The Red and the Black (50 page)

outside the open windows of the drawing-room. She told him one day that she was reading D'Aubigné's
^*
History
, and Brantôme. Strange reading matter, thought Julien; and the marquise doesn't allow her to read Walter Scott's novels!

One day, her eyes shining with the pleasure which denotes sincerity,
she told him admiringly about something she had read in L'Etoile's
^*
memoirs concerning a young woman who had lived in Henri III's reign:
^*
finding her husband unfaithful, she had stabbed him to death.

Julien's self-esteem was flattered. A person who was surrounded by so
much respect, and who, according to the academician, ruled the entire
household, deigned to speak to him in a way which could almost be
taken for friendship.

I was wrong,
Julien soon thought; it isn't familiarity, I'm only the confidant in a
tragedy, it's her need to talk. They take me for learned in this
family. I'll go off and read Brantôme, D'Aubigné and L'Etoile. I'll be
able to challenge some of the anecdotes M
^lle
de La Mole talks to me about. I want to get out of this role of passive confidant.

Little by little his conversations with this young lady of such
imposing and yet such relaxed bearing became more interesting. He forgot
his dreary role as a rebellious plebeian. He found her learned and
even sound in her ideas. Her opinions in the garden were very
different from the ones she professed in the drawing-room. With him
she sometimes had moments of enthusiasm and frankness which were the
absolute opposite of her usual manner, so haughty and so cold.

'The Wars of the League
^*
were France's heroic age,' she said to him one day, her eyes
glittering with inspiration and enthusiasm. 'At that time everyone
fought to get the particular thing he wanted, to make his party
triumph, and not just to win a boring cross like in the time of your
emperor. You must agree that there was less egoism and
petty-mindedness. I love that century.'

'And Boniface de La Mole was its hero,' he said.

'At any rate he was loved as it must perhaps be sweet to be loved.
What woman alive nowadays would not be revolted to touch the head of
her decapitated lover?'

M
^lle
de La Mole summoned her daughter. If hypocrisy is to

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be of service, it must remain hidden; and Julien, as you observe, had half-confessed to M
^lle
de La Mole his admiration for Napoleon.

This is the tremendous advantage they have over us, said Julien to
himself when he was left alone in the garden. The history of their
ancestors lifts them above vulgar sentiments, and they aren't always
obliged to be thinking about their livelihood! How wretched! he added
bitterly, I'm not worthy to reflect on these higher matters. My life
is nothing but a series of hypocritical postures, because I haven't
got an income of a thousand francs to buy my bread and butter.

'What are you dreaming of now, sir?' Mathilde asked him, running back outside.

Julien was tired of despising himself. His pride made him tell her
openly what he was thinking. He flushed deeply when speaking of his
poverty to a person with so much wealth. He tried to make it clear
from his dignified tone that he wasn't asking for anything. He had
never struck Mathilde as more attractive; she detected in him a
sensitivity and openness which he often lacked.

Less than a month later, Julien was strolling pensively in the garden
of the Hôtel de La Mole; but his face no longer showed the hardness
and the philosophical arrogance stamped on it by the constant feeling
of his own inferiority. He had just gone back to the door of the
drawing-room with M
^lle
de La Mole, who maintained she had hurt her foot while dashing about with her brother.

She leaned on my arm in a rather special way! Julien said to himself.
Am I a fop, or could it be true that she rather fancies me? She
listens to me with such a sweet expression, even when I'm confessing
all the sufferings of my pride to her! When you think how haughty she
is with everyone! They'd be pretty astonished in the drawing-room to
see her with a look like that on her face. It's quite certain she
doesn't wear that sweet, kind expression for anyone else.

Julien tried not to let himself overestimate the significance of this
strange friendship. He compared it himself to an armed encounter.
Every day when they met up again, before resuming the almost intimate
tones of the day before, it was as if

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they asked themselves: shall we be friends or enemies today? Julien
had realized that to let this haughty girl insult him even once with
impunity would be to lose everything. If I have to quarrel with her,
isn't it better for it to happen straight away, in defending the
legitimate rights of my pride, rather than in rebuffing the marks of
scorn that would soon follow the slightest failure to uphold what I
owe to my personal dignity?

Several
times, on days when she was in a bad mood, Mathilde tried to adopt the
manner of a great lady with him; she put a rare degree of subtlety
into these attempts, but Julien rudely rebuffed them.

