“How I should like to make him angry,” said Julien. “With what confidence would I give him a sword thrust now!” And he went through the segoon thrust. “Up till now I have been a mere usher, who exploited basely the little courage he had. After this letter I am his equal.
“Yes,” he slowly said to himself, with an infinite pleasure, “the merits of the marquis and myself have been weighed in the balance, and it is the poor carpenter from the Jura who turns the scale.
“Good!” he exclaimed, “this is how I shall sign my answer. Don’t imagine, mademoiselle de la Mole, that I am forgetting my place. I will make you realise and fully appreciate that it is for a carpenter’s son that you are betraying a descendant of the famous Guy de Croisenois who followed St. Louis to the Crusade.”
Julien was unable to control his joy. He was obliged to go down into the garden. He had locked himself in his room, but he found it too narrow to breathe in.
“To think of it being me, the poor peasant from the Jura,” he kept on repeating to himself, “to think of it being me who am eternally condemned to wear this gloomy black suit! Alas twenty years ago I would have worn a uniform like they do! In those days a man like me either got killed or became a general at thirty-six. The letter which he held clenched in his hand gave him a heroic pose and stature. Nowadays, it is true, if one sticks to this black suit, one gets at forty an income of a hundred thousand francs and the blue ribbon like my lord bishop of Beauvais.
“Well,” he said to himself with a Mephistophelian smile, “I have more brains than they. I am shrewd enough to choose the uniform of my century. And he felt a quickening of his ambition and of his attachment to his ecclesiastical dress. What cardinals of even lower birth than mine have not succeeded in governing! My compatriot Granvelle, for instance.”
Julien’s agitation became gradually calmed! Prudence emerged to the top. He said to himself like his master Tartuffe whose part he knew by heart:
Je puis croire ces mots, un artifice honnête.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Je ne me firai point à des propos si doux,
Qu’un peu de ses faveurs après quoi je soupire
Ne vienne m’assurer tout ce qu’ils m’ont pudire.
Tartuffe, act iv. Scene v.
“Tartuffe, too, was ruined by a woman, and he was as good as most men.... My answer may be shown.... and the way out of that is this,” he added pronouncing his words slowly with an intonation of deliberate and restrained ferocity. “We will begin by quoting the most vivid passages from the letter of the sublime Mathilde.”
“Quite so, but M. de Croisenois’ lackeys will hurl themselves upon me and snatch the original away.”
“No, they won’t, for I am well armed, and as we know I am accustomed to firing on lackeys.”
“Well, suppose one of them has courage, and hurls himself upon me. He has been promised a hundred napoleons. I kill him, or wound him, good, that’s what they want. I shall be thrown into prison legally. I shall be had up in the police court and the judges will send me with all justice and all equity to keep Messieurs Fontan and Magalon company in Poissy. There I shall be landed in the middle of four hundred scoundrels.... And am I to have the slightest pity on these people,” he exclaimed getting up impetuously! “Do they show any to persons of the third estate when they have them in their power!” With these words his gratitude to M. de la Mole, which had been in spite of himself torturing his conscience up to this time, breathed its last.
“Softly, gentlemen, I follow this little Machiavellian trick, the abbé Maslon or M. Castanède of the seminary could not have done better. You will take the provocative letter away from me and I shall exemplify the second volume of Colonel Caron at Colmar.”
“One moment, gentlemen, I will send the fatal letter in a well-sealed packet to M. the abbé Pirard to take care of. He’s an honest man, a Jansenist, and consequently incorruptible. Yes, but he will open the letters.... Fouqué is the man to whom I must send it.”
We must admit that Julien’s expression was awful, his countenance ghastly; it breathed unmitigated criminality. It represented the unhappy man at war with all society.
“To arms,” exclaimed Julien. And he bounded up the flight of steps of the hotel with one stride. He entered the stall of the street scrivener; he frightened him. “Copy this,” he said, giving him mademoiselle de la Mole’s letter.
While the scrivener was working, he himself wrote to Fouqué. He asked him to take care of a valuable deposit. “But he said to himself,” breaking in upon his train of thought, “the secret service of the post-office will open my letter, and will give you gentlemen the one you are looking for ... not quite, gentlemen.” He went and bought an enormous Bible from a Protestant bookseller, skillfully hid Mathilde’s letter in the cover, and packed it all up. His parcel left by the diligence addressed to one of Fouqué’s workmen, whose name was known to nobody at Paris.
This done, he returned to the Hôtel de la Mole, joyous and buoyant.
Now it’s our turn he exclaimed as he locked himself into the room and threw off his coat.
“What! mademoiselle,” he wrote to Mathilde, “is it mademoiselle de la Mole who gets Arsène her father’s lackey to hand an only too flattering letter to a poor carpenter from the Jura, in order no doubt to make fun of his simplicity?” And he copied out the most explicit phrases in the letter which he had just received. His own letter would have done honour to the diplomatic prudence of M. the Chevalier de Beauvoisis. It was still only ten o’clock when Julien entered the Italian opera, intoxicated with happiness and that feeling of his own power which was so novel for a poor devil like him. He heard his friend Geronimo sing. Music had never exalted him to such a pitch.
CHAPTER XLIV
A YOUNG GIRL’S THOUGHTS
What perplexity! What sleepless nights! Great God. Am I going to make myself contemptible? He will despise me himself. But he is leaving, he is going away.
Alfred de Musset.
Mathilde had not written without a struggle. Whatever might have been the beginning of her interest in Julien, it soon dominated that pride which had reigned unchallenged in her heart since she had begun to know herself. This cold and haughty soul was swept away for the first time by a sentiment of passion, but if this passion dominated her pride, it still kept faithfully to the habits of that pride. Two months of struggles and new sensations had transformed, so to speak her whole moral life.
Mathilde thought she was in sight of happiness. This vista, irresistible as it is for those who combine a superior intellect with a courageous soul, had to struggle for a long time against her self respect and all her vulgar duties. One day she went into her mother’s room at seven o’clock in the morning and asked permission to take refuge in Villequier. The marquise did not even deign to answer her, and advised her to go back to bed. This was the last effort of vulgar prudence and respect for tradition.
The fear of doing wrong and of offending those ideas which the Caylus’s, the de Luz’s, the Croisenois’ held for sacred had little power over her soul. She considered such creatures incapable of understanding her. She would have consulted them, if it had been a matter of buying a carriage or an estate. Her real fear was that Julien was displeased with her.
“Perhaps he, too, has only the appearance of a superior man?”
She abhorred lack of character; that was her one objection to the handsome young men who surrounded her. The more they made elegant fun of everything which deviated from the prevailing mode, or which conformed to it but indifferently, the lower they fell in her eyes.
