Part 30

Had I been killed in M. de Rênal's gardens, there would have been no dishonor for me. My death might easily have been made inexplicable. Here, what abominable tales will they not tell in the salons of the Hôtel de Chaulnes, the Hôtel de Caylus, the Hôtel de Retz, etc., everywhere in short! I shall be a monster to posterity.

For two or three years, he went on, laughing, and mocking himself. But the idea crushed him. And I, where shall I be justified? Supposing Fouqué prints my posthumous pamphlet, that will be but one more infamy. What! I am received into a house, and as the price of the hospitality I receive there, the kindnesses heaped upon me, I print a pamphlet about what goes on there! I attack the honor of the women! Ah, a thousand times rather, let us be dupes!

That evening was dreadful.

CHAPTER XVI

ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING

This garden was very large, laid out only a few years before with perfect taste. But the trees had figured in the famous Pré-aux-Clercs, so celebrated in the time of Henry III; they were over a century old. One found something rustic about them.

MASSINGER

He was about to write a counter-order to Fouqué when eleven struck. He made the lock of his door click noisily, as if he had shut himself in. He went on tiptoe to observe what was happening throughout the house, especially in the garrets on the fourth floor, occupied by the servants. There was nothing unusual. One of Mme de La Mole's ladies' maids was giving a party; the servants were drinking punch very gaily. Those who laugh like that, thought Julien, cannot be part of the night expedition; they would be more serious.

At length he went to place himself in a dark corner of the garden. If their plan is to hide from the house servants, they will have the men charged with surprising me come over the garden walls.

If M. de Croisenois keeps any coolness in all this, he must find it less compromising for the young person he means to marry to have me surprised before the moment when I shall have entered her room.

He made a military reconnaissance, and a very exact one. My honor is at stake, he thought; if I fall into some blunder, it will be no excuse in my own eyes to tell myself: I had not thought of that.

The weather was of a despairing serenity. Toward eleven the moon had risen; at half past midnight it lit up in full the façade of the hôtel overlooking the garden.

She is mad, said Julien to himself as one o'clock struck; there was still a light in Count Norbert's windows. Never in his life had Julien been so afraid; he saw only the dangers of the enterprise, and had no enthusiasm at all.

He went to fetch the immense ladder, waited five minutes, to allow time for a counter-order, and at five minutes past one leaned the ladder against Mathilde's window. He climbed softly, pistol in hand, astonished at not being attacked. As he drew near the window, it opened without a sound:

—Here you are, sir, said Mathilde with much emotion; I have been following your movements for an hour.

Julien was very embarrassed; he did not know how to behave, he had no love at all. In his embarrassment, he thought he must dare; he tried to kiss Mathilde.

—For shame! she said, pushing him away.

Quite glad to be rebuffed, he hastened to cast a glance around him: the moon was so bright that the shadows it cast in Mlle de La Mole's room were black. There may very well be men hidden there without my seeing them, he thought.

—What have you in the side pocket of your coat? said Mathilde, delighted to find a subject of conversation. She was suffering strangely; all the feelings of reserve and timidity, so natural to a well-born girl, had resumed their sway, and were tormenting her.

—I have all sorts of weapons and pistols, answered Julien, no less glad to have something to say.

—We must lower the ladder, said Mathilde.

—It is immense, and may break the windows of the salon below, or of the entresol.

—We must not break the windows, resumed Mathilde, trying in vain to take the tone of ordinary conversation; you could, it seems to me, lower the ladder by means of a rope attached to the first rung. I always keep a supply of ropes about me.

And this is a woman in love! thought Julien; she dares to say she loves! so much coolness, so much wisdom in her precautions show me clearly enough that I am not triumphing over M. de Croisenois as I foolishly believed, but that simply I am succeeding him. After all, what do I care? do I love her? I triumph over the marquis in this sense, that he will be very angry to have a successor, and still angrier that this successor is myself. With what haughtiness he looked at me last night at the Café Tortoni, affecting not to recognize me; with what spiteful air he saluted me afterward, when he could no longer avoid it!

Julien had attached the rope to the last rung of the ladder; he was lowering it gently, and leaning far out over the balcony so that it should not touch the panes. Fine moment to kill me, he thought, if anyone is hidden in Mathilde's room; but a profound silence continued to reign everywhere.

The ladder touched the ground; Julien managed to lay it along the bed of exotic flowers against the wall.

—What will my mother say, said Mathilde, when she sees her fine plants all crushed!... We must throw down the rope, she added with great coolness. If it were seen going back up to the balcony, that would be a difficult circumstance to explain.

