The Red and the Black (41 page)

In a less passionate being than Julien, love would have become impossible after a scene of such awful humiliation. Without deviating for a single minute from the requirements of her own self-respect, Mademoiselle de la Mole had addressed to him some of those unpleasant remarks which are so well thought out that they may seem true, even when remembered in cold blood.

The conclusion which Julien drew in the first moment of so surprising a scene, was that Mathilde was infinitely proud. He firmly believed that all was over between them for ever, and none the less, he was awkward and nervous towards her at breakfast on the following day. This was a fault from which up to now he had been exempt.

Both in small things as in big it was his habit to know what he ought and wanted to do, and he used to act accordingly.

The same day after breakfast Madame de la Mole asked him for a fairly rare, seditious pamphlet which her curé had surreptitiously brought her in the morning, and Julien, as he took it from a bracket, knocked over a blue porcelain vase which was as ugly as it could possibly be.

Madame de la Mole got up, uttering a cry of distress, and proceeded to contemplate at close quarters the ruins of her beloved vase. “It was old Japanese,” she said. “It came to me from my great aunt, the Abbess of Chelles. It was a present from the Dutch to the Regent, the Duke of Orleans, who had given it to his daughter. . . .”

Mathilde had followed her mother's movements, and felt delighted at seeing that the blue vase, that she had thought horribly ugly, was broken. Julien was taciturn, and not unduly upset. He saw Mademoiselle de la Mole quite near him.

“This vase,” he said to her, “has been destroyed forever. The same is the case with the sentiment which was once master of my heart. I would ask you to accept my apologies for all the pieces of madness which it has made me commit.” And he went out.

“One would really say,” said Madame de la Mole, as he went out of the room, “that this M. Sorel is quite proud of what he has just done.”

These words went right home to Mathilde's heart. “It is true,” she said to herself; “my mother has guessed right. That is the sentiment which animates him.” It was only then that she ceased rejoicing over yesterday's scene. “Well, it is all over,” she said to herself, with an apparent calm. “It is a great lesson, anyway. It is an awful and humiliating mistake! It is enough to make me prudent all the rest of my life.”

“Why didn't I speak the truth?” thought Julien. “Why am I still tortured by the love which I once had for that mad woman?”

Far, however, from being extinguished as he had hoped it would be, his love grew more and more rapidly. “She is mad, it is true,” he said to himself. “Is she any the less adorable for that? Is it possible for anyone to be prettier? Is not Mademoiselle de la Mole the ideal quintessence of all the most vivid pleasures of the most elegant civilisation?” These memories of a bygone happiness seized hold of Julien's mind, and quickly proceeded to destroy all the work of his reason.

It is in vain that reason wrestles with memories of this character. Its stern struggles only increase the fascination.

Twenty-four hours after the breaking of the Japanese vase, Julien was unquestionably one of the most unhappy men in the world.

The marquis summoned him; M. de la Mole looked rejuvenated; his eye was brilliant.

“Let us discuss your memory a little,” he said to Julien, “it is said to be prodigious. Could you learn four pages by heart and go and say them at London, but without altering a single word?”

The marquis was irritably fingering the day's Quotidienne, and was trying in vain to hide an extreme seriousness which Julien had never noticed in him before, even when discussing the Frilair lawsuit.

Julien had already learned sufficient manners to appreciate that he ought to appear completely taken in by the lightness of tone which was being manifested.

“This number of the Quotidienne is not very amusing possibly, but if M. the Marquis will allow me, I shall do myself the honour to-morrow morning of reciting it to him from beginning to end.”

“What, even the advertisements?”

“Quite accurately and without leaving out a word.”

“You give me your word?” replied the marquis with sudden gravity.

“Yes, Monsieur; the only thing which could upset my memory is the fear of breaking my promise.”

“The fact is, I forgot to put this question to you yesterday: I am not going to ask for your oath never to repeat what you are going to hear. I know you too well to insult you like that. I have answered for you. I am going to take you into a salon where a dozen persons will be assembled. You will make a note of what each one says.

