finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_47_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 18
part 2, chapter 18
{"name": "Part 2, Chapter 18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-18", "summary": "Mathilde thinks back on how Julien almost murdered her in the library and figures that for some reason, this gesture makes him truly worthy of her. She walks up to Julien the next day and asks him to accompany her into the garden. Once they're alone, she starts talking to him about the state of her heart. She makes sure to talk as much as possible about all the other young men in her life. This tortures Julien. Finally, Julien tells her that he loves her and that he'll do anything for her. This destroys Mathilde's interest in him, since she only wanted him in the first place because he paid no attention to her. Now that he's groveling at her feet, she finds him repulsive.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER XLVIII

CRUEL MOMENTS


        And she confesses it to me! She goes into even
        the smallest details! Her beautiful eyes fixed on
        mine, and describes the love which she felt for
        another.--_Schiller_.


The delighted mademoiselle de la Mole thought of nothing but the
happiness of having been nearly killed. She went so far as to say to
herself, "he is worthy of being my master since he was on the point of
killing me. How many handsome young society men would have to be melted
together before they were capable of so passionate a transport."

"I must admit that he was very handsome at the time when he climbed up
on the chair to replace the sword in the same picturesque position in
which the decorator hung it! After all it was not so foolish of me to
love him."

If at that moment some honourable means of reconciliation had presented
itself, she would have embraced it with pleasure. Julien locked in his
room was a prey to the most violent despair. He thought in his madness
of throwing himself at her feet. If instead of hiding himself in an out
of the way place, he had wandered about the garden of the hotel so as
to keep within reach of any opportunity, he would perhaps have changed
in a single moment his awful unhappiness into the keenest happiness.

But the tact for whose lack we are now reproaching him would have been
incompatible with that sublime seizure of the sword, which at the
present time rendered him so handsome in the eyes of mademoiselle de
la Mole. This whim in Julien's favour lasted the whole day; Mathilde
conjured up a charming image of the short moments during which she had
loved him: she regretted them.

"As a matter of fact," she said to herself, "my passion for this poor
boy can from his point of view only have lasted from one hour after
midnight when I saw him arrive by his ladder with all his pistols in
his coat pocket, till eight o'clock in the morning. It was a quarter of
an hour after that as I listened to mass at Sainte-Valere that I began
to think that he might very well try to terrify me into obedience."

After dinner mademoiselle de la Mole, so far from avoiding Julien,
spoke to him and made him promise to follow her into the garden. He
obeyed. It was a new experience.

Without suspecting it Mathilde was yielding to the love which she was
now feeling for him again. She found an extreme pleasure in walking by
his side, and she looked curiously at those hands which had seized the
sword to kill her that very morning.

After such an action, after all that had taken place, some of the
former conversation was out of the question.

Mathilde gradually began to talk confidentially to him about the
state of her heart. She found a singular pleasure in this kind of
conversation, she even went so far as to describe to him the fleeting
moments of enthusiasm which she had experienced for M. de Croisenois,
for M. de Caylus----

"What! M. de Caylus as well!" exclaimed Julien, and all the jealousy of
a discarded lover burst out in those words, Mathilde thought as much,
but did not feel at all insulted.

She continued torturing Julien by describing her former sentiments with
the most picturesque detail and the accent of the most intimate truth.
He saw that she was portraying what she had in her mind's eye. He had
the pain of noticing that as she spoke she made new discoveries in her
own heart.

The unhappiness of jealousy could not be carried further.

It is cruel enough to suspect that a rival is loved, but there is no
doubt that to hear the woman one adores confess in detail the love
which rivals inspires, is the utmost limit of anguish.

Oh, how great a punishment was there now for those impulses of pride
which had induced Julien to place himself as superior to the Caylus
and the Croisenois! How deeply did he feel his own unhappiness as he
exaggerated to himself their most petty advantages. With what hearty
good faith he despised himself.

Mathilde struck him as adorable. All words are weak to express his
excessive admiration. As he walked beside her he looked surreptitiously
at her hands, her arms, her queenly bearing. He was so completely
overcome by love and unhappiness as to be on the point of falling at
her feet and crying "pity."

"Yes, and that person who is so beautiful, who is so superior to
everything and who loved me once, will doubtless soon love M. de
Caylus."

Julien could have no doubts of mademoiselle de la Mole's sincerity,
the accent of truth was only too palpable in everything she said. In
order that nothing might be wanting to complete his unhappiness there
were moments when, as a result of thinking about the sentiments which
she had once experienced for M. de Caylus, Mathilde came to talk of
him, as though she loved him at the present time. She certainly put an
inflection of love into her voice. Julien distinguished it clearly.

He would have suffered less if his bosom had been filled inside with
molten lead. Plunged as he was in this abyss of unhappiness how could
the poor boy have guessed that it was simply because she was talking to
him, that mademoiselle de la Mole found so much pleasure in recalling
those weaknesses of love which she had formerly experienced for M. de
Caylus or M. de Luz.

Words fail to express Julien's anguish. He listened to these detailed
confidences of the love she had experienced for others in that very
avenue of pines where he had waited so few days ago for one o'clock
to strike that he might invade her room. No human being can undergo a
greater degree of unhappiness.

