The Red and the Black (41 page)

young abbé from the Franche-Comté, thought the marquis; but I did so need someone I could rely on!

'
Possible
is spelled with a double s,' the marquis told him; when your work is
finished, look up in the dictionary any words you are unsure how to
spell.'

At six o'clock the marquis
sent for him. He looked with obvious pain at Julien's boots: 'I have
myself to blame for it, I didn't tell you that every day at five
thirty you must go and dress.'

Julien looked at him uncomprehendingly.

'I mean put on stockings. Arsène will remind you; today I shall make your excuses.'

As he finished speaking, M. de La Mole ushered Julien into a
drawing-room resplendent with gilding. On comparable occasions, M. de
Rênal never failed to quicken his pace in order to gain the advantage
of going through the doorway first. This petty vanity of his former
employer caused Julien to tread on the marquis's heels, which was
exceedingly painful for him on account of his gout. 'Oh! he's clumsy
into the bargain,' said the latter to himself. He introduced him to a
tall, imposinglooking woman. It was the marquise. Julien thought she had
an insolent air, rather like M
^me
de Maugiron, the wife of the sub-prefect of the Verrières district, at the St Charles's day
^*
dinner. Somewhat thrown by the extreme magnificence of the
drawing-room, Julien did not hear what M. de La Mole was saying. The
marquise scarcely deigned to look at him. There were a number of men
there, among whom Julien was unutterably delighted to recognize the
young Bishop of Agde, who had deigned to speak to him a few months
back at the Bray-leHaut ceremony. The young prelate must have been
alarmed by the tender gaze which Julien in his timidity cast in his
direction, and he did not trouble to recognize this provincial.

The men gathered in this drawing-room seemed to Julien to have an air
of gloom and constraint about them; people speak softly in Paris, and
do not exaggerate trifling matters.

A
good-looking young man with a moustache, a very pale complexion and a
very slim figure came in at about half-past six; he had an
exceedingly small head.

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'You
will
always keep people waiting,' said the marquise, as he kissed her hand.

Julien realized that this was the Count de La Mole. He found him charming right from the start.

Can it be possible, he wondered, that this is the man whose offensive jokes are to drive me from this house!

After he had scrutinized Count Norbert for a while, Julien noticed
that he was wearing boots and spurs; and I'm supposed to wear shoes,
apparently like an inferior. They sat down to table. Julien heard the
marquise saying something stern in slightly raised tones. Almost at
the same time he caught sight of a young lady with exceedingly fair
hair and a most elegant figure, who came and sat down opposite him. He
did not find her in the least attractive; however, on looking
attentively at her, he thought to himself that he had never seen such
beautiful eyes; but they signalled great emotional coldness. Later
on, Julien decided that they had an expression of watchful boredom
that none the less remains mindful of the duty to appear imposing. And
yet M
^me
de Renal had really beautiful eyes, he said to
himself, she was always being complimented on them; but they had
nothing in common with this pair. Julien did not have enough
experience to discern that it was the fire of repartee that shone from
time to time in the eyes of M
^lle
Mathilde, as he heard her called. When M
^me
de Rênal's eyes lit up, it was with the fire of passions, or from
warm-hearted indignation at the tale of some unkind action. Towards
the end of the meal, Julien hit upon a word to express the sort of
beauty in M
^lle
de La Mole's eyes: they glitter, he said to
himself. Apart from this, she had a cruel likeness to her mother, whom
he disliked more and more, and he stopped looking at her. In
contrast, Count Norbert seemed admirable to him from every point of
view. Julien was so captivated that it did not occur to him to be
jealous and to hate him for being richer and nobler than he was.

Julien thought the marquis looked bored.

At about the time the second course was being served, he said to his son:

' Norbert, I should like you to be kind to M. Julien Sorel

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whom I've just taken on to my staff, and intend to turn into somebody if at all
posible.

'He's my secretary,' the marquis said to his neighbour, 'and he spells
possible
with only one s.'

Everyone looked at Julien, who bowed his head rather too markedly in
Norbert's direction; but on the whole, the expression on his face went
down well.

