Part 31
Miss de La Mole, enraptured, thought of nothing but the happiness of having nearly been killed. She went so far as to say to herself: He is worthy to be my master, since he was on the point of killing me. How many handsome young men of society would have to be blended together to arrive at such a movement of passion?
It must be admitted that he was very handsome at the moment when he climbed onto the chair, to replace the sword precisely in the picturesque position that the upholsterer-decorator had given it! After all, I was not so mad to love him!
At this instant, had some honest means of renewing their bond presented itself, she would have seized it with pleasure. Julien, locked in behind double locks in his room, was prey to the most violent despair. In his mad ideas, he thought of throwing himself at her feet. If instead of keeping to a secluded place, he had wandered in the garden and the hotel so as to keep within reach of opportunities, he might, in a single instant, have changed his awful misfortune into the keenest happiness.
But the address of which we reproach him with the absence would have excluded the sublime movement of seizing the sword which, at this moment, made him so handsome in the eyes of Mlle de La Mole. This caprice, favorable to Julien, lasted the whole day; Mathilde formed a charming image of the brief instants during which she had loved him, she regretted them.
In fact, she said to herself, my passion for that poor boy lasted in his eyes only from an hour after midnight, when I saw him arrive by his ladder with all his pistols in the side pocket of his coat, until nine o'clock in the morning. It is a quarter of an hour later, while hearing mass at Sainte-Valère, that I began to think he was going to consider himself my master, and that he might well try to make me obey in the name of terror.
After dinner, Mlle de La Mole, far from fleeing Julien, spoke to him and in some way engaged him to follow her into the garden; he obeyed. This trial was lacking to him. Mathilde yielded, without quite realizing it, to the love she was recovering for him. She found an extreme pleasure in walking at his side; it was with curiosity that she looked at those hands which, in the morning, had seized the sword to kill her.
However, after all that had passed, there could no longer be any question of their former conversation.
Little by little, Mathilde began to speak to him with intimate confidence of the state of her heart. She found a singular voluptuousness in this kind of conversation; she came to relate to him at length the movements of passing enthusiasm she had once felt for M. de Croisenois, then for M. de Caylus...
'What! for M. de Caylus too!' cried Julien; and all the bitter jealousy of a discarded lover burst forth in that cry. Mathilde judged it thus, and was not at all offended.
She continued to torture Julien, detailing her former feelings in the most picturesque fashion, and with the accent of the most intimate truth. He saw that she was painting what lay before her eyes. He had the sorrow of remarking that, as she spoke, she made discoveries in her own heart.
The misfortune of jealousy cannot go further.
To suspect that a rival is loved is already cruel enough, but to see oneself told in detail of the love he inspires by the woman one adores is perhaps the height of sorrows.
Oh how were punished, in this instant, the movements of pride which had led Julien to prefer himself to the Caylus, to the Croisenois! With what intimate and felt unhappiness he exaggerated their slightest advantages! With what ardent good faith he despised himself!
Mathilde seemed to him a being above the divine; every word is weak to express the excess of his admiration. As he walked beside her, he glanced furtively at her hands, her arms, her queenly figure. He was on the point of falling at her feet, annihilated by love and misfortune, crying: Pity!
'And this person so beautiful, so superior to all, who once loved me, it is M. de Caylus she will no doubt soon love.'
Julien could not doubt the sincerity of Mlle de La Mole; the accent of truth was too evident in all she said. So that absolutely nothing might be lacking to his misfortune, there were moments when, by dint of occupying herself with the feelings she had once experienced for M. de Caylus, Mathilde came to speak of him as if she loved him currently. Certainly there was love in her accent; Julien saw it clearly.
His breast might have been flooded with molten lead and he would have suffered less. How, arrived at this excess of misfortune, could the poor boy guess that it was because she was speaking to him that Mlle de La Mole found so much pleasure in rethinking the stirrings of love she had once felt for M. de Caylus or M. de Croisenois?
Nothing could express Julien's torments. He listened to the detailed confidences of love felt for others, in that same lime-tree walk where, so few days before, he waited for an hour to strike so that he might enter her room. A human being cannot sustain misfortune to a higher degree.
This kind of cruel intimacy lasted eight long days. Mathilde sometimes seemed to seek, sometimes did not flee, the occasions to speak to him; and the subject of conversation, to which they both seemed to return with a kind of cruel voluptuousness, was the recounting of the feelings she had experienced for others: she told him of the letters she had written, she recalled even the words, she recited whole phrases. The last days, she seemed to contemplate Julien with a sort of malicious joy. His sufferings were a lively enjoyment for her; she saw in them the weakness of her tyrant, she could therefore permit herself to love him.
