Part 32

Julien's virtue was equal to his happiness.

"I must go down by the ladder," he said to Mathilde, when he saw the dawn appearing over the distant chimneys to the east, beyond the gardens. "The sacrifice I impose upon myself is worthy of you; I am depriving myself of a few hours of the most astonishing happiness a human soul can taste. It is a sacrifice I make to your reputation. If you know my heart, you understand the violence I am doing to myself. Will you always be for me what you are at this moment? But honor speaks; that is enough. Learn that, at the time of our first meeting, all suspicions were not directed against thieves. M. de La Mole had guards posted in the garden. M. de Croisenois is surrounded by spies; they know what he does every night..."

"The poor boy!" cried Mathilde, and she burst out laughing. Her mother and a maid were awakened; suddenly someone spoke to her through the door. Julien looked at her; she turned pale, scolding the chambermaid, and did not deign to address a word to her mother.

"But if they think of opening the window, they'll see the ladder!" Julien said to her.

He clasped her once more in his arms, threw himself upon the ladder, and slid rather than descended; in a moment he was on the ground.

Three seconds later, the ladder was beneath the lime-tree walk, and Mathilde's honor was saved. Julien, coming to himself, found he was all bloody and nearly naked; he had wounded himself sliding down without caution.

Excess of happiness had restored all the energy of his character: had twenty men presented themselves, to attack them alone at that instant would have been but an added pleasure. Fortunately his military virtue was not put to the test: he laid the ladder in its usual place; he replaced the chain that held it; he did not forget to return and erase the imprint the ladder had left in the bed of exotic flowers beneath Mathilde's window.

As, in the darkness, he passed his hand over the soft earth to assure himself the imprint was entirely effaced, he felt something fall upon his hands; it was a whole side of Mathilde's hair, which she had cut off and was throwing to him.

She was at her window.

"This is what your handmaid sends you," she said, rather loudly; "it is the sign of eternal obedience. I renounce the exercise of my reason; be my master."

Julien, vanquished, was on the point of taking up the ladder again and climbing back to her. At length reason prevailed.

To re-enter the house from the garden was no easy matter. He succeeded in forcing the door of a cellar; once inside the house, he was obliged to force open, as silently as possible, the door of his room. In his confusion he had left, in the little room he had so hastily abandoned, even the key which was in the pocket of his coat. "Provided," he thought, "she thinks to hide all this mortal spoil!"

At length, fatigue overcame happiness, and, as the sun rose, he fell into a deep sleep.

The breakfast bell had great difficulty in waking him; he appeared in the dining room. Soon after, Mathilde entered. Julien's pride had a most happy moment in seeing the love that shone in the eyes of this person, so beautiful and surrounded by so many homages; but soon his prudence had cause to be alarmed.

Under pretext of the little time she had had to attend to her coiffure, Mathilde had arranged her hair so that Julien could at a glance perceive the full extent of the sacrifice she had made for him in cutting it the night before. If so beautiful a face could have been spoiled by anything, Mathilde would have accomplished it; a whole side of her fine ash-blonde hair was cut unevenly, half an inch from the scalp.

At breakfast, Mathilde's whole manner answered to this first indiscretion. One would have said she took it as a task to make known to everyone the mad passion she had for Julien. Happily, that day, M. de La Mole and the marquise were much occupied with a promotion of blue ribbons which was about to take place, and in which M. de Chaulnes was not included. Toward the end of the meal, it happened that Mathilde, who was speaking to Julien, called him "my master." He blushed to the whites of his eyes.

Whether by chance or design on the part of Mlle de La Mole, Mathilde was not alone for a single instant that day. In the evening, passing from the dining room to the salon, she found, however, the moment to say to Julien:

"All my plans are overturned. Will you believe it is a pretext on my part? Mamma has just decided that one of her women shall spend the night in my apartment."

This day passed like a flash of lightning; Julien was at the height of happiness. As early as seven in the morning the next day, he was installed in the library; he hoped Mlle de La Mole would deign to appear there; he had written her an endless letter.

He did not see her until many hours later, at breakfast. She was, that day, coiffed with the greatest care; a marvellous art had undertaken to hide the place of the cut hair. She looked at Julien once or twice, but with polite and calm eyes; there was no more question of calling him "my master."

Julien's astonishment kept him from breathing... Mathilde almost reproached herself for all she had done for him.

On thinking it over maturely, she had decided that he was a being, if not altogether common, at least not sufficiently out of the ordinary to merit all the strange follies she had dared for him. On the whole, she scarcely thought of love; that day, she was weary of loving.

