CHAPTER XXXI

THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY

     O rus quando ego te aspiciam?--_Horace_

"You've no doubt come to wait for the Paris mail, Monsieur," said the
host of an inn where he had stopped to breakfast.

"To-day or to-morrow, it matters little," said Julien.

The mail arrived while he was still posing as indifferent. There were
two free places.

"Why! it's you my poor Falcoz," said the traveller who was coming from
the Geneva side to the one who was getting in at the same time as
Julien.

"I thought you were settled in the outskirts of Lyons," said Falcoz,
"in a delicious valley near the Rhone."

"Nicely settled! I am running away."

"What! you are running away? you Saint Giraud! Have you, who look so
virtuous, committed some crime?" said Falcoz with a smile.

"On my faith it comes to the same thing. I am running away from the
abominable life which one leads in the provinces. I like the freshness
of the woods and the country tranquillity, as you know. You have often
accused me of being romantic. I don't want to hear politics talked as
long as I live, and politics are hounding me out."

"But what party do you belong to?"

"To none and that's what ruins me. That's all there is to be said
about my political life--I like music and painting. A good book is
an event for me. I am going to be forty-four. How much longer have I
got to live? Fifteen--twenty--thirty years at the outside. Well, I
want the ministers in thirty years' time to be a little cleverer than
those of to-day but quite as honest. The history of England serves as
a mirror for our own future. There will always be a king who will try
to increase his prerogative. The ambition of becoming a deputy, the
fame of Mirabeau and the hundreds of thousand francs which he won for
himself will always prevent the rich people in the province from going
to sleep: they will call that being Liberal and loving the people. The
desire of becoming a peer or a gentleman of the chamber will always win
over the ultras. On the ship of state every one is anxious to take over
the steering because it is well paid. Will there be never a poor little
place for the simple passenger?"

"Is it the last elections which are forcing you out of the province?"

"My misfortune goes further back. Four years ago I was forty and
possessed 500,000 francs. I am four years older to-day and probably
50,000 francs to the bad, as I shall lose that sum on the sale of my
chateau of Monfleury in a superb position near the Rhone.

"At Paris I was tired of that perpetual comedy which is rendered
obligatory by what you call nineteenth-century civilisation. I thirsted
for good nature and simplicity. I bought an estate in the mountains
near the Rhine, there was no more beautiful place under the heavens.

"The village clergyman and the gentry of the locality pay me court for
six months; I invite them to dinner; I have left Paris, I tell them, so
as to avoid talking politics or hearing politics talked for the rest of
my life. As you know I do not subscribe to any paper, the less letters
the postman brought me the happier I was.

"That did not suit the vicar's book. I was soon the victim of a
thousand unreasonable requests, annoyances, etc. I wished to give two
or three hundred francs a year to the poor, I was asked to give it
to the Paris associations, that of Saint Joseph, that of the Virgin,
etc. I refused. I was then insulted in a hundred ways. I was foolish
enough to be upset by it. I could not go out in the morning to enjoy
the beauty of our mountain without finding some annoyance which
distracted me from my reveries and recalled unpleasantly both men and
their wickedness. On the Rogation processions, for instance whose
chanting I enjoy (it is probably a Greek melody) they will not bless
my fields because, says the clergyman, they belong to an infidel. A
cow dies belonging to a devout old peasant woman. She says the reason
is the neighbourhood of a pond which belongs to my infidel self, a
philosopher coming from Paris, and eight days afterwards I find my
fish in agonies poisoned by lime. Intrigue in all its forms envelops
me. The justice of the peace, who is an honest man, but frightened of
losing his place, always decides against me. The peace of the country
proved a hell for me. Once they saw that I was abandoned by the vicar,
the head of the village congregation, and that I was not supported by
the retired captain who was the head of the Liberals they all fell upon
me, down to the mason whom I had supported for a year, down to the very
wheel-wright who wanted to cheat me with impunity over the repairing of
my ploughs.

"In order to find some support, and to win at any rate some of my law
suits I became a Liberal, but, as you say, those damned elections come
along. They asked me for my vote."

"For an unknown man?"

"Not at all, for a man whom I knew only too well. I refused. It was
terribly imprudent. From that moment I had the Liberals on my hands as
well, and my position became intolerable. I believe that if the vicar
had got it into his head to accuse me of assassinating my servant,
there would be twenty witnesses of the two parties who would swear that
they had seen me committing the crime."

"You mean to say you want to live in the country without pandering
to the passions of your neighbours, without even listening to their
gossip. What a mistake!"

"It is rectified at last. Monfleury is for sale. I will lose 50,000
francs if necessary, but I am over-joyed I am leaving that hell of
hypocrisy and annoyance. I am going to look for solitude and rustic
peace in the only place where those things are to be found in France,
on a fourth storey looking on to the Champs-Elysees; and, moreover, I
am actually deliberating if I shall not commence my political career by
giving consecrated bread to the parish in the Roule quarter."

"All this would not have happened under Bonaparte," said Falcoz with
eyes shining with rage and sorrow.

"Very good, but why didn't your Bonaparte manage to keep his position?
Everything which I suffer to-day is his work."

At this point Julien's attention was redoubled. He had realised from
the first word that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the old boyhood friend
of M. de Renal, who had been repudiated by him in 1816, and that the
philosopher Saint-Giraud must be the brother of that chief of the
prefecture of----who managed to get the houses of the municipality
knocked down to him at a cheap price.

"And all this is the work of your Bonaparte. An honest man, aged forty,
and possessed of five hundred thousand francs however inoffensive he
is, cannot settle in the provinces and find peace there; those priests
and nobles of his will turn him out."

"Oh don't talk evil of him," exclaimed Falcoz. "France was never so
high in the esteem of the nations as during the thirteen years of his
reign; then every single act was great."

"Your emperor, devil take him," replied the man of forty-four, "was
only great on his battle fields and when he reorganised the finances
about 1802. What is the meaning of all his conduct since then? What
with his chamberlains, his pomp, and his receptions in the Tuileries,
he has simply provided a new edition of all the monarchical tomfoolery.
It was a revised edition and might possibly have lasted for a century
or two. The nobles and the priests wish to go back to the old one, but
they did not have the iron hand necessary to impose it on the public."

"Yes, that's just how an old printer would talk."

"Who has turned me out of my estate?" continued the printer, angrily.
"The priests, whom Napoleon called back by his Concordat instead
of treating them like the State treats doctors, barristers, and
astronomers, simply seeing in them ordinary citizens, and not bothering
about the particular calling by which they are trying to earn their
livelihood. Should we be saddled with these insolent gentlemen today,
if your Bonaparte had not created barons and counts? No, they were out
of fashion. Next to the priests, it's the little country nobility who
have annoyed me the most, and compelled me to become a Liberal."

The conversation was endless. The theme will occupy France for another
half-century. As Saint-Giraud kept always repeating that it was
impossible to live in the provinces, Julien timidly suggested the case
of M. de Renal.

"Zounds, young man, you're a nice one," exclaimed Falcoz. "He turned
spider so as not to be fly, and a terrible spider into the bargain.
But I see that he is beaten by that man Valenod. Do you know that
scoundrel? He's the villain of the piece. What will your M. de Renal
say if he sees himself turned out one of these fine days, and Valenod
put in his place?"

"He will be left to brood over his crimes," said Saint-Giraud. "Do
you know Verrieres, young man? Well, Bonaparte, heaven confound him!
Bonaparte and his monarchical tomfoolery rendered possible the reign
of the Renals and the Chelans, which brought about the reign of the
Valenods and the Maslons."

