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 C?ur.
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.