As for Julien, the movements of his heart were those of a child of sixteen. Hideous doubt, astonishment, despair occupied him by turns during that breakfast which seemed to him of eternal duration.

As soon as he could decently leave the table, he precipitated himself rather than ran to the stable, saddled his horse himself, and set off at a gallop; he feared to dishonor himself by some weakness. "I must kill my heart with physical fatigue," he said to himself, galloping through the woods of Meudon. "What have I done, what have I said to deserve such disgrace?"

"I must do nothing, say nothing today," he thought, re-entering the hotel; "be dead in body as I am in spirit." Julien no longer saw; it is his corpse that still stirs.

CHAPTER XX

THE JAPANESE VASE

His heart does not at first comprehend the excess of its misfortune: it is more troubled than moved. But as reason returns, he feels the depth of his unhappiness. All the pleasures of life are annihilated for him; he can feel only the sharp pangs of the despair that tears him. But what use to speak of physical pain? What pain, felt by the body alone, is comparable to this?

JEAN-PAUL.

The dinner bell rang; Julien had only time to dress. He found in the salon Mathilde, who was urging her brother and M. de Croisenois to engage them not to go spend the evening at Suresnes, at the house of Mme la maréchale de Fervaques.

It would have been difficult to be more seductive and more amiable toward them. After dinner appeared MM. de Luz, de Caylus, and several of their friends. One would have said that Mlle de La Mole had resumed, with the cult of fraternal friendship, that of the most exact conventions. Although the weather was charming that evening, she insisted on not going into the garden; she wished them not to stray from the bergère where Mme de La Mole was seated. The blue sofa was the center of the group, as in winter.

Mathilde was out of humor with the garden, or at least it seemed perfectly tedious to her: it was linked to the memory of Julien.

Misfortune diminishes the spirit. Our hero had the awkwardness to stop near that little straw chair which formerly had been witness to such brilliant triumphs. Today no one spoke to him; his presence was as if unnoticed, and worse still. Those of Mlle de La Mole's friends who were placed near him at the end of the sofa, affected in some sort to turn their backs on him—at least such was his idea.

"This is a court disgrace," he thought. He wished to study for an instant the people who pretended to overwhelm him with their disdain.

The uncle of M. de Luz held a great office near the king, whence it resulted that this handsome officer placed at the beginning of his conversation, with each new interlocutor, this piquant particular: his uncle had set out at seven o'clock for Saint-Cloud, and meant to sleep there that night. This detail was introduced with all the appearance of good-nature, but it always came in.

In observing M. de Croisenois with the severe eye of misfortune, Julien remarked the extreme influence that this amiable and good young man attributed to occult causes. It was to the point that he grew sad and ill-humored if he saw an event of some importance attributed to a simple and wholly natural cause. "There is a beginning of madness there," said Julien to himself. "This character has a striking resemblance to that of Emperor Alexander, as the Prince Korasoff described him to me. During the first year of his stay in Paris, the poor Julien, fresh from the seminary, dazzled by the graces so new to him of all these amiable young men, could only admire them. Their true character was only beginning to reveal itself to his eyes."

"I am playing here an unworthy role," he suddenly thought. It was a question of leaving his little straw chair in a way that was not too awkward. He wished to invent; he asked something new of an imagination wholly occupied elsewhere. He had to have recourse to memory; his, it must be admitted, was poor in resources of this kind; the poor boy had still very little practice, and so he was of a perfect awkwardness, remarked by all, when he rose to leave the salon. The misfortune was too evident in his whole manner. He had for three quarters of an hour been playing the role of a subordinate bore, whom one does not take the trouble to hide from what one thinks of him.

The critical observations he had just made upon his rivals, nevertheless prevented him from taking his misfortune too tragically; he had, to sustain his pride, the memory of what had passed the day before last. "Whatever their thousand advantages over me," he thought, entering the garden alone, "Mathilde has not been for any of them what, twice in my life, she deigned to be for me."

His wisdom went no further. He understood not at all the character of the singular person whom chance had just made absolute mistress of all his happiness.

He confined himself, the following day, to killing with fatigue himself and his horse. He no longer tried, in the evening, to approach the blue sofa, to which Mathilde remained faithful. He noticed that Count Norbert did not even deign to look at him when meeting him in the house. "He must be doing himself strange violence," he thought, "he naturally so polite."

As for Julien, sleep would have been happiness. Despite physical fatigue, too seductive memories began to invade all his imagination. He had not the genius to see that, by his long rides on horseback in the woods around Paris, acting only upon himself and in no way upon the heart or mind of Mathilde, he left to chance the disposition of his fate.

It seemed to him that one thing would bring infinite relief to his sorrow: it would be to speak to Mathilde. But what, then, would he dare say to her?

