Chapter summary
A cold, just, and impassive tutor, yet loved because his arrival drove boredom out of the house, Julien Sorel feels hatred for the society that admits him to the other end of the table, above all for Valenod, and is beaten by his brothers in the Belvedere wood, where Madame de Rênal believes him dead. Moved by his poverty, she wants to give him clothes; her husband replies that one does not give presents to someone who serves properly, and when she offers some louis to Julien himself, he refuses them, offended, and says he is ready to show Rênal the account book. Rênal calls Julien a servant and gives him a hundred francs, which Julien reports to Madame de Rênal with a bitter smile, and she makes up for it by buying, for ten louis, the books he wants for the children. Little by little Julien gets the mayor to accept a subscription from the bookseller in the name of the lowliest servant. Alone, the two sink into an embarrassed silence, and Madame de Rênal, who had never felt anything resembling love, does not reproach herself at all.
Analysis
Julien refuses Madame de Rênal's louis and says he is ready to show the account book, because the offer comes with a request to hide it from her husband, and hiding anything about his money from his employer would lower him more than a servant. After her husband humiliates him with the hundred francs, she finds a detour: she buys, with ten louis, the books she knows Julien wants and gives them to the children. It is a reparation he does not even notice, busy marveling at the number of books in the bookshop.
The narrator sums up the tutor in a sentence that is also a diagnosis of the character: The children adored him, he did not like them; his thoughts were elsewhere. [...] Cold, just, impassive and yet loved, because his arrival had somehow driven boredom from the house, he was a good tutor.
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