Part 38

What was to be done? Julien asked himself, walking in the garden at midnight while M. de La Mole read that letter. Where is, 1st, my duty; 2nd, my interest? What I owe him is immense: without him I should have been a subordinate scoundrel, and not scoundrel enough not to be hated and persecuted by the others. He has made me a man of the world. My *necessary* knaveries will be 1st rarer, 2nd less ignoble. That is more than if he had given me a million. I owe him this cross and the appearance of diplomatic services which lift me out of the common rank.

If he held the pen to prescribe my conduct, what would he write?...

Julien was abruptly interrupted by the old valet of M. de La Mole.

"The marquis asks for you this instant, dressed or undressed."

The valet added in a low voice, walking beside Julien:

"The marquis is beside himself; mind yourself."

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE HELL OF WEAKNESS

In cutting this diamond a clumsy lapidary has taken from it some of its brightest sparks. In the Middle Ages, what do I say? still under Richelieu, the Frenchman had the strength to will.

MIRABEAU.

Julien found the marquis furious: for the first time in his life, perhaps, this nobleman was in bad taste; he overwhelmed Julien with every insult that came to his lips. Our hero was astonished, impatient, but his gratitude was not shaken. What fair projects long cherished in the depths of his thought the poor man sees crumble in an instant! But I owe it to him to answer him; my silence would increase his anger. The answer was supplied by the part of Tartuffe.

"_I am not an angel_... I have served you well, you have paid me generously... I was grateful, but I am twenty-two... In this house my thought was understood only by you and by that amiable person..."

"Monster!" cried the marquis. "Amiable! amiable! The day you found her amiable, you should have fled."

"I tried to; then I asked you to leave for Languedoc."

Weary of walking about in fury, the marquis, subdued by grief, threw himself into an armchair; Julien heard him say half aloud: "He is not a bad man."

"No, I am not a bad man toward you," cried Julien, falling at his knees.

But he felt extreme shame at this movement and rose again quickly.

The marquis was really beside himself. At the sight of this gesture he began again to overwhelm him with atrocious insults worthy of a hackney-coach driver. The novelty of these oaths was perhaps a distraction.

"What! my daughter to be called Mme Sorel! what! my daughter not to be a duchess!" Whenever these two ideas presented themselves as clearly, M. de La Mole was tortured and the movements of his soul were no longer voluntary. Julien feared to be beaten.

In the lucid intervals, and when the marquis began to grow used to his misfortune, he addressed reproaches to Julien that were quite reasonable:

"You should have fled, sir," he said to him. "It was your duty to flee... You are the last of men..."

Julien approached the table and wrote:

"_For a long time your life has been unbearable to me, I put an end to it. I pray the marquis to accept, with the expression of boundless gratitude, my apologies for the embarrassment that my death in his hotel may cause._"

"Let the marquis deign to run through this paper... Kill me," said Julien, "or have me killed by your valet. It is one in the morning; I am going to walk in the garden toward the back wall."

"Go to the devil," the marquis cried after him as he went.

I understand, thought Julien; he would not be sorry to see me spare his valet the trouble of my death... Let him kill me, so much the better, it is a satisfaction I offer him... But, zounds, I love life... I owe myself to my son.

This idea, which for the first time appeared so clearly to his imagination, occupied him wholly after the first minutes of walking given to the sense of danger.

This interest so new made of him a prudent being. I need advice to conduct myself with this fiery man... He has no reason, he is capable of anything. Fouqué is too far off, besides he would not understand the feelings of a heart such as the marquis's.

Count Altamira... Am I sure of eternal silence? My request for advice must not be an action and complicate my position. Alas! there remains to me only the gloomy abbé Pirard... His mind is narrowed by Jansenism... A knavish Jesuit would know the world, and would suit me better... M. Pirard is capable of beating me, at the mere statement of the crime.

The genius of Tartuffe came to Julien's aid: Well, I shall go and confess to him. Such was the last resolution he took in the garden, after debating two long hours. He no longer thought he might be surprised by a gunshot; sleep was coming over him.

The next day, very early in the morning, Julien was several leagues from Paris, knocking at the door of the severe Jansenist. He found, to his great astonishment, that he was not too surprised at his confidence.

"I perhaps have reproaches to make myself," said the abbé, more anxious than irritated. "I thought I had guessed this love... My friendship for you, poor little wretch, kept me from warning the father..."

"What will he do?" said Julien quickly. (He loved the abbé at that moment, and a scene would have been very painful to him.)

"I see three courses," continued Julien: "1st, M. de La Mole may have me put to death, and he told of the suicide letter he had left with the marquis. 2nd, Have me shot in a duel by Count Norbert, who would challenge me.

"You would accept?" said the abbé, furious, and rising.