They were brave and that was all. “And after all in what way were they brave?” she said to herself. “In duels, but the duel is nothing more than a formality. The whole thing is mapped out beforehand, even the correct thing to say when you fall. Stretched on the turf, and with your hand on your heart, you must vouchsafe a generous forgiveness to the adversary, and a few words for a fair lady, who is often imaginary, or if she does exist, will go to a ball on the day of your death for fear of arousing suspicion.”
“One braves danger at the head of a squadron brilliant with steel, but how about that danger which is solitary, strange, unforeseen and really ugly.”
“Alas,” said Mathilde to herself, “it was at the court of Henri III. that men who were great both by character and by birth were to be found! Yes! If Julien had served at Jarnac or Moncontour, I should no longer doubt. In those days of strength and vigour Frenchmen were not dolls. The day of the battle was almost the one which presented the fewest problems.”
Their life was not imprisoned, like an Egyptian mummy in a covering which was common to all, and always the same. “Yes,” she added, “there was more real courage in going home alone at eleven o’clock in the evening when one came out of the Hôtel de Soissons where Catherine de’ Medici lived than there is nowadays in running over to Algiers. A man’s life was then a series of hazards. Nowadays civilisation has banished hazard. There are no more surprises. If anything new appears in any idea there are not sufficient epigrams to immortalise it, but if anything new appears in actual life, our panic reaches the lowest depth of cowardice. Whatever folly panic makes us commit is excused. What a degenerate and boring age! What would Boniface de la Mole have said if, lifting his cut-off head out of the tomb, he had seen seventeen of his descendants allow themselves to be caught like sheep in 1793 in order to be guillotined two days afterwards! Death was certain, but it would have been bad form to have defended themselves and to have killed at least one or two Jacobins. Yes! in the heroic days of France, in the age of Boniface de la Mole, Julien would have been the chief of a squadron, while my brother would have been the young priest with decorous manners, with wisdom in his eyes and reason on his lips.” Some months previously Mathilde had given up all hope of meeting any being who was a little different from the common pattern. She had found some happiness in allowing herself to write to some young society men. This rash procedure, which was so unbecoming and so imprudent in a young girl, might have disgraced her in the eyes of M. de Croisenois, the Duke de Chaulnes, his father, and the whole Hôtel de Chaulnes, who on seeing the projected marriage broken off would have wanted to know the reason. At that time Mathilde had been unable to sleep on those days when she had written one of her letters. But those letters were only answers. But now she ventured to declare her own love. She wrote first (what a terrible word!) to a man of the lowest social grade.
This circumstance rendered her eternal disgrace quite inevitable in the event of detection. Who of the women who visited her mother would have dared to take her part? What official excuse could be evolved which could successfully cope with the awful contempt of society.
Besides speaking was awful enough, but writing! “There are some things which are not written!” Napoleon had exclaimed on learning of the capitulation of Baylen. And it was Julien who had told her that epigram, as though giving her a lesson that was to come in useful subsequently.
But all this was comparatively unimportant, Mathilde’s anguish had other causes. Forgetting the terrible effect it would produce on society, and the ineffable blot on her scutcheon that would follow such an outrage on her own caste, Mathilde was going to write to a person of a very different character to the Croisenois’, the de Luz’s, the Caylus’s.
She would have been frightened at the depth and mystery in Julien’s character, even if she had merely entered into a conventional acquaintance with him. And she was going to make him her lover, perhaps her master.
“What will his pretensions not be, if he is ever in a position to do everything with me? Well! I shall say, like Medea: Au milieu de tant de périls il me reste Moi.” She believed that Julien had no respect for nobility of blood. What was more, he probably did not love her.
In these last moments of awful doubt her feminine pride suggested to her certain ideas. “Everything is bound to be extraordinary in the life of a girl like me,” exclaimed Mathilde impatiently. The pride, which had been drilled into her since her cradle, began to struggle with her virtue. It was at this moment that Julien’s departure precipitated everything.
(Such characters are luckily very rare.)
Very late in the evening, Julien was malicious enough to have a very heavy trunk taken down to the porter’s lodge. He called the valet, who was courting mademoiselle de la Mole’s chambermaid, to move it. “This manœuvre cannot result in anything,” he said to himself, “but if it does succeed, she will think that I have gone.” Very tickled by this humorous thought, he fell asleep. Mathilde did not sleep a wink.
Julien left the hôtel very early the next morning without being seen, but he came back before eight o’clock.
He had scarcely entered the library before M. de la Mole appeared on the threshold. He handed her his answer. He thought that it was his duty to speak to her, it was certainly perfectly feasible, but mademoiselle de la Mole would not listen to him and disappeared. Julien was delighted. He did not know what to say.
“If all this is not a put up job with comte Norbert, it is clear that it is my cold looks which have kindled the strange love which this aristocratic girl chooses to entertain for me. I should be really too much of a fool if I ever allowed myself to take a fancy to that big blonde doll.” This train of reasoning left him colder and more calculating than he had ever been.
“In the battle for which we are preparing,” he added, “pride of birth will be like a high hill which constitutes a military position between her and me. That must be the field of the manœuvres. I made a great mistake in staying in Paris; this postponing of my departure cheapens and exposes me, if all this is simply a trick. What danger was there in leaving? If they were making fun of me, I was making fun of them. If her interest for me was in any way real, I was making that interest a hundred times more intense.”
Mademoiselle de la Mole’s letter had given Julien’s vanity so keen a pleasure, that wreathed as he was in smiles at his good fortune he had forgotten to think seriously about the propriety of leaving.
It was one of the fatal elements of his character to be extremely sensitive to his own weaknesses. He was extremely upset by this one, and had almost forgotten the incredible victory which had preceded this slight check, when about nine o’clock mademoiselle de la Mole appeared on the threshold of the library, flung him a letter and ran away.
“So this is going to be the romance by letters,” he said as he picked it up. “The enemy makes a false move; I will reply by coldness and virtue.”
He was asked with a poignancy which merely increased his inner gaiety to give a definite answer. He indulged in the pleasure of mystifying those persons who he thought wanted to make fun of him for two pages, and it was out of humour again that he announced towards the end of his answer his definite departure on the following morning.
“The garden will be a useful place to hand her the letter,” he thought after he had finished it, and he went there. He looked at the window of mademoiselle de la Mole’s room.
It was on the first storey, next to her mother’s apartment, but there was a large ground floor.
This latter was so high that, as Julien walked under the avenue of pines with his letter in his hands, he could not be seen from mademoiselle de la Mole’s window. The dome formed by the well clipped pines intercepted the view. “What!” said Julien to himself angrily, “another indiscretion! If they have really begun making fun of me, showing myself with a letter is playing into my enemy’s hands.”
Norbert’s room was exactly above his sister’s and if Julien came out from under the dome formed by the clipped branches of the pine, the comte and his friend could follow all his movements.
Mademoiselle de la Mole appeared behind her window; he half showed his letter; she lowered her head, then Julien ran up to his own room and met accidentally on the main staircase the fair Mathilde, who seized the letter with complete self-possession and smiling eyes.
