Part 22

From constantly observing Count Norbert, Julien noticed that he was wearing boots and spurs; and I, apparently, must be in shoes, as befits an inferior. They sat down to table. Julien heard the marchioness utter a stern word, raising her voice somewhat. Almost at the same moment, he caught sight of a very blonde and exceedingly well-formed young lady, who came to sit opposite him. She did not please him; yet, looking at her attentively, he thought he had never seen such beautiful eyes; but they betrayed a great coldness of soul. Later, Julien found that they had the expression of boredom taking notice, yet mindful of the duty to be imposing. Madame de Rênal, however, had very beautiful eyes, he told himself; the world paid her compliments on them; but they had nothing in common with these. Julien lacked the experience to distinguish that it was the fire of wit that now and then sparkled in the eyes of Mademoiselle Mathilde—for so he heard her named. When Madame de Rênal's eyes grew animated, it was with the fire of passions, or through generous indignation at the tale of some wicked deed. Toward the end of the meal, Julien found a word to express the kind of beauty in Mademoiselle de La Mole's eyes: they are scintillating, he said to himself. Apart from that, she cruelly resembled her mother, who displeased him more and more, and he ceased to look at her. On the other hand, Count Norbert seemed to him admirable in every respect. Julien was so charmed that the idea did not occur to him of being jealous of him and hating him, because he was richer and nobler than himself.

Julien thought the marquis looked bored.

Toward the second course, he said to his son:

"Norbert, I ask this kindness of you for M. Julien Sorel, whom I have just taken onto my staff, and whom I mean to make a man of, if it be possible."

"He is my secretary," the marquis said to his neighbor, "and he writes *that* with two *l*'s."

Everyone looked at Julien, who made a bow a little too pronounced toward Norbert; but in general they were pleased with his glance.

The marquis must have spoken of the sort of education Julien had received, for one of the guests attacked him on Horace: It is precisely in speaking of Horace that I succeeded with the Bishop of Besançon, Julien said to himself; apparently they know no author but that one. From that instant, he was master of himself. This composure was made easy because he had just decided that Mademoiselle de La Mole should never be a woman in his eyes. Since the seminary, he had put men at their worst, and was not easily intimidated by them. He would have enjoyed all his coolness, had the dining room been less magnificently furnished. In fact, there were two mirrors eight feet high each, in which he sometimes watched his interlocutor while speaking of Horace, and they still imposed on him. His sentences were not too long for a provincial. He had fine eyes whose trembling or happy shyness, when he had answered well, redoubled their brilliance. He was found agreeable. This sort of examination threw a little interest into a solemn dinner. The marquis, by a sign, encouraged Julien's interlocutor to press him hard. Can it be possible that he knows something? he thought.

Julien replied by inventing his ideas, and lost enough of his timidity to show not wit—a thing impossible for one who does not know the language spoken in Paris—but he had new ideas, though presented without grace or aptness, and it was seen that he knew his Latin perfectly.

Julien's adversary was an academician of the Inscriptions, who by chance knew Latin; he found in Julien a very good humanist, no longer feared to make him blush, and genuinely sought to embarrass him. In the heat of the contest, Julien at last forgot the magnificent furnishings of the dining room; he came to expound, on the Latin poets, ideas the interlocutor had read nowhere. As an honest man, he gave credit for them to the young secretary. Happily, they entered upon a discussion as to whether Horace was poor or rich: an amiable man, voluptuous and careless, writing verses for his amusement, like Chapelle, the friend of Molière and La Fontaine, or a poor devil of a laureate poet following the court and composing odes for the king's birthday, like Southey, the accuser of Lord Byron. They spoke of the state of society under Augustus and under George; in both epochs the aristocracy was all-powerful; but at Rome it saw power wrested from it by Maecenas, who was but a simple knight; and in England it had reduced George almost to the state of a Doge of Venice. This discussion seemed to rouse the marquis from the torpor into which boredom had plunged him at the beginning of the dinner.

Julien understood nothing of all the modern names like Southey, Lord Byron, George, which he heard pronounced for the first time. But it escaped no one that, whenever the question was of facts past at Rome, whose knowledge might be deduced from the works of Horace, Martial, Tacitus, etc., he had an incontestable superiority. Julien freely availed himself of several ideas he had learned from the Bishop of Besançon, in the famous discussion he had had with that prelate; these were not the least relished.

When they were weary of talking of poets, the marchioness, who made it a rule to admire whatever amused her husband, deigned to look at Julien.

"The awkward manners of this young abbé may perhaps conceal a learned man," said the academician near her to the marchioness; and Julien overheard something of it.