This conversation, with its gloomy politics, astonished Julien and
distracted him from his delicious reveries.

He appreciated but little the first sight of Paris as perceived in the
distance. The castles in the air he had built about his future had to
struggle with the still present memory of the twenty-four hours that
he had just passed in Verrieres. He vowed that he would never abandon
his mistress's children, and that he would leave everything in order
to protect them, if the impertinence of the priests brought about a
republic and the persecution of the nobles.

What would have happened on the night of his arrival in Verrieres if,
at the moment when he had leant his ladder against the casement of
Madame de Renal's bedroom he had found that room occupied by a stranger
or by M. de Renal?

But how delicious, too, had been those first two hours when his
sweetheart had been sincerely anxious to send him away and he had
pleaded his cause, sitting down by her in the darkness! A soul like
Julien's is haunted by such memories for a lifetime. The rest of the
interview was already becoming merged in the first period of their
love, fourteen months previous.

Julien was awakened from his deep meditation by the stopping of the
coach. They had just entered the courtyard of the Post in the Rue
Rousseau. "I want to go to La Malmaison," he said to a cabriolet which
approached.

"At this time, Monsieur--what for?"

"What's that got to do with you? Get on."

Every real passion only thinks about itself. That is why, in my view,
passions are ridiculous at Paris, where one's neighbour always insists
on one's considering him a great deal. I shall refrain from recounting
Julien's ecstasy at La Malmaison. He wept. What! in spite of those
wretched white walls, built this very year, which cut the path up into
bits? Yes, monsieur, for Julien, as for posterity, there was nothing to
choose between Arcole, Saint Helena, and La Malmaison.

In the evening, Julien hesitated a great deal before going to the
theatre. He had strange ideas about that place of perdition.

A deep distrust prevented him from admiring actual Paris. He was only
affected by the monuments left behind by his hero.

"So here I am in the centre of intrigue and hypocrisy. Here reign the
protectors of the abbe de Frilair." On the evening of the third day
his curiosity got the better of his plan of seeing everything before
presenting himself to the abbe Pirard. The abbe explained to him coldly
the kind of life which he was to expect at M. de la Mole's.

"If you do not prove useful to him at the end of some months you will
go back to the seminary, but not in disgrace. You will live in the
house of the marquis, who is one of the greatest seigneurs of France.
You will wear black, but like a man who is in mourning, and not like
an ecclesiastic. I insist on your following your theological studies
three days a week in a seminary where I will introduce you. Every day
at twelve o'clock you will establish yourself in the marquis's library;
he counts on making use of you in drafting letters concerning his
lawsuits and other matters. The marquis will scribble on the margin
of each letter he gets the kind of answer which is required. I have
assured him that at the end of three months you will be so competent to
draft the answers, that out of every dozen you hand to the marquis for
signature, he will be able to sign eight or nine. In the evening, at
eight o'clock, you will tidy up his bureau, and at ten you will be free.

"It may be," continued the abbe Pirard, "that some old lady or some
smooth-voiced man will hint at immense advantages, or will crudely
offer you gold, to show him the letters which the marquis has received."

"Ah, monsieur," exclaimed Julien, blushing.

"It is singular," said the abbe with a bitter smile, "that poor as
you are, and after a year at a seminary, you still have any of this
virtuous indignation left. You must have been very blind."

"Can it be that blood will tell," muttered the abbe in a whisper, as
though speaking to himself. "The singular thing is," he added, looking
at Julien, "that the marquis knows you--I don't know how. He will give
you a salary of a hundred louis to commence with. He is a man who only
acts by his whim. That is his weakness. He will quarrel with you about
the most childish matters. If he is satisfied, your wages may rise in
consequence up to eight thousand francs.

"But you realise," went on the abbe, sourly, "that he is not giving
you all this money simply on account of your personal charm. The thing
is to prove yourself useful. If I were in your place I would talk very
little, and I would never talk about what I know nothing about.

"Oh, yes," said the abbe, "I have made some enquiries for you. I was
forgetting M. de la Mole's family. He has two children--a daughter and
a son of nineteen, eminently elegant--the kind of madman who never
knows to-day what he will do to-morrow. He has spirit and valour; he
has been through the Spanish war. The marquis hopes, I don't know why,
that you will become a friend of the young count Norbert. I told him
that you were a great classic, and possibly he reckons on your teaching
his son some ready-made phrases about Cicero and Virgil.

"If I were you, I should never allow that handsome young man to make
fun of me, and before I accepted his advances, which you will find
perfectly polite but a little ironical, I would make him repeat them
more than once.

"I will not hide from you the fact that the young count de La Mole is
bound to despise you at first, because you are nothing more than a
little bourgeois. His grandfather belonged to the court, and had the
honour of having his head cut off in the Place de Greve on the 26th
April, 1574, on account of a political intrigue.

"As for you, you are the son of a carpenter of Verrieres, and what
is more, in receipt of his father's wages. Ponder well over these
differences, and look up the family history in Moreri. All the
flatterers who dine at their house make from time to time what they
call delicate allusions to it.

"Be careful of how you answer the pleasantries of M. the count de La
Mole, chief of a squadron of hussars, and a future peer of France, and
don't come and complain to me later on."

"It seems to me," said Julien, blushing violently, "that I ought not
even to answer a man who despises me."

"You have no idea of his contempt. It will only manifest itself by
inflated compliments. If you were a fool, you might be taken in by it.
If you want to make your fortune, you ought to let yourself be taken in
by it."

"Shall I be looked upon as ungrateful," said Julien, "if I return to my
little cell Number 108 when I find that all this no longer suits me?"

"All the toadies of the house will no doubt calumniate you," said the
abbe, "but I myself will come to the rescue. Adsum qui feci. I will say
that I am responsible for that resolution."

Julien was overwhelmed by the bitter and almost vindictive tone which
he noticed in M. Pirard; that tone completely infected his last answer.

The fact is that the abbe had a conscientious scruple about loving
Julien, and it was with a kind of religious fear that he took so direct
a part in another's life.

"You will also see," he added with the same bad grace, as though
accomplishing a painful duty, "you also will see Madame the marquise
de La Mole. She is a big blonde woman about forty, devout, perfectly
polite, and even more insignificant. She is the daughter of the old
Duke de Chaulnes so well known for his aristocratic prejudices. This
great lady is a kind of synopsis in high relief of all the fundamental
characteristics of women of her rank. She does not conceal for her own
part that the possession of ancestors who went through the crusades
is the sole advantage which she respects. Money only comes a long way
afterwards. Does that astonish you? We are no longer in the provinces,
my friend.

"You will see many great lords in her salon talk about our princes in
a tone of singular flippancy. As for Madame de la Mole, she lowers her
voice out of respect every time she mentions the name of a Prince, and
above all the name of a Princess. I would not advise you to say in her
hearing that Philip II. or Henry VII. were monsters. They were kings, a
fact which gives them indisputable rights to the respect of creatures
without birth like you and me. Nevertheless," added M. Pirard, "we are
priests, for she will take you for one; that being our capacity, she
considers us as spiritual valets necessary for her salvation."

"Monsieur," said Julien, "I do not think I shall be long at Paris."

"Good, but remember that no man of our class can make his fortune
except through the great lords. With that indefinable element in your
character, at any rate I think it is, you will be persecuted if you
do not make your fortune. There is no middle course for you, make no
mistake about it; people see that they do not give you pleasure when
they speak to you; in a social country like this you are condemned to
unhappiness if you do not succeed in winning respect."