“Do not be uneasy. It will not be a confused conversation by any means. Each one will speak in his turn, though not necessarily in an orderly manner,” added the marquis, falling back into that light, subtle manner which was so natural to him. “While we are talking, you will write out twenty pages and will come back here with me, and we will get those twenty pages down to four, and those are the four pages you will recite to me to-morrow morning instead of the four pages of the Quotidienne. You will leave immediately afterwards. You must post about like a young man travelling on pleasure. Your aim will be to avoid attracting attention. You will arrive at the house of a great personage. You will there need more skill. Your business will then be to take in all his entourage, for among his secretaries and his servants are some people who have sold themselves to our enemies, and who spy on our travelling agents in order to intercept them.

“You will have an insignificant letter of introduction. At the moment his Excellency looks at you, you will take out this watch of mine, which I will lend you for the journey. Wear it now, it will be so much done; at any rate give me yours.

“The duke himself will be good enough to write at your dictation the four pages you have learnt by heart.

“Having done this, but not earlier, mind you, you can, if his Excellency questions you, tell him about the meeting at which you are now going to be present.

“You will be prevented from boring yourself on the journey between Paris and the minister's residence by the thought that there are people who would like nothing better than to fire a shot at M. the Abbé Sorel. In that case that gentleman's mission will be finished, and I see a great delay, for how are we to know of your death, my dear friend? Even your zeal cannot go to the length of informing us of it.

“Run straight away and buy a complete suit,” went on the marquis seriously. “Dress in the fashion of two years ago. To-night you must look somewhat badly groomed. When you travel, on the other hand, you will be as usual. Does this surprise you? Does your suspiciousness guess the secret? Yes, my friend, one of the venerable personages you are going to hear deliver his opinion, is perfectly capable of giving information as the result of which you stand a very good chance of being given at least opium some fine evening in some good inn where you will have asked for supper.”

“It is better,” said Julien, “to do an extra thirty leagues and not take the direct road. It is a case of Rome, I suppose. . . . .” The marquis assumed an expression of extreme haughtiness and dissatisfaction which Julien had never seen him wear since Bray-le-Haut.

“That is what you will know, Monsieur, when I think it proper to tell you. I do not like questions.”

“That was not one,” answered Julien eagerly. “I swear, Monsieur, I was thinking quite aloud. My mind was trying to find out the safest route.”

“Yes, it seems your mind was a very long way off. Remember that an emissary, and particularly one of your age, should not appear to be a man who forces confidences.”

Julien was very mortified; he was in the wrong. His vanity tried to find an excuse and did not find one.

“You understand,” added Monsieur de la Mole, “that one always falls back on one's heart when one has committed some mistake.”

An hour afterwards Julien was in the marquis's ante-chamber. He looked quite like a servant with his old clothes, a tie of a dubious white, and a certain touch of the usher in his whole appearance. The marquis burst out laughing as he saw him, and it was only then that Julien's justification was complete.

“If this young man betrays me,” said M. de la Mole to himself, “whom is one to trust? And yet, when one acts, one must trust someone. My son and his brilliant friends of the same calibre have as much courage and loyalty as a hundred thousand men. If it were necessary to fight, they would die on the steps of the throne. They know everything—except what one needs in an emergency. Devil take me if I can find a single one among them who can learn four pages by heart and do a hundred leagues without being tracked down. Norbert would know how to sell his life as dearly as his grandfathers did. But any conscript could do as much.”

The marquis fell into a profound reverie. “As for selling one's life too,” he said with a sigh, “perhaps this Sorel would manage it quite as well as he could.

“Let us get into the carriage,” said the marquis as though to chase away an unwanted idea.

“Monsieur,” said Julien, “while they were getting this suit ready for me, I learnt the first page of to-day's Quotidienne by heart.”

The marquis took the paper. Julien recited it without making a single mistake. “Good,” said the marquis, who this night felt very diplomatic. “During the time he takes over this our young man will not notice the streets through which we are passing.”

They arrived in a big salon that looked melancholy enough and was partly upholstered in green velvet. In the middle of the room a scowling lackey had just placed a big dining-table which he subsequently changed into a writing-table by means of an immense green inkstained tablecloth which had been plundered from some minister.

The master of the house was an enormous man whose name was not pronounced. Julien thought he had the appearance and eloquence of a man who ruminated. At a sign from the marquis, Julien had remained at the lower end of the table. In order to keep himself in countenance, he began to cut quills. He counted out of the corner of his eye seven visitors, but Julien could only see their backs. Two seemed to him to be speaking to M. de la Mole on a footing of equality, the others seemed more or less respectful.

