The Red and the Black (38 page)

She did not appear at dinner. She came for a minute into the salon in the evening, but did not look at Julien. He considered this behaviour strange, “but,” he thought, “I do not know their usages. She will give me some good reason for all this.” None the less he was a prey to the most extreme curiosity; he studied the expression of Mathilde's features; he was bound to own to himself that she looked cold and malicious. It was evidently not the same woman who on the preceding night had had, or pretended to have, transports of happiness which were too extravagant to be genuine.

The day after, and the subsequent day, she showed the same coldness; she did not look at him, she did not notice his existence. Julien was devoured by the keenest anxiety and was a thousand leagues removed from that feeling of triumph which had been his only emotion on the first day. “Can it be by chance,” he said to himself, “a return to virtue?” But this was a very bourgeois word to apply to the haughty Mathilde.

“Placed in an ordinary position in life she would disbelieve in religion,” thought Julien, “she only likes it in so far as it is very useful to the interests of her class.”

But perhaps she may, as a mere matter of delicacy, be keenly reproaching herself for the mistake which she has committed. Julien believed that he was her first lover.

“But,” he said to himself at other moments, “I must admit that there is no trace of naiveté, simplicity, or tenderness in her own demeanour; I have never seen her more haughty; can she despise me? It would be worthy of her to reproach herself simply because of my low birth, for what she has done for me.”

While Julien, full of those preconceived ideas which he had found in books and in his memories of Verrières, was chasing the phantom of a tender mistress, who from the minute when she has made her lover happy no longer thinks of her own existence, Mathilde's vanity was infuriated against him.

As for the last two months she had no longer been bored, she was not frightened of boredom; consequently, without being able to have the slightest suspicion of it, Julien had lost his greatest advantage.

“I have given myself a master,” said Mademoiselle de la Mole to herself, a prey to the blackest sorrow. “Luckily he is honour itself, but if I offend his vanity, he will revenge himself by making known the nature of our relations.” Mathilde had never had a lover, and though passing through a stage of life which affords some tender illusions even to the coldest souls, she fell a prey to the most bitter reflections.

“He has an immense dominion over me since his reign is one of terror, and he is capable, if I provoke him, of punishing me with an awful penalty.” This idea alone was enough to induce Mademoiselle de la Mole to insult him. Courage was the primary quality in her character. The only thing which could give her any thrill and cure her of a fundamental and chronically recurring ennui was the idea that she was staking her entire existence on a single throw.

As Mademoiselle de la Mole obstinately refused to look at him, Julien on the third day, in spite of her evident objection, followed her into the billiard-room after dinner.

“Well, sir, you think you have acquired some very strong rights over me?” she said to him with scarcely controlled anger, “since you venture to speak to me, in spite of my very clearly manifested wish? Do you know that no one in the world has had such effrontery?”

The dialogue of these two lovers was incomparably humourous. Without suspecting it, they were animated by mutual sentiments of the most vivid hate. As neither the one nor the other had a meekly patient character, while they were both disciples of good form, they soon came to informing each other quite clearly that they would break for ever.

“I swear eternal secrecy to you,” said Julien. “I should like to add that I would never address a single word to you, were it not that a marked change might perhaps jeopardise your reputation.” He saluted respectfully and left.

He accomplished easily enough what he believed to be a duty; he was very far from thinking himself much in love with Mademoiselle de la Mole. He had certainly not loved her three days before, when he had been hidden in the big mahogany cupboard. But the moment that he found himself estranged from her forever, his mood underwent a complete and rapid change.

His memory tortured him by going over the least details in that night, which had, as a matter of fact, left him so cold. In the very night that followed this announcement of a final rupture, Julien almost went mad at being obliged to own to himself that he loved Mademoiselle de la Mole.

This discovery was followed by awful struggles: all his emotions were overwhelmed.

Two days later, instead of being haughty towards M. de Croisenois, he could have almost burst out into tears and embraced him.

His habituation to unhappiness gave him a gleam of common sense. He decided to leave for Languedoc, packed his trunk and went to the post.