"What would have become of you at Besancon without this whim of the
marquis de la Mole? One day you will realise the extraordinary extent
of what he has done for you, and if you are not a monster you will be
eternally grateful to him and his family. How many poor abbes more
learned than you have lived years at Paris on the fifteen sous they
got for their mass and their ten sous they got for their dissertations
in the Sorbonne. Remember what I told you last winter about the first
years of that bad man Cardinal Dubois. Are you proud enough by chance
to think yourself more talented than he was?

"Take, for instance, a quiet and average man like myself; I reckoned
on dying in my seminary. I was childish enough to get attached to
it. Well I was on the point of being turned out, when I handed in
my resignation. You know what my fortune consisted of. I had five
hundred and twenty francs capital neither more nor less, not a friend,
scarcely two or three acquaintances. M. de la Mole, whom I had never
seen, extricated me from that quandary. He only had to say the word
and I was given a living where the parishioners are well-to-do people
above all crude vices, and where the income puts me to shame, it is so
disproportionate to my work. I refrained from talking to you all this
time simply to enable you to find your level a bit.

"One word more, I have the misfortune to be irritable. It is possible
that you and I will cease to be on speaking terms.

"If the airs of the marquise or the spiteful pleasantries of her son
make the house absolutely intolerable for you I advise you to finish
your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris and rather
north than south. There is more civilisation in the north, and, he
added lowering his voice, I must admit that the nearness of the Paris
papers puts fear into our petty tyrants.

"If we continue to find pleasure in each other's society and if the
marquis's house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my
curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the
living. I owe you that and even more, he added interrupting Julien's
thanks, for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besancon. If
instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you
would have saved me."

The abbe's voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to
feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself
into his friend's arms. He could not help saying to him in the most
manly manner he could assume:

"I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great
misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found
another father in you, monsieur."

"That is good, that is good," said the embarrassed abbe, then suddenly
remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude "you must never
say luck, my child, always say providence."

The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an
immense door. It was the Hotel de la Mole, and to prevent the passers
by having any doubt on the subject these words could be read in black
marble over the door.

This affectation displeased Julien. "They are so frightened of the
Jacobins. They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head.
Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and they advertise their
house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can
recognise it and loot it." He communicated his thought to the abbe
Pirard.

"Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate. What a dreadful idea you
have got into your head."

"Nothing could be simpler," said Julien.

The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the the
court, struck him with admiration. It was fine sunshine. "What
magnificent architecture," he said to his friend. The hotel in question
was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat
facade built about the time of Voltaire's death. At no other period had
fashion and beauty been so far from one another.

CHAPTER XXXII

ENTRY INTO SOCIETY

        Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room
        where one appeared alone and without support at the
        age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to
        intimidate me. The more I wished to please the more
        clumsy I became. I evolved the most unfounded ideas
        about everything. I would either abandon myself without
        any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply
        because he had looked at me with a serious air; but
        all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of
        my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful
        day--_Kant_.

Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. "Pull
yourself together," said the abbe Pirard. "You get horrible ideas into
your head, besides you are only a child. What has happened to the
nil mirari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you
established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you. They will
see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under
a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to
make you fall into some gross blunder."

"Let them do their worst," said Julien biting his lip, and he became as
distrustful as ever.

The salons on the first storey which our gentlemen went through before
reaching the marquis' study, would have seemed to you, my reader, as
gloomy as they were magnificent. If they had been given to you just as
they were, you would have refused to live in them. This was the domain
of yawning and melancholy reasoning. They redoubled Julien's rapture.
"How can any one be unhappy?" he thought, "who lives in so splendid an
abode."

Finally our gentlemen arrived at the ugliest rooms in this superb
suite. There was scarcely any light. They found there a little keen
man with a lively eye and a blonde wig. The abbe turned round
to Julien and presented him. It was the marquis. Julien had much
difficulty in recognising him, he found his manner was so polite.
It was no longer the grand seigneur with that haughty manner of the
abbey of Bray-le-Haut. Julien thought that his wig had much too many
hairs. As the result of this opinion he was not at all intimidated.
The descendant of the friend of Henry III. seemed to him at first of
a rather insignificant appearance. He was extremely thin and very
restless, but he soon noticed that the marquis had a politeness which
was even more pleasant to his listener than that of the Bishop of
Besancon himself. The audience only lasted three minutes. As they went
out the abbe said to Julien,

"You looked at the marquis just as you would have looked at a picture.
I am not a great expert in what these people here call politeness. You
will soon know more about it than I do, but really the boldness of your
looks seemed scarcely polite."

They had got back into the fiacre. The driver stopped near the
boulevard; the abbe ushered Julien into a suite of large rooms. Julien
noticed that there was no furniture. He was looking at the magnificent
gilded clock representing a subject which he thought very indecent,
when a very elegant gentleman approached him with a smiling air. Julien
bowed slightly.

The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. Julien shuddered
and leapt back, he reddened with rage. The abbe Pirard, in spite of his
gravity, laughed till the tears came into his eyes. The gentleman was a
tailor.

"I give you your liberty for two days," said the abbe as they went
out. "You cannot be introduced before then to Madame de la Mole. Any
one else would watch over you as if you were a young girl during these
first few moments of your life in this new Babylon. Get ruined at once
if you have got to be ruined, and I will be rid of my own weakness of
being fond of you. The day after to-morrow this tailor will bring you
two suits, you will give the man who tries them on five francs. Apart
from that don't let these Parisians hear the sound of your voice. If
you say a word they will manage somehow to make fun of you. They have a
talent for it. Come and see me the day after to-morrow at noon.... Go
and ruin yourself.... I was forgetting, go and order boots and a hat at
these addresses."

Julien scrutinised the handwriting of the addresses.

"It's the marquis's hand," said the abbe; "he is an energetic man who
foresees everything, and prefers doing to ordering. He is taking you
into his house, so that you may spare him that kind of trouble. Will
you have enough brains to execute efficiently all the instructions
which he will give you with scarcely a word of explanation? The future
will show, look after yourself."

Julien entered the shops indicated by the addresses without saying a
single word. He observed that he was received with respect, and that
the bootmaker as he wrote his name down in the ledger put M. de Sorel.

When he was in the Cemetery of Pere La Chaise a very obliging
gentleman, and what is more, one who was Liberal in his views,
suggested that he should show Julien the tomb of Marshal Ney which a
sagacious statecraft had deprived of the honour of an epitaph, but when
he left this Liberal, who with tears in his eyes almost clasped him in
his arms, Julien was without his watch. Enriched by this experience two
days afterwards he presented himself to the abbe Pirard, who looked at
him for a long time.

"Perhaps you are going to become a fop," said the abbe to him severely.
Julien looked like a very young man in full mourning; as a matter of
fact, he looked very well, but the good abbe was too provincial himself
to see that Julien still carried his shoulders in that particular way
which signifies in the provinces both elegance and importance. When the
marquis saw Julien his opinion of his graces differed so radically from
that of the good abbe as he said,

"Would you have any objection to M. le Sorel taking some dancing
lessons?"

The abbe was thunderstruck.

"No," he answered at last. "Julien is not a priest."

The marquis went up the steps of a little secret staircase two at a
time, and installed our hero in a pretty attic which looked out on the
big garden of the hotel. He asked him how many shirts he had got at the
linen drapers.

