants Julien to stay way from the priesthood. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal realizes that Elisa has been very depressed lately, in spite of the money she's just inherited. Elisa tells Madame about Julien refusing her. Madame feels bad, but also is secretly pleased. She still promises Elisa that she'll try to convince Julien to marry the girl. The narrator tells us that Madame only does this because she loves the pleasure of hearing Julien reject Elisa over and over. It's only after this encounter that she starts to wonder if she's in love with Julien. The mayor needs to leave for a few days on business. While he's gone, Madame asks the workmen to construct a walkway on her property. She relishes the opportunity to spend the next couple of days with Julien, with both of them directing the workers. In other words, she likes having Julien temporarily replace her husband as man of the house. Julien and Madame start hunting butterflies together and reading about them in books. They finally have something they can talk about. Neighbors notice that Madame has started paying more attention to her wardrobe. A cousin of Madame de Renal's, named Madame Derville, visits the de Renal house. The two spend a lot of time together, and Derville recognizes that Madame is happier than usual. Julien often spends time with the two women as they hang out beneath a tree. One evening, his hand accidentally brushes against Madame de Renal's. She quickly pulls hers away. Julien decides that he must find a way to touch her hand without this happening.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER VIII

LITTLE EPISODES


    "Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression,
    And stolen glances sweeter for the theft,
    And burning blushes, though for no transgression."
                                 _Don Juan_, c. I, st. 74.


It was only when Madame de Renal began to think of her maid Elisa
that there was some slight change in that angelic sweetness which she
owed both to her natural character and her actual happiness. The girl
had come into a fortune, went to confess herself to the cure Chelan
and confessed to him her plan of marrying Julien. The cure was truly
rejoiced at his friend's good fortune, but he was extremely surprised
when Julien resolutely informed him that Mademoiselle Elisa's offer
could not suit him.

"Beware, my friend, of what is passing within your heart," said the
cure with a frown, "I congratulate you on your mission, if that is the
only reason why you despise a more than ample fortune. It is fifty-six
years since I was first cure of Verrieres, and yet I shall be turned
out, according to all appearances. I am distressed by it, and yet my
income amounts to eight hundred francs. I inform you of this detail so
that you may not be under any illusions as to what awaits you in your
career as a priest. If you think of paying court to the men who enjoy
power, your eternal damnation is assured. You may make your fortune,
but you will have to do harm to the poor, flatter the sub-prefect,
the mayor, the man who enjoys prestige, and pander to his passion;
this conduct, which in the world is called knowledge of life, is not
absolutely incompatible with salvation so far as a layman is concerned;
but in our career we have to make a choice; it is a question of making
one's fortune either in this world or the next; there is no middle
course. Come, my dear friend, reflect, and come back in three days with
a definite answer. I am pained to detect that there is at the bottom
of your character a sombre passion which is far from indicating to me
that moderation and that perfect renunciation of earthly advantages so
necessary for a priest; I augur well of your intellect, but allow me to
tell you," added the good cure with tears in his eyes, "I tremble for
your salvation in your career as a priest."

Julien was ashamed of his emotion; he found himself loved for the first
time in his life; he wept with delight; and went to hide his tears in
the great woods behind Verrieres.

"Why am I in this position?" he said to himself at last, "I feel that
I would give my life a hundred times over for this good cure Chelan,
and he has just proved to me that I am nothing more than a fool. It
is especially necessary for me to deceive him, and he manages to find
me out. The secret ardour which he refers to is my plan of making my
fortune. He thinks I am unworthy of being a priest, that too, just when
I was imagining that my sacrifice of fifty louis would give him the
very highest idea of my piety and devotion to my mission."

"In future," continued Julien, "I will only reckon on those elements in
my character which I have tested. Who could have told me that I should
find any pleasure in shedding tears? How I should like some one to
convince me that I am simply a fool!"

Three days later, Julien found the excuse with which he ought to have
been prepared on the first day; the excuse was a piece of calumny, but
what did it matter? He confessed to the cure, with a great deal of
hesitation, that he had been persuaded from the suggested union by a
reason he could not explain, inasmuch as it tended to damage a third
party. This was equivalent to impeaching Elisa's conduct. M. Chelan
found that his manner betrayed a certain worldly fire which was very
different from that which ought to have animated a young acolyte.