“What passion there was in the eyes of that poor madame de Rênal,” said Julien to himself, “when she ventured to receive a letter from me, even after six months of intimate relationship! I don’t think she ever looked at me with smiling eyes in her whole life.”
He did not formulate so precisely the rest of his answer; was he perhaps ashamed of the triviality of the motive which were actuating him?
“But how different too,” he went on to think, “are her elegant morning dress and her distinguished appearance! A man of taste on seeing mademoiselle de la Mole thirty yards off would infer the position which she occupies in society. That is what can be called a specific merit.”
In spite of all this humorousness, Julien was not yet quite honest with himself; madame de Rênal had no marquis de Croisenois to sacrifice to him. His only rival was that grotesque sub-prefect, M. Charcot, who assumed the name of Maugiron, because there were no Maugirons left in France.
At five o’clock Julien received a third letter. It was thrown to him from the library door. Mademoiselle de la Mole ran away again. “What a mania for writing,” he said to himself with a laugh, “when one can talk so easily. The enemy wants my letters, that is clear, and many of them.” He did not hurry to open this one. “More elegant phrases,” he thought; but he paled as he read it. There were only eight lines.
“I need to speak to you; I must speak to you this evening. Be in the garden at the moment when one o’clock is striking. Take the big gardeners’ ladder near the well; place it against my window, and climb up to my room. It is moonlight; never mind.”
CHAPTER XLV
IS IT A PLOT?
Oh, how cruel is the interval between the conception
and the execution of a great project. What vain fears,
what fits of irresolution! It is a matter of life and
death—even more is at stake honour!—Schiller.
“This is getting serious,” thought Julien, “and a little too clear,” he added after thinking a little. “Why to be sure! This fine young lady can talk to me in the library with a freedom which, thank heaven, is absolutely complete; the marquis, frightened as he is that I show him accounts, never sets foot in it. Why! M. de la Mole and the comte Norbert, the only persons who ever come here, are absent nearly the whole day, and the sublime Mathilde for whom a sovereign prince would not be too noble a suitor, wants me to commit an abominable indiscretion.
“It is clear they want to ruin me, or at the least make fun of me. First they wanted to ruin me by my own letters; they happen to be discreet; well, they want some act which is clearer than daylight. These handsome little gentlemen think I am too silly or too conceited. The devil! To think of climbing like this up a ladder to a storey twenty-five feet high in the finest moonlight. They would have time to see me, even from the neighbouring houses. I shall cut a pretty figure to be sure on my ladder!” Julien went up to his room again and began to pack his trunk whistling. He had decided to leave and not even to answer.
But this wise resolution did not give him peace of mind. “If by chance,” he suddenly said to himself after he had closed his trunk, “Mathilde is in good faith, why then I cut the figure of an arrant coward in her eyes. I have no birth myself, so I need great qualities attested straight away by speaking actions—money down—no charitable credit.”
He spent a quarter-of-an-hour in reflecting. “What is the good of denying it?” he said at last. “She will think me a coward. I shall lose not only the most brilliant person in high society, as they all said at M. the duke de Retz’s ball, but also the heavenly pleasure of seeing the marquis de Croisenois, the son of a duke, who will be one day a duke himself, sacrificed to me. A charming young man who has all the qualities I lack. A happy wit, birth, fortune....
“This regret will haunt me all my life, not on her account, ‘there are so many mistresses!... but there is only one honour!’ says old don Diégo. And here am I clearly and palpably shrinking from the first danger that presents itself; for the duel with M. de Beauvoisis was simply a joke. This is quite different. A servant may fire at me point blank, but that is the least danger; I may be disgraced.
“This is getting serious, my boy,” he added with a Gascon gaiety and accent. “Honour is at stake. A poor devil flung by chance into as low a grade as I am will never find such an opportunity again. I shall have my conquests, but they will be inferior ones....”
He reflected for a long time, he walked up and down hurriedly, and then from time to time would suddenly stop. A magnificent marble bust of cardinal de Richelieu had been placed in his room. It attracted his gaze in spite of himself. This bust seemed to look at him severely as though reproaching him with the lack of that audacity which ought to be so natural to the French character. “Would I have hesitated in your age great man?”
“At the worst,” said Julien to himself, “suppose all this is a trap, it is pretty black and pretty compromising for a young girl. They know that I am not the man to hold my tongue. They will therefore have to kill me. That was right enough in 1574 in the days of Boniface de la Mole, but nobody today would ever have the pluck. They are not the same men. Mademoiselle de la Mole is the object of so much jealousy. Four hundred salons would ring with her disgrace to-morrow, and how pleased they would all be.
“The servants gossip among themselves about marked the favours of which I am the recipient. I know it, I have heard them....
“On the other hand they’re her letters. They may think that I have them on me. They may surprise me in her room and take them from me. I shall have to deal with two, three, or four men. How can I tell? But where are they going to find these men? Where are they to find discreet subordinates in Paris? Justice frightens them.... By God! It may be the Caylus’s, the Croisenois’, the de Luz’s themselves. The idea of the ludicrous figure I should cut in the middle of them at the particular minute may have attracted them. Look out for the fate of Abélard, M. the secretary.
“Well, by heaven, I’ll mark you. I’ll strike at your faces like Cæsar’s soldiers at Pharsalia. As for the letters, I can put them in a safe place.”
Julien copied out the two last, hid them in a fine volume of Voltaire in the library and himself took the originals to the post.
“What folly am I going to rush into,” he said to himself with surprise and terror when he returned. He had been a quarter of an hour without contemplating what he was to do on this coming night.
“But if I refuse, I am bound to despise myself afterwards. This matter will always occasion me great doubt during my whole life, and to a man like me such doubts are the most poignant unhappiness. Did I not feel like that for Amanda’s lover! I think I would find it easier to forgive myself for a perfectly clear crime; once admitted, I could leave off thinking of it.
“Why! I shall have been the rival of a man who bears one of the finest names in France, and then out of pure light-heartedness, declared myself his inferior! After all, it is cowardly not to go; these words clinch everything,” exclaimed Julien as he got up ... “besides she is quite pretty.”
“If this is not a piece of treachery, what a folly is she not committing for my sake. If it’s a piece of mystification, by heaven, gentlemen, it only depends on me to turn the jest into earnest and that I will do.
“But supposing they tie my hands together at the moment I enter the room: they may have placed some ingenious machine there.
“It’s like a duel,” he said to himself with a laugh. “Everyone makes a full parade, says my maître d’armes, but the good God, who wishes the thing to end, makes one of them forget to parry. Besides, here’s something to answer them with.” He drew his pistols out of his pocket, and although the priming was shining, he renewed it.