"Two," answered Julien, intimidated at seeing so great a lord
condescend to such details.

"Very good," replied the marquis quite seriously, and with a certain
curt imperiousness which gave Julien food for thought. "Very good, get
twenty-two more shirts. Here are your first quarter's wages."

As he went down from the attic the marquis called an old man. "Arsene,"
he said to him, "you will serve M. Sorel." A few minutes afterwards
Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library. It was a delicious
moment. To prevent his emotion being discovered he went and hid in
a little dark corner. From there he contemplated with rapture the
brilliant backs of the books. "I shall be able to read all these," he
said to himself. "How can I fail to like it here? M. de Renal would
have thought himself dishonoured for ever by doing one-hundredth part
of what the Marquis de la Mole has just done for me.

"But let me have a look at the copies I have to make." Having finished
this work Julien ventured to approach the books. He almost went mad
with joy as he opened an edition of Voltaire. He ran and opened the
door of the library to avoid being surprised. He then indulged in the
luxury of opening each of the eighty volumes. They were magnificently
bound and were the masterpiece of the best binder in London. It was
even more than was required to raise Julien's admiration to the maximum.

An hour afterwards the marquis came in and was surprised to notice that
Julien spelt cela with two "ll" cella. "Is all that the abbe told me of
his knowledge simply a fairy tale?" The marquis was greatly discouraged
and gently said to him,

"You are not sure of your spelling?"

"That is true," said Julien without thinking in the least of the
injustice that he was doing to himself. He was overcome by the kindness
of the marquis which recalled to him through sheer force of contrast
the superciliousness of M. de Renal.

"This trial of the little Franc-comtois abbe is waste of time," thought
the marquis, "but I had such great need of a reliable man."

"You spell cela with one 'l,'" said the marquis to him, "and when you
have finished your copies look the words whose spelling you are not
sure of up in the dictionary."

The marquis sent for him at six o'clock. He looked at Julien's boots
with manifest pain. "I am sorry for a mistake I made. I did not tell
you that you must dress every day at half-past five."

Julien looked at him but did not understand.

"I mean to say put on stockings. Arsene will remind you. To-day I will
make your apologies."

As he finished the sentence M. de la Mole escorted Julien into a salon
resplendent with gilding. On similar occasions M. de Renal always made
a point of doubling his pace so as to have the privilege of being the
first to pass the threshold. His former employer's petty vanity caused
Julien to tread on the marquis's feet and hurt him a great deal because
of his gout. "So he is clumsy to the bargain," he said to himself. He
presented him to a woman of high stature and of imposing appearance.
It was the marquise. Julien thought that her manner was impertinent,
and that she was a little like Madame de Maugiron, the wife of the
sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Verrieres when she was present
at the Saint-Charles dinner. Rendered somewhat nervous by the extreme
magnificence of the salon Julien did not hear what M. de la Mole was
saying. The marquise scarcely deigned to look at him. There were
several men there, among whom Julien recognised with an inexpressible
pleasure the young bishop of Agde who had deigned to speak to him some
months before at the ceremony of Bray-le-Haut. This young prelate was
doubtless frightened by the tender look which the timidity of Julien
fixed on him, and did not bother to recognise "the provincial."

The men assembled in this salon seemed to Julien to have a certain
element of gloom and constraint. Conversation takes place in a low
voice in Paris and little details are not exaggerated.

A handsome young man with moustaches, came in about half-past six. He
was very pale, and had a very small head.

"You always keep us waiting" said the marquise, as he kissed her hand.

Julien realised that it was the Count de la Mole. From the very first
he thought he was charming.

"Is it possible," he said to himself "that this is the man whose
offensive jests are going to drive me out of the house."

As the result of scrutinising count Norbert, Julien noticed that he
was in boots and spurs. "And I have got to be in shoes just like
an inferior apparently." They sat down at table, Julien heard the
marquise raising her voice a little and saying something severe. Almost
simultaneously he noticed an extremely blonde and very well developed
young person who had just sat down opposite him. Nevertheless she
made no appeal to him. Looking at her attentively he thought that he
had never seen such beautiful eyes, although they betokened a great
coldness of soul. Subsequently Julien thought that, though they
looked bored and sceptical, they were conscious of the duty of being
impressive. "Madame de Renal of course had very fine eyes" he said to
himself, "she used to be universally complimented on them, but they had
nothing in common with these." Julien did not know enough of society
to appreciate that it was the fire of repartee which from time to time
gave their brilliancy to the eyes of Mademoiselle Mathilde (for that
was the name he heard her called by). When Madame de Renal's eyes
became animated, it was with the fire of passion, or as the result of a
generous indignation on hearing of some evil deed. Towards the end of
the meal Julien found a word to express Mademoiselle de la Mole's type
of beauty. Her eyes are scintillating, he said to himself. Apart from
her eyes she was cruelly like her mother, whom he liked less and less,
and he ceased looking at her. By way of compensation he thought Count
Norbert admirable in every respect. Julien was so fascinated that the
idea never occurred to him of being jealous, and hating him because he
was richer and of nobler birth than he was himself.

Julien thought that the marquis looked bored.

About the second course he said to his son: "Norbert, I ask all your
good offices for M. Julien Sorel, whom I have just taken into my staff
and of whom I hope to make a man _si cella se peut_."

"He is my secretary," said the marquis to his neighbour, "and he spells
cela with two ll's." Everybody looked at Julien, who bowed to Norbert
in a manner that was slightly too marked, but speaking generally they
were satisfied with his expression.

The marquis must have spoken about the kind of education which Julien
had received for one of the guests tackled him on Horace. "It was
just by talking about Horace that I succeeded with the bishop of
Besancon," said Julien to himself. Apparently that is the only author
they know. From that instant he was master of himself. This transition
was rendered easy because he had just decided that he would never look
upon Madamoiselle de la Mole as a woman after his own taste. Since the
seminary he had the lowest opinion of men, and was not to be easily
intimidated by them. He would have enjoyed all his self-possession if
the dining-room had been furnished with less magnificence. It was,
as a matter of fact, two mirrors each eight feet high in which he
would look from time to time at the man who was speaking to him about
Horace, which continued to impress him. His phrases were not too long
for a provincial, he had fine eyes whose brilliancy was doubled by his
quavering timidity, or by his happy bashfulness when he had given a
good answer. They found him pleasant. This kind of examination gave
a little interest to a solemn dinner. The marquis signed to Julien's
questioner to press him sharply. "Can he possibly know something?" he
thought.

Julien answered and thought out new ideas. He lost sufficient of his
nervousness, not indeed to exhibit any wit, for that is impossible
for any one ignorant of the special language which is used in Paris,
but to show himself possessed of ideas which, though presented out of
place and ungracefully, were yet original. They saw that he knew Latin
perfectly.

Julien's adversary was a member of the Academy Inscriptions who chanced
to know Latin. He found Julien a very good humanist, was not frightened
of making him feel uncomfortable, and really tried to embarrass him. In
the heat of the controversy Julien eventually forgot the magnificent
furniture of the dining-room. He managed to expound theories concerning
the Latin poets which his questioner had never read of anywhere. Like
an honest man, he gave the young secretary all due credit for them.
As luck would have it, they started a discussion on the question
of whether Horace was poor or rich, a good humoured and careless
voluptuary who made verses to amuse himself, like Chapelle the friend
of Moliere and de la Fontaine, or a poor devil of a poet laureate who
wrote odes for the king's birthday like Southey, the accuser of Lord
Byron. They talked about the state of society under Augustus and under
George IV. At both periods the aristocracy was all-powerful, but,
while at Rome it was despoiled of its power by Maecenas who was only a
simple knight, it had in England reduced George IV practically to the
position of a Venetian doge. This discussion seemed to lift the marquis
out of that state of bored torpor in which he had been plunged at the
beginning of the dinner.