"You do not let me finish. Certainly I shall never fire upon the son of my benefactor.

"3rd, He may send me away. If he says to me: Go to Edinburgh, to New York, I shall obey. Then the condition of Mlle de La Mole may be hidden; but I shall not suffer my son to be suppressed."

"That will be, doubt it not, the first idea of that corrupt man..."

In Paris, Mathilde was in despair. She had seen her father toward seven o'clock. He had shown her Julien's letter; she trembled lest he had thought it noble to end his life: And without my permission? she said to herself with a grief that was anger.

"If he is dead, I shall die," she said to her father. "You will be the cause of his death... You may rejoice at it perhaps... But I swear to his shade, first I shall go into mourning, and be publicly _Mme widow Sorel_; I shall send my cards, count on that... You will find me neither pusillanimous nor cowardly."

Her love went to madness. In his turn, M. de La Mole was disconcerted.

He began to see events with some reason. At luncheon, Mathilde did not appear. The marquis was delivered from an immense weight and above all flattered, when he perceived that she had said nothing to her mother.

Toward noon Julien arrived. The sound of the horse's step was heard resounding in the court. Julien alighted. Mathilde had him called, and threw herself into his arms almost in sight of her maid. Julien was not very grateful for this transport; he came out quite diplomatic and calculating from his long conference with abbé Pirard. His imagination was extinguished by the calculation of possibilities. Mathilde, tears in her eyes, told him she had seen his suicide letter.

"My father may change his mind; do me the pleasure of leaving this instant for Villequier. Remount your horse, leave the hotel before they rise from table."

As Julien did not lose his astonished and cold air she had a fit of tears.

"Let me conduct our affairs," she cried with transport, and clasping him in her arms. "You know well it is not voluntarily that I separate from you. Write under cover to my maid, that the address be in a strange hand; I will write you volumes. Adieu! flee."

This last word wounded Julien; he obeyed, however. It is fatal, he thought, that, even in their best moments, these people find the secret of offending me.

Mathilde resisted with firmness all the prudent plans of her father. She would never establish the negotiation on other bases than these: She would be Mme Sorel, and live poorly with her husband in Switzerland, or at her father's in Paris. She put far from her the proposal of a clandestine confinement.

"Then would begin for me the possibility of calumny and dishonor. Two months after the marriage, I shall go traveling with my husband, and it will be easy for us to suppose that my son was born at a fitting time."

At first met with transports of anger, this firmness ended by giving the marquis doubts.

In a moment of tenderness:

"See!" he said to his daughter, "here is an assignment of ten thousand livres of income; send it to your Julien, and let him put me very quickly in the impossibility of taking it back."

To _obey_ Mathilde, whose love of command he knew, Julien had made forty useless leagues: he was at Villequier, settling the accounts of the farmers; this bounty of the marquis was the occasion of his return. He went to ask shelter of abbé Pirard, who, during his absence, had become the most useful ally of Mathilde. Whenever he was questioned by the marquis, he proved to him that any other course than a public marriage would be a crime in the eyes of God.

"And happily," added the abbé, "the wisdom of the world here agrees with religion. Could one count for an instant, with the fiery character of Mlle de La Mole, on the secret she would not have imposed on herself? If the frank march of a public marriage is not admitted, society will occupy itself much longer with this strange misalliance. All must be told at once, without appearance or reality of the least mystery."

"It is true," said the pensive marquis. "On this system, to speak of this marriage after three days becomes a repetition of a man who has no ideas. One would have to profit by some great anti-Jacobin measure of the government and slip in incognito in its train."

Two or three friends of M. de La Mole thought like abbé Pirard. The great obstacle, in their eyes, was the decided character of Mathilde. But after so many fine reasonings, the soul of the marquis could not accustom itself to renouncing the hope of a stool of state for his daughter.

His memory and his imagination were nourished by the tricks and falsehoods of all kinds which were still possible in his youth. To yield to necessity, to fear the law, seemed to him absurd and dishonoring for a man of his rank. He paid dearly now for the enchanting reveries he had allowed himself for ten years on the future of this beloved daughter.

Who could have foreseen it? he said to himself. A daughter of so haughty a character, of so lofty a genius, prouder than I of the name she bears! whose hand was asked of me in advance by all that is most illustrious in France!

One must renounce all prudence. This century is made to confound everything; we are marching toward chaos.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A MAN OF WIT

The prefect walking on his horse said to himself: Why should I not be minister, president of the council, duke? Here is how I would make war... By this means I would throw the innovators into irons...