The marquis must have
mentioned the kind of education Julien had received, for one of the
guests challenged him on Horace: talking about Horace was precisely
how I succeeded with the Bishop of Besançon, Julien said to himself,
it seems they only know this author. From then on, he had himself well
under control. The effort was made easy for him because he had just
decided that M
^lle
de La Mole would never be a woman in his
eyes. Since being in the seminary, he defied men to do their worst,
and was not easily intimidated by them. He would have been perfectly
calm and collected if the dining-room had been less magnificently
furnished. What actually overawed him still further was two mirrors,
both eight foot high, in which from time to time he would glance at
his interlocutor while speaking of Horace. His sentences were not too
long for a provincial. He had beautiful eyes, and nervousness made
them shine, now hesitantly, now radiantly when he had given a good
answer. He was deemed to be agreeable. This kind of examination added a
spark of interest to a solemn dinner. The marquis signalled to
Julien's interlocutor to push him hard. Could it possibly be that he
knows something! he thought.

In his
replies Julien improvised ideas, and he lost enough of his nervousness
to display not wit--something impossible for anyone who doesn't know
the idiom used in Paris--but fresh ideas, even if they were lacking in
polish and inappositely presented. And everyone saw that he knew
Latin perfectly.

Julien's opponent was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions
^*
who happened to know Latin; he found Julien to be a very fine
humanist, lost his fear of making him blush, and tried in earnest to
put him on the spot. In the heat of battle Julien at last forgot the
magnificent furnishings in the diningroom, and reached the point of
putting forward ideas about the Latin poets that his interlocutor had
not seen anywhere in

-256-

print. As a gentleman he gave the young secretary credit for them. By
a stroke of good fortune, they embarked on a discussion about whether
Horace was poor or rich: an amiable, sensuous and carefree man who
wrote poetry for his own enjoyment like Chapelle,
^*
the friend of Molière and La Fontaine; or a poor devil of a poet
laureate imitating the Court and writing odes for the king's birthday
like Southey, Lord Byron's accuser. They talked about the state of
society under Augustus and under George IV; in both periods the
aristocracy was all-powerful, but in Rome it had had power wrested
from it by Maecenas, who was only a mere knight, while in England it
had more or less reduced George IV to the state of a Venetian doge.
This discussion appeared to rouse the marquis from the state of torpor
in which boredom had kept him submerged at the beginning of the
dinner.

Julien was at a complete loss
over all the modern names like Southey, Lord Byron, George IV, which
he was hearing for the first time. But it escaped no one's notice that
whenever the conversation turned to events that had happened in Rome,
knowledge of which could have been gleaned from the works of
Horace, Martial, Tacitus etc., he displayed an unquestionable
superiority. Julien did not hesitate to take over several of the ideas
he had got from the Bishop of Besançon in the famous discussion he
had had with that prelate; they went down more than well.

When everyone was tired of talking about poets, the marquise, who made
it her rule to admire whatever entertained her husband, deigned to
look at Julien. 'The uncouth manners of this young abbé may perhaps
conceal a man of learning,' the academician sitting near her said to
the marquise; and Julien caught snatches of this. Ready-made comments
suited the mistress of the house's intelligence well enough; she
adopted this one on Julien, and felt pleased with herself for inviting
the academician to dinner. He entertains M. de La Mole, she thought.

-257-

This huge valley filled with brilliant lights and so many thousands
of men dazzled my eyes. Not a single one knows me, they are all my
betters. My head is swimming.

Poemi dell' avvocato
REINA
^*

VERY early the next morning, Julien was writing out fair copies of letters in the library when M
^lle
Mathilde came in by a little communicating door very cleverly hidden
with book spines. While Julien was admiring this invention, M
^lle
Mathilde seemed most astonished and somewhat put out to encounter
him there. With her hair in curl-papers Julien thought she looked
hard, haughty and almost masculine. M
^lle
de La Mole had
found her own way of stealing books from her father's library without
letting it show. Julien's presence made that morning's errand
fruitless, which vexed her all the more as she was coming to fetch the
second volume of Voltaire
Princess of Babylon
,
^*
a worthy complement to an eminently royalist and religious upbringing
that was a masterpiece of the Sacred Heart! At nineteen this poor
girl was already in need of the zest of wit in order to find a novel
interesting.

