finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_43_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 14
part 2, chapter 14
{"name": "Part 2, Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-14", "summary": "Mathilde waits for some sort of reply to her letter to Julien. She is overwhelmed with happiness. Meanwhile, Julien gets a servant to put his trunk near the front door to make Mathilde think he has left for Languedoc. He does this just to tease her desire a little more. He runs into Mathilde later the next night and hands her his written reply to her note. She takes it and runs away. About an hour later, Mathilde shows up at the door of the study and throws a letter at him, running away again. He writes another letter quickly and gives it to Mathilde while passing her on the stairs. He gets a third letter from Mathilde that night, which shows him just how obsessed she's become. He gets nervous, though, when he reads the letter and finds out that Mathilde wants him to meet her in the garden at one a.m. She says there'll be a ladder there that can lead him up to her room. Now he really thinks he's being led into a trap, because this sounds too bold to be true.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER XLIV

A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS


        What perplexity! What sleepless nights! Great God. Am I
        going to make myself contemptible? He will despise me
        himself. But he is leaving, he is going away.
                                    _Alfred de Musset_


Mathilde had not written without a struggle. Whatever might have been
the beginning of her interest in Julien, it soon dominated that pride
which had reigned unchallenged in her heart since she had begun to know
herself. This cold and haughty soul was swept away for the first time
by a sentiment of passion, but if this passion dominated her pride,
it still kept faithfully to the habits of that pride. Two months of
struggles and new sensations had transformed, so to speak her whole
moral life.

Mathilde thought she was in sight of happiness. This vista,
irresistible as it is for those who combine a superior intellect with
a courageous soul, had to struggle for a long time against her self
respect and all her vulgar duties. One day she went into her mother's
room at seven o'clock in the morning and asked permission to take
refuge in Villequier. The marquise did not even deign to answer her,
and advised her to go back to bed. This was the last effort of vulgar
prudence and respect for tradition.

The fear of doing wrong and of offending those ideas which the
Caylus's, the de Luz's, the Croisenois' held for sacred had little
power over her soul. She considered such creatures incapable of
understanding her. She would have consulted them, if it had been a
matter of buying a carriage or an estate. Her real fear was that Julien
was displeased with her.

"Perhaps he, too, has only the appearance of a superior man?"

She abhorred lack of character; that was her one objection to the
handsome young men who surrounded her. The more they made elegant
fun of everything which deviated from the prevailing mode, or which
conformed to it but indifferently, the lower they fell in her eyes.

They were brave and that was all. "And after all in what way were they
brave?" she said to herself. "In duels, but the duel is nothing more
than a formality. The whole thing is mapped out beforehand, even the
correct thing to say when you fall. Stretched on the turf, and with
your hand on your heart, you must vouchsafe a generous forgiveness to
the adversary, and a few words for a fair lady, who is often imaginary,
or if she does exist, will go to a ball on the day of your death for
fear of arousing suspicion."

"One braves danger at the head of a squadron brilliant with steel, but
how about that danger which is solitary, strange, unforeseen and really
ugly."

"Alas," said Mathilde to herself, "it was at the court of Henri III.
that men who were great both by character and by birth were to be
found! Yes! If Julien had served at Jarnac or Moncontour, I should no
longer doubt. In those days of strength and vigour Frenchmen were not
dolls. The day of the battle was almost the one which presented the
fewest problems."