"My friend," he said to him again, "be a good country citizen,
respected and educated, rather than a priest without a true mission."

So far as words were concerned, Julien answered these new remonstrances
very well. He managed to find the words which a young and ardent
seminarist would have employed, but the tone in which he pronounced
them, together with the thinly concealed fire which blazed in his eye,
alarmed M. Chelan.

You must not have too bad an opinion of Julien's prospects. He
invented with correctness all the words suitable to a prudent and
cunning hypocrisy. It was not bad for his age. As for his tone and his
gestures, he had spent his life with country people; he had never been
given an opportunity of seeing great models. Consequently, as soon as
he was given a chance of getting near such gentlemen, his gestures
became as admirable as his words.

Madame de Renal was astonished that her maid's new fortune did not
make her more happy. She saw her repeatedly going to the cure and
coming back with tears in her eyes. At last Elisa talked to her of her
marriage.

Madame de Renal thought she was ill. A kind of fever prevented her from
sleeping. She only lived when either her maid or Julien were in sight.
She was unable to think of anything except them and the happiness
which they would find in their home. Her imagination depicted in the
most fascinating colours the poverty of the little house, where they
were to live on their income of fifty louis a year. Julien could quite
well become an advocate at Bray, the sub-prefecture, two leagues from
Verrieres. In that case she would see him sometimes. Madame de Renal
sincerely believed she would go mad. She said so to her husband and
finally fell ill. That very evening when her maid was attending her,
she noticed that the girl was crying. She abhorred Elisa at that
moment, and started to scold her; she then begged her pardon. Elisa's
tears redoubled. She said if her mistress would allow her, she would
tell her all her unhappiness.

"Tell me," answered Madame de Renal.

"Well, Madame, he refuses me, some wicked people must have spoken badly
about me. He believes them."

"Who refuses you?" said Madame de Renal, scarcely breathing.

"Who else, Madame, but M. Julien," answered the maid sobbing. "M. the
cure had been unable to overcome his resistance, for M. the cure thinks
that he ought not to refuse an honest girl on the pretext that she
has been a maid. After all, M. Julien's father is nothing more than
a carpenter, and how did he himself earn his living before he was at
Madame's?"

Madame de Renal stopped listening; her excessive happiness had almost
deprived her of her reason. She made the girl repeat several times
the assurance that Julien had refused her, with a positiveness which
shut the door on the possibility of his coming round to a more prudent
decision.

"I will make a last attempt," she said to her maid. "I will speak to M.
Julien."

The following day, after breakfast, Madame de Renal indulged in the
delightful luxury of pleading her rival's cause, and of seeing Elisa's
hand and fortune stubbornly refused for a whole hour.

Julien gradually emerged from his cautiously worded answers, and
finished by answering with spirit Madame de Renal's good advice. She
could not help being overcome by the torrent of happiness which, after
so many days of despair, now inundated her soul. She felt quite ill.
When she had recovered and was comfortably in her own room she sent
everyone away. She was profoundly astonished.

"Can I be in love with Julien?" she finally said to herself. This
discovery, which at any other time would have plunged her into remorse
and the deepest agitation, now only produced the effect of a singular,
but as it were, indifferent spectacle. Her soul was exhausted by all
that she had just gone through, and had no more sensibility to passion
left.

Madame de Renal tried to work, and fell into a deep sleep; when she
woke up she did not frighten herself so much as she ought to have. She
was too happy to be able to see anything wrong in anything. Naive and
innocent as she was, this worthy provincial woman had never tortured
her soul in her endeavours to extract from it a little sensibility to
some new shade of sentiment or unhappiness. Entirely absorbed as she
had been before Julien's arrival with that mass of work which falls
to the lot of a good mistress of a household away from Paris, Madame
de Renal thought of passion in the same way in which we think of a
lottery: a certain deception, a happiness sought after by fools.

The dinner bell rang. Madame de Renal blushed violently. She heard the
voice of Julien who was bringing in the children. Having grown somewhat
adroit since her falling in love, she complained of an awful headache
in order to explain her redness.

"That's just like what all women are," answered M. de Renal with a
coarse laugh. "Those machines have always got something or other to be
put right."