Count Norbert appeared
in the library around three o'clock; he was coming to study a
newspaper in order to be able to talk politics that evening, and was
delighted to encounter Julien, whose existence he had forgotten about.
He behaved exemplarily towards him; he offered to take him riding.

'My father is giving us time off until dinner.'

Julien understood the force of this
us
and was utterly charmed by it.

'My goodness, your lordship,' said Julien, 'if it were a matter of
felling a tree eighty foot high, squaring it off and sawing it into
planks, I'd make a good showing, if I may make so bold as to say so;
but riding a horse--I've not done that more than six times in my whole
life.'

-258-

'Well, this'll be the seventh, then,' said Norbert.

Actually, Julien remembered the King of -----'s triumphal entry into
Verrières and thought himself most expert on horseback. But coming
back from the Bois de Boulogne,
^*
right in the middle of the Rue du Bac,
^*
he fell off as he swerved suddenly to avoid a cab, and he plastered
himself in mud. It was lucky for him that he had two suits. At dinner,
wishing to say something to Julien, the marquis asked him about his
outing; Norbert hastened to reply in general terms.

'His lordship is full of kindness towards me,' Julien added, 'I thank
him for it, and I appreciate it fully. He deigned to have me ride the
more docile and handsome of the horses; but of course he couldn't tie
me on, and for want of this precaution I fell off right in the middle
of that very long street, near the bridge.'

M
^lle
Mathilde tried in vain to conceal a fit of laughter; her indiscretion
then requested details. Julien acquitted himself in a perfectly
straightforward manner; he had style without realizing it.

'I think this young priest will go far,' said the marquis to the
academician; 'a provincial being straightforward in a situation like
that! It's never been seen before and won't be again; and what's more,
he's recounting his misfortune in the presence of
ladies!
'

Julien put his hearers so much at their ease over his mishap that at
the end of dinner, when the general conversation had taken another
turn, M
^lle
Mathilde questioned her brother about the
details of the unfortunate incident. As she persisted in her
questioning, and Julien caught her eye several times, he plucked up
courage to reply directly, although he had not been addressed, and all
three of them ended up laughing just like three young inhabitants of a
village in the depths of a wood.

The
next day Julien went to two theology classes, and then returned to
transcribe some twenty letters. Settled down next to him in the
library he found a young man dressed with considerable care, but his
appearance was unimpressive and his face spelled envy.

The marquis came in.

-259-

'What are you doing here, Monsieur Tanbeau?' he asked the newcomer sternly.

'I thought . . .' replied the young man with an ingratiating smile.

'No, sir, you didn't
think
. You are trying this on, and it's a failure.'

Young Tanbeau got up in fury and marched out. He was a nephew of M
^me
de La Mole's friend the academician, and he hoped to become a man of
letters. The academician had secured the marquis's agreement to engage
him as a secretary. When Tanbeau, who worked in a remote room, had
found out about the favour bestowed on Julien, he wanted to share it,
and had come along in the morning to set up his writing things in
the library.

At four o'clock, after
some hesitation, Julien was bold enough to call on Count Norbert. The
latter was about to go riding and was embarrassed, for he was
exquisitely polite.

'I think', he
said to Julien, 'that you will soon be going to riding school; and in a
few weeks' time I'll be delighted to go out on horseback with you.'

'I wanted to have the honour of thanking you for all your kindness
towards me. Be assured, sir,' Julien added with a very serious air,
'that I am most conscious of everything I owe you. If your horse isn't
wounded as a result of my clumsiness yesterday, and if he's free, I
should like to ride him before dinner.'

'Goodness me, my dear Sorel, on your own head be it! Just assume that
I've put to you all the objections that prudence requires; the fact
is that it's four o'clock, we've no time to lose.'

Once he was mounted:

'What do you have to do to avoid falling off?' Julien asked the young count.

'Lots of things,' replied Norbert, laughing his head off. 'For instance, lean back.'

Julien set off at a fast trot. They were on the Place Louis XVI.
^*

'Hey! you young hothead,' said Norbert, 'there are too many carriages, and what's more, driven by rash fools! Once you're

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