It was to this that, one morning at seven o'clock, he was dreaming profoundly, when suddenly he saw her enter the library.

"I know, sir, that you desire to speak to me."

"Great God! who told you so?"

"I know that you desire it; what matters it to you? If you lack honor, you may ruin me, or at least attempt it; but this danger, which I do not believe real, will certainly not prevent me from being sincere. I no longer love you, sir; my mad imagination deceived me..."

At this terrible blow, distraught with love and unhappiness, Julien tried to justify himself. Nothing more absurd. Does one justify oneself for displeasing? But reason no longer had any empire over his conduct. A blind instinct pushed him to delay the decision of his fate. It seemed to him that as long as he spoke, all was not finished. Mathilde did not listen to his words; their sound irritated her; she could not conceive that he should have the audacity to interrupt her.

Remorse of virtue and remorse of pride made her, that morning, equally unhappy. She was in some sort annihilated by the frightful idea of having given rights over herself to a little abbé, son of a peasant. "It is about," she said to herself, in moments when she exaggerated her misfortune, "as if I had to reproach myself with a weakness for one of the footmen."

In bold and proud characters, there is but a step from anger against oneself to outburst against others; fits of fury are in this case a keen pleasure.

In an instant, Mlle de La Mole reached the point of overwhelming Julien with the most excessive marks of contempt. She had infinite wit, and that wit triumphed in the art of torturing vanities and inflicting cruel wounds upon them.

For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the action of a superior mind animated against him with the most violent hatred. Far from thinking in the least of defending himself in that instant, his mobile imagination came even to despise itself. Hearing himself overwhelmed with such cruel marks of contempt, and calculated with so much wit to destroy any good opinion he might have of himself, it seemed to him that Mathilde was right, and that she did not say enough.

As for her, she found a delicious pleasure of pride in thus punishing herself and him for the adoration she had felt a few days before.

She had no need to invent and think for the first time the cruel things she addressed to him with such complaisance. She did but repeat what, for eight days, the advocate of the party contrary to love had been saying in her heart.

Each word centupled Julien's frightful misfortune. He wished to flee; Mlle de La Mole detained him by the arm with authority.

"Deign to observe," he said to her, "that you are speaking very loud; you will be heard in the next room."

"What matter!" replied Mlle de La Mole proudly. "Who would dare say he heard me? I wish to cure your little vanity forever of the ideas it may have formed concerning me."

When Julien could leave the library, he was so astonished that he felt his misfortune the less. "Well! she no longer loves me," he repeated to himself, speaking aloud as if to learn his position. "It appears she loved me eight or ten days, and I shall love her all my life."

"Is it possible—she was nothing! nothing to my heart, so few days ago!"

Tides of pride flooded Mathilde's heart; she had then been able to break forever! To triumph so completely over so powerful an inclination would render her perfectly happy. "Thus this little gentleman will understand, and once for all, that he has and will have no power over me." She was so happy that she really had no love left at that moment.

After so atrocious, so humiliating a scene, with a being less passionate than Julien, love would have become impossible. Without departing a single instant from what she owed herself, Mlle de La Mole had addressed to him those disagreeable things, so well calculated, that they may pass for truth, even when remembered with cold blood.

The conclusion Julien drew in the first moment of so astonishing a scene, was that Mathilde had infinite pride. He firmly believed all was finished forever between them, and yet the next day, at breakfast, he was awkward and timid before her. It was a fault that had not till then been imputed to him. In small as in great things, he knew clearly what he ought and wished to do, and executed it.

That day, after breakfast, as Mme de La Mole asked him for a seditious yet rather rare pamphlet, which her curé had that morning brought her in secret, Julien, in taking it from a console, let fall an old blue porcelain vase, hideous to a degree.

Mme de La Mole rose with a cry of distress, and came to consider closely the ruins of her cherished vase. "It was old Japan," said she; "it came to me from my great-aunt, the abbess of Chelles; it was a present from the Dutch to the Duke of Orléans, Regent, who had given it to his daughter..."

Mathilde had followed her mother's movement, delighted to see this blue vase broken, which seemed to her horribly ugly. Julien was silent and not too troubled; he saw Mlle de La Mole very near him.

"This vase," he said to her, "is forever destroyed; so is a sentiment which was once master of my heart; I beg you to accept my apologies for all the follies it made me commit"; and he went out.

"One would really say," said Mme de La Mole, as he went off, "that this M. Sorel is proud and content with what he has just done."

