"And is this the woman who was so maddened by remorse?" he thought. "What are her plans at this moment?" He was too proud to ask her, but she had never perhaps pleased him more. "If this turns out badly," she added with the same coolness, "I shall be deprived of everything. Take charge of this, and bury it in some place of the mountain. It will perhaps one day be my only resource." She gave him a glass case in red morocco filled with gold and some diamonds. "Now go," she said to him. She kissed the children, embracing the youngest twice. Julien remained motionless. She left him at a rapid pace without looking at him. From the moment that M. de Rênal had opened the anonymous letter his life had been awful. He had not been so agitated since a duel which he had just missed having in 1816, and to do him justice, the prospect of receiving a bullet would have made him less unhappy. He scrutinised the letter from every standpoint. "Is that not a woman's handwriting?" he said to himself. In that case, what woman had written it? He reviewed all those whom he knew at Verrières without being able to fix his suspicions on any one. Could a man have dictated that letter? Who was that man? Equal uncertainty on this point. The majority of his acquaintances were jealous of him, and, no doubt, hated him. "I must consult my wife," he said to himself through habit, as he got up from the arm-chair in which he had collapsed. "Great God!" he said aloud before he got up, striking his head, "it is she above all of whom I must be distrustful. At the present moment she is my enemy," and tears came into his eyes through sheer anger. By a poetic justice for that hardness of heart which constitutes the provincial idea of shrewdness, the two men whom M. de Rênal feared the most at the present moment were his two most intimate friends. "I have ten friends perhaps after those," and he passed them in review, gauging the degree of consolation which he could get from each one. "All of them, all of them," he exclaimed in a rage, "will derive the most supreme pleasure from my awful experience." As luck would have it, he thought himself envied, and not without reason. Apart from his superb town mansion in which the king of ---- had recently spent the night, and thus conferred on it an enduring honour, he had decorated his château at Vergy extremely well. The façade was painted white and the windows adorned with fine green shutters. He was consoled for a moment by the thought of this magnificence. The fact was that this château was seen from three or four leagues off, to the great prejudice of all the country houses or so-called châteaux of the neighbourhood, which had been left in the humble grey colour given them by time.