Although she was accustomed to this type of wit, Madame de Renal was
shocked by the tone of voice. In order to distract herself, she looked
at Julien's physiognomy; he would have pleased her at this particular
moment, even if he had been the ugliest man imaginable.

M. de Renal, who always made a point of copying the habits of the
gentry of the court, established himself at Vergy in the first fine
days of the spring; this is the village rendered celebrated by the
tragic adventure of Gabrielle. A hundred paces from the picturesque
ruin of the old Gothic church, M. de Renal owns an old chateau with its
four towers and a garden designed like the one in the Tuileries with
a great many edging verges of box and avenues of chestnut trees which
are cut twice in the year. An adjacent field, crowded with apple trees,
served for a promenade. Eight or ten magnificent walnut trees were at
the end of the orchard. Their immense foliage went as high as perhaps
eighty feet.

"Each of these cursed walnut trees," M. de Renal was in the habit of
saying, whenever his wife admired them, "costs me the harvest of at
least half an acre; corn cannot grow under their shade."

Madame de Renal found the sight of the country novel: her admiration
reached the point of enthusiasm. The sentiment by which she was
animated gave her both ideas and resolution. M. de Renal had returned
to the town, for mayoral business, two days after their arrival in
Vergy. But Madame de Renal engaged workmen at her own expense. Julien
had given her the idea of a little sanded path which was to go round
the orchard and under the big walnut trees, and render it possible
for the children to take their walk in the very earliest hours of the
morning without getting their feet wet from the dew. This idea was put
into execution within twenty-four hours of its being conceived. Madame
de Renal gaily spent the whole day with Julien in supervising the
workmen.

When the Mayor of Verrieres came back from the town he was very
surprised to find the avenue completed. His arrival surprised Madame
de Renal as well. She had forgotten his existence. For two months
he talked with irritation about the boldness involved in making so
important a repair without consulting him, but Madame de Renal had had
it executed at her own expense, a fact which somewhat consoled him.

She spent her days in running about the orchard with her children,
and in catching butterflies. They had made big hoods of clear gauze
with which they caught the poor _lepidoptera_. This is the barbarous
name which Julien taught Madame de Renal. For she had had M. Godart's
fine work ordered from Besancon, and Julien used to tell her about the
strange habits of the creatures.

They ruthlessly transfixed them by means of pins in a great cardboard
box which Julien had prepared.

Madame de Renal and Julien had at last a topic of conversation; he was
no longer exposed to the awful torture that had been occasioned by
their moments of silence.

They talked incessantly and with extreme interest, though always about
very innocent matters. This gay, full, active life, pleased the fancy
of everyone, except Mademoiselle Elisa who found herself overworked.
Madame had never taken so much trouble with her dress, even at carnival
time, when there is a ball at Verrieres, she would say; she changes her
gowns two or three times a day.

As it is not our intention to flatter anyone, we do not propose to
deny that Madame de Renal, who had a superb skin, arranged her gowns
in such a way as to leave her arms and her bosom very exposed. She was
extremely well made, and this style of dress suited her delightfully.

"You have never been _so young_, Madame," her Verrieres friends would
say to her, when they came to dinner at Vergy (this is one of the local
expressions).

It is a singular thing, and one which few amongst us will believe, but
Madame de Renal had no specific object in taking so much trouble. She
found pleasure in it and spent all the time which she did not pass in
hunting butterflies with the children and Julien, in working with Elisa
at making gowns, without giving the matter a further thought. Her only
expedition to Verrieres was caused by her desire to buy some new summer
gowns which had just come from Mulhouse.

She brought back to Vergy a young woman who was a relative of hers.
Since her marriage, Madame de Renal had gradually become attached to
Madame Derville, who had once been her school mate at the _Sacre Coeur_.

Madame Derville laughed a great deal at what she called her cousin's
mad ideas: "I would never have thought of them alone," she said. When
Madame de Renal was with her husband, she was ashamed of those sudden
ideas, which, are called sallies in Paris, and thought them quite
silly: but Madame Derville's presence gave her courage. She would start
to telling her her thoughts in a timid voice, but after the ladies
had been alone for a long time, Madame de Renal's brain became more
animated, and a long morning spent together by the two friends passed
like a second, and left them in the best of spirits. On this particular
journey, however, the acute Madame Derville thought her cousin much
less merry, but much more happy than usual.