A new person entered without being announced. “This is strange,” thought Julien. “People are not announced in this salon. Is this precaution taken in my honour?” Everybody got up to welcome the new arrival. He wore the same extremely distinguished decoration as three of the other persons who were in the salon. They talked fairly low. In endeavouring to form an opinion of the newcomer, Julien was reduced to seeing what he could learn from his features and his appearance. He was short and thick-set. He had a high colour and a brilliant eye and an expression that looked like a malignant boar, and nothing else.

Julien's attention was partly distracted by the almost immediate arrival of a very different kind of person. It was a tall, very thin man who wore three or four waistcoats. His eye was caressing, his demeanour polite.

“He looks exactly like the old bishop of Besançon,” thought Julien. This man evidently belonged to the church, was apparently not more than fifty to fifty-five years of age, and no one could have looked more paternal than he did.

The young bishop of Agde appeared. He looked very astonished when, in making a scrutiny of those present, his gaze fell upon Julien. He had not spoken to him since the ceremony of Brayl le-Haut. His look of surprise embarrassed and irritated Julien. “What!” he said to himself, “will knowing a man always turn out unfortunate for me? I don't feel the least bit intimidated by all those great lords whom I have never seen, but the look of that young bishop freezes me. I must admit that I am a very strange and very unhappy person.”

An extremely swarthy little man entered noisily soon afterwards and started talking as soon as he reached the door. He had a yellow complexion and looked a little mad. As soon as this ruthless talker arrived, the others formed themselves into knots with the apparent object of avoiding the bother of listening to him.

As they went away from the mantelpiece they came near the lower end of the table where Julien was placed. His countenance became more and more embarrassed, for whatever efforts he made, he could not avoid hearing, and in spite of all his lack of experience he appreciated all the moment of the things which they were discussing with such complete frankness, and the importance which the high personages whom he apparently had under his observation must attach to their being kept secret.

Julien had already cut twenty quills as slowly as possible; this distraction would shortly be no longer available. He looked in vain at M. de la Mole's eyes for an order; the marquis had forgotten him.

“What I am doing is ridiculous,” he said to himself as he cut his quills, “but persons with so mediocre an appearance and who are handling such great interests either for themselves or for others must be extremely liable to take offence. My unfortunate look has a certain questioning and scarcely respectful expression, which will doubtless irritate them. But if I palpably lower my eyes I shall look as if I were picking up every word they said.”

His embarrassment was extreme; he was listening to strange things.

The footmen rushed in saying, “Monsieur the Duke de——”

“Hold your tongue, you are just a fool,” said the duke as he entered. He spoke these words so well, and with so much majesty, that Julien could not help thinking this great person's accomplishments were limited to the science of snubbing a lackey. Julien raised his eyes and immediately lowered them. He had so fully appreciated the significance of the new arrival that he feared that his look might be an indiscretion.

The duke was a man of fifty dressed like a dandy and with a jerky walk. He had a narrow head with a large nose and a face that jutted forward; it would have been difficult to have looked at the same time more insignificant. His arrival was the signal for the opening of the meeting.

Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical observations by de la Mole's voice. “I present to you M. the Abbé Sorel,” said the Marquis. “He is gifted with an astonishing memory; it is scarcely an hour ago since I spoke to him of the mission by which he might be honoured, and he has learned the first page of the Quotidienne by heart in order to give proof of his memory.”

“Ah! foreign news of that poor N—” said the master of the house. He took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered humorous by its own self-importance. “Speak, monsieur,” he said to him.

The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines, “That is enough.” The little man who looked like a boar sat down. He was the president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him. Julien established himself at it with writing materials. He counted twelve persons seated round the green table cloth.

“M. Sorel,” said the Duke, “retire into the next room, you will be called.”

The master of the house began to look very anxious. “The shutters are not shut,” he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper. “It is no good looking out of the window,” he stupidly cried to Julien—“so here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy,” thought the latter. “Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Grève. Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis, and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him.”

While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory for ever. He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way. Julien was left to his own reflections for a long time. He was in a salon upholstered in red velvet with large pieces of gold lace. A large ivory crucifix was on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M. de Maistre's book The Pope was on the mantelpiece. Julien opened it so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. From time to time they talked loudly in the next room. At last the door was opened and he was called in.

