Madame de Rênal boldly entered Julien’s room. The news of this encounter made him shudder.
“You are frightened,” she said to him, “but I would brave all the dangers in the world without flinching. There is only one thing I fear, and that is the moment when I shall be alone after you have left,” and she left him and ran downstairs.
“Ah,” thought Julien ecstatically, “remorse is the only danger which this sublime soul is afraid of.”
At last evening came. Monsieur de Rênal went to the Casino.
His wife had given out that she was suffering from an awful headache. She went to her room, hastened to dismiss Elisa and quickly got up in order to let Julien out.
He was literally starving. Madame de Rênal went to the pantry to fetch some bread. Julien heard a loud cry. Madame de Rênal came back and told him that when she went to the dark pantry and got near the cupboard where they kept the bread, she had touched a woman’s arm as she stretched out her hand. It was Elisa who had uttered the cry Julien had heard.
“What was she doing there?”
“Stealing some sweets or else spying on us,” said Madame de Rênal with complete indifference, “but luckily I found a pie and a big loaf of bread.”
“But what have you got there?” said Julien pointing to the pockets of her apron.
Madame de Rênal had forgotten that they had been filled with bread since dinner.
Julien clasped her in his arms with the most lively passion. She had never seemed to him so beautiful. “I could not meet a woman of greater character even at Paris,” he said confusedly to himself. She combined all the clumsiness of a woman who was but little accustomed to paying attentions of this kind, with all the genuine courage of a person who is only afraid of dangers of quite a different sphere and quite a different kind of awfulness.
While Julien was enjoying his supper with a hearty appetite and his sweetheart was rallying him on the simplicity of the meal, the door of the room was suddenly shaken violently. It was M. de Rênal.
“Why have you shut yourself in?” he cried to her.
Julien had only just time to slip under the sofa.
On any ordinary day Madame de Rênal would have been upset by this question which was put with true conjugal harshness; but she realised that M. de Rênal had only to bend down a little to notice Julien, for M. de Rênal had flung himself into the chair opposite the sofa which Julien had been sitting in one moment before.
Her headache served as an excuse for everything. While her husband on his side went into a long-winded account of the billiards pool which he had won at Casino, “yes, to be sure a nineteen franc pool,” he added. She noticed Julien’s hat on a chair three paces in front of them. Her self-possession became twice as great, she began to undress, and rapidly passing one minute behind her husband threw her dress over the chair with the hat on it.
At last M. de Rênal left. She begged Julien to start over again his account of his life at the Seminary. “I was not listening to you yesterday all the time you were speaking, I was only thinking of prevailing on myself to send you away.”
She was the personification of indiscretion. They talked very loud and about two o’clock in the morning they were interrupted by a violent knock at the door. It was M. de Rênal again.
“Open quickly, there are thieves in the house!” he said. “Saint Jean found their ladder this morning.”
“This is the end of everything,” cried Madame de Rênal, throwing herself into Julien’s arms. “He will kill both of us, he doesn’t believe there are any thieves. I will die in your arms, and be more happy in my death than I ever was in my life.” She made no attempt to answer her husband who was beginning to lose his temper, but started kissing Julien passionately.
“Save Stanislas’s mother,” he said to her with an imperious look. “I will jump down into the courtyard through the lavatory window, and escape in the garden; the dogs have recognised me. Make my clothes into a parcel and throw them into the garden as soon as you can. In the meanwhile let him break the door down. But above all, no confession, I forbid you to confess, it is better that he should suspect rather than be certain.”
“You will kill yourself as you jump!” was her only answer and her only anxiety.
She went with him to the lavatory window; she then took sufficient time to hide his clothes. She finally opened the door to her husband who was boiling with rage. He looked in the room and in the lavatory without saying a word and disappeared. Julien’s clothes were thrown down to him; he seized them and ran rapidly towards the bottom of the garden in the direction of the Doubs.
As he was running he heard a bullet whistle past him, and heard at the same time the report of a gun.
“It is not M. de Rênal,” he thought, “he’s far too bad a shot.” The dogs ran silently at his side, the second shot apparently broke the paw of one dog, for he began to whine piteously. Julien jumped the wall of the terrace, did fifty paces under cover, and began to fly in another direction. He heard voices calling and had a distinct view of his enemy the servant firing a gun; a farmer also began to shoot away from the other side of the garden. Julien had already reached the bank of the Doubs where he dressed himself.
An hour later he was a league from Verrières on the Geneva road. “If they had suspicions,” thought Julien, “they will look for me on the Paris road.”
CHAPTER XXXI
THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY
O rus quando ego te aspiciam?—Horace
“You’ve no doubt come to wait for the Paris mail, Monsieur,” said the host of an inn where he had stopped to breakfast.
“To-day or to-morrow, it matters little,” said Julien.
The mail arrived while he was still posing as indifferent. There were two free places.
“Why! it’s you my poor Falcoz,” said the traveller who was coming from the Geneva side to the one who was getting in at the same time as Julien.
“I thought you were settled in the outskirts of Lyons,” said Falcoz, “in a delicious valley near the Rhône.”
“Nicely settled! I am running away.”
“What! you are running away? you Saint Giraud! Have you, who look so virtuous, committed some crime?” said Falcoz with a smile.
“On my faith it comes to the same thing. I am running away from the abominable life which one leads in the provinces. I like the freshness of the woods and the country tranquillity, as you know. You have often accused me of being romantic. I don’t want to hear politics talked as long as I live, and politics are hounding me out.”
“But what party do you belong to?”
“To none and that’s what ruins me. That’s all there is to be said about my political life—I like music and painting. A good book is an event for me. I am going to be forty-four. How much longer have I got to live? Fifteen—twenty—thirty years at the outside. Well, I want the ministers in thirty years’ time to be a little cleverer than those of to-day but quite as honest. The history of England serves as a mirror for our own future. There will always be a king who will try to increase his prerogative. The ambition of becoming a deputy, the fame of Mirabeau and the hundreds of thousand francs which he won for himself will always prevent the rich people in the province from going to sleep: they will call that being Liberal and loving the people. The desire of becoming a peer or a gentleman of the chamber will always win over the ultras. On the ship of state every one is anxious to take over the steering because it is well paid. Will there be never a poor little place for the simple passenger?”
“Is it the last elections which are forcing you out of the province?”
“My misfortune goes further back. Four years ago I was forty and possessed 500,000 francs. I am four years older to-day and probably 50,000 francs to the bad, as I shall lose that sum on the sale of my chateau of Monfleury in a superb position near the Rhône.
“At Paris I was tired of that perpetual comedy which is rendered obligatory by what you call nineteenth-century civilisation. I thirsted for good nature and simplicity. I bought an estate in the mountains near the Rhine, there was no more beautiful place under the heavens.