One day he interrupted her brusquely: 'Does M
^lle
de La Mole have some order to give her father's secretary?' he said
to her. 'He is required to listen to her orders and to carry them out
with respect; but beyond that, he is not obliged to say a single word
to her. He is not paid to communicate his thoughts to her.'

This kind of behaviour, and the strange suspicions Julien was having,
banished the boredom he regularly experienced in that magnificent
drawing-room where people were yet afraid of everything, and it was
not seemly to joke about anything.

It'd be funny if she were in love with me! Whether or not she loves
me, Julien went on, I have an intimate confidante in a girl of
intelligence who has the whole household in fear and trembling before
her, so I see, and the Marquis de Croisenois more than anyone else.
Such a polite, gentle and brave young man, who has all the advantages
of birth and fortune put together, a single one of which would more
than gladden my heart! He's madly in love with her, and is due to
marry her. How many letters M. de La Mole has had me write to the two
solicitors to arrange the contract! And yours truly, who feels just
how subordinate he is with pen in hand, finds himself, two hours later
in the garden, triumphing over this agreeable young man: for after
all, her preference is striking, and very marked. Perhaps, too, she
hates in him the future husband. She has pride enough for that. And
the kindness she shows to me is earned in my capacity as a subordinate
confidant.

Come off it! Either I'm mad, or she's making advances to me; the more coldly and respectfully I treat her, the more she

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seeks me out. It could be deliberate policy, a sort of affectation;
but I see her eyes light up when I turn up unexpectedly. Do women in
Paris have the art of feigning to such a degree? What does it matter
to me! Appearances are on my side, so let's enjoy appearances.
Goodness, she's beautiful! I do so like her big blue eyes, seen from
close up, when they gaze at me as they so often do! What a difference
between this spring and last, when I lived in misery, keeping myself
going by sheer will-power in the midst of those hundreds of filthy,
spiteful hypocrites! I was almost as spiteful as they are.

On days when he felt mistrustful: This girl is making fun of me,
Julien thought. She's in league with her brother to mystify me. But
she looks as if she so despises the lack of energy in that brother of
hers! 'He's brave, but that's all there is to him,' she says to me.
'He doesn't have a single thought that dares to deviate from what's
fashionable, I'm always the one who has to come to his defence.' A
girl of nineteen! At that age is it possible to keep to a self-imposed
hypocrisy every moment of the day?

On the other hand, when M
^lle
de La Mole fixes her big blue eyes on me with that strange look in
them, Count Norbert invariably goes away. I find that suspect;
shouldn't he be indignant at seeing his sister single out one of their
household
domestics
? For that's how I've heard the Duc de
Chaulnes speaking of me. This memory caused anger to wipe out all
other feelings. Is it just a fondness this obsessive old duke has for
old-fashioned ways of speaking?

So
then, she's pretty! Julien went on with the look of a tiger. I shall
have her and then make my exit, and woe betide anyone who disturbs me
in my flight!

This idea became
Julien's sole preoccupation; he was no longer able to think of
anything else. His days passed by like hours.

Time and time again, when he was trying to deal with some matter of
serious business, his mind would let everything drop, and he would
wake up a quarter of an hour later with his heart pounding and his
head in turmoil, fixated on this thought: Is she in love with me?

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I admire her beauty, but I live in fear of her mind

MÉRIMÉE
^*

IF Julien had spent as much time studying what went on in the
drawing-room as he devoted to exaggerating Mathilde's beauty, or to
working himself into a passion against the innate haughtiness of her
family--which she laid aside on his account--he would have understood
what constituted her power over her entourage. As soon as anyone
displeased M
^lle
de La Mole, she had a way of punishing the
offender with a joke that was so measured, so well chosen, so seemly
on the surface, and so appositely delivered, that the wound grew
greater every moment, the more you thought about it. It gradually
became unbearable to the afflicted self-esteem. As she laid no store
by many of the things that were genuinely desired by the rest of the
family, she always appeared imperturbable in their eyes. Aristocratic
salons are a fine source of quotations once you've stepped outside,
but that's all; politeness in itself doesn't impress after the first few
days. Julien experienced this--after the first enchantment, the first
astonishment. Politeness, he told himself, is only an absence of the
anger that would be occasioned by bad manners. Mathilde was often
bored, she would perhaps have been bored anywhere. So sharpening an
epigram was a distraction and a real pleasure for her.