Julien found meaningless such modern names as Southey, Lord Byron,
and George IV, which he now heard pronounced for the first time. But
every one noticed that whenever the conversation dealt with events that
had taken place in Rome and about which knowledge could be obtained
by a perusal of the works of Horace, Martial or Tacitus, etc., he
showed an indisputable superiority. Julien coolly appropriated several
ideas which he had learnt from the bishop of Besancon in the historic
conversation which he had had with that prelate. These ideas were not
the least appreciated.

When every one was tired of talking about poets the marquise, who
always made it a rule to admire whatever amused her husband, deigned
to look at Julien. "Perhaps an educated man lies hid beneath the
clumsy manners of this young abbe," said the Academician who happened
to be near the marquise. Julien caught a few words of what he said.
Ready-made phrases suited the intellect of the mistress of the house
quite well. She adopted this one about Julien, and was very pleased
with herself for having invited the academician to dinner. "He has
amused M. de la Mole" she thought.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FIRST STEPS

        This immense valley, filled with brilliant lights and so
        many thousands of men dazzles my sight. No one knows me.
        All are superior to me. I lose my head. _Poemi dell' av.
        REINA_.

Julien was copying letters in the library very early the next day
when Mademoiselle Mathilde came in by a little dummy door very well
masked by the backs of the books. While Julien was admiring the
device, Mademoiselle Mathilde seemed astonished and somewhat annoyed
at finding him there: Julien saw that she was in curl-papers and had
a hard, haughty, and masculine expression. Mademoiselle de la Mole
had the habit of surreptitiously stealing books from her father's
library. Julien's presence rendered this morning's journey abortive,
a fact which annoyed her all the more as she had come to fetch the
second volume of Voltaire's _Princess of Babylon_, a worthy climax to
one of the most eminently monarchical and religious educations which
the convent of the Sacred Heart had ever provided. This poor girl of
nineteen already required some element of spiciness in order to get up
an interest in a novel.

Count Norbert put in an appearance in the library about three o'clock.
He had come to study a paper so as to be able to talk politics in the
evening, and was very glad to meet Julien, whose existence he had
forgotten. He was charming, and offered him a ride on horseback.

"My father will excuse us until dinner."

Julien appreciated the us and thought it charming.

"Great heavens! M. le Comte," said Julien, "if it were a question of
felling an eighty-foot tree or hewing it out and making it into planks
I would acquit myself all right, I daresay, but as for riding a horse,
I haven't done such a thing six times in my life."

"Well, this will be the seventh," said Norbert.

As a matter of fact, Julien remembered the king of ----'s entry into
Verrieres, and thought he rode extremely well. But as they were
returning from the Bois de Boulogne he fell right in the middle of the
Rue du Bac, as he suddenly tried to get out of the way of a cabriolet,
and was spattered all over with mud. It was lucky that he had two
suits. The marquis, wishing to favour him with a few words at dinner,
asked him for news of his excursion. Norbert began immediately to
answer him in general terms.

"M. le Comte is extremely kind to me," answered Julien. "I thank him
for it, and I fully appreciate it. He was good enough to have the
quietest and prettiest horse given to me, but after all he could
not tie me on to it, and owing to the lack of that precaution, I
had a fall right in the middle of that long street near the bridge.
Madame Mathilde made a futile effort to hide a burst of laughter, and
subsequently was indiscreet enough to ask for details. Julien acquitted
himself with much simplicity. He had grace without knowing it.

"I prophesy favourably about that little priest," said the marquis to
the academician. "Think of a provincial being simple over a matter like
that. Such a thing has never been witnessed before, and will never be
witnessed again; and what is more, he describes his misfortune before
ladies."

Julien put his listeners so thoroughly at their ease over his
misfortune that at the end of the dinner, when the general conversation
had gone off on to another subject, Mademoiselle Mathilde asked her
brother some questions over the details of the unfortunate occurrence.
As she put numerous questions, and as Julien met her eyes several
times, he ventured to answer himself, although the questions had not
been addressed to him, and all three of them finished up by laughing
just as though they had all been inhabitants of some village in the
depths of a forest.

On the following day Julien attended two theology lectures, and then
came back to copy out about twenty letters. He found a young man, who
though very carefully dressed, had a mean appearance and an envious
expression, established near him in the library.

The marquis entered, "What are you doing here, M. Tanbeau?" he said
severely to the new-comer.

"I thought--" answered the young man, with a base smile.

"No, monsieur, you thought nothing of the kind. This is a try-on, but
it is an unfortunate one."

Young Tanbeau got up in a rage and disappeared. He was a nephew of the
academician who was a friend of Madame de la Mole, and intended to take
up the profession of letters. The academician had induced the marquis
to take him as a secretary. Tanbeau used to work in a separate room,
but having heard of the favour that was vouchsafed to Julien he wished
to share it, and he had gone this morning and established his desk in
the library.

At four o'clock Julien ventured, after a little hesitation, to present
himself to Count Norbert. The latter was on the point of going riding,
and being a man of perfect politeness felt embarrassed.

"I think," he said to Julien, "that you had better go to the riding
school, and after a few weeks, I shall be charmed to ride with you."

"I should like to have the honour of thanking you for the kindness
which you have shewn me. Believe me, monsieur," added Julien very
seriously, "that I appreciate all I owe you. If your horse has not been
hurt by the reason of my clumsiness of yesterday, and if it is free I
should like to ride it this afternoon."

"Well, upon my word, my dear Sorel, you do so at your own risk and
peril; kindly assume that I have put forth all the objections required
by prudence. As a matter of fact it is four o'clock, we have no time to
lose."

As soon as Julien was on horseback, he said to the young count, "What
must one do not to fall off?"

"Lots of things," answered Norbert, bursting into laughter. "Keep your
body back for instance."

Julien put his horse to the trot. They were at the Place Louis XVI.

"Oh, you foolhardy youngster," said Norbert "there are too many
carriages here, and they are driven by careless drivers into the
bargain. Once you are on the ground their tilburies will run over your
body, they will not risk spoiling their horses' mouths by pulling up
short."

Norbert saw Julien twenty times on the point of tumbling, but in the
end the excursion finished without misadventure. As they came back the
young count said to his sister,

"Allow me to introduce a dashing dare-devil."

When he talked to his father over the dinner from one end of the table
to the other, he did justice to Julien's courage. It was the only
thing one could possibly praise about his style of riding. The young
count had heard in the morning the men who groomed the horses in the
courtyard making Julien's fall an opportunity for the most outrageous
jokes at his expense.

In spite of so much kindness Julien soon felt himself completely
isolated in this family. All their customs seemed strange to him, and
he was cognizant of none of them. His blunders were the delight of the
valets.

The abbe Pirard had left for his living. "If Julien is a weak reed,
let him perish. If he is a man of spirit, let him get out of his
difficulties all alone," he thought.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE

        What is he doing here? Will he like it there? Will he
        try to please?--_Ronsard_.

If everything in the aristocratic salon of the Hotel de la Mole seemed
strange to Julien, that pale young man in his black suit seemed in his
turn very strange to those persons who deigned to notice him. Madame de
la Mole suggested to her husband that he should send him off on some
business on those days when they had certain persons to dinner.