“The village clergyman and the gentry of the locality pay me court for six months; I invite them to dinner; I have left Paris, I tell them, so as to avoid talking politics or hearing politics talked for the rest of my life. As you know I do not subscribe to any paper, the less letters the postman brought me the happier I was.
“That did not suit the vicar’s book. I was soon the victim of a thousand unreasonable requests, annoyances, etc. I wished to give two or three hundred francs a year to the poor, I was asked to give it to the Paris associations, that of Saint Joseph, that of the Virgin, etc. I refused. I was then insulted in a hundred ways. I was foolish enough to be upset by it. I could not go out in the morning to enjoy the beauty of our mountain without finding some annoyance which distracted me from my reveries and recalled unpleasantly both men and their wickedness. On the Rogation processions, for instance whose chanting I enjoy (it is probably a Greek melody) they will not bless my fields because, says the clergyman, they belong to an infidel. A cow dies belonging to a devout old peasant woman. She says the reason is the neighbourhood of a pond which belongs to my infidel self, a philosopher coming from Paris, and eight days afterwards I find my fish in agonies poisoned by lime. Intrigue in all its forms envelops me. The justice of the peace, who is an honest man, but frightened of losing his place, always decides against me. The peace of the country proved a hell for me. Once they saw that I was abandoned by the vicar, the head of the village congregation, and that I was not supported by the retired captain who was the head of the Liberals they all fell upon me, down to the mason whom I had supported for a year, down to the very wheel-wright who wanted to cheat me with impunity over the repairing of my ploughs.
“In order to find some support, and to win at any rate some of my law suits I became a Liberal, but, as you say, those damned elections come along. They asked me for my vote.”
“For an unknown man?”
“Not at all, for a man whom I knew only too well. I refused. It was terribly imprudent. From that moment I had the Liberals on my hands as well, and my position became intolerable. I believe that if the vicar had got it into his head to accuse me of assassinating my servant, there would be twenty witnesses of the two parties who would swear that they had seen me committing the crime.”
“You mean to say you want to live in the country without pandering to the passions of your neighbours, without even listening to their gossip. What a mistake!”
“It is rectified at last. Monfleury is for sale. I will lose 50,000 francs if necessary, but I am over-joyed I am leaving that hell of hypocrisy and annoyance. I am going to look for solitude and rustic peace in the only place where those things are to be found in France, on a fourth storey looking on to the Champs-Elysées; and, moreover, I am actually deliberating if I shall not commence my political career by giving consecrated bread to the parish in the Roule quarter.”
“All this would not have happened under Bonaparte,” said Falcoz with eyes shining with rage and sorrow.
“Very good, but why didn’t your Bonaparte manage to keep his position? Everything which I suffer to-day is his work.”
At this point Julien’s attention was redoubled. He had realised from the first word that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the old boyhood friend of M. de Rênal, who had been repudiated by him in 1816, and that the philosopher Saint-Giraud must be the brother of that chief of the prefecture of——who managed to get the houses of the municipality knocked down to him at a cheap price.
“And all this is the work of your Bonaparte. An honest man, aged forty, and possessed of five hundred thousand francs however inoffensive he is, cannot settle in the provinces and find peace there; those priests and nobles of his will turn him out.”
“Oh don’t talk evil of him,” exclaimed Falcoz. “France was never so high in the esteem of the nations as during the thirteen years of his reign; then every single act was great.”
“Your emperor, devil take him,” replied the man of forty-four, “was only great on his battle fields and when he reorganised the finances about 1802. What is the meaning of all his conduct since then? What with his chamberlains, his pomp, and his receptions in the Tuileries, he has simply provided a new edition of all the monarchical tomfoolery. It was a revised edition and might possibly have lasted for a century or two. The nobles and the priests wish to go back to the old one, but they did not have the iron hand necessary to impose it on the public.”
“Yes, that’s just how an old printer would talk.”
“Who has turned me out of my estate?” continued the printer, angrily. “The priests, whom Napoleon called back by his Concordat instead of treating them like the State treats doctors, barristers, and astronomers, simply seeing in them ordinary citizens, and not bothering about the particular calling by which they are trying to earn their livelihood. Should we be saddled with these insolent gentlemen today, if your Bonaparte had not created barons and counts? No, they were out of fashion. Next to the priests, it’s the little country nobility who have annoyed me the most, and compelled me to become a Liberal.”
The conversation was endless. The theme will occupy France for another half-century. As Saint-Giraud kept always repeating that it was impossible to live in the provinces, Julien timidly suggested the case of M. de Rênal.
“Zounds, young man, you’re a nice one,” exclaimed Falcoz. “He turned spider so as not to be fly, and a terrible spider into the bargain. But I see that he is beaten by that man Valenod. Do you know that scoundrel? He’s the villain of the piece. What will your M. de Rênal say if he sees himself turned out one of these fine days, and Valenod put in his place?”
“He will be left to brood over his crimes,” said Saint-Giraud. “Do you know Verrières, young man? Well, Bonaparte, heaven confound him! Bonaparte and his monarchical tomfoolery rendered possible the reign of the Rênals and the Chélans, which brought about the reign of the Valenods and the Maslons.”
This conversation, with its gloomy politics, astonished Julien and distracted him from his delicious reveries.
He appreciated but little the first sight of Paris as perceived in the distance. The castles in the air he had built about his future had to struggle with the still present memory of the twenty-four hours that he had just passed in Verrières. He vowed that he would never abandon his mistress’s children, and that he would leave everything in order to protect them, if the impertinence of the priests brought about a republic and the persecution of the nobles.
What would have happened on the night of his arrival in Verrières if, at the moment when he had leant his ladder against the casement of Madame de Rênal’s bedroom he had found that room occupied by a stranger or by M. de Rênal?
But how delicious, too, had been those first two hours when his sweetheart had been sincerely anxious to send him away and he had pleaded his cause, sitting down by her in the darkness! A soul like Julien’s is haunted by such memories for a lifetime. The rest of the interview was already becoming merged in the first period of their love, fourteen months previous.
Julien was awakened from his deep meditation by the stopping of the coach. They had just entered the courtyard of the Post in the Rue Rousseau. “I want to go to La Malmaison,” he said to a cabriolet which approached.
“At this time, Monsieur—what for?”
“What’s that got to do with you? Get on.”
Every real passion only thinks about itself. That is why, in my view, passions are ridiculous at Paris, where one’s neighbour always insists on one’s considering him a great deal. I shall refrain from recounting Julien’s ecstasy at La Malmaison. He wept. What! in spite of those wretched white walls, built this very year, which cut the path up into bits? Yes, monsieur, for Julien, as for posterity, there was nothing to choose between Arcole, Saint Helena, and La Malmaison.
In the evening, Julien hesitated a great deal before going to the theatre. He had strange ideas about that place of perdition.
A deep distrust prevented him from admiring actual Paris. He was only affected by the monuments left behind by his hero.