This word fell directly upon Mathilde's heart. "It is true," she said to herself, "my mother has guessed rightly; such is the feeling that animates him." Only then ceased the joy of the scene she had made him the day before. "Well, all is finished," she said to herself with apparent calm; "I have a great example left; this error is frightful and humiliating! It will earn me wisdom for the rest of my life."

"Why did I not speak true?" thought Julien. "Why does the love I had for this madwoman still torment me?"

This love, far from dying out as he had hoped, made rapid progress. She is mad, it is true, he said to himself; is she less adorable for that? is it possible to be prettier? Was not all that the most elegant civilization can offer of lively pleasures united, as if in rivalry, in Mlle de La Mole? These memories of past happiness seized upon Julien, and rapidly destroyed all the work of reason.

Reason struggles in vain against memories of this kind; its severe essays but increase their charm.

Twenty-four hours after the breaking of the old Japan vase, Julien was decidedly one of the most unhappy of men.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SECRET NOTE

For all that I relate, I have seen; and if I may have been mistaken in seeing it, certainly I do not deceive you in telling it you.

Letter to the Author.

The marquis had him summoned; M. de La Mole seemed rejuvenated, his eye was bright.

"Let us speak a little of your memory," he said to Julien; "they say it is prodigious! Could you learn by heart four pages and go recite them in London? but without changing a word!..."

The marquis was fretfully crumpling the day's _Quotidienne_, and sought in vain to disguise a very serious air such as Julien had never seen in him, even when the Frilair trial was in question.

Julien already had enough experience to feel he ought to appear quite duped by the light tone shown him.

"This number of the _Quotidienne_ is perhaps not very amusing; but, if Monsieur le marquis permits, tomorrow morning I shall have the honor of reciting it to him entire."

"What! even the advertisements?"

"Most exactly, and without a word missing."

"Do you give me your word?" resumed the marquis with sudden gravity.

"Yes, sir; the fear of failing in it alone could trouble my memory."

"It is that I forgot to put you this question yesterday: I do not ask your oath never to repeat what you are about to hear; I know you too well to do you that injury. I have answered for you; I am going to take you into a salon where twelve persons will assemble; you will take note of what each says.

"Be not uneasy; it will not be a confused conversation; each will speak in turn—I do not mean in order," added the marquis, resuming the shrewd and light air so natural to him. "While we speak, you will write some twenty pages; you will come back here with me, we will reduce these twenty pages to four. It is these four pages that you will recite to me tomorrow morning, instead of the whole number of the _Quotidienne_. You will set off immediately after; you will have to ride post like a young man travelling for his pleasure. Your aim will be to be noticed by no one. You will arrive at the residence of a great personage. There, you will need more address. It is a question of deceiving all who surround him; for among his secretaries, among his domestics, there are men sold to our enemies, and who lie in wait for our agents on the road to intercept them. You will have an insignificant letter of recommendation.

"At the moment His Excellency looks at you, you will draw forth this watch of mine which I lend you for the journey. Keep it about you; it is always so much done—give me yours.

"The Duke himself will deign to write under your dictation the four pages you shall have learned by heart.

"That done, but no sooner—mark this well—you may, if His Excellency questions you, relate the session you are about to attend.

"What will keep you from being bored along the journey, is that between Paris and the minister's residence there are people who would ask nothing better than to fire a shot at M. l'abbé Sorel. Then his mission is ended, and I see a great delay; for, my dear, how should we know of your death? your zeal cannot go so far as to inform us of it.

"Run at once to buy a complete outfit," resumed the marquis with a serious air. "Put yourself in the fashion of two years ago. This evening you must look little cared-for. In travel, on the contrary, you will be as usual. This surprises you, your suspicion guesses? Yes, my friend, one of the venerable personages you are about to hear opine is quite capable of sending information, by means of which they may well give you at least opium, in the evening, in some good inn where you shall have asked for supper."

"It is better," said Julien, "to make thirty leagues more and not take the direct road. It is a question of Rome, I suppose..."

The marquis took an air of haughtiness and discontent such as Julien had not seen in him to that degree since Bray-le-Haut.

"That is what you will know, sir, when I judge it proper to tell you. I do not like questions."

"This was not one," resumed Julien with effusion; "I swear to you, sir, I was thinking aloud; I was searching in my mind for the safest road."

"Yes, it appears your mind was far away. Never forget that an ambassador, and of your age still, must not seem to force confidence."

Julien was much mortified; he was wrong. His self-love sought an excuse and found none.

"Understand, then," added M. de La Mole, "that one always appeals to one's heart when one has done some foolish thing."

An hour later, Julien was in the marquis's antechamber with a subordinate air, antique clothes, a cravat of doubtful white, and something of the tutor's assistant in his whole appearance.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”