The mayor's wife in Verrières, mother of three, devout and with no training in society. She receives Julien at home, whom her husband hires as the children's tutor, and she is his first love, the truer of the two, and the one who decides the ending of the book.
What she is, and what she is not
She is not the scheming woman the plot would call for. She does not know she is falling in love while she falls, and this unawareness is the trait that Stendhal protects from beginning to end: where Mathilde deliberates, she simply obeys what she feels.
Madame de Rênal found reasons to do what her heart dictated; this young woman of high society lets her heart be moved only after finding good reasons for it to be moved.
Her happiness is measured by nothing. The question below, which is usually recalled alongside her, belongs to Julien, not to her: he asks it when he leaves the room on the first night, and the contrast is that she asks nothing.
My God! Being happy, being loved, is that all it is?
Ch. VII. The narrator on Madame de Rênal's emotional upbringing:
Madame de Rênal, the wealthy heiress of a devout aunt, married at sixteen to a good gentleman, had never in her life felt or seen anything that resembled love in the slightest.
Ch. VIII. The idea Madame de Rênal had of the passions:
she thought of the passions as we think of the lottery: a sure deception and happiness sought by madmen.
Ch. IX. That same night, from her side:
As for Madame de Rênal, hand in hand with Julien, she thought of nothing; she let herself live.
Her role in the novel's machinery
She calculates little, and only when danger forces her to, and for that reason she works as a yardstick: everything Julien does takes on meaning when compared with someone who acts more from feeling than from strategy. While he tallies victories, she lives what is happening, and it is precisely this asymmetry that makes the reader perceive his coldness without the narrator needing to say so.
And it is she who brings everything down, in a gesture that is not calculated revenge but religious conscience presenting its bill: the letter to the Marquis de La Mole, written by the young priest who directed her and copied out by her, arrives on the eve of triumph and undoes the marriage and the entire future.
Poor and ambitious, it was with the help of the most consummate hypocrisy and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman that this man tried to attain a position and become somebody.
When her son falls ill, Madame de Rênal's remorse:
Madame de Rênal suddenly succumbed to a terrible remorse. For the first time, she reproached herself firmly for her love; she seemed to understand, as if by miracle, the enormous deception to which she had let herself be dragged. Although of a deeply religious character, until then she had not thought about the dimension of her crime in the eyes of God.
What she does without knowing it is politics
She almost never calculates, and yet she is not outside the machine: it is precisely because she does not calculate her own position that she reproduces the yardstick of the age with ease, and the book shows her doing this three times.
The first is in enjoying hearing her husband divide the children's future among the three careers that the Restoration left open to those with a name.
Madame de Rênal herself, in enjoying hearing her husband talk of the children's future, accepts without noticing the yardstick of closed careers that governs the whole town:
She enjoyed Monsieur de Rênal most of all when he spoke to her of his plans for the children, destining one of them for the army, the second for the magistracy and the third for the Church.
The second is when she spends all the influence she has to get Julien out of his black clothes (see the uniform and the cassock) for a day, and what she obtains is a favor taken from the sons of rich manufacturers, that is, an exact piece of the economy of patronage that governs Verrières.
Madame de Rênal uses all the influence she has to get Julien out of his black clothes (see the uniform and the cassock) for a day, and gets more than she had imagined:
she obtained first from Mr. Moirod, and then from the sub-governor de Maugiron, that Julien be named honor guard to the detriment of five or six sons of very wealthy manufacturers, at least two of whom were of exemplary piety.
The third is the most serious, and the gesture that brings down the whole book. The letter to the marquis is not the revenge of a betrayed woman: it is imposed by her confessor, a young priest recently arrived from Dijon, who writes it; she only copies it, softening the worst passages, and later blames religion, which acts in this way, one last time, through the hand of the one who least wants to act.
Poor and ambitious, it was with the help of the most consummate hypocrisy and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman that this man tried to attain a position and become somebody.
The letter to Mr. de La Mole had been written by the young priest who was Madame de Rênal's spiritual adviser and had then been copied out by her.
The husband, on the other side, measures everything by position, and his fear is electoral before it is conjugal.
The threat hanging over Monsieur de Rênal is not only financial, it is political:
Monsieur de Rênal spoke of politics with anger: two or three manufacturers of Verrières were becoming decidedly richer than he was and wanted to challenge him at the elections.
The ending, which closes the book
After the shot, in prison, it is with her that Julien has the happiest hours of his life, and he himself says so without any farewell rhetoric.
Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy.
And her death closes the novel in silence, three days later, without any grand gesture, in exact contrast with what Mathilde does in the same chapter.
Madame de Rênal kept her promise. She made no attempt whatsoever on her own life; but three days later she died, embracing her children.
Trajectory
In chapter 6 of Book I, she waits for a dirty, shabbily dressed priest and finds at the door an almost boyish young man, pale, who has just been crying. She is charmed by him at once.