“So here I am in the centre of intrigue and hypocrisy. Here reign the protectors of the abbé de Frilair.” On the evening of the third day his curiosity got the better of his plan of seeing everything before presenting himself to the abbé Pirard. The abbé explained to him coldly the kind of life which he was to expect at M. de la Mole’s.
“If you do not prove useful to him at the end of some months you will go back to the seminary, but not in disgrace. You will live in the house of the marquis, who is one of the greatest seigneurs of France. You will wear black, but like a man who is in mourning, and not like an ecclesiastic. I insist on your following your theological studies three days a week in a seminary where I will introduce you. Every day at twelve o’clock you will establish yourself in the marquis’s library; he counts on making use of you in drafting letters concerning his lawsuits and other matters. The marquis will scribble on the margin of each letter he gets the kind of answer which is required. I have assured him that at the end of three months you will be so competent to draft the answers, that out of every dozen you hand to the marquis for signature, he will be able to sign eight or nine. In the evening, at eight o’clock, you will tidy up his bureau, and at ten you will be free.
“It may be,” continued the abbé Pirard, “that some old lady or some smooth-voiced man will hint at immense advantages, or will crudely offer you gold, to show him the letters which the marquis has received.”
“Ah, monsieur,” exclaimed Julien, blushing.
“It is singular,” said the abbé with a bitter smile, “that poor as you are, and after a year at a seminary, you still have any of this virtuous indignation left. You must have been very blind.”
“Can it be that blood will tell,” muttered the abbé in a whisper, as though speaking to himself. “The singular thing is,” he added, looking at Julien, “that the marquis knows you—I don’t know how. He will give you a salary of a hundred louis to commence with. He is a man who only acts by his whim. That is his weakness. He will quarrel with you about the most childish matters. If he is satisfied, your wages may rise in consequence up to eight thousand francs.
“But you realise,” went on the abbé, sourly, “that he is not giving you all this money simply on account of your personal charm. The thing is to prove yourself useful. If I were in your place I would talk very little, and I would never talk about what I know nothing about.
“Oh, yes,” said the abbé, “I have made some enquiries for you. I was forgetting M. de la Mole’s family. He has two children—a daughter and a son of nineteen, eminently elegant—the kind of madman who never knows to-day what he will do to-morrow. He has spirit and valour; he has been through the Spanish war. The marquis hopes, I don’t know why, that you will become a friend of the young count Norbert. I told him that you were a great classic, and possibly he reckons on your teaching his son some ready-made phrases about Cicero and Virgil.
“If I were you, I should never allow that handsome young man to make fun of me, and before I accepted his advances, which you will find perfectly polite but a little ironical, I would make him repeat them more than once.
“I will not hide from you the fact that the young count de La Mole is bound to despise you at first, because you are nothing more than a little bourgeois. His grandfather belonged to the court, and had the honour of having his head cut off in the Place de Grève on the 26th April, 1574, on account of a political intrigue.
“As for you, you are the son of a carpenter of Verrières, and what is more, in receipt of his father’s wages. Ponder well over these differences, and look up the family history in Moreri. All the flatterers who dine at their house make from time to time what they call delicate allusions to it.
“Be careful of how you answer the pleasantries of M. the count de La Mole, chief of a squadron of hussars, and a future peer of France, and don’t come and complain to me later on.”
“It seems to me,” said Julien, blushing violently, “that I ought not even to answer a man who despises me.”
“You have no idea of his contempt. It will only manifest itself by inflated compliments. If you were a fool, you might be taken in by it. If you want to make your fortune, you ought to let yourself be taken in by it.”
“Shall I be looked upon as ungrateful,” said Julien, “if I return to my little cell Number 108 when I find that all this no longer suits me?”
“All the toadies of the house will no doubt calumniate you,” said the abbé, “but I myself will come to the rescue. Adsum qui feci. I will say that I am responsible for that resolution.”
Julien was overwhelmed by the bitter and almost vindictive tone which he noticed in M. Pirard; that tone completely infected his last answer.
The fact is that the abbé had a conscientious scruple about loving Julien, and it was with a kind of religious fear that he took so direct a part in another’s life.
“You will also see,” he added with the same bad grace, as though accomplishing a painful duty, “you also will see Madame the marquise de La Mole. She is a big blonde woman about forty, devout, perfectly polite, and even more insignificant. She is the daughter of the old Duke de Chaulnes so well known for his aristocratic prejudices. This great lady is a kind of synopsis in high relief of all the fundamental characteristics of women of her rank. She does not conceal for her own part that the possession of ancestors who went through the crusades is the sole advantage which she respects. Money only comes a long way afterwards. Does that astonish you? We are no longer in the provinces, my friend.
“You will see many great lords in her salon talk about our princes in a tone of singular flippancy. As for Madame de la Mole, she lowers her voice out of respect every time she mentions the name of a Prince, and above all the name of a Princess. I would not advise you to say in her hearing that Philip II. or Henry VII. were monsters. They were kings, a fact which gives them indisputable rights to the respect of creatures without birth like you and me. Nevertheless,” added M. Pirard, “we are priests, for she will take you for one; that being our capacity, she considers us as spiritual valets necessary for her salvation.”
“Monsieur,” said Julien, “I do not think I shall be long at Paris.”
“Good, but remember that no man of our class can make his fortune except through the great lords. With that indefinable element in your character, at any rate I think it is, you will be persecuted if you do not make your fortune. There is no middle course for you, make no mistake about it; people see that they do not give you pleasure when they speak to you; in a social country like this you are condemned to unhappiness if you do not succeed in winning respect.”
“What would have become of you at Besançon without this whim of the marquis de la Mole? One day you will realise the extraordinary extent of what he has done for you, and if you are not a monster you will be eternally grateful to him and his family. How many poor abbés more learned than you have lived years at Paris on the fifteen sous they got for their mass and their ten sous they got for their dissertations in the Sorbonne. Remember what I told you last winter about the first years of that bad man Cardinal Dubois. Are you proud enough by chance to think yourself more talented than he was?
“Take, for instance, a quiet and average man like myself; I reckoned on dying in my seminary. I was childish enough to get attached to it. Well I was on the point of being turned out, when I handed in my resignation. You know what my fortune consisted of. I had five hundred and twenty francs capital neither more nor less, not a friend, scarcely two or three acquaintances. M. de la Mole, whom I had never seen, extricated me from that quandary. He only had to say the word and I was given a living where the parishioners are well-to-do people above all crude vices, and where the income puts me to shame, it is so disproportionate to my work. I refrained from talking to you all this time simply to enable you to find your level a bit.
“One word more, I have the misfortune to be irritable. It is possible that you and I will cease to be on speaking terms.
“If the airs of the marquise or the spiteful pleasantries of her son make the house absolutely intolerable for you I advise you to finish your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris and rather north than south. There is more civilisation in the north, and, he added lowering his voice, I must admit that the nearness of the Paris papers puts fear into our petty tyrants.