There was still several hours to wait. Julien wrote to Fouqué in order to have something to do. “My friend, do not open the enclosed letter except in the event of an accident, if you hear that something strange has happened to me. In that case blot out the proper names in the manuscript which I am sending you, make eight copies of it, and send it to the papers of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons, Brussels, etc. Ten days later have the manuscript printed, send the first copy to M. the marquis de la Mole, and a fortnight after that throw the other copies at night into the streets of Verrières.”
Julien made this little memoir in defence of his position as little compromising as possible for mademoiselle de la Mole. Fouqué was only to open it in the event of an accident. It was put in the form of a story, but in fact it exactly described his situation.
Julien had just fastened his packet when the dinner bell rang. It made his heart beat. His imagination was distracted by the story which he had just composed, and fell a prey to tragic presentiments. He saw himself seized by servants, trussed, and taken into a cellar with a gag in his mouth. A servant was stationed there, who never let him out of sight, and if the family honour required that the adventure should have a tragic end, it was easy to finish everything with those poisons which leave no trace. They could then say that he had died of an illness and would carry his dead body back into his room.
Thrilled like a dramatic author by his own story, Julien was really afraid when he entered the dining-room. He looked at all those liveried servants—he studied their faces. “Which ones are chosen for to-night’s expedition?” he said to himself. “The memories of the court of Henri III. are so vivid in this family, and so often recalled, that if they think they have been insulted they will show more resolution than other persons of the same rank.” He looked at mademoiselle de la Mole in order to read the family plans in her eyes; she was pale and looked quite middle-aged. He thought that she had never looked so great: she was really handsome and imposing; he almost fell in love with her. “Pallida morte futura,” he said to himself (her pallor indicates her great plans). It was in vain that after dinner he made a point of walking for a long time in the garden, mademoiselle did not appear. Speaking to her at that moment would have lifted a great weight off his heart.
Why not admit it? he was afraid. As he had resolved to act, he was not ashamed to abandon himself to this emotion. “So long as I show the necessary courage at the actual moment,” he said to himself, “what does it matter what I feel at this particular moment?” He went to reconnoitre the situation and find out the weight of the ladder.
“This is an instrument,” he said to himself with a smile, “which I am fated to use both here and at Verrières. What a difference! In those days,” he added with a sigh, “I was not obliged to distrust the person for whom I exposed myself to danger. What a difference also in the danger!”
“There would have been no dishonour for me if I had been killed in M. de Rênal’s gardens. It would have been easy to have made my death into a mystery. But here all kinds of abominable scandal will be talked in the salons of the Hôtel de Chaulnes, the Hôtel de Caylus, de Retz, etc., everywhere in fact. I shall go down to posterity as a monster.”
“For two or three years,” he went on with a laugh, making fun of himself; but the idea paralysed him. “And how am I going to manage to get justified? Suppose that Fouqué does print my posthumous pamphlet, it will only be taken for an additional infamy. Why! I get received into a house, and I reward the hospitality which I have received, the kindness with which I have been loaded by printing a pamphlet about what has happened and attacking the honour of women! Nay! I’d a thousand times rather be duped.”
The evening was awful.
CHAPTER XLVI
ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
This garden was very big, it had been planned a few years ago in perfect taste. But the trees were more than a century old. It had a certain rustic atmosphere.—Massinger.
He was going to write a countermanding letter to Fouqué when eleven o’clock struck. He noisily turned the lock of the door of his room as though he had locked himself in. He went with a sleuth-like step to observe what was happening over the house, especially on the fourth storey where the servants slept. There was nothing unusual. One of madame de la Mole’s chambermaids was giving an entertainment, the servants were taking punch with much gaiety. “Those who laugh like that,” thought Julien, “cannot be participating in the nocturnal expedition; if they were, they would be more serious.”
Eventually he stationed himself in an obscure corner of the garden. “If their plan is to hide themselves from the servants of the house, they will despatch the persons whom they have told off to surprise me over the garden wall.
“If M. de Croisenois shows any sense of proportion in this matter, he is bound to find it less compromising for the young person, whom he wishes to make his wife if he has me surprised before I enter her room.”
He made a military and extremely detailed reconnaissance. “My honour is at stake,” he thought. “If I tumble into some pitfall it will not be an excuse in my own eyes to say, ‘I never thought of it.’”
The weather was desperately serene. About eleven o’clock the moon rose, at half-past twelve it completely illuminated the facade of the hôtel looking out upon the garden.
“She is mad,” Julien said to himself. As one o’clock struck there was still a light in comte Norbert’s windows. Julien had never been so frightened in his life, he only saw the dangers of the enterprise and had no enthusiasm at all. He went and took the immense ladder, waited five minutes to give her time to tell him not to go, and five minutes after one placed the ladder against Mathilde’s window. He mounted softly, pistol in hand, astonished at not being attacked. As he approached the window it opened noiselessly.
“So there you are, monsieur,” said Mathilde to him with considerable emotion. “I have been following your movements for the last hour.”
Julien was very much embarrassed. He did not know how to conduct himself. He did not feel at all in love. He thought in his embarrassment that he ought to be venturesome. He tried to kiss Mathilde.
“For shame,” she said to him, pushing him away.
Extremely glad at being rebuffed, he hastened to look round him. The moon was so brilliant that the shadows which it made in mademoiselle de la Mole’s room were black. “It’s quite possible for men to be concealed without my seeing them,” he thought.
“What have you got in your pocket at the side of your coat?” Mathilde said to him, delighted at finding something to talk about. She was suffering strangely; all those sentiments of reserve and timidity which were so natural to a girl of good birth, had reasserted their dominion and were torturing her.
“I have all kinds of arms and pistols,” answered Julien equally glad at having something to say.
“You must take the ladder away,” said Mathilde.
“It is very big, and may break the windows of the salon down below or the room on the ground floor.”
“You must not break the windows,” replied Mathilde making a vain effort to assume an ordinary conversational tone; “it seems to me you can lower the ladder by tying a cord to the first rung. I have always a supply of cords at hand.”
“So this is a woman in love,” thought Julien. “She actually dares to say that she is in love. So much self-possession and such shrewdness in taking precautions are sufficient indications that I am not triumphing over M. de Croisenois as I foolishly believed, but that I am simply succeeding him. As a matter of fact, what does it matter to me? Do I love her? I am triumphing over the marquis in so far as he would be very angry at having a successor, and angrier still at that successor being myself. How haughtily he looked at me this evening in the Café Tortoni when he pretended not to recognise me! And how maliciously he bowed to me afterwards, when he could not get out of it.”
Julien had tied the cord to the last rung of the ladder. He lowered it softly and leant far out of the balcony in order to avoid its touching the window pane. “A fine opportunity to kill me,” he thought, “if anyone is hidden in Mathilde’s room;” but a profound silence continued to reign everywhere.
The ladder touched the ground. Julien succeeded in laying it on the border of the exotic flowers along side the wall.
“What will my mother say,” said Mathilde, “when she sees her beautiful plants all crushed? You must throw down the cord,” she added with great self-possession. “If it were noticed going up to the balcony, it would be a difficult circumstance to explain.”
