"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.