Ready-made phrases suited the mind of the lady of the house; she adopted this one concerning Julien and gave herself credit for having invited the academician to dinner. He amuses M. de La Mole, she thought.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST STEPS

This immense valley filled with dazzling lights and so many thousands of men dazzles my sight. Not one knows me, all are above me. My head is lost.

Poemi dell'av. REINA.

The next day, very early, Julien was copying letters in the library, when Mademoiselle Mathilde entered by a small concealed door, very well hidden among the backs of books. While Julien admired this contrivance, Mademoiselle Mathilde appeared much surprised and rather vexed to find him there. Julien thought her, in curl-papers, had a harsh, haughty, and almost masculine air. Mademoiselle de La Mole had the secret of stealing books from her father's library without his noticing. The presence of Julien made her errand that morning useless, which vexed her the more, as she had come for the second volume of Voltaire's *Princess of Babylon*, worthy complement of an eminently monarchical and religious education—a masterpiece of the Sacred Heart! This poor girl, at nineteen, already needed the piquancy of wit to take an interest in a novel.

Count Norbert appeared in the library toward three o'clock; he came to study a newspaper, so as to be able to talk politics in the evening, and was glad to meet Julien, whose existence he had forgotten. He was perfect with him: he offered to go horseback riding.

"My father gives us leave until dinner."

Julien understood this *us* and found it charming.

"Good heavens, Monsieur le Comte," said Julien, "if it were a matter of felling a tree eighty feet high, squaring it and making planks, I should acquit myself well, I dare say; but mounting on horseback—that has not happened to me six times in my life."

"Well, this will be the seventh," said Norbert.

Deep down, Julien recalled the entry of the King of ***, at Verrières, and believed he rode supremely well. But, returning from the Bois de Boulogne, in the very middle of the Rue du Bac, he fell in abruptly avoiding a cabriolet and covered himself with mud. He was lucky to have two suits. At dinner, the marquis, wishing to speak to him, asked for news of his outing; Norbert hastened to reply in general terms.

"The Count is full of kindness to me," Julien resumed, "and I thank him for it, and feel all its worth. He deigned to have me given the gentlest and prettiest horse; but finally he could not tie me to it, and, for want of that precaution, I fell in the very middle of that long street, near the bridge."

Mademoiselle Mathilde tried in vain to hide a burst of laughter; then her indiscretion asked for details. Julien got out of it with great simplicity; he had grace without knowing it.

"I augur well of this little priest," said the marquis to the academician; "a simple provincial in such a circumstance! that is what was never seen and will never be seen again; and yet he tells his mishap before ladies!"

Julien so much put the listeners at ease regarding his misfortune, that at the end of dinner, when the general conversation had taken another turn, Mademoiselle Mathilde put questions to her brother about the details of the unhappy event. Her questions prolonging, and Julien meeting her eyes several times, he dared reply directly, though not addressed, and all three ended by laughing, as three young inhabitants of a village deep in a wood might have done.

The next day, Julien attended two theology lectures, and then returned to transcribe some twenty letters. He found established near him, in the library, a young man dressed with great care; but his bearing was mean, and his countenance that of envy.

The marquis entered.

"What are you doing here, Monsieur Tanbeau?" he said to the newcomer in a stern tone.

"I thought..." resumed the young man with a base smile.

"No, sir, you did not think. This is an attempt, but an ill-fated one."

The young Tanbeau rose in a fury and disappeared. He was a nephew of the academician, friend of Madame de La Mole; he was destined for letters. The academician had obtained that the marquis would take him as secretary. Tanbeau, who worked in a remote room, having learned of the favor of which Julien was the object, wished to share it, and that morning had come to set up his writing-case in the library.

At four o'clock, Julien, after a little hesitation, dared present himself to Count Norbert. The latter was about to mount his horse, and was embarrassed, for he was perfectly polite.

"I think," he said to Julien, "that soon you will go to the riding-school; and, after some weeks, I shall be delighted to ride with you."

"I wished to have the honor of thanking you for the kindness you showed me; believe, sir," added Julien with a very serious air, "that I feel all I owe you. If your horse is not hurt from my clumsiness of yesterday, and if he is free, I should like to ride him this morning."

"Upon my word, my dear Sorel, at your own risk and peril. Suppose I made you all the objections prudence demands; the fact is it is four o'clock, we have no time to lose."

Once on horseback:

"What must one do not to fall?" Julien asked the young count.

"Many things," answered Norbert, laughing heartily; "for example, hold the body back."

Julien took the great trot. They were on the Place Louis XVI.