“If we continue to find pleasure in each other’s society and if the marquis’s house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the living. I owe you that and even more, he added interrupting Julien’s thanks, for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besançon. If instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you would have saved me.”
The abbé’s voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself into his friend’s arms. He could not help saying to him in the most manly manner he could assume:
“I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found another father in you, monsieur.”
“That is good, that is good,” said the embarrassed abbé, then suddenly remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude “you must never say luck, my child, always say providence.”
The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an immense door. It was the Hôtel de la Mole, and to prevent the passers by having any doubt on the subject these words could be read in black marble over the door.
This affectation displeased Julien. “They are so frightened of the Jacobins. They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head. Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and they advertise their house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can recognise it and loot it.” He communicated his thought to the abbé Pirard.
“Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate. What a dreadful idea you have got into your head.”
“Nothing could be simpler,” said Julien.
The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the court, struck him with admiration. It was fine sunshine. “What magnificent architecture,” he said to his friend. The hotel in question was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat façade built about the time of Voltaire’s death. At no other period had fashion and beauty been so far from one another.
CHAPTER XXXII
ENTRY INTO SOCIETY
Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room where one appeared alone and without support at the age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to intimidate me. The more I wished to please the more clumsy I became. I evolved the most unfounded ideas about everything. I would either abandon myself without any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply because he had looked at me with a serious air; but all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful day—Kant.
Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. “Pull yourself together,” said the abbé Pirard. “You get horrible ideas into your head, besides you are only a child. What has happened to the nil mirari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you. They will see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to make you fall into some gross blunder.”
“Let them do their worst,” said Julien biting his lip, and he became as distrustful as ever.
The salons on the first storey which our gentlemen went through before reaching the marquis’ study, would have seemed to you, my reader, as gloomy as they were magnificent. If they had been given to you just as they were, you would have refused to live in them. This was the domain of yawning and melancholy reasoning. They redoubled Julien’s rapture. “How can any one be unhappy?” he thought, “who lives in so splendid an abode.”
Finally our gentlemen arrived at the ugliest rooms in this superb suite. There was scarcely any light. They found there a little keen man with a lively eye and a blonde wig. The abbé turned round to Julien and presented him. It was the marquis. Julien had much difficulty in recognising him, he found his manner was so polite. It was no longer the grand seigneur with that haughty manner of the abbey of Bray-le-Haut. Julien thought that his wig had much too many hairs. As the result of this opinion he was not at all intimidated. The descendant of the friend of Henry III. seemed to him at first of a rather insignificant appearance. He was extremely thin and very restless, but he soon noticed that the marquis had a politeness which was even more pleasant to his listener than that of the Bishop of Besançon himself. The audience only lasted three minutes. As they went out the abbé said to Julien,
“You looked at the marquis just as you would have looked at a picture. I am not a great expert in what these people here call politeness. You will soon know more about it than I do, but really the boldness of your looks seemed scarcely polite.”
They had got back into the fiacre. The driver stopped near the boulevard; the abbé ushered Julien into a suite of large rooms. Julien noticed that there was no furniture. He was looking at the magnificent gilded clock representing a subject which he thought very indecent, when a very elegant gentleman approached him with a smiling air. Julien bowed slightly.
The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. Julien shuddered and leapt back, he reddened with rage. The abbé Pirard, in spite of his gravity, laughed till the tears came into his eyes. The gentleman was a tailor.
“I give you your liberty for two days,” said the abbé as they went out. “You cannot be introduced before then to Madame de la Mole. Any one else would watch over you as if you were a young girl during these first few moments of your life in this new Babylon. Get ruined at once if you have got to be ruined, and I will be rid of my own weakness of being fond of you. The day after to-morrow this tailor will bring you two suits, you will give the man who tries them on five francs. Apart from that don’t let these Parisians hear the sound of your voice. If you say a word they will manage somehow to make fun of you. They have a talent for it. Come and see me the day after to-morrow at noon.... Go and ruin yourself.... I was forgetting, go and order boots and a hat at these addresses.”
Julien scrutinised the handwriting of the addresses.
“It’s the marquis’s hand,” said the abbé; “he is an energetic man who foresees everything, and prefers doing to ordering. He is taking you into his house, so that you may spare him that kind of trouble. Will you have enough brains to execute efficiently all the instructions which he will give you with scarcely a word of explanation? The future will show, look after yourself.”
Julien entered the shops indicated by the addresses without saying a single word. He observed that he was received with respect, and that the bootmaker as he wrote his name down in the ledger put M. de Sorel.
When he was in the Cemetery of Père La Chaise a very obliging gentleman, and what is more, one who was Liberal in his views, suggested that he should show Julien the tomb of Marshal Ney which a sagacious statecraft had deprived of the honour of an epitaph, but when he left this Liberal, who with tears in his eyes almost clasped him in his arms, Julien was without his watch. Enriched by this experience two days afterwards he presented himself to the abbé Pirard, who looked at him for a long time.
“Perhaps you are going to become a fop,” said the abbé to him severely. Julien looked like a very young man in full mourning; as a matter of fact, he looked very well, but the good abbé was too provincial himself to see that Julien still carried his shoulders in that particular way which signifies in the provinces both elegance and importance. When the marquis saw Julien his opinion of his graces differed so radically from that of the good abbé as he said,
“Would you have any objection to M. le Sorel taking some dancing lessons?”
The abbé was thunderstruck.
“No,” he answered at last. “Julien is not a priest.”
The marquis went up the steps of a little secret staircase two at a time, and installed our hero in a pretty attic which looked out on the big garden of the hotel. He asked him how many shirts he had got at the linen drapers.
“Two,” answered Julien, intimidated at seeing so great a lord condescend to such details.
“Very good,” replied the marquis quite seriously, and with a certain curt imperiousness which gave Julien food for thought. “Very good, get twenty-two more shirts. Here are your first quarter’s wages.”
As he went down from the attic the marquis called an old man. “Arsène,” he said to him, “you will serve M. Sorel.” A few minutes afterwards Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library. It was a delicious moment. To prevent his emotion being discovered he went and hid in a little dark corner. From there he contemplated with rapture the brilliant backs of the books. “I shall be able to read all these,” he said to himself. “How can I fail to like it here? M. de Rênal would have thought himself dishonoured for ever by doing one-hundredth part of what the Marquis de la Mole has just done for me.
“But let me have a look at the copies I have to make.” Having finished this work Julien ventured to approach the books. He almost went mad with joy as he opened an edition of Voltaire. He ran and opened the door of the library to avoid being surprised. He then indulged in the luxury of opening each of the eighty volumes. They were magnificently bound and were the masterpiece of the best binder in London. It was even more than was required to raise Julien’s admiration to the maximum.
An hour afterwards the marquis came in and was surprised to notice that Julien spelt cela with two “ll” cella. “Is all that the abbé told me of his knowledge simply a fairy tale?” The marquis was greatly discouraged and gently said to him,
“You are not sure of your spelling?”