—And how do I get away? said Julien in a bantering tone, affecting the Creole manner. (One of the housemaids was born at Saint-Domingue.)

—You, you are to leave by the door, said Mathilde, delighted with the idea.

Ah! how worthy this man is of all my love! she thought.

Julien had just let the rope fall into the garden; Mathilde pressed his arm. He thought himself seized by an enemy, and turned quickly, drawing a dagger. She had thought she heard a window open. They remained motionless and holding their breath. The moon lit them up fully. The noise not recurring, there was no further uneasiness.

Then the embarrassment began again, and was great on both sides. Julien made sure the door was bolted with all its bolts; he thought well to look under the bed, but dared not; one might have placed there one or two footmen. At last he feared a future reproach of his prudence and looked.

Mathilde had fallen into all the anguish of the extremest timidity. She had a horror of her situation.

—What have you done with my letters? she said at last.

What a fine chance to disconcert these gentlemen if they are listening, and to avoid the fight! thought Julien.

—The first is hidden in a large Protestant Bible which yesterday evening's diligence is carrying far from here.

He spoke very distinctly as he entered into these details, and in a way to be heard by persons who might be hidden in two large mahogany wardrobes which he had not dared to search.

—The other two are at the post, and following the same route as the first.

—Oh, good heavens! why all these precautions? said Mathilde, astonished.

What reason should I have to lie? thought Julien, and he confessed to her all his suspicions.

—So that is the cause of the coldness of your letters! cried Mathilde with the accent of madness rather than tenderness.

Julien did not notice the nuance. This use of the familiar 'tu' turned his head, or at least his suspicions vanished; he found himself elevated in his own eyes; he dared to clasp in his arms this girl so beautiful, and who inspired him with so much respect. He was only half repulsed.

He had recourse to his memory, as formerly at Besançon with Amanda Binet, and recited several of the finest passages of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_.

—You have a man's heart, he was answered, without listening too closely to his phrases; I meant to test your courage, I confess it. Your first suspicions and your resolution show you even more intrepid than I believed.

Mathilde was making an effort to use the familiar form; she was evidently attending more to this strange way of speaking than to the substance of what she said. This familiar address, stripped of any tone of tenderness, after a moment gave Julien no pleasure; he wondered at the absence of happiness; at last, to feel it, he had recourse to his reason. He saw himself esteemed by this young girl so proud, who never granted praise without reservation; with this reasoning he attained a happiness of self-love.

It was not, it is true, that voluptuousness of the soul he had sometimes found with Mme de Rênal. What a difference, good heavens! There was nothing tender in his feelings of that first moment. It was the keenest happiness of ambition, and Julien was above all ambitious. He spoke again of the persons he suspected, and of the precautions he had invented. As he spoke, he thought of the means of profiting by his victory.

Mathilde, still much embarrassed, and looking appalled at her own step, seemed enchanted to find a subject of conversation. They spoke of the means of meeting again. Julien deliciously enjoyed the wit and bravery he displayed anew during this discussion. They had to do with very clear-sighted people; little Tanbeau was certainly a spy, but Mathilde and he were not without address either.

What easier than to meet in the library, to settle everything?

—I can appear, without exciting suspicion, in all parts of the hôtel, Julien added, and almost as far as Mme de La Mole's room. One had absolutely to cross it to reach her daughter's. If Mathilde thought better that he should always come by a ladder, it was with a heart drunk with joy that he would expose himself to that slight danger.

In listening to him speak, Mathilde was shocked at this air of triumph. He is then my master! she said to herself. Already she was prey to remorse. Her reason had a horror of the signal folly she had just committed. Could she have done so, she would have annihilated herself and Julien. When, at intervals, the force of her will silenced remorse, feelings of timidity and suffering modesty made her very unhappy. She had by no means foreseen the dreadful state she was in.

I must however speak to him, she said to herself at last; that is proper; one speaks to one's lover. And then, to fulfill a duty and with a tenderness that was much more in the words she used than in the sound of her voice, she related the various resolutions she had taken toward him during these last days.

She had decided that, if he dared to come to her with the help of the gardener's ladder, as he had been enjoined, she would be wholly his. But never were things so tender said in a colder and more polite tone. Until then this rendezvous had been icy. It was enough to make one hate love. What a lesson in morality for a rash young girl! Is it worth the pain to lose one's future for such a moment?

After long uncertainties, which to a superficial observer might have seemed the effect of the most decided hatred, so much did the feelings a woman owes herself have difficulty yielding to a will so firm, Mathilde ended by being for him an amiable mistress.

To be sure, these transports were a little forced. Passionate love was much rather a model that was imitated than a reality.