"Ah! young foolhardy," said Norbert, "there are too many carriages, and moreover driven by reckless fellows! Once on the ground, their tilburys will pass over your body; they will not risk spoiling their horse's mouth by pulling up short."

Twenty times Norbert saw Julien on the point of falling; but finally the ride ended without accident. On returning, the young count said to his sister:

"I present you a bold break-neck."

At dinner, speaking to his father from one end of the table to the other, he did justice to Julien's boldness; it was all that could be praised in his way of riding. The young count had heard that morning the grooms in the courtyard, taking occasion from Julien's fall, mock him outrageously.

Despite so much kindness, Julien soon felt perfectly isolated amid this family. All the customs seemed strange to him, and he failed in all. His blunders made the valets' sport.

Abbé Pirard had left for his parish. If Julien is a weak reed, let him perish; if he is a man of heart, let him get out of it alone, he thought.

CHAPTER IV

THE HÔTEL DE LA MOLE

What does he here? would he be pleased? would he think to please?

RONSARD.

If all seemed strange to Julien in the noble salon of the Hôtel de La Mole, this young man, pale and clothed in black, seemed in turn quite singular to the persons who deigned to notice him. Madame de La Mole proposed to her husband to send him on a mission on days when certain personages were to dine.

"I have a mind to push the experiment to the end," answered the marquis. "Abbé Pirard claims we are wrong to break the self-love of those we admit near us. *One leans only on what resists*, etc. This one is inconvenient only by his unknown face; otherwise he is a deaf-mute."

That I may know my way, Julien said to himself, I must write the names and a word on the character of the personages I see arriving in this salon.

He placed in the first rank five or six friends of the house, who courted him at all hazards, believing him protected by a whim of the marquis. They were poor wretches, more or less sycophantic; but, to the praise of this class of men, as found today in the salons of the aristocracy, they were not equally sycophantic to all. One of them would have let himself be ill-used by the marquis, who would have rebelled against a harsh word addressed him by Madame de La Mole.

There was too much pride and too much boredom at bottom in the character of the masters of the house, they were too accustomed to giving offense to relieve their boredom, for them to hope for true friends. But, except on rainy days, and in moments of fierce boredom, which were rare, they were always found of perfect politeness.

If the five or six complaisants who testified so paternal a friendship to Julien had deserted the Hôtel de La Mole, the marchioness would have been exposed to great stretches of solitude; and, in the eyes of women of that rank, solitude is frightful: it is the emblem of *disgrace*.

The marquis was perfect for his wife; he took care that her salon was sufficiently filled; not with peers, he found his new colleagues not noble enough to come to him as friends, not amusing enough to be admitted as subordinates.

It was only much later that Julien penetrated these secrets. The governing politics that make the talk of bourgeois houses are broached in that of the marquis's class only in moments of distress.

Such is still, even in this bored century, the empire of the necessity of amusing oneself, that even on dinner days, scarcely had the marquis left the salon than all fled. Provided one did not jest of God, nor of priests, nor of the king, nor of those in office, nor of artists protected by the Court, nor of all that is established; provided one spoke well of neither Béranger, nor the opposition journals, nor Voltaire, nor Rousseau, nor of all that permits itself a little free speech; provided above all that one never spoke politics, one might freely reason on everything.

There is no hundred thousand livres of income nor blue ribbon that can contend against such a salon charter. The least lively idea seemed a grossness. Despite good tone, perfect politeness, the wish to please, boredom was read on every brow. The young men who came to pay their respects, fearing to speak of something that might suggest a thought, or betray some prohibited reading, fell silent after a few elegant words on Rossini and the weather.

Julien observed that conversation was ordinarily kept alive by two viscounts and five barons whom M. de La Mole had known in the emigration. These gentlemen enjoyed six to eight thousand livres of income; four were for the *Quotidienne*, and three for the *Gazette de France*. One of them had every day an anecdote of the Château to relate, where the admirable word was not spared. Julien noted he had five crosses; the others generally had but three.

On the other hand, one saw in the antechamber ten liveried lackeys, and all the evening, ices or tea every quarter hour; and, toward midnight, a kind of supper with Champagne.

It was reason that sometimes made Julien stay to the end; otherwise, he scarcely understood that one could seriously listen to the ordinary conversation of this so-magnificently-gilded salon. Sometimes he looked at the speakers, to see if they themselves were not mocking what they said. My M. de Maistre, whom I know by heart, has said a hundred times better, he thought, and yet he is tiresome enough.

Julien was not the only one to perceive the moral asphyxia. Some consoled themselves by taking many ices; others by the pleasure of saying the rest of the evening: I am just out of the Hôtel de La Mole, where I learned that Russia, etc...