He felt he would faint, when on arriving at the office of the mails, he was told that by a singular chance there was a place in the Toulouse mail. He booked it and returned to the Hôtel de la Mole to announce his departure to the marquis.

M. de la Mole had gone out. More dead than alive, Julien went into the library to wait for him. What was his emotion when he found Mademoiselle de la Mole there?

As she saw him come, she assumed a malicious expression which it was impossible to mistake.

In his unhappiness and surprise Julien lost his head and was weak enough to say to her in a tone of the most heartfelt tenderness, “So you love me no more.”

“I am horrified at having given myself to the first man who came along,” said Mathilde crying with rage against herself.

“The first man who came along,” cried Julien, and he made for an old mediaeval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.

His grief—which he thought was at its maximum at the moment when he had spoken to Mademoiselle de la Mole—had been rendered a hundred times more intense by the tears of shame which he saw her shedding.

He would have been the happiest of men if he had been able to kill her.

When he was on the point of drawing the sword with some difficulty from its ancient scabbard, Mathilde, rendered happy by so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him; her tears were dry.

The thought of his benefactor—the Marquis de la Mole—presented itself vividly to Julien. “Shall I kill his daughter?” he said to himself, “how horrible.” He made a movement to throw down the sword. “She will certainly,” he thought, “burst out laughing at the sight of such a melodramatic pose;” that idea was responsible for his regaining all his self-possession. He looked curiously at the blade of the old sword as though he had been looking for some spot of rust, then put it back in the scabbard and replaced it with the utmost tranquillity on the gilt bronze nail from which it hung.

The whole manœuvre, which towards the end was very slow, lasted quite a minute; Mademoiselle de la Mole looked at him in astonishment. “So I have been on the verge of being killed by my lover,” she said to herself.

This idea transported her into the palmiest days of the age of Charles IX. and of Henri III.

She stood motionless before Julien, who had just replaced the sword; she looked at him with eyes whose hatred had disappeared. It must be owned that she was very fascinating at this moment, certainly no woman looked less like a Parisian doll (this expression symbolised Julien's great objection to the women of this city).

“I shall relapse into some weakness for him,” thought Mathilde; “it is quite likely that he will think himself my lord and master after a relapse like that, at the very moment that I have been talking to him so firmly.” She ran away.

“By heaven, she is pretty,” said Julien as he watched her run, “and that's the creature who threw herself into my arms with so much passion scarcely a week ago . . . and to think that those moments will never come back. And that it's my fault, to think of my being lacking in appreciation at the very moment when I was doing something so extraordinarily interesting! I must own that I was born with a very dull and unfortunate character.”

The marquis appeared; Julien hastened to announce his departure.

“Where to?” said M. de la Mole.

“For Languedoc.”

“No, if you please, you are reserved for higher destinies. If you leave it will be for the North.... In military phraseology I actually confine you in the hôtel. You will promise me to be never more than two or three hours away. I may have need of you at any moment.”

Julien bowed and retired without a word, leaving the marquis in a state of great astonishment. He was incapable of speaking. He shut himself up in his room. He was there free to exaggerate to himself all the awfulness of his fate.

“So,” he thought, “I cannot even get away. God knows how many days the marquis will keep me in Paris. Great God, what will become of me, and not a friend whom I can consult? The Abbé Pirard will never let me finish my first sentence, while the Comte Altamira will propose enlisting me in some conspiracy. And yet I am mad; I feel it, I am mad. Who will be able to guide me, what will become of me?”

The delighted Mademoiselle de la Mole thought of nothing but the happiness of having been nearly killed. She went so far as to say to herself, “he is worthy of being my master since he was on the point of killing me. How many handsome young society men would have to be melted together before they were capable of so passionate a transport?”

“I must admit that he was very handsome at the time when he climbed up on the chair to replace the sword in the same picturesque position in which the decorator hung it! After all it was not so foolish of me to love him.”

If at that moment some honourable means of reconciliation had presented itself, she would have embraced it with pleasure. Julien, locked in his room, was a prey to the most violent despair. He thought in his madness of throwing himself at her feet. If, instead of hiding himself in an out of the way place, he had wandered about the garden of the hôtel so as to keep within reach of any opportunity, he would perhaps have changed in a single moment his awful unhappiness into the keenest happiness.