It was perhaps in a bid to find some slightly more amusing victims
than her immediate family, the academician and the five or six other
subordinates who curried favour with them, that she had kindled hopes
in the Marquis de Croisenois, the Comte de Caylus and two or three
other young men of the greatest distinction. For her, they were
nothing more than fresh targets for her epigrams.

We shall admit with some distress, for we like Mathilde,

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that she had received letters from several of them, and had on
occasion replied. We hasten to add she is a character who constitutes
an exception to the mores of this century. Lack of prudence is not
generally a reproach to be levelled at pupils of the noble convent of
the Sacred Heart.

One day the Marquis
de Croisenois handed back to Mathilde a rather compromising letter
she had written him the day before. He was hoping by this mark of the
highest prudence to advance his affairs considerably. But imprudence
was what. Mathilde relished in her correspondence. She took pleasure
in gambling with her fate. She did not speak to him for six weeks
afterwards.

She was amused by these
young men's letters; but in her opinion, they were all alike. It was
always the deepest of passions, and the most melancholy.

'They're all the same perfect man, ready to set off for Palestine,'
she said to her cousin. 'Can you think of anything more insipid? So
these are the letters I shall be getting all my life! Letters like
that can only change every twenty years, according to the kind of
occupation in fashion. They must have been less colourless at the time
of the Empire. Then, an those young men from high society had seen or
engaged in actions that
really
were heroic. The Duc de N-----, my uncle, was at Wagram.'
^*

'What wit do you need to strike someone with a sabre? And when this
has happened to them, they talk about it so much!' said M
^lle
de Sainte-Hérédité, Mathilde's cousin.

'Well! I enjoy these accounts. Being in a
real
battle, one of Napoleon's battles, where ten thousand soldiers got
killed, that proves courage. Exposing yourself to danger elevates the
soul and saves it from the boredom which seems to engulf my poor
worshippers; and it's catching, this boredom is. Which one of them has
it in mind to do something out of the ordinary? They're striving to
win my hand, big deal! I'm rich, and my father will see to his
son-in-law's advancement. Ah! would that he might find one who was the
slightest bit amusing!'

Mathilde's
lively, trenchant and picturesque way of looking at things ruined her
style, as you can see. Often one of her expressions was felt to be a
blot by her exquisitely polite

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friends. They would almost have admitted to themselves, if she had
been less in fashion, that her speech was just a bit too colourful for
feminine delicacy.

She, for her
part, was most unjust towards the good-looking cavaliers who frequent
the Bois de Boulogne. She viewed the future not with terror--that
would have been a strong sentiment--but with a repugnance rare at her
age.

What more could she wish for?
Fortune, noble birth, intelligence, beauty--so they said and so she
believed--had all been heaped upon her by the hand of Fate.

These were the thoughts of the most highly envied heiress of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain when she began to take pleasure in going for
walks with Julien. She was astonished at his pride; she admired the
canniness of this ordinary commoner. He'll work his way up to becoming a
bishop like the Abbé Maury,
^*
she said to herself.

Soon the genuine, unfeigned resistance with which our hero greeted
several of her ideas began to preoccupy her; she kept thinking about
it; she related to her friend and confidante the finest details of
their conversations, and felt that she never managed to convey their
full Ravour properly.

She had a
sudden illumination: I'm fortunate enough to be in love, she said to
herself one day, in a fit of unbelievable joy. I'm in love, I'm in
love, it's obvious! At my age, where else should a young, beautiful
and witty girl experience strong emotion, if not in love? It's no use,
I'll never feel love for Croisenois, Caylus and
tutti quanti.
They're perfect, maybe too perfect; anyway, they bore me.

She ran through in her mind all the descriptions of passion she had read in
Manon Lescaut
,
^*
La Nouvelle Héloise
, the
Letters from a Portuguese Nun
,
etc. etc. There was no question, of course, of anything other than a
grand passion: a passing fancy was unworthy of a girl of her age and
her birth. She only bestowed the name of love on that heroic sentiment
encountered in France in the days of Henri III and Bassompierre.
^*
That kind of love did not yield basely before obstacles; quite the
opposite, it caused great deeds to be done. What a misfortune for me
that there isn't a real Court like Catherine de Medici's or Louis
XIII's!
^*
I feel ready for the boldest and

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