“And how am I to get away?” said Julien in a jesting tone affecting the Creole accent. (One of the chambermaids of the household had been born in Saint-Domingo.)
“You? Why you will leave by the door,” said Mathilde, delighted at the idea.
“Ah! how worthy this man is of all my love,” she thought.
Julien had just let the cord fall into the garden; Mathilde grasped his arm. He thought he had been seized by an enemy and turned round sharply, drawing a dagger. She had thought that she had heard a window opening. They remained motionless and scarcely breathed. The moonlight lit up everything. The noise was not renewed and there was no more cause for anxiety.
Then their embarrassment began again; it was great on both sides. Julien assured himself that the door was completely locked; he thought of looking under the bed, but he did not dare; “they might have stationed one or two lackeys there.” Finally he feared that he might reproach himself in the future for this lack of prudence, and did look. Mathilde had fallen into all the anguish of the most extreme timidity. She was horrified at her position.
“What have you done with my letters?” she said at last.
“What a good opportunity to upset these gentlemen, if they are eavesdropping, and thus avoiding the battle,” thought Julien.
“The first is hid in a big Protestant Bible, which last night’s diligence is taking far away from here.”
He spoke very distinctly as he went into these details, so as to be heard by any persons who might be concealed in two large mahogany cupboards which he had not dared to inspect.
“The other two are in the post and are bound for the same destination as the first.”
“Heavens, why all these precautions?” said Mathilde in alarm.
“What is the good of my lying?” thought Julien, and he confessed all his suspicions.
“So that’s the cause for the coldness of your letters, dear,” exclaimed Mathilde in a tone of madness rather than of tenderness.
Julien did not notice that nuance. The endearment made him lose his head, or at any rate his suspicions vanished. He dared to clasp in his arms that beautiful girl who inspired him with such respect. He was only partially rebuffed. He fell back on his memory as he had once at Besançon with Armanda Binet, and recited by heart several of the finest phrases out of the Nouvelle Héloise.
“You have the heart of a man,” was the answer she made without listening too attentively to his phrases; “I wanted to test your courage, I confess it. Your first suspicions and your resolutions show you even more intrepid, dear, than I had believed.”
Mathilde had to make an effort to call him “dear,” and was evidently paying more attention to this strange method of speech than to the substance of what she was saying. Being called “dear” without any tenderness in the tone afforded no pleasure to Julien; he was astonished at not being happy, and eventually fell back on his reasoning in order to be so. He saw that he was respected by this proud young girl who never gave undeserved praise; by means of this reasoning he managed to enjoy the happiness of satisfied vanity. It was not, it was true, that soulful pleasure which he had sometimes found with madame de Rênal. There was no element of tenderness in the feelings of these first few minutes. It was the keen happiness of a gratified ambition, and Julien was, above all, ambitious. He talked again of the people whom he had suspected and of the precautions which he had devised. As he spoke, he thought of the best means of exploiting his victory.
Mathilde was still very embarrassed and seemed paralysed by the steps which she had taken. She appeared delighted to find a topic of conversation. They talked of how they were to see each other again. Julien extracted a delicious joy from the consciousness of the intelligence and the courage, of which he again proved himself possessed during this discussion. They had to reckon with extremely sharp people, the little Tanbeau was certainly a spy, but Mathilde and himself as well had their share of cleverness.
What was easier than to meet in the library, and there make all arrangements?
“I can appear in all parts of the hôtel,” added Julien, “without rousing suspicion almost, in fact, in madame de la Mole’s own room.” It was absolutely necessary to go through it in order to reach her daughter’s room. If Mathilde thought it preferable for him always to come by a ladder, then he would expose himself to that paltry danger with a heart intoxicated with joy.
As she listened to him speaking, Mathilde was shocked by this air of triumph. “So he is my master,” she said to herself, she was already a prey to remorse. Her reason was horrified at the signal folly which she had just committed. If she had had the power she would have annihilated both herself and Julien. When for a few moments she managed by sheer will-power to silence her pangs of remorse, she was rendered very unhappy by her timidity and wounded shame. She had quite failed to foresee the awful plight in which she now found herself.
“I must speak to him, however,” she said at last. “That is the proper thing to do. One does talk to one’s lover.” And then with a view of accomplishing a duty, and with a tenderness which was manifested rather in the words which she employed than in the inflection of her voice, she recounted various resolutions which she had made concerning him during the last few days.
She had decided that if he should dare to come to her room by the help of the gardener’s ladder according to his instructions, she would be entirely his. But never were such tender passages spoken in a more polite and frigid tone. Up to the present this assignation had been icy. It was enough to make one hate the name of love. What a lesson in morality for a young and imprudent girl! Is it worth while to ruin one’s future for moments such as this?
After long fits of hesitation which a superficial observer might have mistaken for the result of the most emphatic hate (so great is the difficulty which a woman’s self-respect finds in yielding even to so firm a will as hers) Mathilde became eventually a charming mistress.
In point of fact, these ecstasies were a little artificial. Passionate love was still more the model which they imitated than a real actuality.
Mademoiselle de la Mole thought she was fulfilling a duty towards herself and towards her lover. “The poor boy,” she said to herself, “has shewn a consummate bravery. He deserves to be happy or it is really I who will be shewing a lack of character.” But she would have been glad to have redeemed the cruel necessity in which she found herself even at the price of an eternity of unhappiness.
In spite of the awful violence she was doing to herself she was completely mistress of her words.
No regret and no reproach spoiled that night which Julien found extraordinary rather than happy. Great heavens! what a difference to his last twenty-four hours’ stay in Verrières. These fine Paris manners manage to spoil everything, even love, he said to himself, quite unjustly.
He abandoned himself to these reflections as he stood upright in one of the great mahogany cupboards into which he had been put at the sign of the first sounds of movement in the neighbouring apartment, which was madame de la Mole’s. Mathilde followed her mother to mass, the servants soon left the apartment and Julien easily escaped before they came back to finish their work.
He mounted a horse and tried to find the most solitary spots in one of the forests near Paris. He was more astonished than happy. The happiness which filled his soul from time to time resembled that of a young sub-lieutenant who as the result of some surprising feat has just been made a full-fledged colonel by the commander-in-chief; he felt himself lifted up to an immense height. Everything which was above him the day before was now on a level with him or even below him. Little by little Julien’s happiness increased in proportion as he got further away from Paris.
If there was no tenderness in his soul, the reason was that, however strange it may appear to say so, Mathilde had in everything she had done, simply accomplished a duty. The only thing she had not foreseen in all the events of that night, was the shame and unhappiness which she had experienced instead of that absolute felicity which is found in novels.
“Can I have made a mistake, and not be in love with him?” she said to herself.
CHAPTER XLVII
AN OLD SWORD
I now mean to be serious; it is time
Since laughter now-a-days is deemed too serious.