Mlle de La Mole believed she was fulfilling a duty toward herself and toward her lover. The poor boy, she said to herself, has shown accomplished bravery; he must be happy, or else it is I who lack character. But she would have wished to buy back, at the price of an eternity of unhappiness, the cruel necessity in which she found herself.

Despite the frightful violence she imposed on herself, she was perfectly mistress of her words.

No regret, no reproach came to spoil this night which seemed to Julien singular rather than happy. What a difference, good heavens! from his last twenty-four hours at Verrières! These fine Paris ways have found the secret of spoiling everything, even love, he said in his extreme injustice.

He was giving himself up to these reflections standing in one of the large mahogany wardrobes into which he had been made to enter at the first noises heard in the neighboring apartment, which was Mme de La Mole's. Mathilde followed her mother to mass; the women left the apartment, and Julien slipped away before they returned to finish their work.

He mounted his horse and rode at a walk to seek the most solitary spots of the Bois de Meudon. He was much more astonished than happy. The happiness which, from time to time, came to occupy his soul was like that of a young sub-lieutenant who, following some astonishing action, should have been made colonel on the spot by the commander-in-chief; he felt himself raised to an immense height. All that was above him the day before was now at his side or below him. Little by little Julien's happiness increased as he drew away.

If there was nothing tender in his soul, it is that, however strange this word may seem, Mathilde, in all her conduct toward him, had fulfilled a duty. There was nothing unforeseen for her in all the events of this night but the unhappiness and the shame she had found instead of those divine transports of which novels speak.

Can I have been mistaken, have I no love for him? she said to herself.

CHAPTER XVII

AN OLD SWORD

I now mean to be serious;--it is time, Since laughter now-a-days is deem'd too serious A jest at vice by virtue's called a crime.

_Don Juan_, C. XIII.

She did not appear at dinner. In the evening she came to the salon for an instant, but did not look at Julien. This conduct seemed strange to him; but, he thought, I must own it, I know the usages of good society only through the everyday actions I have seen done a hundred times; she will give me some good reason for all this. Nevertheless, agitated by the extremest curiosity, he studied the expression of Mathilde's features; he could not hide from himself that she looked dry and spiteful. Evidently it was not the same woman who, the previous night, had or feigned transports of happiness too excessive to be true.

The next day, the day after, the same coldness on her part; she did not look at him, she was unaware of his existence. Julien, devoured by the liveliest uneasiness, was a thousand leagues from the feelings of triumph which alone had animated him the first day. Could it be, by chance, he said to himself, a return to virtue? But that word was too bourgeois for the haughty Mathilde.

In the ordinary positions of life she scarcely believes in religion, thought Julien; she loves it as useful to the interests of her caste.

But by simple feminine delicacy can she not be sharply reproaching herself with the irreparable fault she has committed? Julien believed himself her first lover.

But, he said to himself at other moments, one must admit there is nothing naive, simple, tender in all her manner; never have I seen her more like a queen who has just descended from her throne. Would she despise me? It would be worthy of her to reproach herself with what she has done for me, solely because of the lowness of my birth.

While Julien, full of prejudices drawn from books and from the memories of Verrières, pursued the chimera of a tender mistress who no longer thinks of her own existence from the moment she has made her lover happy, Mathilde's vanity was furious against him.

As she had not been bored for two months, she no longer feared boredom; thus, without being able to suspect it in the least, Julien had lost his greatest advantage.

So I have given myself a master! said Mlle de La Mole, walking agitated in her room. He is full of honor, very well; but if I push his vanity to the limit, he will avenge himself by making known the nature of our relations. Such is the misfortune of our century; even the strangest aberrations do not cure one of boredom. Julien had been Mathilde's first love, and, in this circumstance of life which gives some tender illusions even to the driest souls, she was prey to the bitterest reflections.

He has an immense empire over me, since he reigns through terror and can punish me with an atrocious pain if I push him to the limit. This single idea was enough to lead Mathilde to insult, for courage was the first quality of her character. Nothing could give her some agitation and cure her of a foundation of ever-renewing boredom but the idea that she was playing her whole existence at heads or tails.

On the third day, as Mlle de La Mole persisted in not looking at him, Julien followed her after dinner, and evidently despite herself, into the billiard room.

—Well, sir, do you then believe you have acquired very powerful rights over me, she said to him with a scarcely restrained anger, since, in opposition to my will so clearly declared, you presume to speak to me?... Do you know that no one in the world has ever dared so much?

Nothing was so amusing as the dialogue of these two young lovers, who without suspecting it were animated one against the other by feelings of the liveliest hatred. As neither had the enduring character which besides they had from habits of good society, they soon came to declare plainly that they were breaking with each other forever.