This kind of familiar cruelty lasted for eight long days. Mathilde
sometimes seemed to seek opportunities of speaking to him and sometimes
not to avoid them; and the one topic of conversation to which they both
seemed to revert with a kind of cruel pleasure, was the description of
the sentiments she had felt for others. She told him about the letters
which she had written, she remembered their very words, she recited
whole sentences by heart.

She seemed during these last days to be envisaging Julien with a kind
of malicious joy. She found a keen enjoyment in his pangs.

One sees that Julien had no experience of life; he had not even read
any novels. If he had been a little less awkward and he had coolly said
to the young girl, whom he adored so much and who had been giving him
such strange confidences: "admit that though I am not worth as much as
all these gentlemen, I am none the less the man whom you loved," she
would perhaps have been happy at being at thus guessed; at any rate
success would have entirely depended on the grace with which Julien had
expressed the idea, and on the moment which he had chosen to do so. In
any case he would have extricated himself well and advantageously from
a situation which Mathilde was beginning to find monotonous.

"And you love me no longer, me, who adores you!" said Julien to her one
day, overcome by love and unhappiness. This piece of folly was perhaps
the greatest which he could have committed. These words immediately
destroyed all the pleasure which mademoiselle de la Mole found in
talking to him about the state of her heart. She was beginning to be
surprised that he did not, after what had happened, take offence at
what she told him. She had even gone so far as to imagine at the very
moment when he made that foolish remark that perhaps he did not love
her any more. "His pride has doubtless extinguished his love," she was
saying to herself. "He is not the man to sit still and see people like
Caylus, de Luz, Croisenois whom he admits are so superior, preferred to
him. No, I shall never see him at my feet again."

Julien had often in the naivety of his unhappiness, during the previous
days praised sincerely the brilliant qualities of these gentlemen; he
would even go so far as to exaggerate them. This nuance had not escaped
mademoiselle de la Mole, she was astonished by it, but did not guess
its reason. Julien's frenzied soul, in praising a rival whom he thought
was loved, was sympathising with his happiness.

These frank but stupid words changed everything in a single moment;
confident that she was loved, Mathilde despised him utterly.

She was walking with him when he made his ill-timed remark; she left
him, and her parting look expressed the most awful contempt. She
returned to the salon and did not look at him again during the whole
evening. This contempt monopolised her mind the following day. The
impulse which during the last week had made her find so much pleasure
in treating Julien as her most intimate friend was out of the question;
the very sight of him was disagreeable. The sensation Mathilde felt
reached the point of disgust; nothing can express the extreme contempt
which she experienced when her eyes fell upon him.

Julien had understood nothing of the history of Mathilde's heart during
the last week, but he distinguished the contempt. He had the good sense
only to appear before her on the rarest possible occasions, and never
looked at her.

But it was not without a mortal anguish that he, as it were, deprived
himself of her presence. He thought he felt his unhappiness increasing
still further. "The courage of a man's heart cannot be carried
further," he said to himself. He passed his life seated at a little
window at the top of the hotel; the blind was carefully closed, and
from here at any rate he could see mademoiselle de la Mole when she
appeared in the garden.

What were his emotions when he saw her walking after dinner with M. de
Caylus, M. de Luz, or some other for whom she had confessed to him some
former amorous weakness!

Julien had no idea that unhappiness could be so intense; he was on
the point of shouting out. This firm soul was at last completely
overwhelmed.

Thinking about anything else except mademoiselle de la Mole had become
odious to him; he became incapable of writing the simplest letters.

"You are mad," the marquis said to him.

Julien was frightened that his secret might be guessed, talked
about illness and succeeded in being believed. Fortunately for him
the marquis rallied him at dinner about his next journey; Mathilde
understood that it might be a very long one. It was now several days
that Julien had avoided her, and the brilliant young men who had all
that this pale sombre being she had once loved was lacking, had no
longer the power of drawing her out of her reverie.

"An ordinary girl," she said to herself, "would have sought out the man
she preferred among those young people who are the cynosure of a salon;
but one of the characteristics of genius is not to drive its thoughts
over the rut traced by the vulgar.

"Why, if I were the companion of a man like Julien, who only lacks the
fortune that I possess, I should be continually exciting attention, I
should not pass through life unnoticed. Far from incessantly fearing
a revolution like my cousins who are so frightened of the people that
they have not the pluck to scold a postillion who drives them badly, I
should be certain of playing a role and a great role, for the man whom
I have chosen has a character and a boundless ambition. What does he
lack? Friends, money? I will give them him." But she treated Julien in
her thought as an inferior being whose love one could win whenever one
wanted.






Part 2, Chapter 18
Mathilde thinks back on how Julien almost murdered her in the library and figures that for some reason, this gesture makes him truly worthy of her. She walks up to Julien the next day and asks him to accompany her into the garden. Once they're alone, she starts talking to him about the state of her heart. She makes sure to talk as much as possible about all the other young men in her life. This tortures Julien. Finally, Julien tells her that he loves her and that he'll do anything for her. This destroys Mathilde's interest in him, since she only wanted him in the first place because he paid no attention to her. Now that he's groveling at her feet, she finds him repulsive.