A jest at vice by virtues called a crime.
Don Juan, c. xiii.
She did not appear at dinner. She came for a minute into the salon in the evening, but did not look at Julien. He considered this behaviour strange, “but,” he thought, “I do not know their usages. She will give me some good reason for all this.” None the less he was a prey to the most extreme curiosity; he studied the expression of Mathilde’s features; he was bound to own to himself that she looked cold and malicious. It was evidently not the same woman who on the proceeding night had had, or pretended to have, transports of happiness which were too extravagant to be genuine.
The day after, and the subsequent day she showed the same coldness; she did not look at him, she did not notice his existence. Julien was devoured by the keenest anxiety and was a thousand leagues removed from that feeling of triumph which had been his only emotion on the first day. “Can it be by chance,” he said to himself, “a return to virtue?” But this was a very bourgeois word to apply to the haughty Mathilde.
“Placed in an ordinary position in life she would disbelieve in religion,” thought Julien, “she only likes it in so far as it is very useful to the interests of her class.”
But perhaps she may as a mere matter of delicacy be keenly reproaching herself for the mistake which she has committed. Julien believed that he was her first lover.
“But,” he said to himself at other moments, “I must admit that there is no trace of naivety, simplicity, or tenderness in her own demeanour; I have never seen her more haughty, can she despise me? It would be worthy of her to reproach herself simply because of my low birth, for what she has done for me.”
While Julien, full of those preconceived ideas which he had found in books and in his memories of Verrières, was chasing the phantom of a tender mistress, who from the minute when she has made her lover happy no longer thinks of her own existence, Mathilde’s vanity was infuriated against him.
As for the last two months she had no longer been bored, she was not frightened of boredom; consequently, without being able to have the slightest suspicion of it, Julien had lost his greatest advantage.
“I have given myself a master,” said mademoiselle de la Mole to herself, a prey to the blackest sorrow. “Luckily he is honour itself, but if I offend his vanity, he will revenge himself by making known the nature of our relations.” Mathilde had never had a lover, and though passing through a stage of life which affords some tender illusions even to the coldest souls, she fell a prey to the most bitter reflections.
“He has an immense dominion over me since his reign is one of terror, and he is capable, if I provoke him, of punishing me with an awful penalty.” This idea alone was enough to induce mademoiselle de la Mole to insult him. Courage was the primary quality in her character. The only thing which could give her any thrill and cure her from a fundamental and chronically recurring ennui was the idea that she was staking her entire existence on a single throw.
As mademoiselle de la Mole obstinately refused to look at him, Julien on the third day in spite of her evident objection, followed her into the billiard-room after dinner.
“Well, sir, you think you have acquired some very strong rights over me?” she said to him with scarcely controlled anger, “since you venture to speak to me, in spite of my very clearly manifested wish? Do you know that no one in the world has had such effrontery?”
The dialogue of these two lovers was incomparably humourous. Without suspecting it, they were animated by mutual sentiments of the most vivid hate. As neither the one nor the other had a meekly patient character, while they were both disciples of good form, they soon came to informing each other quite clearly that they would break for ever.
“I swear eternal secrecy to you,” said Julien. “I should like to add that I would never address a single word to you, were it not that a marked change might perhaps jeopardise your reputation.” He saluted respectfully and left.
He accomplished easily enough what he believed to be a duty; he was very far from thinking himself much in love with mademoiselle de la Mole. He had certainly not loved her three days before, when he had been hidden in the big mahogany cupboard. But the moment that he found himself estranged from her for ever his mood underwent a complete and rapid change.
His memory tortured him by going over the least details in that night, which had as a matter of fact left him so cold. In the very night that followed this announcement of a final rupture, Julien almost went mad at being obliged to own to himself that he loved mademoiselle de la Mole.
This discovery was followed by awful struggles: all his emotions were overwhelmed.
Two days later, instead of being haughty towards M. de Croisenois, he could have almost burst out into tears and embraced him.
His habituation to unhappiness gave him a gleam of commonsense, he decided to leave for Languedoc, packed his trunk and went to the post.
He felt he would faint, when on arriving at the office of the mails, he was told that by a singular chance there was a place in the Toulouse mail. He booked it and returned to the Hôtel de la Mole to announce his departure to the marquis.
M. de la Mole had gone out. More dead than alive Julien went into the library to wait for him. What was his emotion when he found mademoiselle de la Mole there.
As she saw him come, she assumed a malicious expression which it was impossible to mistake.
In his unhappiness and surprise Julien lost his head and was weak enough to say to her in a tone of the most heartfelt tenderness. “So you love me no more.”
“I am horrified at having given myself to the first man who came along,” said Mathilde crying with rage against herself.
“The first man who came along,” cried Julien, and he made for an old mediæval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.
His grief—which he thought was at its maximum at the moment when he had spoken to mademoiselle de la Mole—had been rendered a hundred times more intense by the tears of shame which he saw her shedding.
He would have been the happiest of men if he had been able to kill her.
When he was on the point of drawing the sword with some difficulty from its ancient scabbard, Mathilde, rendered happy by so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him, her tears were dry.
The thought of his benefactor—the marquis de la Mole—presented itself vividly to Julien. “Shall I kill his daughter?” he said to himself, “how horrible.” He made a movement to throw down the sword. “She will certainly,” he thought, “burst out laughing at the sight of such a melodramatic pose:” that idea was responsible for his regaining all his self-possession. He looked curiously at the blade of the old sword as though he had been looking for some spot of rust, then put it back in the scabbard and replaced it with the utmost tranquillity on the gilt bronze nail from which it hung.
The whole manœuvre, which towards the end was very slow, lasted quite a minute; mademoiselle de la Mole looked at him in astonishment. “So I have been on the verge of being killed by my lover,” she said to herself.
This idea transported her into the palmiest days of the age of Charles IX. and of Henri III.
She stood motionless before Julien, who had just replaced the sword; she looked at him with eyes whose hatred had disappeared. It must be owned that she was very fascinating at this moment, certainly no woman looked less like a Parisian doll (this expression symbolised Julien’s great objection to the women of this city).
“I shall relapse into some weakness for him,” thought Mathilde; “it is quite likely that he will think himself my lord and master after a relapse like that at the very moment that I have been talking to him so firmly.” She ran away.
“By heaven, she is pretty said Julien as he watched her run and that’s the creature who threw herself into my arms with so much passion scarcely a week ago ... and to think that those moments will never come back? And that it’s my fault, to think of my being lacking in appreciation at the very moment when I was doing something so extraordinarily interesting! I must own that I was born with a very dull and unfortunate character.”
The marquis appeared; Julien hastened to announce his departure.
“Where to?” said M. de la Mole.
“For Languedoc.”
“No, if you please, you are reserved for higher destinies. If you leave it will be for the North.... In military phraseology I actually confine you in the hotel. You will compel me to be never more than two or three hours away. I may have need of you at any moment.”
