Chapter summary
Julien Sorel asks Fouqué for a Jansenist confessor who cannot be reached by intrigue, and Madame de Rênal returns to Besançon. She obtains permission to see him twice a day and finds him without any vanity, telling her all his weaknesses. Mathilde de La Mole, jealous, torments Julien with almost daily scenes, and the death of Croisenois in a duel leads Julien to try to persuade her to accept the Viscount de Luz. Julien refuses the conversion with a show that his confessor advises as a means of obtaining clemency, and he forbids Madame de Rênal to go to Saint-Cloud to throw herself at the king's feet. On the morning of the execution, under a beautiful sun, he dies without affectation, having asked Fouqué to put Mathilde and Madame de Rênal in the same carriage, and having required of Madame de Rênal the oath that she would live for Mathilde's son. Fouqué buys the body for the grotto on the mountain that overlooks Verrières, and Mathilde kisses Julien's head, follows the burial, and has the grotto adorned with Italian marbles. Madame de Rênal keeps her oath and does not attempt her own life, but she dies three days later, embracing her children.
Analysis
Julien refuses a showy conversion, and he forbids Madame de Rênal to go to Saint-Cloud to throw herself at the king's feet, because he wants a death without pose or favor. In his last request he puts Mathilde and Madame de Rênal in the same carriage and demands of the second that she live for Mathilde's son. He leaves each of them the obligation that still joins them.
Before Madame de Rênal, Julien confesses the weaknesses he had hidden from Mathilde and Fouqué. It is the inversion of the method of the chapters of the siege, and the text calls love what needs neither calculation nor pose.
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