LE GLOBE

No argument avails to destroy the empire of ten years of agreeable reveries. The marquis did not find it reasonable to be angry, but could not resolve to forgive. If this Julien could die by accident! he sometimes said to himself. Thus this saddened imagination found some relief in pursuing the most absurd chimeras. They paralyzed the influence of the wise reasonings of abbé Pirard. A month passed thus without the negotiation making a step.

In this family affair, as in those of politics, the marquis had brilliant insights of which he grew enthusiastic for three days. Then, a plan of conduct did not please him because it was supported by good reasons; but reasons found favor in his eyes only insofar as they supported his favorite plan. For three days, he worked with all the ardor and enthusiasm of a poet, to bring things to a certain position; the next day, he thought no more of it.

At first Julien was disconcerted by the marquis's slowness; but, after some weeks, he began to guess that M. de La Mole had, in this affair, no fixed plan.

Mme de La Mole and all the house believed that Julien was traveling in the province for the administration of the lands; he was hidden in the presbytery of abbé Pirard, and saw Mathilde almost every day; she, every morning, went to spend an hour with her father, but sometimes they were whole weeks without speaking of the affair that occupied all their thoughts.

"I do not wish to know where that man is," the marquis said to her one day; "send him this letter." Mathilde read:

"The lands of Languedoc yield 20,600 fr. I give 10,600 fr. to my daughter, and 10,000 fr. to M. Julien Sorel. I give the lands themselves, understand. Tell the notary to draw two separate deeds of gift, and bring them to me tomorrow; after which, no more relations between us. Ah! Sir, should I have expected all this?

"_The Marquis de_ LA MOLE."

"I thank you very much," said Mathilde gaily. "We shall settle at the château of Aiguillon, between Agen and Marmande. They say it is a country as beautiful as Italy."

This gift surprised Julien extremely. He was no longer the severe and cold man we have known. The destiny of his son absorbed beforehand all his thoughts. This unforeseen fortune, and quite considerable for so poor a man, made of him an ambitious man. He saw himself, for his wife or for himself, 36,000 livres of income. For Mathilde, all her feelings were absorbed in her adoration for her husband, for thus her pride always called Julien. Her great, her only ambition was to have her marriage acknowledged. She spent her life exaggerating to herself the high prudence she had shown in linking her fate to that of a superior man. Personal merit was in fashion in her head.

The almost continual absence, the multiplicity of affairs, the little time one had to speak of love, came to complete the good effect of the wise policy formerly invented by Julien.

Mathilde ended by growing impatient at seeing so little the man she had managed to love really.

In a fit of humor, she wrote to her father, and began her letter like Othello:

That I preferred Julien to the pleasures that society offered the daughter of M. the marquis de La Mole, my choice proves it enough. These pleasures of consideration and petty vanity are naught to me. It is nearly six weeks that I live separated from my husband. That is enough to testify to you my respect. Before next Thursday, I shall leave my father's house. Your benefits have enriched us. No one knows my secret, save the respectable abbé Pirard. I shall go to him, he will marry us, and an hour after the ceremony we shall be on the road to Languedoc, and shall never reappear at Paris except by your orders. But what pierces my heart is that all this will make piquant anecdote against me, against you. The epigrams of a foolish public, cannot they oblige our excellent Norbert to seek a quarrel with Julien? In this circumstance, I know him, I should have no power over him. We should find in his soul the revolted plebeian. I beseech you on my knees, O my father! come assist at my marriage, in the church of M. Pirard, next Thursday. The piquancy of the malicious anecdote will be softened, and the life of your only son, that of my husband, will be assured, etc., etc.

The soul of the marquis was thrown by this letter into a strange embarrassment. He must then at last take a side. All the little habits, all the vulgar friends had lost their influence.

In this strange circumstance, the great traits of character, imprinted by the events of youth, resumed all their empire. The misfortunes of emigration had made of him a man of imagination. After having enjoyed for two years an immense fortune and all the distinctions of the court, 1790 had thrown him into the frightful miseries of the emigrants. This hard school had changed a soul of twenty-two years. At bottom, he was encamped amid his present riches, more than he was dominated by them. But this same imagination which had preserved his soul from the gangrene of gold, had cast him a prey to a mad passion to see his daughter decorated with a fine title. During the six weeks just elapsed, sometimes pushed by a caprice, the marquis had wished to enrich Julien; poverty seemed to him ignoble, dishonoring for him M. de La Mole, impossible in the husband of his daughter; he threw money. The next day, his imagination taking another course, it seemed to him that Julien, hearing the mute language of this money generosity, would change his name, exile himself to America, write to Mathilde that he was dead for her... M. de La Mole supposed this letter written; he followed its effect on his daughter's character...

