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?"