“Remember, gentlemen,” the president was saying “that from this moment we are talking in the presence of the Duke of——. This gentleman,” he said, pointing to Julien, “is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily our very slightest words.”

“It is your turn to speak, Monsieur,” he said pointing to the paternal looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.

(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of dots. “That,” said his publisher, “would be clumsy and in the case of so light a work clumsiness is death.”

“Politics,” replied the author, “is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give moral offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half, who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the morning paper in its own drastic manner.”

“If your characters don't talk politics,” replied the publisher, “they cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as you claim.”)

Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed either offensive or intolerable (see the Gazette des Tribunaux).

The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first before the duke (“but what duke is it?” thought Julien to himself) with the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,

“Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution. If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently in dealing with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions, there is nothing decisive except personal methods.”

“Ah! praising assassination again!” said the master of the house anxiously.

“Spare us your sentimental sermons,” cried the president angrily. His boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. “Go on,” he said to the man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president became purple.

“Noble England,” replied the advocate-general, “is crushed to-day: for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the Jacobins. She has no more Pitt.”

She has the Duke of Wellington,” said a military personage looking very important.

“Please, gentlemen, silence,” exclaimed the president. “If we are still going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in.”

“We know that monsieur has many ideas,” said the duke irritably, looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside himself with rage.

“There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen,” went on the speaker with all the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his listeners to reason. “If there were a new Pitt in England, you would not dupe a nation twice over by the same means.”

“That's why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward impossible in France,” exclaimed the military interrupter.

On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the speaker was put upon his mettle.

“My audience is eager for me to finish,” he said vigorously, completely discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that Julien thought had expressed his character so well. “It is eager for me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to offend nobody's ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will be brief.

“I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases,” continued the speaker, becoming more and more animated, “I will say this to you: Help yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia—who will only have courage but have no money—cannot launch more than one or two campaigns against France.

“One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes, in the third campaign—in the third campaign I say—you will have the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792.”

At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four quarters.

“Monsieur,” said the president to Julien, “Go and make a précis in the next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out.”

Julien went out, to his great regret. The speaker was just dealing with the question of probabilities, which formed the usual subject for his meditations. “They are frightened of my making fun of them,” he thought. When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,

“Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, ‘is it god, table or tub?' especially applicable to this unhappy people. ‘It is god' exclaims the writer of fables. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and profound phrase seems to apply. Act on your own initiative, and noble France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.

“England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia would only be able to give battle two or three times. Would that be sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817? I do not think so.”

At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes of the whole room. It came again from the old Imperial general who wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the secret note.

“I do not think so,” replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had subsided. He laid stress on the “I” with an insolence which charmed Julien.

“That's a pretty piece of acting,” he said to himself, as he made his pen almost keep pace with the marquis' words.

M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a well-turned phrase.

“It is not only on foreign powers,” continued the marquis in a more even tone, “on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military occupation. All those young men who write inflammatory articles in the Globe will provide you with three or four thousand young captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good intentions of a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru.”

“We did not know how to glorify him,” said the president. “He should have been immortalized.”

“Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties,” went on M. de la Mole; “but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut lines of cleavage. Let us realise what has got to be crushed. On the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public opinion; youth and all that admire it. While it is stupefying itself with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of administrating the expenditure of the budget.”

At this point there was another interruption.

“As for you, Monsieur,” said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, “you do not spend, if the words choke you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from the civil list.”

“Well, Monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to take you for an example. Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their lives in its service. You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of a rebellion would frighten you yourselves.”

“Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen, so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.

“Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews, of real gentlemen, in fact. Each of them will have beside him not a little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815 turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau. Our gentleman will have educated him; it will be his own foster brother if it is possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth of his income in order to form this little devoted force of five hundred men in each department. Then you will be able to reckon on a foreign occupation. The foreign soldier will never penetrate even as far as Dijon if he is not certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each department.

“The foreign kings will only listen to you when you are in a position to announce to them that you have twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms in order to open to them the gates of France. The service is troublesome, you say. Gentlemen, it is the only way of saving our lives. There is war to the death between the liberty of the press and our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers, become peasants, or take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open your eyes.