Julien learned, from one of the complaisants, that it was not yet six months since Madame de La Mole had rewarded an assiduity of more than twenty years by making prefect the poor Baron Le Bourguignon, sub-prefect since the Restoration.

This great event had revived the zeal of all these gentlemen; they would have taken offense at very little before, they took offense at nothing now. Rarely was the want of regard direct; but Julien had already surprised at table two or three brief little dialogues, between the marquis and his wife, cruel to those placed near them. These noble personages did not disguise their sincere contempt for all not sprung from those *mounting in the king's coaches*. Julien observed that the word crusade was the only one that gave their faces the expression of profound seriousness, mingled with respect. Ordinary respect always had a shade of complaisance.

Amid this magnificence and this boredom, Julien interested himself in nothing but M. de La Mole; he heard him with pleasure protest one day that he had no hand in the advancement of that poor Le Bourguignon. It was an attention for the marchioness; Julien knew the truth from Abbé Pirard.

One morning when the abbé was working with Julien in the marquis's library, on the eternal Frilair lawsuit:

"Sir," said Julien suddenly, "is dining every day with Madame the marchioness one of my duties, or a kindness done me?"

"It is a signal honor!" replied the abbé, scandalized. "Never M. N..., the academician, who for fifteen years has paid assiduous court, could obtain it for his nephew M. Tanbeau."

"For me, sir, it is the most painful part of my employment. I was less bored at the seminary. I see even Mademoiselle de La Mole yawn sometimes, though she must be used to the amiability of the house's friends. I fear falling asleep. I beg you, obtain me leave to go dine at forty sous in some obscure tavern."

The abbé, a true parvenu, was keenly sensible to the honor of dining with a great lord. While he strove to make Julien understand this sentiment, a noise behind them made them turn their heads. Julien saw Mademoiselle de La Mole listening. He blushed. She had come for a book and had heard all; she conceived a certain consideration for Julien. That one was not born on his knees, she thought, like that old abbé. Good God! how ugly he is.

At dinner, Julien dared not look at Mademoiselle de La Mole; but she had the kindness to speak to him. That day many were expected; she urged him to stay. The young girls of Paris little like people of a certain age, especially when they are carelessly dressed. Julien had not needed much sagacity to perceive that the colleagues of M. Le Bourguignon remaining in the salon had the honor of being the ordinary butt of Mademoiselle de La Mole's jests. That day, whether affected or not on her part, she was cruel to the bores.

Mademoiselle de La Mole was the center of a little group that formed almost every evening behind the marchioness's immense armchair. There were found the Marquis de Croisenois, the Count de Caylus, the Viscount de Luz, and two or three other young officers, friends of Norbert or his sister. These gentlemen sat on a large blue sofa. At the end of the sofa opposite that occupied by the brilliant Mathilde, Julien was placed silently on a low little straw chair. This modest post was envied by all the complaisants; Norbert decently maintained the young secretary of his father there, by addressing a word to him or naming him once or twice an evening. That day, Mademoiselle de La Mole asked him what might be the height of the mountain on which the citadel of Besançon stands. Julien could never say whether that mountain was higher or lower than Montmartre. Often he laughed heartily at what was said in this little group; but he felt incapable of inventing anything like it. It was like a foreign tongue he understood and admired, but could not speak.

Mathilde's friends were that day in continuous hostility with the people arriving in that magnificent salon. The friends of the house had at first the preference, as being better known. One may judge if Julien was attentive; everything interested him, both the substance of things and the manner of jesting about them.

"Ah! here is M. Descoulis," said Mathilde; "he has no more wig; does he mean to reach the prefecture by genius? he displays that bald forehead he says is full of lofty thoughts."

"He is a man who knows the whole earth," said the Marquis de Croisenois; "he comes also to my uncle the cardinal's. He is capable of cultivating a lie with each of his friends, for years on end, and he has two or three hundred friends. He knows how to feed friendship, that is his talent. As you see him, he is already mud-spattered, at the door of one of his friends, from seven o'clock in the morning, in winter.

He quarrels from time to time, and writes seven or eight letters for the quarrel. Then he reconciles, and has seven or eight letters for transports of friendship. But it is in the frank and sincere outpouring of the honest man who keeps nothing on his heart that he shines most. This maneuver appears when he has some service to ask. One of my uncle's grand vicars is admirable in relating the life of M. Descoulis since the Restoration. I will bring him to you."

"Bah! I should not believe those tales, it is professional jealousy among small folk," said the Count de Caylus.

"M. Descoulis will have a name in history," resumed the Marquis de Croisenois; "he made the Restoration with the Abbé de Pradt and MM. de Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”