But the tact for whose lack we are now reproaching him would have been incompatible with that sublime seizure of the sword, which at the present time rendered him so handsome in the eyes of Mademoiselle de la Mole. This whim in Julien's favour lasted the whole day; Mathilde conjured up a charming image of the short moments during which she had loved him: she regretted them.

“As a matter of fact,” she said to herself, “my passion for this poor boy can, from his point of view, only have lasted from one hour after midnight when I saw him arrive by his ladder with all his pistols in his coat pocket, till eight o'clock in the morning. It was a quarter of an hour after that as I listened to mass at Sainte-Valère that I began to think that he might very well try to terrify me into obedience.”

After dinner Mademoiselle de la Mole, so far from avoiding Julien, spoke to him and made him promise to follow her into the garden. He obeyed. It was a new experience.

Without suspecting it Mathilde was yielding to the love which she was now feeling for him again. She found an extreme pleasure in walking by his side, and she looked curiously at those hands which had seized the sword to kill her that very morning.

After such an action, after all that had taken place, some of the former conversation was out of the question.

Mathilde gradually began to talk confidentially to him about the state of her heart. She found a singular pleasure in this kind of conversation; she even went so far as to describe to him the fleeting moments of enthusiasm which she had experienced for M. de Croisenois, for M. de Caylus——

“What! M. de Caylus as well!” exclaimed Julien, and all the jealousy of a discarded lover burst out in those words. Mathilde thought as much, but did not feel at all insulted.

She continued torturing Julien by describing her former sentiments with the most picturesque detail and the accent of the most intimate truth. He saw that she was portraying what she had in her mind's eye. He had the pain of noticing that as she spoke she made new discoveries in her own heart.

The unhappiness of jealousy could not be carried further.

It is cruel enough to suspect that a rival is loved, but there is no doubt that to hear the woman one adores confess in detail the love which rivals inspire, is the utmost limit of anguish.

Oh, how great a punishment was there now for those impulses of pride which had induced Julien to place himself as superior to the Caylus and the Croisenois! How deeply did he feel his own unhappiness as he exaggerated to himself their most petty advantages. With what hearty good faith he despised himself.

Mathilde struck him as adorable. All words are weak to express his excessive admiration. As he walked beside her he looked surreptitiously at her hands, her arms, her queenly bearing. He was so completely overcome by love and unhappiness as to be on the point of falling at her feet and crying “pity.”

“Yes, and that person who is so beautiful, who is so superior to everything and who loved me once, will doubtless soon love M. de Caylus.”

Julien could have no doubts of Mademoiselle de la Mole's sincerity, the accent of truth was only too palpable in everything she said. In order that nothing might be wanting to complete his unhappiness, there were moments when, as a result of thinking about the sentiments which she had once experienced for M. de Caylus, Mathilde came to talk of him, as though she loved him at the present time. She certainly put an inflection of love into her voice. Julien distinguished it clearly.

He would have suffered less if his bosom had been filled inside with molten lead. Plunged as he was in this abyss of unhappiness how could the poor boy have guessed that it was simply because she was talking to him, that Mademoiselle de la Mole found so much pleasure in recalling those weaknesses of love which she had formerly experienced for M. de Caylus or M. de Luz.

Words fail to express Julien's anguish. He listened to these detailed confidences of the love she had experienced for others in that very avenue of pines where he had waited so few days ago for one o'clock to strike, that he might invade her room. No human being can undergo a greater degree of unhappiness.

This kind of familiar cruelty lasted for eight long days. Mathilde sometimes seemed to seek opportunities of speaking to him and sometimes not to avoid them; and the one topic of conversation to which they both seemed to revert with a kind of cruel pleasure, was the description of the sentiments she had felt for others. She told him about the letters which she had written, she remembered their very words, she recited whole sentences by heart.

She seemed during these last days to be envisaging Julien with a kind of malicious joy. She found a keen enjoyment in his pangs.