“That is true,” said Julien without thinking in the least of the injustice that he was doing to himself. He was overcome by the kindness of the marquis which recalled to him through sheer force of contrast the superciliousness of M. de Rênal.
“This trial of the little Franc-comtois abbé is waste of time,” thought the marquis, “but I had such great need of a reliable man.”
“You spell cela with one ‘l,’” said the marquis to him, “and when you have finished your copies look the words whose spelling you are not sure of up in the dictionary.”
The marquis sent for him at six o’clock. He looked at Julien’s boots with manifest pain. “I am sorry for a mistake I made. I did not tell you that you must dress every day at half-past five.”
Julien looked at him but did not understand.
“I mean to say put on stockings. Arsène will remind you. To-day I will make your apologies.”
As he finished the sentence M. de la Mole escorted Julien into a salon resplendent with gilding. On similar occasions M. de Rênal always made a point of doubling his pace so as to have the privilege of being the first to pass the threshold. His former employer’s petty vanity caused Julien to tread on the marquis’s feet and hurt him a great deal because of his gout. “So he is clumsy to the bargain,” he said to himself. He presented him to a woman of high stature and of imposing appearance. It was the marquise. Julien thought that her manner was impertinent, and that she was a little like Madame de Maugiron, the wife of the sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Verrières when she was present at the Saint-Charles dinner. Rendered somewhat nervous by the extreme magnificence of the salon Julien did not hear what M. de la Mole was saying. The marquise scarcely deigned to look at him. There were several men there, among whom Julien recognised with an inexpressible pleasure the young bishop of Agde who had deigned to speak to him some months before at the ceremony of Bray-le-Haut. This young prelate was doubtless frightened by the tender look which the timidity of Julien fixed on him, and did not bother to recognise “the provincial.”
The men assembled in this salon seemed to Julien to have a certain element of gloom and constraint. Conversation takes place in a low voice in Paris and little details are not exaggerated.
A handsome young man with moustaches, came in about half-past six. He was very pale, and had a very small head.
“You always keep us waiting” said the marquise, as he kissed her hand.
Julien realised that it was the Count de la Mole. From the very first he thought he was charming.
“Is it possible,” he said to himself “that this is the man whose offensive jests are going to drive me out of the house.”
As the result of scrutinising count Norbert, Julien noticed that he was in boots and spurs. “And I have got to be in shoes just like an inferior apparently.” They sat down at table, Julien heard the marquise raising her voice a little and saying something severe. Almost simultaneously he noticed an extremely blonde and very well developed young person who had just sat down opposite him. Nevertheless she made no appeal to him. Looking at her attentively he thought that he had never seen such beautiful eyes, although they betokened a great coldness of soul. Subsequently Julien thought that, though they looked bored and sceptical, they were conscious of the duty of being impressive. “Madame de Rênal of course had very fine eyes” he said to himself, “she used to be universally complimented on them, but they had nothing in common with these.” Julien did not know enough of society to appreciate that it was the fire of repartee which from time to time gave their brilliancy to the eyes of Mademoiselle Mathilde (for that was the name he heard her called by). When Madame de Rênal’s eyes became animated, it was with the fire of passion, or as the result of a generous indignation on hearing of some evil deed. Towards the end of the meal Julien found a word to express Mademoiselle de la Mole’s type of beauty. Her eyes are scintillating, he said to himself. Apart from her eyes she was cruelly like her mother, whom he liked less and less, and he ceased looking at her. By way of compensation he thought Count Norbert admirable in every respect. Julien was so fascinated that the idea never occurred to him of being jealous, and hating him because he was richer and of nobler birth than he was himself.
Julien thought that the marquis looked bored.
About the second course he said to his son: “Norbert, I ask all your good offices for M. Julien Sorel, whom I have just taken into my staff and of whom I hope to make a man si cella se peut.”
“He is my secretary,” said the marquis to his neighbour, “and he spells cela with two ll’s.” Everybody looked at Julien, who bowed to Norbert in a manner that was slightly too marked, but speaking generally they were satisfied with his expression.
The marquis must have spoken about the kind of education which Julien had received for one of the guests tackled him on Horace. “It was just by talking about Horace that I succeeded with the bishop of Besançon,” said Julien to himself. Apparently that is the only author they know. From that instant he was master of himself. This transition was rendered easy because he had just decided that he would never look upon Madamoiselle de la Mole as a woman after his own taste. Since the seminary he had the lowest opinion of men, and was not to be easily intimidated by them. He would have enjoyed all his self-possession if the dining-room had been furnished with less magnificence. It was, as a matter of fact, two mirrors each eight feet high in which he would look from time to time at the man who was speaking to him about Horace, which continued to impress him. His phrases were not too long for a provincial, he had fine eyes whose brilliancy was doubled by his quavering timidity, or by his happy bashfulness when he had given a good answer. They found him pleasant. This kind of examination gave a little interest to a solemn dinner. The marquis signed to Julien’s questioner to press him sharply. “Can he possibly know something?” he thought.
Julien answered and thought out new ideas. He lost sufficient of his nervousness, not indeed to exhibit any wit, for that is impossible for any one ignorant of the special language which is used in Paris, but to show himself possessed of ideas which, though presented out of place and ungracefully, were yet original. They saw that he knew Latin perfectly.
Julien’s adversary was a member of the Academy Inscriptions who chanced to know Latin. He found Julien a very good humanist, was not frightened of making him feel uncomfortable, and really tried to embarrass him. In the heat of the controversy Julien eventually forgot the magnificent furniture of the dining-room. He managed to expound theories concerning the Latin poets which his questioner had never read of anywhere. Like an honest man, he gave the young secretary all due credit for them. As luck would have it, they started a discussion on the question of whether Horace was poor or rich, a good humoured and careless voluptuary who made verses to amuse himself, like Chapelle the friend of Molière and de la Fontaine, or a poor devil of a poet laureate who wrote odes for the king’s birthday like Southey, the accuser of Lord Byron. They talked about the state of society under Augustus and under George IV. At both periods the aristocracy was all-powerful, but, while at Rome it was despoiled of its power by Maecenas who was only a simple knight, it had in England reduced George IV practically to the position of a Venetian doge. This discussion seemed to lift the marquis out of that state of bored torpor in which he had been plunged at the beginning of the dinner.
Julien found meaningless such modern names as Southey, Lord Byron, and George IV, which he now heard pronounced for the first time. But every one noticed that whenever the conversation dealt with events that had taken place in Rome and about which knowledge could be obtained by a perusal of the works of Horace, Martial or Tacitus, etc., he showed an indisputable superiority. Julien coolly appropriated several ideas which he had learnt from the bishop of Besançon in the historic conversation which he had had with that prelate. These ideas were not the least appreciated.
