Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/153

Rh thinking of availing himself of it when, in one of the turnings of the avenue he met the very woman whom he would like to have seen dead. She was coming back from the village. She had gone to hear mass in the church of Vergy. A tradition, extremely doubtful in the eyes of the cold philosopher, but in which she believed, alleges that the little church was once the chapel of the château of the Lord of Vergy. This idea obsessed Madame de Rênal all the time in the church that she had counted on spending in prayer. She kept on imagining to herself the spectacle of her husband killing Julien when out hunting as though by accident, and then making her eat his heart in the evening.

"My fate," she said to herself, "depends on what he will think when he listens to me. It may be I shall never get another opportunity of speaking to him after this fatal quarter of an hour. He is not a reasonable person who is governed by his intellect. In that case, with the help of my weak intelligence, I could anticipate what he will do or say. He will decide our common fate. He has the power. 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 Rênal 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