"I wish to carry the experiment to its logical conclusion," answered
the marquis. "The abbe Pirard contends that we are wrong in crushing
the self-respect of the people whom we allow around us. _One can only
lean on what resists_. The only thing against this man is his unknown
face, apart from that he is a deaf mute."

"If I am to know my way about," said Julien to himself. "I must write
down the names of the persons whom I see come to the salon together
with a few words on their character."

He put at the head of the list five or six friends of the house who
took every opportunity of paying court to him, believing that he was
protected by a whim of the marquis. They were poor dull devils. But it
must be said in praise of this class of men, such as they are found
to-day in the salons of the aristocracy, that every one did not find
them equally tame. One of them was now allowing himself to be bullied
by the marquis, who was venting his irritation at a harsh remark which
had been addressed to him by the marquise.

The masters of the house were too proud or too prone to boredom; they
were too much used to finding their only distraction in the addressing
of insults, to enable them to expect true friends. But, except on
rainy days and in rare moments of savage boredom, they always showed
themselves perfectly polite.

If the five or six toadies who manifested so paternal an affection
towards Julien had deserted the Hotel de la Mole, the marquise would
have been exposed to long spells of solitude, and in the eyes of women
of that class, solitude is awful, it is the symbol of _disgrace_.

The marquis was charming to his wife. He saw that her salon was
sufficiently furnished, though not with peers, for he did not think his
new colleagues were sufficiently noble to come to his house as friends,
or sufficiently amusing to be admitted as inferiors.

It was only later that Julien fathomed these secrets. The governing
policy of a household, though it forms the staple of conversation in
bourgeois families, is only alluded to in families of the class of that
of the marquis in moments of distress. So paramount even in this bored
century is the necessity of amusing one's self, that even on the days
of dinner-parties the marquis had scarcely left the salon before all
the guests ran away. Provided that one did not make any jests about
either God or the priests or the king or the persons in office, or the
artists who enjoyed the favour of the court, or of anything that was
established, provided that one did not praise either Beranger or the
opposition papers, or Voltaire or Rousseau or anything which involved
any element of free speech, provided that above all that one never
talked politics, one could discuss everything with freedom.

There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns a year and no blue
ribbon which could sustain a contest against such a code of salon
etiquette.

The slightest live idea appeared a crudity. In spite of the prevailing
good form, perfect politeness, and desire to please, _ennui_ was
visible in every face. The young people who came to pay their calls
were frightened of speaking of anything which might make them suspected
of thinking or of betraying that they had read something prohibited,
and relapsed into silence after a few elegant phrases about Rossini and
the weather.

Julien noticed that the conversation was usually kept alive by two
viscounts and five barons whom M. de la Mole had known at the time of
the emigration. These gentlemen enjoyed an income of from six to eight
hundred thousand francs. Four swore by the _Quotidienne_ and three
by the _Gazette de France_. One of them had every day some anecdote
to tell about the Chateau, in which he made lavish use of the word
_admirable_. Julien noticed that he had five crosses, the others as a
rule only had three.

By way of compensation six footmen in livery were to be seen in the
ante-room, and during the whole evening ices or tea were served every
quarter-of-an-hour, while about midnight there was a kind of supper
with champagne.

This was the reason that sometimes induced Julien to stay till the
end. Apart from this he could scarcely understand why any one could
bring himself to take seriously the ordinary conversation in this
magnificently gilded salon. Sometimes he would look at the talkers to
see if they themselves were not making fun of what they were saying.
"My M. de Maistre, whom I know by heart," he thought, "has put it a
hundred times better, and all the same he is pretty boring."

Julien was not the only one to appreciate this stifling moral
atmosphere. Some consoled themselves by taking a great quantity of
ices, others by the pleasure of saying all the rest of the evening, "I
have just come from the Hotel de la Mole where I learnt that Russia,
etc."

Julien learnt from one of the toadies that scarcely six months ago
madame de la Mole had rewarded more than twenty years of assiduous
attention by promoting the poor baron Le Bourguignon, who had been a
sub-prefect since the restoration, to the rank of prefect.

This great event had whetted the zeal of all these gentlemen.
Previously there were few things to which they would have objected,
now they objected to nothing. There was rarely any overt lack of
consideration, but Julien had already caught at meals two or three
little short dialogues between the marquis and his wife which were
cruel to those who were seated near them. These noble personages did
not conceal their sincere contempt for everyone who was not sprung
from people who were entitled to ride in the carriages of the king.
Julien noticed that the word crusade was the only word which gave their
face an expression of deep seriousness akin to respect. Their ordinary
respect had always a touch of condescension. In the middle of this
magnificence and this boredom Julien was interested in nothing except
M. de la Mole. He was delighted to hear him protest one day that he
had had nothing to do with the promotion of that poor Le Bourguignon,
it was an attention to the marquise. Julien knew the truth from the
abbe Pirard.

The abbe was working in the marquis's library with Julien one morning
at the eternal de Frilair lawsuit.

"Monsieur," said Julien suddenly, "is dining every day with madame la
marquise one of my duties or a special favour that they show to me?"

"It's a special honour," replied the scandalised abbe. "M. the
Academician, who has been cultivating the family for fifteen years, has
never been able to obtain so much for his M. Tanbeau."

"I find it, sir, the most painful part of my employment. I was less
bored at the seminary. Some times I see even mademoiselle de la Mole
yawn, and yet she ought to be accustomed to the social charms of the
friends of the house. I am frightened of falling asleep. As a favour,
obtain permission for me to go and get a forty sous' dinner in some
obscure inn."

The abbe who was a true snob, was very appreciative of the honour of
dining with a great lord. While he was endeavouring to get Julien to
understand this point of view a slight noise made them turn round.
Julien saw mademoiselle de la Mole listening. He reddened. She had come
to fetch a book and had heard everything. She began to entertain some
respect for Julien. "He has not been born servile," she thought, "like
that old abbe. Heavens, how ugly he is."

At dinner Julien did not venture to look at mademoiselle de la Mole
but she was kind enough to speak to him. They were expecting a lot
of visitors that day and she asked him to stay. The young girls of
Paris are not at all fond of persons of a certain age, especially when
they are slovenly. Julien did not need much penetration to realise
that the colleagues of M. le Bourguignon who remained in the salon
had the privilege of being the ordinary butt of mademoiselle de la
Mole's jokes. On this particular day, whether or not by reason of some
affectation on her part, she proved cruel to bores.

Mademoiselle de la Mole was the centre of a little knot which used to
form nearly every evening behind the marquise's immense arm-chair.
There were to be found there the marquis de Croisenois, the comte
de Caylus, the vicomte de Luz and two or three other young officers,
the friends of Norbert or his sister. These gentlemen used to sit
down on a large blue sofa. At the end of the sofa, opposite the part
where the brilliant Mathilde was sitting, Julien sat in silence on a
little, rather low straw chair. This modest position was envied by all
the toadies; Norbert kept his father's young secretary in countenance
by speaking to him, or mentioning him by name once or twice in the
evening. On this particular occasion mademoiselle de la Mole asked him
what was the height of the mountain on which the citadel of Besancon
is planted. Julien had never any idea if this mountain was higher or
lower than Montmartre. He often laughed heartily at what was said in
this little knot, but he felt himself incapable of inventing anything
analagous. It was like a strange language which he understood but could
not speak.