One sees that Julien had no experience of life; he had not even read any novels. If he had been a little less awkward and he had coolly said to the young girl, whom he adored so much and who had been giving him such strange confidences: “admit that though I am not worth as much as all these gentlemen, I am none the less the man whom you love,” she would perhaps have been happy at being thus guessed; at any rate success would have entirely depended on the grace with which Julien had expressed the idea, and on the moment which he had chosen to do so. In any case he would have extricated himself well and advantageously from a situation which Mathilde was beginning to find monotonous.

“And you love me no longer, I, who adore you!” said Julien to her one day, overcome by love and unhappiness. This piece of folly was perhaps the greatest which he could have committed. These words immediately destroyed all the pleasure which Mademoiselle de la Mole found in talking to him about the state of her heart. She was beginning to be surprised that he did not, after what had happened, take offence at what she told him. She had even gone so far as to imagine at the very moment when he made that foolish remark that perhaps he did not love her any more. “His pride has doubtless extinguished his love,” she was saying to herself. “He is not the man to sit still and see people like Caylus, de Luz, Croisenois whom he admits are so superior, preferred to him. No, I shall never see him at my feet again.”

Julien had often, in the naiveté of his unhappiness, during the previous days praised sincerely the brilliant qualities of these gentlemen; he would even go so far as to exaggerate them. This nuance had not escaped Mademoiselle de la Mole, she was astonished by it, but did not guess its reason. Julien's frenzied soul, in praising a rival whom he thought was loved, was sympathising with his happiness.

These frank but stupid words changed everything in a single moment; confident that she was loved, Mathilde despised him utterly.

She was walking with him when he made his ill-timed remark; she left him, and her parting look expressed the most awful contempt. She returned to the salon and did not look at him again during the whole evening. This contempt monopolised her mind the following day. The impulse which during the last week had made her find so much pleasure in treating Julien as her most intimate friend was out of the question; the very sight of him was disagreeable. The sensation Mathilde felt reached the point of disgust; nothing can express the extreme contempt which she experienced when her eyes fell upon him.

Julien had understood nothing of the history of Mathilde's heart during the last week, but he distinguished the contempt. He had the good sense only to appear before her on the rarest possible occasions, and never looked at her.

But it was not without a mortal anguish that he, as it were, deprived himself of her presence. He thought he felt his unhappiness increasing still further. “The courage of a man's heart cannot be carried further,” he said to himself. He passed his life seated at a little window at the top of the hôtel; the blind was carefully closed, and from here at any rate he could see Mademoiselle de la Mole when she appeared in the garden.

What were his emotions when he saw her walking after dinner with M. de Caylus, M. de Luz, or some other for whom she had confessed to him some former amorous weakness?

Julien had no idea that unhappiness could be so intense; he was on the point of shouting out. This firm soul was at last completely overwhelmed.

Thinking about anything else except Mademoiselle de la Mole had become odious to him; he became incapable of writing the simplest letters.

“You are mad,” the marquis said to him.

Julien, frightened that his secret might be guessed, talked about illness and succeeded in being believed. Fortunately for him the marquis rallied him at dinner about his next journey; Mathilde understood that it might be a very long one. It was now several days that Julien had avoided her, and the brilliant young men, who had all that this pale sombre being she had once loved was lacking, had no longer the power of drawing her out of her reverie.

“An ordinary girl,” she said to herself, “would have sought out the man she preferred among those young people who are the cynosure of a salon; but one of the characteristics of genius is not to drive its thoughts over the rut traced by the vulgar.

“Why, if I were the companion of a man like Julien, who only lacks the fortune that I possess, I should be continually exciting attention, I should not pass through life unnoticed. Far from incessantly fearing a revolution like my cousins who are so frightened of the people that they have not the pluck to scold a postilion who drives them badly, I should be certain of playing a rôle and a great rôle, for the man whom I have chosen has a character and a boundless ambition. What does he lack? Friends? Money? I will give them him.” But she treated Julien in her thoughts as an inferior being whose love one could win whenever one wanted.