When every one was tired of talking about poets the marquise, who always made it a rule to admire whatever amused her husband, deigned to look at Julien. “Perhaps an educated man lies hid beneath the clumsy manners of this young abbé,” said the Academician who happened to be near the marquise. Julien caught a few words of what he said. Ready-made phrases suited the intellect of the mistress of the house quite well. She adopted this one about Julien, and was very pleased with herself for having invited the academician to dinner. “He has amused M. de la Mole” she thought.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE FIRST STEPS
This immense valley, filled with brilliant lights and so many thousands of men dazzles my sight. No one knows me. All are superior to me. I lose my head. Poemi dell’ av. REINA.
Julien was copying letters in the library very early the next day when Mademoiselle Mathilde came in by a little dummy door very well masked by the backs of the books. While Julien was admiring the device, Mademoiselle Mathilde seemed astonished and somewhat annoyed at finding him there: Julien saw that she was in curl-papers and had a hard, haughty, and masculine expression. Mademoiselle de la Mole had the habit of surreptitiously stealing books from her father’s library. Julien’s presence rendered this morning’s journey abortive, a fact which annoyed her all the more as she had come to fetch the second volume of Voltaire’s Princess of Babylon, a worthy climax to one of the most eminently monarchical and religious educations which the convent of the Sacred Heart had ever provided. This poor girl of nineteen already required some element of spiciness in order to get up an interest in a novel.
Count Norbert put in an appearance in the library about three o’clock. He had come to study a paper so as to be able to talk politics in the evening, and was very glad to meet Julien, whose existence he had forgotten. He was charming, and offered him a ride on horseback.
“My father will excuse us until dinner.”
Julien appreciated the us and thought it charming.
“Great heavens! M. le Comte,” said Julien, “if it were a question of felling an eighty-foot tree or hewing it out and making it into planks I would acquit myself all right, I daresay, but as for riding a horse, I haven’t done such a thing six times in my life.”
“Well, this will be the seventh,” said Norbert.
As a matter of fact, Julien remembered the king of ——’s entry into Verrières, and thought he rode extremely well. But as they were returning from the Bois de Boulogne he fell right in the middle of the Rue du Bac, as he suddenly tried to get out of the way of a cabriolet, and was spattered all over with mud. It was lucky that he had two suits. The marquis, wishing to favour him with a few words at dinner, asked him for news of his excursion. Norbert began immediately to answer him in general terms.
“M. le Comte is extremely kind to me,” answered Julien. “I thank him for it, and I fully appreciate it. He was good enough to have the quietest and prettiest horse given to me, but after all he could not tie me on to it, and owing to the lack of that precaution, I had a fall right in the middle of that long street near the bridge. Madame Mathilde made a futile effort to hide a burst of laughter, and subsequently was indiscreet enough to ask for details. Julien acquitted himself with much simplicity. He had grace without knowing it.
“I prophesy favourably about that little priest,” said the marquis to the academician. “Think of a provincial being simple over a matter like that. Such a thing has never been witnessed before, and will never be witnessed again; and what is more, he describes his misfortune before ladies.”
Julien put his listeners so thoroughly at their ease over his misfortune that at the end of the dinner, when the general conversation had gone off on to another subject, Mademoiselle Mathilde asked her brother some questions over the details of the unfortunate occurrence. As she put numerous questions, and as Julien met her eyes several times, he ventured to answer himself, although the questions had not been addressed to him, and all three of them finished up by laughing just as though they had all been inhabitants of some village in the depths of a forest.
On the following day Julien attended two theology lectures, and then came back to copy out about twenty letters. He found a young man, who though very carefully dressed, had a mean appearance and an envious expression, established near him in the library.
The marquis entered, “What are you doing here, M. Tanbeau?” he said severely to the new-comer.
“I thought—” answered the young man, with a base smile.
“No, monsieur, you thought nothing of the kind. This is a try-on, but it is an unfortunate one.”
Young Tanbeau got up in a rage and disappeared. He was a nephew of the academician who was a friend of Madame de la Mole, and intended to take up the profession of letters. The academician had induced the marquis to take him as a secretary. Tanbeau used to work in a separate room, but having heard of the favour that was vouchsafed to Julien he wished to share it, and he had gone this morning and established his desk in the library.
At four o’clock Julien ventured, after a little hesitation, to present himself to Count Norbert. The latter was on the point of going riding, and being a man of perfect politeness felt embarrassed.
“I think,” he said to Julien, “that you had better go to the riding school, and after a few weeks, I shall be charmed to ride with you.”
“I should like to have the honour of thanking you for the kindness which you have shewn me. Believe me, monsieur,” added Julien very seriously, “that I appreciate all I owe you. If your horse has not been hurt by the reason of my clumsiness of yesterday, and if it is free I should like to ride it this afternoon.”
“Well, upon my word, my dear Sorel, you do so at your own risk and peril; kindly assume that I have put forth all the objections required by prudence. As a matter of fact it is four o’clock, we have no time to lose.”
As soon as Julien was on horseback, he said to the young count, “What must one do not to fall off?”
“Lots of things,” answered Norbert, bursting into laughter. “Keep your body back for instance.”
Julien put his horse to the trot. They were at the Place Louis XVI.
“Oh, you foolhardy youngster,” said Norbert “there are too many carriages here, and they are driven by careless drivers into the bargain. Once you are on the ground their tilburies will run over your body, they will not risk spoiling their horses’ mouths by pulling up short.”
Norbert saw Julien twenty times on the point of tumbling, but in the end the excursion finished without misadventure. As they came back the young count said to his sister,
“Allow me to introduce a dashing dare-devil.”
When he talked to his father over the dinner from one end of the table to the other, he did justice to Julien’s courage. It was the only thing one could possibly praise about his style of riding. The young count had heard in the morning the men who groomed the horses in the courtyard making Julien’s fall an opportunity for the most outrageous jokes at his expense.
In spite of so much kindness Julien soon felt himself completely isolated in this family. All their customs seemed strange to him, and he was cognizant of none of them. His blunders were the delight of the valets.
The abbé Pirard had left for his living. “If Julien is a weak reed, let him perish. If he is a man of spirit, let him get out of his difficulties all alone,” he thought.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE HÔTEL DE LA MOLE
What is he doing here? Will he like it there? Will he try to please?—Ronsard.
If everything in the aristocratic salon of the Hotel de la Mole seemed strange to Julien, that pale young man in his black suit seemed in his turn very strange to those persons who deigned to notice him. Madame de la Mole suggested to her husband that he should send him off on some business on those days when they had certain persons to dinner.
“I wish to carry the experiment to its logical conclusion,” answered the marquis. “The abbé Pirard contends that we are wrong in crushing the self-respect of the people whom we allow around us. One can only lean on what resists. The only thing against this man is his unknown face, apart from that he is a deaf mute.”
“If I am to know my way about,” said Julien to himself. “I must write down the names of the persons whom I see come to the salon together with a few words on their character.”