One sees that Julien had no experience of life; he had not even read novels; if he had been a little less awkward and had said with some coolness to this young girl, by him so adored and who made him such strange confidences:
'Admit that though I am not worth all those gentlemen, it is nevertheless me that you love...'
Perhaps she would have been happy to be seen through; at least success would have depended entirely on the grace with which Julien expressed this idea, and on the moment he chose. In any case, he would have emerged well, and with advantage to himself, from a situation which was becoming monotonous in Mathilde's eyes.
'And you no longer love me, I who adore you!' said him one day, after a long walk, Julien distraught with love and misfortune.
This folly was about the greatest he could commit.
This word destroyed in a twinkling all the pleasure Mlle de La Mole found in speaking to him of the state of her heart. She began to wonder that after what had passed he did not take offense at her tales; she went so far as to imagine, at the moment he spoke this silly speech, that perhaps he no longer loved her. Pride has no doubt extinguished his love, she said to herself. He is not a man to see himself with impunity preferred to beings like Caylus, de Luz, Croisenois, whom he admits are so superior to him. No, I shall no longer see him at my feet!
The preceding days, in the naivety of his misfortune, Julien had made him a passionate eulogy of these gentlemen's brilliant qualities; he went so far as to exaggerate them. This nuance had not escaped Mlle de La Mole, she was astonished at it. The frenetic soul of Julien, in praising a rival he believed loved, sympathized with his happiness.
His word so frank, but so stupid, changed all in an instant; Mathilde, sure of being loved, despised him perfectly.
She was walking with him at the moment of this blunder; she left him, and her last glance expressed the most awful contempt. Back in the salon, all evening she looked at him no more. The next day this contempt occupied all her heart; there was no longer any question of the movement which, for eight days, had made her find so much pleasure in treating Julien as the most intimate friend; his sight was disagreeable to her. Mathilde's sensation soon went as far as disgust; nothing could express the excess of contempt she felt on encountering him before her eyes.
Julien had understood nothing of all that had passed in Mathilde's heart, but his clear-sighted vanity discerned the contempt. He had the good sense to appear before her as rarely as possible, and never to look at her.
But it was not without mortal pain that he in some way deprived himself of her presence. He believed he felt his misfortune increased still further. The courage of a man's heart cannot go further, he said to himself. He spent his life at a small window in the garrets of the hotel; the shutter was carefully closed, and from there at least he could catch sight of Mlle de La Mole in the moments when she appeared in the garden.
What became of him when, after dinner, he saw her walking with M. de Caylus, M. de Luz or some other for whom she had once avowed some stirring of love?
Julien had no idea of such intensity of misfortune; he was on the point of crying out, this soul so closed was at last overturned from top to bottom.
Every thought foreign to Mlle de La Mole had become odious to him; he was incapable of writing the simplest letters.
'You are mad,' the marquis said to him one morning.
Julien, trembling to be discovered, spoke of illness and managed to be believed. Happily for him, M. de La Mole joked at dinner about his approaching journey: Mathilde understood it might be very long. It was already several days since Julien fled her, and the brilliant young men who had all that was lacking to this pale and somber being once loved by her, no longer had the power to draw her from her reverie.
'A common girl,' she said to herself, 'would have sought the man she prefers among those young men who attract all eyes in a salon; but one of the characters of genius is not to drag its thought in the rut traced by the vulgar.
'Companion of a man such as Julien, to whom only the fortune I have is lacking, I shall continually excite attention, I shall not pass unnoticed in life. Far from constantly fearing a revolution like my cousins, who, for fear of the people, dare not scold a postilion who drives them badly, I shall be sure to play a role, and a great one, for the man I have chosen has character and boundless ambition. What does he lack? friends, money? I give him all that. But her thought treated Julien a little as an inferior being whose fortune one makes when and how one wishes, and whose love one does not even permit oneself to doubt.'
CHAPTER XIX
THE COMIC OPERA
O how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day; Which now shows all the beauty of the sun And by and by a cloud takes all away!
SHAKESPEARE.
Occupied with the future and the singular role she hoped for, Mathilde soon came to regret the dry and metaphysical discussions she had once had with Julien. Weary of such lofty thoughts, sometimes too she regretted the moments of happiness she had found near him; these last memories did not appear without remorse, she was overwhelmed by them at certain moments.