Julien, on his side, had since coming to the country lived like an
absolute child, and been as happy as his pupils in running after
the butterflies. After so long a period of constraint and wary
diplomacy, he was at last alone and far from human observation; he
was instinctively free from any apprehension on the score of Madame
de Renal, and abandoned himself to the sheer pleasure of being alive,
which is so keen at so young an age, especially among the most
beautiful mountains in the world.

Ever since Madame Derville's arrival, Julien thought that she was his
friend; he took the first opportunity of showing her the view from the
end of the new avenue, under the walnut tree; as a matter of fact it is
equal, if not superior, to the most wonderful views that Switzerland
and the Italian lakes can offer. If you ascend the steep slope which
commences some paces from there, you soon arrive at great precipices
fringed by oak forests, which almost jut on to the river. It was to the
peaked summits of these rocks that Julien, who was now happy, free, and
king of the household into the bargain, would take the two friends, and
enjoy their admiration these sublime views.

"To me it's like Mozart's music," Madame Derville would say.

The country around Verrieres had been spoilt for Julien by the jealousy
of his brothers and the presence of a tyranous and angry father. He
was free from these bitter memories at Vergy; for the first time in
his life, he failed to see an enemy. When, as frequently happened, M.
de Renal was in town, he ventured to read; soon, instead of reading at
night time, a procedure, moreover, which involved carefully hiding his
lamp at the bottom of a flower-pot turned upside down, he was able to
indulge in sleep; in the day, however, in the intervals between the
children's lessons, he would come among these rocks with that book
which was the one guide of his conduct and object of his enthusiasm. He
found in it simultaneously happiness, ecstasy and consolation for his
moments of discouragement.

Certain remarks of Napoleon about women, several discussions about the
merits of the novels which were fashionable in his reign, furnished him
now for the first time with some ideas which any other young man of his
age would have had for a long time.

The dog days arrived. They started the habit of spending the evenings
under an immense pine tree some yards from the house. The darkness was
profound. One evening, Julien was speaking and gesticulating, enjoying
to the full the pleasure of being at his best when talking to young
women; in one of his gestures, he touched the hand of Madame de Renal
which was leaning on the back of one of those chairs of painted wood,
which are so frequently to be seen in gardens.

The hand was quickly removed, but Julien thought it a point of duty
to secure that that hand should not be removed when he touched it.
The idea of a duty to be performed and the consciousness of his
stultification, or rather of his social inferiority, if he should fail
in achieving it, immediately banished all pleasure from his heart.






Part 1, Chapter 8
The chambermaid Elisa finds out that she's going to inherit some money. She hopes that this money will give her the freedom she needs to marry Julien. Her local priest, Father Chelan is happy about this. But he's sad to find out that Julien isn't interested. Father sits Julien down and tells him that he needs to think carefully about becoming a priest. He knows Julien is ambitious and he's worried that Julien will do whatever it takes to become rich. That's why he's worried that Julien is going to compromise on his holy values in order to flatter and make friends with powerful men. Father Chelan can see through Julien's phony belief in the church. He wants Julien to stay way from the priesthood. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal realizes that Elisa has been very depressed lately, in spite of the money she's just inherited. Elisa tells Madame about Julien refusing her. Madame feels bad, but also is secretly pleased. She still promises Elisa that she'll try to convince Julien to marry the girl. The narrator tells us that Madame only does this because she loves the pleasure of hearing Julien reject Elisa over and over. It's only after this encounter that she starts to wonder if she's in love with Julien. The mayor needs to leave for a few days on business. While he's gone, Madame asks the workmen to construct a walkway on her property. She relishes the opportunity to spend the next couple of days with Julien, with both of them directing the workers. In other words, she likes having Julien temporarily replace her husband as man of the house. Julien and Madame start hunting butterflies together and reading about them in books. They finally have something they can talk about. Neighbors notice that Madame has started paying more attention to her wardrobe. A cousin of Madame de Renal's, named Madame Derville, visits the de Renal house. The two spend a lot of time together, and Derville recognizes that Madame is happier than usual. Julien often spends time with the two women as they hang out beneath a tree. One evening, his hand accidentally brushes against Madame de Renal's. She quickly pulls hers away. Julien decides that he must find a way to touch her hand without this happening.