Julien bowed and retired without a word, leaving the marquis in a state of great astonishment. He was incapable of speaking. He shut himself up in his room. He was there free to exaggerate to himself all the awfulness of his fate.
“So,” he thought, “I cannot even get away. God knows how many days the marquis will keep me in Paris. Great God, what will become of me, and not a friend whom I can consult? The abbé Pirard will never let me finish my first sentence, while the comte Altamira will propose enlisting me in some conspiracy. And yet I am mad; I feel it, I am mad. Who will be able to guide me, what will become of me?”
CHAPTER XLVIII
CRUEL MOMENTS
And she confesses it to me! She goes into even the smallest details! Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and describes the love which she felt for another.—Schiller.
The delighted mademoiselle de la Mole thought of nothing but the happiness of having been nearly killed. She went so far as to say to herself, “he is worthy of being my master since he was on the point of killing me. How many handsome young society men would have to be melted together before they were capable of so passionate a transport.”
“I must admit that he was very handsome at the time when he climbed up on the chair to replace the sword in the same picturesque position in which the decorator hung it! After all it was not so foolish of me to love him.”
If at that moment some honourable means of reconciliation had presented itself, she would have embraced it with pleasure. Julien locked in his room was a prey to the most violent despair. He thought in his madness of throwing himself at her feet. If instead of hiding himself in an out of the way place, he had wandered about the garden of the hôtel so as to keep within reach of any opportunity, he would perhaps have changed in a single moment his awful unhappiness into the keenest happiness.
But the tact for whose lack we are now reproaching him would have been incompatible with that sublime seizure of the sword, which at the present time rendered him so handsome in the eyes of mademoiselle de la Mole. This whim in Julien’s favour lasted the whole day; Mathilde conjured up a charming image of the short moments during which she had loved him: she regretted them.
“As a matter of fact,” she said to herself, “my passion for this poor boy can from his point of view only have lasted from one hour after midnight when I saw him arrive by his ladder with all his pistols in his coat pocket, till eight o’clock in the morning. It was a quarter of an hour after that as I listened to mass at Sainte-Valère that I began to think that he might very well try to terrify me into obedience.”
After dinner mademoiselle de la Mole, so far from avoiding Julien, spoke to him and made him promise to follow her into the garden. He obeyed. It was a new experience.
Without suspecting it Mathilde was yielding to the love which she was now feeling for him again. She found an extreme pleasure in walking by his side, and she looked curiously at those hands which had seized the sword to kill her that very morning.
After such an action, after all that had taken place, some of the former conversation was out of the question.
Mathilde gradually began to talk confidentially to him about the state of her heart. She found a singular pleasure in this kind of conversation, she even went so far as to describe to him the fleeting moments of enthusiasm which she had experienced for M. de Croisenois, for M. de Caylus——
“What! M. de Caylus as well!” exclaimed Julien, and all the jealousy of a discarded lover burst out in those words, Mathilde thought as much, but did not feel at all insulted.
She continued torturing Julien by describing her former sentiments with the most picturesque detail and the accent of the most intimate truth. He saw that she was portraying what she had in her mind’s eye. He had the pain of noticing that as she spoke she made new discoveries in her own heart.
The unhappiness of jealousy could not be carried further.
It is cruel enough to suspect that a rival is loved, but there is no doubt that to hear the woman one adores confess in detail the love which rivals inspires, is the utmost limit of anguish.
Oh, how great a punishment was there now for those impulses of pride which had induced Julien to place himself as superior to the Caylus and the Croisenois! How deeply did he feel his own unhappiness as he exaggerated to himself their most petty advantages. With what hearty good faith he despised himself.
Mathilde struck him as adorable. All words are weak to express his excessive admiration. As he walked beside her he looked surreptitiously at her hands, her arms, her queenly bearing. He was so completely overcome by love and unhappiness as to be on the point of falling at her feet and crying “pity.”
“Yes, and that person who is so beautiful, who is so superior to everything and who loved me once, will doubtless soon love M. de Caylus.”
Julien could have no doubts of mademoiselle de la Mole’s sincerity, the accent of truth was only too palpable in everything she said. In order that nothing might be wanting to complete his unhappiness there were moments when, as a result of thinking about the sentiments which she had once experienced for M. de Caylus, Mathilde came to talk of him, as though she loved him at the present time. She certainly put an inflection of love into her voice. Julien distinguished it clearly.
He would have suffered less if his bosom had been filled inside with molten lead. Plunged as he was in this abyss of unhappiness how could the poor boy have guessed that it was simply because she was talking to him, that mademoiselle de la Mole found so much pleasure in recalling those weaknesses of love which she had formerly experienced for M. de Caylus or M. de Luz.
Words fail to express Julien’s anguish. He listened to these detailed confidences of the love she had experienced for others in that very avenue of pines where he had waited so few days ago for one o’clock to strike that he might invade her room. No human being can undergo a greater degree of unhappiness.
This kind of familiar cruelty lasted for eight long days. Mathilde sometimes seemed to seek opportunities of speaking to him and sometimes not to avoid them; and the one topic of conversation to which they both seemed to revert with a kind of cruel pleasure, was the description of the sentiments she had felt for others. She told him about the letters which she had written, she remembered their very words, she recited whole sentences by heart.
She seemed during these last days to be envisaging Julien with a kind of malicious joy. She found a keen enjoyment in his pangs.
One sees that Julien had no experience of life; he had not even read any novels. If he had been a little less awkward and he had coolly said to the young girl, whom he adored so much and who had been giving him such strange confidences: “admit that though I am not worth as much as all these gentlemen, I am none the less the man whom you loved,” she would perhaps have been happy at being at thus guessed; at any rate success would have entirely depended on the grace with which Julien had expressed the idea, and on the moment which he had chosen to do so. In any case he would have extricated himself well and advantageously from a situation which Mathilde was beginning to find monotonous.
“And you love me no longer, me, who adores you!” said Julien to her one day, overcome by love and unhappiness. This piece of folly was perhaps the greatest which he could have committed. These words immediately destroyed all the pleasure which mademoiselle de la Mole found in talking to him about the state of her heart. She was beginning to be surprised that he did not, after what had happened, take offence at what she told him. She had even gone so far as to imagine at the very moment when he made that foolish remark that perhaps he did not love her any more. “His pride has doubtless extinguished his love,” she was saying to herself. “He is not the man to sit still and see people like Caylus, de Luz, Croisenois whom he admits are so superior, preferred to him. No, I shall never see him at my feet again.”
Julien had often in the naivety of his unhappiness, during the previous days praised sincerely the brilliant qualities of these gentlemen; he would even go so far as to exaggerate them. This nuance had not escaped mademoiselle de la Mole, she was astonished by it, but did not guess its reason. Julien’s frenzied soul, in praising a rival whom he thought was loved, was sympathising with his happiness.