'But if one has a weakness,' she said to herself, 'it is worthy of a girl such as I to forget her duties only for a man of merit; it will not be said that it was his pretty moustaches or his grace in mounting a horse that seduced me, but his profound discussions on the future awaiting France, his ideas on the resemblance that the events about to fall upon us may have with the revolution of 1688 in England. I have been seduced,' she answered her remorse, 'I am a weak woman, but at least I have not been led astray like a doll by outward advantages.'
'If there is a revolution, why should not Julien Sorel play the role of Roland, and I that of Mme Roland? I prefer that role to that of Mme de Staël: the immorality of conduct will be an obstacle in our century. Certainly no one will reproach me with a second weakness; I should die of shame.'
Mathilde's reveries were not all as grave, it must be admitted, as the thoughts we have just transcribed.
She looked at Julien furtively, she found a charming grace in his slightest actions.
'No doubt,' she said to herself, 'I have succeeded in destroying in him even the smallest idea he had of his rights.
'The air of unhappiness and profound passion with which the poor boy said that naive word of love to me in the garden, eight days ago, proves it abundantly; it must be owned I was very extraordinary to take offense at a word where so much respect, so much passion shone. Am I not his wife? His word was natural, and, it must be owned, it was very amiable. Julien still loved me after endless conversations, in which I spoke to him, and with much cruelty I confess it, only of stirrings of love that the boredom of the life I lead had inspired in me for those young men of society of whom he is so jealous! Ah! if he knew how little dangerous they are for him! how beside him they seem to me etiolated and pale copies one of another.'
As she made these reflections, Mathilde, to give herself a composed air before her mother who was looking at her, traced at random some pencil strokes on a leaf of her album. One of the profiles she had just finished astonished her, enraptured her: it resembled Julien in a striking way. 'It is the voice of heaven! here is one of the miracles of love,' she cried in transport. 'Without suspecting it, I am drawing his portrait.'
She fled to her room, locked herself in, took up colors, applied herself greatly, seriously sought to make Julien's portrait, but she could not succeed; the profile traced at random always proved the most likeness; Mathilde was delighted, she saw in it an evident proof of great passion.
She left her album only very late, when the marquise sent for her to go to the Italian opera. She had but one idea, to seek Julien with her eyes to have her mother engage him to accompany them.
He did not appear; the ladies had only vulgar beings in their box. During the whole first act of the opera, Mathilde dreamed of the man she loved with the transports of the liveliest passion; but in the second act, a maxim of love sung, it must be admitted, to a melody worthy of Cimarosa, penetrated her heart. The heroine of the opera said: I must punish myself for the excess of adoration I feel for him, I love him too much!
From the moment she heard this sublime cantilena, all that existed in the world vanished for Mathilde. She was spoken to, she did not answer; her mother scolded her, she could scarcely bring herself to look at her. Her ecstasy reached a state of exaltation and passion comparable to the most violent movements that, for some days, Julien had experienced for her. The cantilena, full of a divine grace, to which was sung the maxim that seemed to her to have so striking an application to her position, occupied every instant when she was not thinking directly of Julien. Thanks to her love of music, she was that evening like Mme de Rênal always was in thinking of Julien. Love of the head has more wit, no doubt, than true love, but it has only moments of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it judges itself unceasingly; far from leading thought astray it is built only by force of thoughts.
Back at the house, whatever Mme de La Mole might say, Mathilde pretended to have a fever and spent part of the night repeating this cantilena on her piano. She sang the words of the celebrated air that had charmed her:
_Devo punirmi devo punirmi,_ _Se troppo amai_
etc.
The result of this night of madness was that she believed herself to have triumphed over her love. (This page will harm the unhappy author in more than one way. Frozen souls will accuse him of indecency. He does no injury to the young persons who shine in the salons of Paris, in supposing that a single one of them is susceptible of the movements of madness which degrade Mathilde's character. This personage is entirely imaginary, and even imagined well outside the social habits which, among all centuries, will assure so distinguished a rank to the civilization of the nineteenth century.
It is not prudence that is lacking to the young girls who have been the ornament of this winter's balls.
Nor do I think one can accuse them of too much despising a brilliant fortune, horses, fine estates and all that assures an agreeable position in the world. Far from seeing only boredom in all these advantages, they are in general the object of the most constant desires, and, if there is passion in the courts, it is for them.
It is not love either which takes charge of the fortune of young men gifted with some talent like Julien; they attach themselves with an invincible grip to a clique, and when the clique makes its fortune, all the good things of society rain down upon them. Woe to the man of study who is of no clique, he will be reproached even for small and very uncertain successes, and high virtue will triumph in robbing him. Why, sir, a novel is a mirror that travels along a great road. At times it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at times the mire of the road's puddles. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror! Accuse rather the great road where the puddle is, and still more the road inspector who lets the water stagnate and the puddle form.