On this particular day Matilde's friends manifested a continuous
hostility to the visitors who came into the vast salon. The friends of
the house were the favoured victims at first, inasmuch as they were
better known. You can form your opinion as to whether Julien paid
attention; everything interested him, both the substance of things and
the manner of making fun of them.

"And there is M. Descoulis," said Matilde; "he doesn't wear a wig any
more. Does he want to get a prefectship through sheer force of genius?
He is displaying that bald forehead which he says is filled with lofty
thoughts."

"He is a man who knows the whole world," said the marquis de
Croisenois. "He also goes to my uncle the cardinal's. He is capable of
cultivating a falsehood with each of his friends for years on end, and
he has two or three hundred friends. He knows how to nurse friendship,
that is his talent. He will go out, just as you see him, in the worst
winter weather, and be at the door of one of his friends by seven
o'clock in the morning.

"He quarrels from time to time and he writes seven or eight letters
for each quarrel. Then he has a reconciliation and he writes seven or
eight letters to express his bursts of friendship. But he shines most
brilliantly in the frank and sincere expansiveness of the honest man
who keeps nothing up his sleeve. This manoeuvre is brought into play
when he has some favour to ask. One of my uncle's grand vicars is very
good at telling the life of M. Descoulis since the restoration. I will
bring him to you."

"Bah! I don't believe all that, it's professional jealousy among the
lower classes," said the comte de Caylus.

"M. Descoulis will live in history," replied the marquis. "He brought
about the restoration together with the abbe de Pradt and messieurs de
Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo."

"That man has handled millions," said Norbert, "and I can't conceive
why he should come here to swallow my father's epigrams which are
frequently atrocious. 'How many times have you betrayed your friends,
my dear Descoulis?' he shouted at him one day from one end of the table
to the other."

"But is it true that he has played the traitor?" asked mademoiselle de
la Mole. "Who has not played the traitor?"

"Why!" said the comte de Caylus to Norbert, "do you have that
celebrated Liberal, M. Sainclair, in your house. What the devil's he
come here for? I must go up to him and speak to him and make him speak.
He is said to be so clever."

"But how will your mother receive him?" said M. de Croisenois. "He has
such extravagant, generous and independent ideas."

"Look," said mademoiselle de la Mole, "look at the independent man who
bows down to the ground to M. Descoulis while he grabs hold of his
hand. I almost thought he was going to put it to his lips."

"Descoulis must stand better with the powers that be than we thought,"
answered M. de Croisenois.

"Sainclair comes here in order to get into the academy," said Norbert.
"See how he bows to the baron L----, Croisenois."

"It would be less base to kneel down," replied M. de Luz.

"My dear Sorel," said Norbert, "you are extremely smart, but you come
from the mountains. Mind you never bow like that great poet is doing,
even to God the Father."

"Ah there's a really witty man, M. the Baron Baton," said mademoiselle
de la Mole, imitating a little the voice of the flunkey who had just
announced him.

"I think that even your servants make fun of him. What a name Baron
Baton," said M. de Caylus.

"What's in a name?" he said to us the other day, went on Matilde.
"Imagine the Duke de Bouillon announced for the first time. So far as I
am concerned the public only need to get used to me."

"Julien left the vicinity of the sofa."

Still insufficiently appreciative of the charming subtleties of a
delicate raillery to laugh at a joke, he considered that a jest ought
to have some logical foundation. He saw nothing in these young peoples'
conversation except a vein of universal scandal-mongering and was
shocked by it. His provincial or English prudery went so far as to
detect envy in it, though in this he was certainly mistaken.

"Count Norbert," he said to himself, "who has had to make three drafts
for a twenty-line letter to his colonel would be only too glad to have
written once in his whole life one page as good as M. Sainclair."

Julien approached successively the several groups and attracted no
attention by reason of his lack of importance. He followed the Baron
Baton from a distance and tried to hear him.

This witty man appeared nervous and Julien did not see him recover
his equanimity before he had hit upon three or four stinging phrases.
Julien thought that this kind of wit had great need of space.

The Baron could not make epigrams. He needed at least four sentences of
six lines each, in order to be brilliant.

"That man argues, he does not talk," said someone behind Julien. He
turned round and reddened with pleasure when he heard the name of the
comte Chalvet. He was the subtlest man of the century. Julien had often
found his name in the _Memorial of St. Helena_ and in the portions of
history dictated by Napoleon. The diction of comte Chalvet was laconic,
his phrases were flashes of lightning--just, vivid, deep. If he talked
about any matter the conversation immediately made a step forward; he
imported facts into it; it was a pleasure to hear him. In politics,
however, he was a brazen cynic.

"I am independent, I am," he was saying to a gentleman with three
stars, of whom apparently he was making fun. "Why insist on my having
to-day the same opinion I had six weeks ago. In that case my opinion
would be my master."

Four grave young men who were standing round scowled; these gentlemen
did not like flippancy. The comte saw that he had gone too far. Luckily
he perceived the honest M. Balland, a veritable hypocrite of honesty.
The count began to talk to him; people closed up, for they realised
that poor Balland was going to be the next victim.

M. Balland, although he was horribly ugly and his first steps in the
world were almost unmentionable, had by dint of his morals and his
morality married a very rich wife who had died; he subsequently married
a second very rich one who was never seen in society. He enjoyed, in
all humility, an income of sixty thousand francs, and had his own
flatterers. Comte Chalvet talked to him pitilessly about all this.
There was soon a circle of thirty persons around them. Everybody was
smiling, including the solemn young men who were the hope of the
century.

"Why does he come to M. de la Mole where he is obviously only a
laughing stock?" thought Julien. He approached the abbe Pirard to ask
him.

M. Balland made his escape.

"Good," said Norbert, "there is one of the spies of my father gone;
there is only the little limping Napier left."

"Can that be the key of the riddle?" thought Julien, "but if so, why
does the marquis receive M. Balland?"

The stern abbe Pirard was scowling in a corner of the salon listening
to the lackeys announcing the names.

"This is nothing more than a den," he was saying like another Basil, "I
see none but shady people come in."

As a matter of fact the severe abbe did not know what constitutes
high society. But his friends the Jansenites, had given him some very
precise notions about those men who only get into society by reason
of their extreme subtlety in the service of all parties, or of their
monstrous wealth. For some minutes that evening he answered Julien's
eager questions fully and freely, and then suddenly stopped short
grieved at having always to say ill of every one, and thinking he was
guilty of a sin. Bilious Jansenist as he was, and believing as he did
in the duty of Christian charity, his life was a perpetual conflict.

"How strange that abbe Pirard looks," said mademoiselle de la Mole, as
Julien came near the sofa.

Julien felt irritated, but she was right all the same. M. Pirard was
unquestionably the most honest man in the salon, but his pimply face,
which was suffering from the stings of conscience, made him look
hideous at this particular moment. "Trust physiognomy after this,"
thought Julien, "it is only when the delicate conscience of the abbe
Pirard is reproaching him for some trifling lapse that he looks so
awful; while the expression of that notorious spy Napier shows a pure
and tranquil happiness." The abbe Pirard, however, had made great
concessions to his party. He had taken a servant, and was very well
dressed.

Julien noticed something strange in the salon, it was that all eyes
were being turned towards the door, and there was a semi silence. The
flunkey was announcing the famous Barron Tolly, who had just become
publicly conspicuous by reason of the elections. Julien came forward
and had a very good view of him. The baron had been the president of
an electoral college; he had the brilliant idea of spiriting away
the little squares of paper which contained the votes of one of the
parties. But to make up for it he replaced them by an equal number of
other little pieces of paper containing a name agreeable to himself.
This drastic manoeuvre had been noticed by some of the voters, who had
made an immediate point of congratulating the Baron de Tolly. The good
fellow was still pale from this great business. Malicious persons had
pronounced the word galleys. M. de la Mole received him coldly. The
poor Baron made his escape.