He put at the head of the list five or six friends of the house who took every opportunity of paying court to him, believing that he was protected by a whim of the marquis. They were poor dull devils. But it must be said in praise of this class of men, such as they are found to-day in the salons of the aristocracy, that every one did not find them equally tame. One of them was now allowing himself to be bullied by the marquis, who was venting his irritation at a harsh remark which had been addressed to him by the marquise.
The masters of the house were too proud or too prone to boredom; they were too much used to finding their only distraction in the addressing of insults, to enable them to expect true friends. But, except on rainy days and in rare moments of savage boredom, they always showed themselves perfectly polite.
If the five or six toadies who manifested so paternal an affection towards Julien had deserted the Hotel de la Mole, the marquise would have been exposed to long spells of solitude, and in the eyes of women of that class, solitude is awful, it is the symbol of disgrace.
The marquis was charming to his wife. He saw that her salon was sufficiently furnished, though not with peers, for he did not think his new colleagues were sufficiently noble to come to his house as friends, or sufficiently amusing to be admitted as inferiors.
It was only later that Julien fathomed these secrets. The governing policy of a household, though it forms the staple of conversation in bourgeois families, is only alluded to in families of the class of that of the marquis in moments of distress. So paramount even in this bored century is the necessity of amusing one’s self, that even on the days of dinner-parties the marquis had scarcely left the salon before all the guests ran away. Provided that one did not make any jests about either God or the priests or the king or the persons in office, or the artists who enjoyed the favour of the court, or of anything that was established, provided that one did not praise either Béranger or the opposition papers, or Voltaire or Rousseau or anything which involved any element of free speech, provided that above all that one never talked politics, one could discuss everything with freedom.
There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns a year and no blue ribbon which could sustain a contest against such a code of salon etiquette.
The slightest live idea appeared a crudity. In spite of the prevailing good form, perfect politeness, and desire to please, ennui was visible in every face. The young people who came to pay their calls were frightened of speaking of anything which might make them suspected of thinking or of betraying that they had read something prohibited, and relapsed into silence after a few elegant phrases about Rossini and the weather.
Julien noticed that the conversation was usually kept alive by two viscounts and five barons whom M. de la Mole had known at the time of the emigration. These gentlemen enjoyed an income of from six to eight hundred thousand francs. Four swore by the Quotidienne and three by the Gazette de France. One of them had every day some anecdote to tell about the Château, in which he made lavish use of the word admirable. Julien noticed that he had five crosses, the others as a rule only had three.
By way of compensation six footmen in livery were to be seen in the ante-room, and during the whole evening ices or tea were served every quarter-of-an-hour, while about midnight there was a kind of supper with champagne.
This was the reason that sometimes induced Julien to stay till the end. Apart from this he could scarcely understand why any one could bring himself to take seriously the ordinary conversation in this magnificently gilded salon. Sometimes he would look at the talkers to see if they themselves were not making fun of what they were saying. “My M. de Maistre, whom I know by heart,” he thought, “has put it a hundred times better, and all the same he is pretty boring.”
Julien was not the only one to appreciate this stifling moral atmosphere. Some consoled themselves by taking a great quantity of ices, others by the pleasure of saying all the rest of the evening, “I have just come from the Hôtel de la Mole where I learnt that Russia, etc.”
Julien learnt from one of the toadies that scarcely six months ago madame de la Mole had rewarded more than twenty years of assiduous attention by promoting the poor baron Le Bourguignon, who had been a sub-prefect since the restoration, to the rank of prefect.
This great event had whetted the zeal of all these gentlemen. Previously there were few things to which they would have objected, now they objected to nothing. There was rarely any overt lack of consideration, but Julien had already caught at meals two or three little short dialogues between the marquis and his wife which were cruel to those who were seated near them. These noble personages did not conceal their sincere contempt for everyone who was not sprung from people who were entitled to ride in the carriages of the king. Julien noticed that the word crusade was the only word which gave their face an expression of deep seriousness akin to respect. Their ordinary respect had always a touch of condescension. In the middle of this magnificence and this boredom Julien was interested in nothing except M. de la Mole. He was delighted to hear him protest one day that he had had nothing to do with the promotion of that poor Le Bourguignon, it was an attention to the marquise. Julien knew the truth from the abbé Pirard.
The abbé was working in the marquis’s library with Julien one morning at the eternal de Frilair lawsuit.
“Monsieur,” said Julien suddenly, “is dining every day with madame la marquise one of my duties or a special favour that they show to me?”
“It’s a special honour,” replied the scandalised abbé. “M. the Academician, who has been cultivating the family for fifteen years, has never been able to obtain so much for his M. Tanbeau.”
“I find it, sir, the most painful part of my employment. I was less bored at the seminary. Some times I see even mademoiselle de la Mole yawn, and yet she ought to be accustomed to the social charms of the friends of the house. I am frightened of falling asleep. As a favour, obtain permission for me to go and get a forty sous’ dinner in some obscure inn.”
The abbé who was a true snob, was very appreciative of the honour of dining with a great lord. While he was endeavouring to get Julien to understand this point of view a slight noise made them turn round. Julien saw mademoiselle de la Mole listening. He reddened. She had come to fetch a book and had heard everything. She began to entertain some respect for Julien. “He has not been born servile,” she thought, “like that old abbé. Heavens, how ugly he is.”
At dinner Julien did not venture to look at mademoiselle de la Mole but she was kind enough to speak to him. They were expecting a lot of visitors that day and she asked him to stay. The young girls of Paris are not at all fond of persons of a certain age, especially when they are slovenly. Julien did not need much penetration to realise that the colleagues of M. le Bourguignon who remained in the salon had the privilege of being the ordinary butt of mademoiselle de la Mole’s jokes. On this particular day, whether or not by reason of some affectation on her part, she proved cruel to bores.
Mademoiselle de la Mole was the centre of a little knot which used to form nearly every evening behind the marquise’s immense arm-chair. There were to be found there the marquis de Croisenois, the comte de Caylus, the vicomte de Luz and two or three other young officers, the friends of Norbert or his sister. These gentlemen used to sit down on a large blue sofa. At the end of the sofa, opposite the part where the brilliant Mathilde was sitting, Julien sat in silence on a little, rather low straw chair. This modest position was envied by all the toadies; Norbert kept his father’s young secretary in countenance by speaking to him, or mentioning him by name once or twice in the evening. On this particular occasion mademoiselle de la Mole asked him what was the height of the mountain on which the citadel of Besançon is planted. Julien had never any idea if this mountain was higher or lower than Montmartre. He often laughed heartily at what was said in this little knot, but he felt himself incapable of inventing anything analagous. It was like a strange language which he understood but could not speak.
On this particular day Matilde’s friends manifested a continuous hostility to the visitors who came into the vast salon. The friends of the house were the favoured victims at first, inasmuch as they were better known. You can form your opinion as to whether Julien paid attention; everything interested him, both the substance of things and the manner of making fun of them.