—I swear you an eternal secret, said Julien; I should even add that I shall never address a word to you, if your reputation could not suffer from so marked a change.

He bowed with perfect respect and left.

He accomplished without too much pain what he believed a duty; he was far from thinking himself much in love with Mlle de La Mole. No doubt he did not love her three days before, when they had hidden him in the large mahogany wardrobe. But all changed rapidly in his soul, from the moment he saw himself forever quarreled with her.

His cruel memory set itself to retrace to him the slightest circumstances of that night which, in reality, had left him so cold.

From the second night following the declaration of eternal quarrel, Julien nearly went mad in being forced to admit to himself that he was in love with Mlle de La Mole.

Dreadful struggles followed this discovery: all his feelings were overturned.

A week later, instead of being proud with M. de Croisenois, he would almost have embraced him, melting into tears.

Habit of unhappiness gave him a glimmer of good sense; he decided to leave for the Languedoc, packed his trunk and went to the stagecoach office.

He felt faint when, arrived at the mail-coach desk, he was told that, by a singular chance, there was a place the next day in the Toulouse coach. He booked it and returned to the Hôtel de La Mole, to announce his departure to the marquis.

M. de La Mole was out. More dead than alive, Julien went to wait for him in the library. What became of him on finding Mlle de La Mole there?

On seeing him appear, she assumed an air of spitefulness which he could not mistake.

Carried away by his unhappiness, bewildered by surprise, Julien had the weakness to say to her, in the tenderest tone and from the heart:

—So, you no longer love me?

—I have a horror of having given myself to the first comer, said Mathilde, weeping with rage against herself.

—To the first comer! cried Julien, and he sprang upon an old sword of the Middle Ages, which was kept in the library as a curiosity.

His grief, which he believed extreme at the moment he had spoken to Mlle de La Mole, had just been multiplied a hundredfold by the tears of shame he saw her shed. He would have been the happiest of men to be able to kill her.

At the moment when he had drawn the sword, with some difficulty, from its antique scabbard, Mathilde, happy at so novel a sensation, advanced proudly toward him; her tears had dried.

The idea of the Marquis de La Mole, his benefactor, presented itself vividly to Julien. I should kill his daughter! he said to himself; what horror! He made a movement to throw down the sword. Certainly, he thought, she will burst out laughing at the sight of this melodramatic movement: he owed to this idea the return of all his coolness. He looked at the blade of the old sword curiously, as if searching for some rust stain, then replaced it in the scabbard, and with the greatest tranquility hung it again on the gilded bronze nail that held it.

All this movement, very slow toward the end, lasted fully a minute; Mlle de La Mole watched him astonished: So I was on the point of being killed by my lover! she said to herself.

This idea transported her to the finest years of the century of Charles IX and Henry III.

She stood motionless before Julien, who had just replaced the sword, looking at him with eyes from which hatred had flown. It must be owned she was very seductive at that moment; certainly never had a woman less resembled a Paris doll (this word was Julien's great objection against the women of that country).

I am going to fall again into some weakness for him, thought Mathilde; this time indeed he would think himself my lord and master, after a relapse, and at the very moment when I have just spoken to him so firmly. She fled.

My God, how beautiful she is! said Julien, seeing her run: this is the being who threw herself into my arms with such fury not fifteen days ago... and those instants will never return; and it is my fault! and at the moment of so extraordinary an action, so interesting for me, I was not sensible of it!... One must admit I was born with a very flat and very unhappy character.

The marquis appeared; Julien hastened to announce his departure.

—For where? said M. de La Mole.

—For the Languedoc.

—Not so, if you please; you are reserved for higher destinies; if you leave, it will be for the North... indeed, in military terms, I place you under arrest at the hôtel. You will oblige me by never being more than two or three hours absent; I may need you at any moment.

Julien bowed and withdrew without a word, leaving the marquis much astonished; he was unable to speak, and shut himself in his room. There he could exaggerate in freedom the atrocity of his fate.

So, he thought, I cannot even go away! God knows how many days the marquis will keep me in Paris; good heavens! what shall I become? and not a friend to consult! Abbé Pirard would not let me finish the first phrase; Count Altamira would propose, to distract me, to affiliate me to some conspiracy.

And yet I am mad, I feel it; I am mad!

Who will guide me, what shall I become?

CHAPTER XVIII

CRUEL MOMENTS

And she confesses it to me! She details even the slightest circumstances! Her eye so beautiful, fixed on mine, paints the love she feels for another!

SCHILLER

“Stories of the world, in your language.”