The day he was drawn from these so youthful dreams by the real letter of Mathilde, after having thought long of killing Julien or making him disappear, he dreamed of building him a brilliant fortune. He had him take the name of one of his lands, and why would he not make him pass his peerage? M. the duke de Chaulnes, his father-in-law, had spoken to him several times, since his only son had been killed in Spain, of the desire to transmit his title to Norbert...

One cannot refuse Julien a singular aptitude for business, some boldness, perhaps even some brilliance, said the marquis... but at the bottom of that character I find something frightening. It is the impression he produces on everyone. Therefore there is something real there (the more this real point was difficult to grasp, the more it frightened the imaginative soul of the old marquis).

My daughter told me very adroitly the other day (in a suppressed letter): Julien has affiliated himself with no salon, with no clique. He has secured himself no support against me, not the smallest resource if I abandon him... But is that ignorance of the present state of society?... Two or three times I have said to him: There is no real and profitable candidacy but that of the salons...

No, he has not the adroit and cunning genius of an attorney who loses neither a minute nor an opportunity... He is not a character in the manner of Louis XI. On the other hand, I see in him the most ungenerous maxims... I lose myself in it... Does he repeat these maxims to himself, to serve as a _dike_ to his passions?

For the rest, one thing survives: he is impatient of contempt, I hold him by that.

He has not the religion of high birth; it is true, he does not respect us by instinct... That is a fault, but finally, the soul of a seminarian should be impatient only of lack of enjoyment and money. He, quite different, cannot bear contempt at any price.

Pressed by his daughter's letter, M. de La Mole saw the necessity of deciding: At last, here is the great question: has Julien's audacity gone so far as to undertake to pay court to my daughter, because he knows that I love her before all, and that I have a hundred thousand crowns of income?

Mathilde protests the contrary... No, my Julien, here is a point on which I will not let myself be deluded.

Has there been true, unforeseen love? or vulgar desire to rise to a fine position? Mathilde is clear-sighted; she felt at first that this suspicion may ruin him with me; hence this avowal: it is she who thought of loving him first...

A daughter of so haughty a character would have forgotten herself so far as to make material advances!... To press his arm in the garden, one evening, what horror! as if she had not had a hundred less indecent means to make him know she distinguished him.

Who excuses himself accuses himself; I distrust Mathilde... That day, the marquis's reasonings were more conclusive than usual. However, habit prevailed; he resolved to gain time and write to his daughter. For they wrote from one side of the hotel to the other; M. de La Mole dared not discuss with Mathilde and face her down. He was afraid to end it all by a sudden concession.

LETTER

"Beware of committing new follies; here is a commission as lieutenant of hussars, for M. the chevalier Julien Sorel de La Vernaye. You see what I do for him. Do not cross me, do not question me. Let him leave within twenty-four hours, to be received at Strasbourg, where his regiment is. Here is an order on my banker; let me be obeyed."

* * * * *

The love and joy of Mathilde had no bounds; she wished to profit by the victory, and answered instantly:

* * * * *

"M. de La Vernaye would be at your feet, distraught with gratitude, if he knew all you deign to do for him. But in the midst of this generosity, my father has forgotten me; the honor of your daughter is in danger. An indiscretion may make an eternal stain that twenty thousand crowns of income would not repair. I shall not send the commission to M. de La Vernaye unless you give me your word that, during the course of next month, my marriage will be celebrated in public, at Villequier. Soon after that time, which I beg you not to exceed, your daughter can appear in public only with the name of Mme de La Vernaye. How I thank you, dear papa, for having saved me from that name of Sorel, etc., etc."

* * * * *

The response was unforeseen.

* * * * *

"Obey, or I retract everything. Tremble, young imprudent one. I do not yet know what your Julien is, and you yourself know him less than I. Let him leave for Strasbourg, and think of marching straight. I shall make my will known within fifteen days."

* * * * *

This so firm response astonished Mathilde. _I do not know Julien_; this word threw her into a reverie, which soon ended in the most enchanting suppositions; but she believed them the truth. The mind of my Julien has not clothed itself in the petty _uniform_ of the salons, and my father does not believe in his superiority, precisely because of that which proves it...

However, if I do not obey this velleity of character, I see the possibility of a public scene; an outburst lowers my position in the world, and may make me less amiable in the eyes of Julien. After the outburst... poverty for ten years; and the folly of choosing a husband because of his merit cannot save itself from ridicule except by the most brilliant opulence. If I live far from my father, at his age, he may forget me... Norbert will marry an adroit, amiable woman: old Louis XIV was seduced by the duchess of Burgundy...

She decided to obey, but took care not to communicate her father's letter to Julien; that fierce character might have been led to some folly.

In the evening, when she told Julien that he was lieutenant of hussars, her joy was without bounds. One may picture it by the ambition of all his life, and by the passion he now had for his son. The change of name struck him with astonishment.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”