In chapter 7 of Book I, moved by Julien's poverty, she wants to give him clothes and her husband refuses. She does not yet recognize what she feels, because she has never seen or felt anything like love.
Ch. VII. The narrator on Madame de Rênal's emotional upbringing:
Madame de Rênal, the wealthy heiress of a devout aunt, married at sixteen to a good gentleman, had never in her life felt or seen anything that resembled love in the slightest.
In chapter 9 of Book I, she leaves her hand under Julien's, beneath the linden tree, and thinks of nothing. The next day, faced with her husband's rudeness toward Julien, she feels for the first time a desire to take revenge on him.
Ch. IX. That same night, from her side:
As for Madame de Rênal, hand in hand with Julien, she thought of nothing; she let herself live.
Ch. IX. Faced with her husband's rudeness:
For the first time in her life Madame de Rênal felt a kind of desire for revenge against her husband.
In chapter 11 of Book I, after a day tormented by the suspicion that Julien loves another woman, she discovers that she is in love. In her room, the terror of the word adultery is so great that she screams and wakes the maid Élisa, and she resolves to treat him with perfect coldness.
Ch. XI. Madame de Rênal, now without guilt before her husband:
What does it matter to my husband what feelings I may harbor for this young man?
In chapter 15 of Book I, she answers with genuine indignation when Julien announces that he will come to her room and, when he arrives, calls him a wretch. Julien falls at her feet in tears. She judges herself condemned, pushes him away and soon throws herself into his arms.
In chapter 19 of Book I, when the youngest son falls ill, she reads the fever as God's punishment for adultery and asks Julien to go away. One night she almost confesses everything to her husband, who takes her for a romantic.
With her son's illness, Madame de Rênal's remorse:
Madame de Rênal suddenly succumbed to a terrible remorse. For the first time, she reproached herself firmly for her love; she seemed to understand, as if by miracle, the enormous deception to which she had let herself be dragged. Although of a deeply religious character, until then she had not thought about the dimension of her crime in the eyes of God.
In chapter 20 of Book I, after her husband receives an anonymous letter, she takes charge of the affair. She writes Julien the plan: the second anonymous letter will be made of words cut out and pasted onto paper from the house of Valenod, so that her husband will blame the rival. In the next chapter, she applies the plan to her husband, and he falls for it.
The woman who, one chapter earlier, saw herself condemned now gives orders with the precision of a craft:
It is you who will see to the anonymous letter; arm yourself with patience and a pair of scissors.
In chapter 23 of Book I, to avoid a duel between her husband and Valenod, she persuades her husband to offer six hundred francs to Julien for a year of seminary. Julien returns on the third day for a farewell night in which she, icy, seems like a living corpse.
The last night, which she supposes to be the final one, leaves Julien desolate:
Julien was astonished at the lukewarm embraces of that living corpse; he could think of nothing else for many leagues.
In chapter 26 of Book I, Fouqué, visiting the seminary, tells Julien that Madame de Rênal has become devout.
In chapter 30 of Book I, Julien enters her room at dawn, and she repels him with religious horror. She yields only when he announces, with calculated coldness, that he is leaving forever.
The narrator weighs the price of the victory:
Had the return to tender feelings and the eclipse of Madame de Rênal's remorse come a little sooner, they would have been a divine happiness; obtained in this way, by artifice, they were nothing more than a pleasure.
In chapter 35 of Book II, she answers the marquis de La Mole, who had asked her for information about Julien, with the letter that undoes his marriage to Mathilde. Julien buys pistols and shoots her in the church at Verrières, during Mass.
Poor and ambitious, it was with the help of the most consummate hypocrisy and through the seduction of a weak and unhappy woman that this man tried to attain a position and become somebody.
In chapter 36 of Book II, she survives: the first bullet went through her hat and the second broke her shoulder. She sends the maid Élisa to bribe the jailer so that he will treat Julien humanely. It is when Julien learns that she is alive that he begins to repent.
Only then did Julien begin to repent of the crime he had committed.
In chapter 40 of Book II, having promised her husband not to leave her bed, she goes to Besançon. She writes to each of the thirty-six jurors asking them to declare the premeditation not incontestable.
In chapter 43 of Book II, she enters the cell to beg Julien to appeal. The two forgive each other, and he makes the appeal conditional on her oath that she will not attempt her own life. They tell each other what they did not know, and the letter to the marquis becomes clear. Three days later, her husband sends the carriage and calls her back to Verrières.
The letter to Mr. de La Mole had been written by the young priest who was Madame de Rênal's spiritual adviser and had then been copied out by her.
Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are many days. I shall never have been so happy.
In chapter 45 of Book II, she returns to Besançon and obtains permission to see Julien twice a day. He forbids her to go to Saint-Cloud to throw herself at the king's feet, and wrings from her the oath to live for Mathilde's son. She keeps the oath and dies three days after his execution.
Julien had no self-regard whatsoever before her, and told her all his weaknesses.
She kept her promise. She made no attempt whatsoever on her own life; but three days later she died, embracing her children.