Some hesitation was shewn, but eventually the hand was withdrawn in a manner which indicated displeasure.
Julien was inclined to give up the attempt as a bad job, and to continue his conversation quite gaily, when he heard M. de Renal approaching.
The coarse words he had uttered in the morning were still ringing in Julien's ears.
"Would not taking possession of his wife's hand in his very presence," he said to himself, "be a good way of scoring off that creature who has all that life can give him.
Yes! I will do it. I, the very man for whom he has evidenced so great a contempt."
From that moment the tranquillity which was so alien to Julien's real character quickly disappeared.
He was obsessed by an anxious desire that Madame de Renal should abandon her hand to him.
M. de Renal was talking politics with vehemence; two or three commercial men in Verrieres had been growing distinctly richer than he was, and were going to annoy him over the elections. Madame Derville was listening to him.
Irritated by these tirades, Julien brought his chair nearer Madame de Renal.
All his movements were concealed by the darkness.
He dared to put his hand very near to the pretty arm which was left uncovered by the dress.
He was troubled and had lost control of his mind. He brought his face near to that pretty arm and dared to put his lips on it.
Madame de Renal shuddered.
Her husband was four paces away. She hastened to give her hand to Julien, and at the same time to push him back a little.
As M. de Renal was continuing his insults against those ne'er-do-wells and Jacobins who were growing so rich, Julien covered the hand which had been abandoned to him with kisses, which were either really passionate or at any rate seemed so to Madame de Renal.
But the poor woman had already had the proofs on that same fatal day that the man whom she adored, without owning it to herself, loved another!
During the whole time Julien had been absent she had been the prey to an extreme unhappiness which had made her reflect.
"What," she said to herself, "Am I going to love, am I going to be in love?
Am I, a married woman, going to fall in love?
But," she said to herself, "I have never felt for my husband this dark madness, which never permits of my keeping Julien out of my thoughts.
After all, he is only a child who is full of respect for me.
This madness will be fleeting.
In what way do the sentiments which I may have for this young man concern my husband?
M. de Renal would be bored by the conversations which I have with Julien on imaginative subjects.
As for him, he simply thinks of his business. I am not taking anything away from him to give to Julien."
No hypocrisy had sullied the purity of that naive soul, now swept away by a passion such as it had never felt before.
She deceived herself, but without knowing it. But none the less, a certain instinct of virtue was alarmed.
Such were the combats which were agitating her when Julien appeared in the garden.
She heard him speak and almost at the same moment she saw him sit down by her side.
Her soul was as it were transported by this charming happiness which had for the last fortnight surprised her even more than it had allured. Everything was novel for her.
None the less, she said to herself after some moments, "the mere presence of Julien is quite enough to blot out all his wrongs."
She was frightened; it was then that she took away her hand.
His passionate kisses, the like of which she had never received before, made her forget that perhaps he loved another woman.
Soon he was no longer guilty in her eyes.
The cessation of that poignant pain which suspicion had engendered and the presence of a happiness that she had never even dreamt of, gave her ecstasies of love and of mad gaiety.
The evening was charming for everyone, except the mayor of Verrieres, who was unable to forget his parvenu manufacturers.
Julien left off thinking about his black ambition, or about those plans of his which were so difficult to accomplish.
For the first time in his life he was led away by the power of beauty.
Lost in a sweetly vague reverie, quite alien to his character, and softly pressing that hand, which he thought ideally pretty, he half listened to the rustle of the leaves of the pine trees, swept by the light night breeze, and to the dogs of the mill on the Doubs, who barked in the distance.
But this emotion was one of pleasure and not passion.
As he entered his room, he only thought of one happiness, that of taking up again his favourite book. When one is twenty the idea of the world and the figure to be cut in it dominate everything.
He soon, however, laid down the book.
As the result of thinking of the victories of Napoleon, he had seen a new element in his own victory.
"Yes," he said to himself, "I have won a battle.
I must exploit it. I must crush the pride of that proud gentleman while he is in retreat.
That would be real Napoleon.
I must ask him for three days' holiday to go and see my friend Fouque.
If he refuses me I will threaten to give him notice, but he will yield the point."
Madame de Renal could not sleep a wink.
It seemed as though, until this moment, she had never lived.