Their life was not imprisoned, like an Egyptian mummy in a covering
which was common to all, and always the same. "Yes," she added, "there
was more real courage in going home alone at eleven o'clock in the
evening when one came out of the Hotel de Soissons where Catherine
de' Medici lived than there is nowadays in running over to Algiers.
A man's life was then a series of hazards. Nowadays civilisation has
banished hazard. There are no more surprises. If anything new appears
in any idea there are not sufficient epigrams to immortalise it, but if
anything new appears in actual life, our panic reaches the lowest depth
of cowardice. Whatever folly panic makes us commit is excused. What a
degenerate and boring age! What would Boniface de la Mole have said
if, lifting his cut-off head out of the tomb, he had seen seventeen of
his descendants allow themselves to be caught like sheep in 1793 in
order to be guillotined two days afterwards! Death was certain, but it
would have been bad form to have defended themselves and to have killed
at least one or two Jacobins. Yes! in the heroic days of France, in
the age of Boniface de la Mole, Julien would have been the chief of
a squadron, while my brother would have been the young priest with
decorous manners, with wisdom in his eyes and reason on his lips." Some
months previously Mathilde had given up all hope of meeting any being
who was a little different from the common pattern. She had found some
happiness in allowing herself to write to some young society men. This
rash procedure, which was so unbecoming and so imprudent in a young
girl, might have disgraced her in the eyes of M. de Croisenois, the
Duke de Chaulnes, his father, and the whole Hotel de Chaulnes, who on
seeing the projected marriage broken off would have wanted to know the
reason. At that time Mathilde had been unable to sleep on those days
when she had written one of her letters. But those letters were only
answers. But now she ventured to declare her own love. She wrote first
(what a terrible word!) to a man of the lowest social grade.

This circumstance rendered her eternal disgrace quite inevitable in the
event of detection. Who of the women who visited her mother would have
dared to take her part? What official excuse could be evolved which
could successfully cope with the awful contempt of society.

Besides speaking was awful enough, but writing! "There are some
things which are not written!" Napoleon had exclaimed on learning of
the capitulation of Baylen. And it was Julien who had told her that
epigram, as though giving her a lesson that was to come in useful
subsequently.

But all this was comparatively unimportant, Mathilde's anguish had
other causes. Forgetting the terrible effect it would produce on
society, and the ineffable blot on her scutcheon that would follow such
an outrage on her own caste, Mathilde was going to write to a person
of a very different character to the Croisenois', the de Luz's, the
Caylus's.

She would have been frightened at the depth and mystery in Julien's
character, even if she had merely entered into a conventional
acquaintance with him. And she was going to make him her lover, perhaps
her master.

"What will his pretensions not be, if he is ever in a position to do
everything with me? Well! I shall say, like Medea: _Au milieu de tant
de perils il me reste Moi_." She believed that Julien had no respect
for nobility of blood. What was more, he probably did not love her.

In these last moments of awful doubt her feminine pride suggested to
her certain ideas. "Everything is bound to be extraordinary in the life
of a girl like me," exclaimed Mathilde impatiently. The pride, which
had been drilled into her since her cradle, began to struggle with her
virtue. It was at this moment that Julien's departure precipitated
everything.

(Such characters are luckily very rare.)

Very late in the evening, Julien was malicious enough to have a very
heavy trunk taken down to the porter's lodge. He called the valet, who
was courting mademoiselle de la Mole's chambermaid, to move it. "This
manoeuvre cannot result in anything," he said to himself, "but if it
does succeed, she will think that I have gone." Very tickled by this
humorous thought, he fell asleep. Mathilde did not sleep a wink.

Julien left the hotel very early the next morning without being seen,
but he came back before eight o'clock.

He had scarcely entered the library before M. de la Mole appeared
on the threshold. He handed her his answer. He thought that it was
his duty to speak to her, it was certainly perfectly feasible, but
mademoiselle de la Mole would not listen to him and disappeared. Julien
was delighted. He did not know what to say.

"If all this is not a put up job with comte Norbert, it is clear that
it is my cold looks which have kindled the strange love which this
aristocratic girl chooses to entertain for me. I should be really
too much of a fool if I ever allowed myself to take a fancy to that
big blonde doll." This train of reasoning left him colder and more
calculating than he had ever been.

"In the battle for which we are preparing," he added, "pride of birth
will be like a high hill which constitutes a military position between
her and me. That must be the field of the manoeuvres. I made a great
mistake in staying in Paris; this postponing of my departure cheapens
and exposes me, if all this is simply a trick. What danger was there in
leaving? If they were making fun of me, I was making fun of them. If
her interest for me was in any way real, I was making that interest a
hundred times more intense."