These frank but stupid words changed everything in a single moment; confident that she was loved, Mathilde despised him utterly.
She was walking with him when he made his ill-timed remark; she left him, and her parting look expressed the most awful contempt. She returned to the salon and did not look at him again during the whole evening. This contempt monopolised her mind the following day. The impulse which during the last week had made her find so much pleasure in treating Julien as her most intimate friend was out of the question; the very sight of him was disagreeable. The sensation Mathilde felt reached the point of disgust; nothing can express the extreme contempt which she experienced when her eyes fell upon him.
Julien had understood nothing of the history of Mathilde’s heart during the last week, but he distinguished the contempt. He had the good sense only to appear before her on the rarest possible occasions, and never looked at her.
But it was not without a mortal anguish that he, as it were, deprived himself of her presence. He thought he felt his unhappiness increasing still further. “The courage of a man’s heart cannot be carried further,” he said to himself. He passed his life seated at a little window at the top of the hôtel; the blind was carefully closed, and from here at any rate he could see mademoiselle de la Mole when she appeared in the garden.
What were his emotions when he saw her walking after dinner with M. de Caylus, M. de Luz, or some other for whom she had confessed to him some former amorous weakness!
Julien had no idea that unhappiness could be so intense; he was on the point of shouting out. This firm soul was at last completely overwhelmed.
Thinking about anything else except mademoiselle de la Mole had become odious to him; he became incapable of writing the simplest letters.
“You are mad,” the marquis said to him.
Julien was frightened that his secret might be guessed, talked about illness and succeeded in being believed. Fortunately for him the marquis rallied him at dinner about his next journey; Mathilde understood that it might be a very long one. It was now several days that Julien had avoided her, and the brilliant young men who had all that this pale sombre being she had once loved was lacking, had no longer the power of drawing her out of her reverie.
“An ordinary girl,” she said to herself, “would have sought out the man she preferred among those young people who are the cynosure of a salon; but one of the characteristics of genius is not to drive its thoughts over the rut traced by the vulgar.
“Why, if I were the companion of a man like Julien, who only lacks the fortune that I possess, I should be continually exciting attention, I should not pass through life unnoticed. Far from incessantly fearing a revolution like my cousins who are so frightened of the people that they have not the pluck to scold a postillion who drives them badly, I should be certain of playing a rôle and a great rôle, for the man whom I have chosen has a character and a boundless ambition. What does he lack? Friends, money? I will give them him.” But she treated Julien in her thought as an inferior being whose love one could win whenever one wanted.
CHAPTER XLIX
THE OPERA BOUFFE
How the spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.—Shakespeare.
Engrossed by thoughts of her future and the singular rôle which she hoped to play, Mathilde soon came to miss the dry metaphysical conversations which she had often had with Julien. Fatigued by these lofty thoughts she would sometimes also miss those moments of happiness which she had found by his side; these last memories were not unattended by remorse which at certain times even overwhelmed her.
“But one may have a weakness,” she said to herself, “a girl like I am should only forget herself for a man of real merit; they will not say that it is his pretty moustache or his skill in horsemanship which have fascinated me, but rather his deep discussions on the future of France and his ideas on the analogy between the events which are going to burst upon us and the English revolution of 1688.”
“I have been seduced,” she answered in her remorse. “I am a weak woman, but at least I have not been led astray like a doll by exterior advantages.”
“If there is a revolution why should not Julien Sorel play the rôle of Roland and I the rôle of Madame Roland? I prefer that part to Madame de Stael’s; the immorality of my conduct will constitute an obstacle in this age of ours. I will certainly not let them reproach me with an act of weakness; I should die of shame.”
Mathilde’s reveries were not all as grave, one must admit, as the thoughts which we have just transcribed.
She would look at Julien and find a charming grace in his slightest action.
“I have doubtless,” she would say, “succeeded in destroying in him the very faintest idea he had of any one else’s rights.”
“The air of unhappiness and deep passion with which the poor boy declared his love to me eight days ago proves it; I must own it was very extraordinary of me to manifest anger at words in which there shone so much respect and so much of passion. Am I not his real wife? Those words of his were quite natural, and I must admit, were really very nice. Julien still continued to love me, even after those eternal conversations in which I had only spoken to him (cruelly enough I admit), about those weaknesses of love which the boredom of the life I lead had inspired me for those young society men of whom he is so jealous. Ah, if he only knew what little danger I have to fear from them; how withered and stereotyped they seem to me in comparison with him.”
While indulging in these reflections Mathilde made a random pencil sketch of a profile on a page of her album. One of the profiles she had just finished surprised and delighted her. It had a striking resemblance to Julien. “It is the voice of heaven. That’s one of the miracles of love,” she cried ecstatically; “Without suspecting it, I have drawn his portrait.”
She fled to her room, shut herself up in it, and with much application made strenuous endeavours to draw Julien’s portrait, but she was unable to succeed; the profile she had traced at random still remained the most like him. Mathilde was delighted with it. She saw in it a palpable proof of the grand passion.
She only left her album very late when the marquise had her called to go to the Italian Opera. Her one idea was to catch sight of Julien, so that she might get her mother to request him to keep them company.
He did not appear, and the ladies had only ordinary vulgar creatures in their box. During the first act of the opera, Mathilde dreamt of the man she loved with all the ecstasies of the most vivid passion; but a love-maxim in the second act sung it must be owned to a melody worthy of Cimarosa pierced her heart. The heroine of the opera said “You must punish me for the excessive adoration which I feel for him. I love him too much.”
From the moment that Mathilde heard this sublime song everything in the world ceased to exist. She was spoken to, she did not answer; her mother reprimanded her, she could scarcely bring herself to look at her. Her ecstasy reached a state of exultation and passion analogous to the most violent transports which Julien had felt for her for some days. The divinely graceful melody to which the maxim, which seemed to have such a striking application to her own position, was sung, engrossed all the minutes when she was not actually thinking of Julien. Thanks to her love for music she was on this particular evening like madame de Rênal always was, when she thought of Julien. Love of the head has doubtless more intelligence than true love, but it only has moments of enthusiasm. It knows itself too well, it sits in judgment on itself incessantly; far from distracting thought it is made by sheer force of thought.
On returning home Mathilde, in spite of madame de la Mole’s remonstrances, pretended to have a fever and spent a part of the night in going over this melody on her piano. She sang the words of the celebrated air which had so fascinated her:—
Devo punirmi, devo punirmi.
Se troppo amai, etc.
As the result of this night of madness, she imagined that she had succeeded in triumphing over her love. This page will be prejudicial in more than one way to the unfortunate author. Frigid souls will accuse him of indecency. But the young ladies who shine in the Paris salons have no right to feel insulted at the supposition that one of their number might be liable to those transports of madness which have been degrading the character of Mathilde. That character is purely imaginary, and is even drawn quite differently from that social code which will guarantee so distinguished a place in the world’s history to nineteenth century civilization.