“And there is M. Descoulis,” said Matilde; “he doesn’t wear a wig any more. Does he want to get a prefectship through sheer force of genius? He is displaying that bald forehead which he says is filled with lofty thoughts.”
“He is a man who knows the whole world,” said the marquis de Croisenois. “He also goes to my uncle the cardinal’s. He is capable of cultivating a falsehood with each of his friends for years on end, and he has two or three hundred friends. He knows how to nurse friendship, that is his talent. He will go out, just as you see him, in the worst winter weather, and be at the door of one of his friends by seven o’clock in the morning.
“He quarrels from time to time and he writes seven or eight letters for each quarrel. Then he has a reconciliation and he writes seven or eight letters to express his bursts of friendship. But he shines most brilliantly in the frank and sincere expansiveness of the honest man who keeps nothing up his sleeve. This manœuvre is brought into play when he has some favour to ask. One of my uncle’s grand vicars is very good at telling the life of M. Descoulis since the restoration. I will bring him to you.”
“Bah! I don’t believe all that, it’s professional jealousy among the lower classes,” said the comte de Caylus.
“M. Descoulis will live in history,” replied the marquis. “He brought about the restoration together with the abbé de Pradt and messieurs de Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo.”
“That man has handled millions,” said Norbert, “and I can’t conceive why he should come here to swallow my father’s epigrams which are frequently atrocious. ‘How many times have you betrayed your friends, my dear Descoulis?’ he shouted at him one day from one end of the table to the other.”
“But is it true that he has played the traitor?” asked mademoiselle de la Mole. “Who has not played the traitor?”
“Why!” said the comte de Caylus to Norbert, “do you have that celebrated Liberal, M. Sainclair, in your house. What the devil’s he come here for? I must go up to him and speak to him and make him speak. He is said to be so clever.”
“But how will your mother receive him?” said M. de Croisenois. “He has such extravagant, generous and independent ideas.”
“Look,” said mademoiselle de la Mole, “look at the independent man who bows down to the ground to M. Descoulis while he grabs hold of his hand. I almost thought he was going to put it to his lips.”
“Descoulis must stand better with the powers that be than we thought,” answered M. de Croisenois.
“Sainclair comes here in order to get into the academy,” said Norbert. “See how he bows to the baron L——, Croisenois.”
“It would be less base to kneel down,” replied M. de Luz.
“My dear Sorel,” said Norbert, “you are extremely smart, but you come from the mountains. Mind you never bow like that great poet is doing, even to God the Father.”
“Ah there’s a really witty man, M. the Baron Bâton,” said mademoiselle de la Mole, imitating a little the voice of the flunkey who had just announced him.
“I think that even your servants make fun of him. What a name Baron Bâton,” said M. de Caylus.
“What’s in a name?” he said to us the other day, went on Matilde. “Imagine the Duke de Bouillon announced for the first time. So far as I am concerned the public only need to get used to me.”
“Julien left the vicinity of the sofa.”
Still insufficiently appreciative of the charming subtleties of a delicate raillery to laugh at a joke, he considered that a jest ought to have some logical foundation. He saw nothing in these young peoples’ conversation except a vein of universal scandal-mongering and was shocked by it. His provincial or English prudery went so far as to detect envy in it, though in this he was certainly mistaken.
“Count Norbert,” he said to himself, “who has had to make three drafts for a twenty-line letter to his colonel would be only too glad to have written once in his whole life one page as good as M. Sainclair.”
Julien approached successively the several groups and attracted no attention by reason of his lack of importance. He followed the Baron Bâton from a distance and tried to hear him.
This witty man appeared nervous and Julien did not see him recover his equanimity before he had hit upon three or four stinging phrases. Julien thought that this kind of wit had great need of space.
The Baron could not make epigrams. He needed at least four sentences of six lines each, in order to be brilliant.
“That man argues, he does not talk,” said someone behind Julien. He turned round and reddened with pleasure when he heard the name of the comte Chalvet. He was the subtlest man of the century. Julien had often found his name in the Memorial of St. Helena and in the portions of history dictated by Napoleon. The diction of comte Chalvet was laconic, his phrases were flashes of lightning—just, vivid, deep. If he talked about any matter the conversation immediately made a step forward; he imported facts into it; it was a pleasure to hear him. In politics, however, he was a brazen cynic.
“I am independent, I am,” he was saying to a gentleman with three stars, of whom apparently he was making fun. “Why insist on my having to-day the same opinion I had six weeks ago. In that case my opinion would be my master.”
Four grave young men who were standing round scowled; these gentlemen did not like flippancy. The comte saw that he had gone too far. Luckily he perceived the honest M. Balland, a veritable hypocrite of honesty. The count began to talk to him; people closed up, for they realised that poor Balland was going to be the next victim.
M. Balland, although he was horribly ugly and his first steps in the world were almost unmentionable, had by dint of his morals and his morality married a very rich wife who had died; he subsequently married a second very rich one who was never seen in society. He enjoyed, in all humility, an income of sixty thousand francs, and had his own flatterers. Comte Chalvet talked to him pitilessly about all this. There was soon a circle of thirty persons around them. Everybody was smiling, including the solemn young men who were the hope of the century.
“Why does he come to M. de la Mole where he is obviously only a laughing stock?” thought Julien. He approached the abbé Pirard to ask him.
M. Balland made his escape.
“Good,” said Norbert, “there is one of the spies of my father gone; there is only the little limping Napier left.”
“Can that be the key of the riddle?” thought Julien, “but if so, why does the marquis receive M. Balland?”
The stern abbé Pirard was scowling in a corner of the salon listening to the lackeys announcing the names.
“This is nothing more than a den,” he was saying like another Basil, “I see none but shady people come in.”
As a matter of fact the severe abbé did not know what constitutes high society. But his friends the Jansenites, had given him some very precise notions about those men who only get into society by reason of their extreme subtlety in the service of all parties, or of their monstrous wealth. For some minutes that evening he answered Julien’s eager questions fully and freely, and then suddenly stopped short grieved at having always to say ill of every one, and thinking he was guilty of a sin. Bilious Jansenist as he was, and believing as he did in the duty of Christian charity, his life was a perpetual conflict.
“How strange that abbé Pirard looks,” said mademoiselle de la Mole, as Julien came near the sofa.
Julien felt irritated, but she was right all the same. M. Pirard was unquestionably the most honest man in the salon, but his pimply face, which was suffering from the stings of conscience, made him look hideous at this particular moment. “Trust physiognomy after this,” thought Julien, “it is only when the delicate conscience of the abbé Pirard is reproaching him for some trifling lapse that he looks so awful; while the expression of that notorious spy Napier shows a pure and tranquil happiness.” The abbé Pirard, however, had made great concessions to his party. He had taken a servant, and was very well dressed.