Mademoiselle de la Mole's letter had given Julien's vanity so keen a
pleasure, that wreathed as he was in smiles at his good fortune he had
forgotten to think seriously about the propriety of leaving.

It was one of the fatal elements of his character to be extremely
sensitive to his own weaknesses. He was extremely upset by this one,
and had almost forgotten the incredible victory which had preceded this
slight check, when about nine o'clock mademoiselle de la Mole appeared
on the threshold of the library, flung him a letter and ran away.

"So this is going to be the romance by letters," he said as he picked
it up. "The enemy makes a false move; I will reply by coldness and
virtue."

He was asked with a poignancy which merely increased his inner gaiety
to give a definite answer. He indulged in the pleasure of mystifying
those persons who he thought wanted to make fun of him for two pages,
and it was out of humour again that he announced towards the end of his
answer his definite departure on the following morning.

"The garden will be a useful place to hand her the letter," he thought
after he had finished it, and he went there. He looked at the window of
mademoiselle de la Mole's room.

It was on the first storey, next to her mother's apartment, but there
was a large ground floor.

This latter was so high that, as Julien walked under the avenue
of pines with his letter in his hands, he could not be seen from
mademoiselle de la Mole's window. The dome formed by the well clipped
pines intercepted the view. "What!" said Julien to himself angrily,
"another indiscretion! If they have really begun making fun of me,
showing myself with a letter is playing into my enemy's hands."

Norbert's room was exactly above his sister's and if Julien came out
from under the dome formed by the clipped branches of the pine, the
comte and his friend could follow all his movements.

Mademoiselle de la Mole appeared behind her window; he half showed his
letter; she lowered her head, then Julien ran up to his own room and
met accidentally on the main staircase the fair Mathilde, who seized
the letter with complete self-possession and smiling eyes.

"What passion there was in the eyes of that poor madame de Renal," said
Julien to himself, "when she ventured to receive a letter from me,
even after six months of intimate relationship! I don't think she ever
looked at me with smiling eyes in her whole life."

He did not formulate so precisely the rest of his answer; was he
perhaps ashamed of the triviality of the motive which were actuating
him?

"But how different too," he went on to think, "are her elegant morning
dress and her distinguished appearance! A man of taste on seeing
mademoiselle de la Mole thirty yards off would infer the position which
she occupies in society. That is what can be called a specific merit."

In spite of all this humorousness, Julien was not yet quite honest with
himself; madame de Renal had no marquis de Croisenois to sacrifice to
him. His only rival was that grotesque sub-prefect, M. Charcot, who
assumed the name of Maugiron, because there were no Maugirons left in
France.

At five o'clock Julien received a third letter. It was thrown to him
from the library door. Mademoiselle de la Mole ran away again. "What
a mania for writing," he said to himself with a laugh, "when one can
talk so easily. The enemy wants my letters, that is clear, and many of
them." He did not hurry to open this one. "More elegant phrases," he
thought; but he paled as he read it. There were only eight lines.

"I need to speak to you; I must speak to you this evening. Be in
the garden at the moment when one o'clock is striking. Take the big
gardeners' ladder near the well; place it against my window, and climb
up to my room. It is moonlight; never mind."






Part 2, Chapter 14
Mathilde waits for some sort of reply to her letter to Julien. She is overwhelmed with happiness. Meanwhile, Julien gets a servant to put his trunk near the front door to make Mathilde think he has left for Languedoc. He does this just to tease her desire a little more. He runs into Mathilde later the next night and hands her his written reply to her note. She takes it and runs away. About an hour later, Mathilde shows up at the door of the study and throws a letter at him, running away again. He writes another letter quickly and gives it to Mathilde while passing her on the stairs. He gets a third letter from Mathilde that night, which shows him just how obsessed she's become. He gets nervous, though, when he reads the letter and finds out that Mathilde wants him to meet her in the garden at one a.m. She says there'll be a ladder there that can lead him up to her room. Now he really thinks he's being led into a trap, because this sounds too bold to be true.