Now that it is well agreed that Mathilde's character is impossible in our century no less prudent than virtuous, I fear less to irritate by continuing the account of the follies of this amiable girl.)
During the whole of the next day, she watched for occasions to assure herself of her triumph over her mad passion. Her great aim was to displease Julien in everything; but none of her movements escaped him.
Julien was too unhappy and above all too agitated to guess a passion maneuver so complicated; still less could he see all that was favorable to him in it: he was its victim; never perhaps had his misfortune been so excessive. His actions were so little under the direction of his mind, that if some melancholy philosopher had said to him: Think to profit rapidly from the dispositions which are about to be favorable to you; in this kind of love of the head, as seen in Paris, the same manner of being cannot last more than two days, he would not have understood it. But however exalted he was, Julien had honor. His first duty was discretion; he understood it. To ask counsel, to tell his torment to the first comer would have been a happiness comparable to that of the wretch who, crossing a flaming desert, receives from heaven a draught of icy water. He knew the peril, he feared to answer with a torrent of tears the indiscreet one who questioned him; he locked himself in his room.
He saw Mathilde walk long in the garden; when at last she had left it, he went down; he approached a rosebush where she had taken a flower.
The night was dark, he could give himself up to all his misfortune without fear of being seen. It was evident to him that Mlle de La Mole loved one of those young officers with whom she had just spoken so gaily. She had loved him, him, but she had known his little worth.
'And in fact, I have very little!' said Julien to himself with full conviction; 'I am on the whole a very flat being, very vulgar, very boring to others, very insupportable to myself.' He was mortally disgusted with all his good qualities, with all the things he had loved with enthusiasm; and in this state of _overturned imagination_, he undertook to judge life with his imagination. This error is that of a superior man.
Several times the idea of suicide presented itself to him; this image was full of charm; it was like a delicious rest, it was the glass of icy water offered to the wretch who, in the desert, dies of thirst and heat.
'My death will increase the contempt she has for me!' he cried. 'What a memory I shall leave!'
Fallen into this last abyss of misfortune, a human being has no resource but courage. Julien had not enough genius to say to himself: One must dare; but as evening fell, he looked at the window of Mathilde's room, he saw through the shutters that she was putting out her light: he pictured to himself that charming room he had seen, alas! once in his life. His imagination went no further.
One o'clock struck; to hear the sound of the bell and say to himself: I am going up with the ladder, was but an instant.
It was the flash of genius; the good reasons arrived in crowds. 'Can I be more unhappy!' he said to himself. He ran to the ladder, the gardener had chained it. With the help of the dog of one of his small pistols, which he broke, Julien, animated at that moment with superhuman strength, twisted one of the links of the chain that held the ladder; he was master of it in a few minutes, and placed it against Mathilde's window.
'She will be angry, overwhelm me with contempt, what does it matter? I give her a kiss, a last kiss, I go up to my room and kill myself...; my lips will touch her cheek before dying!'
He flew up the ladder, he knocks at the shutter; after some moments Mathilde hears him, she wants to open the shutter, the ladder prevents it: Julien clings to the iron hook meant to hold the shutter open, and, at the risk of hurling himself down a thousand times, gives a violent shake to the ladder and displaces it a little. Mathilde can open the shutter.
He throws himself into the room more dead than alive:
'Is it indeed you!' said she, throwing herself into his arms.
* * * * *
Who could describe the excess of Julien's happiness? That of Mathilde was almost equal.
She spoke against herself, she denounced herself to him.
'Punish me for my atrocious pride,' she said to him, squeezing him in her arms so as to stifle him; 'you are my master, I am your slave, I must ask your pardon on my knees for having wished to rebel.'
She left his arms to fall at his feet.
'Yes, you are my master,' she said to him again, drunk with happiness and love; 'reign forever over me, punish severely your slave when she would rebel.'
At another moment, she tears herself from his arms, lights the candle, and Julien has all the trouble in the world to prevent her from cutting off a whole side of her hair.
'I wish to remind myself,' she said to him, 'that I am your servant: if ever an execrable pride comes to lead me astray, show me these hairs and say: It is no longer a question of love, it is not a matter of the emotion your soul may feel at this moment, you have sworn to obey, obey on your honor.'
But it is wiser to suppress the description of such a degree of aberration and felicity.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”