"If he leaves us so quickly it's to go to M. Comte's,"[1] said Comte
Chalvet and everyone laughed.

Little Tanbeau was trying to win his spurs by talking to some silent
noblemen and some intriguers who, though shady, were all men of wit,
and were on this particular night in great force in M. de la Mole's
salon (for he was mentioned for a place in the ministry). If he had not
yet any subtlety of perception he made up for it as one will see by the
energy of his words.

"Why not sentence that man to ten years' imprisonment," he was saying
at the moment when Julien approached his knot. "Those reptiles should
be confined in the bottom of a dungeon, they ought to languish to death
in gaol, otherwise their venom will grow and become more dangerous.
What is the good of sentencing him to a fine of a thousand crowns? He
is poor, so be it, all the better, but his party will pay for him. What
the case required was a five hundred francs fine and ten years in a
dungeon."

"Well to be sure, who is the monster they are speaking about?" thought
Julien who was viewing with amazement the vehement tone and hysterical
gestures of his colleague. At this moment the thin, drawn, little face
of the academician's nephew was hideous. Julien soon learnt that they
were talking of the greatest poet of the century.

"You monster," Julien exclaimed half aloud, while tears of generosity
moistened his eyes. "You little rascal," he thought, "I will pay you
out for this."

"Yet," he thought, "those are the unborn hopes of the party of which
the marquis is one of the chiefs. How many crosses and how many
sinecures would that celebrated man whom he is now defaming have
accumulated if he had sold himself--I won't say to the mediocre
ministry of M. de Nerval--but to one of those reasonably honest
ministries which we have seen follow each other in succession."

The abbe Pirard motioned to Julien from some distance off; M. de la
Mole had just said something to him. But when Julien, who was listening
at the moment with downcast eyes to the lamentations of the bishop,
had at length got free and was able to get near his friend, he found
him monopolised by the abominable little Tanbeau. The little beast
hated him as the cause of Julien's favour with the marquis, and was now
making up to him.

"_When will death deliver us from that aged rottenness_," it was in
these words of a biblical energy that the little man of letters was
now talking of the venerable Lord Holland. His merit consisted in an
excellent knowledge of the biography of living men, and he had just
made a rapid review of all the men who could aspire to some influence
under the reign of the new King of England.

The abbe Pirard passed in to an adjacent salon. Julien followed him.

"I warn you the marquis does not like scribblers, it is his only
prejudice. Know Latin and Greek if you can manage it, the history of
the Egyptians, Persians, etc., he will honour and protect you as a
learned man. But don't write a page of French, especially on serious
matters which are above your position in society, or he will call you
a scribbler and take you for a scoundrel. How is it that living as you
do in the hotel of a great lord you don't know the Duke de Castries'
epigram on Alembert and Rousseau: 'the fellow wants to reason about
everything and hasn't got an income of a thousand crowns'!"

"Everything leaks out here," thought Julien, "just like the seminary."
He had written eight or six fairly drastic pages. It was a kind of
historical eulogy of the old surgeon-major who had, he said, made a man
of him. "The little note book," said Julien to himself, "has always
been locked." He went up to his room, burnt his manuscript and returned
to the salon. The brilliant scoundrels had left it, only the men with
the stars were left.

Seven or eight very aristocratic ladies, very devout, very affected,
and of from thirty to thirty-five years of age, were grouped round
the table that the servants had just brought in ready served. The
brilliant marechale de Fervaques came in apologising for the lateness
of the hour. It was more than midnight: she went and sat down near
the marquise. Julien was deeply touched, she had the eyes and the
expression of madame de Renal.

Mademoiselle de la Mole's circle was still full of people. She was
engaged with her friends in making fun of the unfortunate comte de
Thaler. He was the only son of that celebrated Jew who was famous for
the riches that he had won by lending money to kings to make war on the
peoples.

The Jew had just died leaving his son an income of one hundred thousand
crowns a month, and a name that was only too well known. This strange
position required either a simple character or force of will power.

Unfortunately the comte was simply a fellow who was inflated by all
kinds of pretensions which had been suggested to him by all his toadies.

M. de Caylus asserted that they had induced him to make up his mind to
ask for the hand of mademoiselle de la Mole, to whom the marquis de
Croisenois, who would be a duke with a hundred thousand francs a year,
was paying his attentions.

"Oh, do not accuse him of having a mind," said Norbert pitifully.

Will-power was what the poor comte de Thaler lacked most of all. So
far as this side of his character went he was worthy of being a king.
He would take council from everybody, but he never had the courage to
follow any advice to the bitter end.

"His physiognomy would be sufficient in itself," mademoiselle de la
Mole was fond of saying, "to have inspired her with a holy joy." It
was a singular mixture of anxiety and disappointment, but from time to
time one could distinguish gusts of self-importance, and above all that
trenchant tone suited to the richest man in France, especially when he
had nothing to be ashamed of in his personal appearance and was not yet
thirty-six. "He is timidly insolent," M. de Croisenois would say. The
comte de Caylus, Norbert, and two or three moustachioed young people
made fun of him to their heart's content without him suspecting it, and
finally packed him off as one o'clock struck.

"Are those your famous Arab horses waiting for you at the door in this
awful weather?" said Norbert to him.

"No, it is a new pair which are much cheaper," said M. de Thaler. "The
horse on the left cost me five thousand francs, while the one on the
right is only worth one hundred louis, but I would ask you to believe
me when I say that I only have him out at night. His trot you see is
exactly like the other ones."

Norbert's remark made the comte think it was good form for a man like
him to make a hobby of his horses, and that he must not let them get
wet. He went away, and the other gentleman left a minute afterwards
making fun of him all the time. "So," thought Julien as he heard them
laugh on the staircase, "I have the privilege of seeing the exact
opposite of my own situation. I have not got twenty louis a year and I
found myself side by side with a man who has twenty louis an hour and
they made fun of him. Seeing a sight like that cures one of envy."

[1] celebrated conjuror.

CHAPTER XXXV

SENSIBILITY AND A GREAT PIOUS LADY

        An idea which has any life in it seems like a crudity,
        so accustomed are they to colourless expression. Woe to
        him who introduces new ideas into his conversation!
                                          --_Faublas_.

This was the stage Julien had reached, when after several months of
probation the steward of the household handed him the third quarter of
his wages. M. de la Mole had entrusted him with the administration of
his estates in Brittany and Normandy. Julien made frequent journeys
there. He had chief control of the correspondence relating to the
famous lawsuit with the abbe de Frilair. M. Pirard had instructed him.

On the data of the short notes which the marquis would scribble on the
margin of all the various paper which were addressed to him, Julien
would compose answers which were nearly all signed.

At the Theology School his professors complained of his lack of
industry, but they did not fail to regard him as one of their most
distinguished pupils. This varied work, tackled as it was with all
the ardour of suffering ambition, soon robbed Julien of that fresh
complexion which he had brought from the provinces. His pallor
constituted one of his merits in the eyes of his comrades, the young
seminarist; he found them much less malicious, much less ready to bow
down to a silver crown than those of Besancon; they thought he was
consumptive. The marquis had given him a horse.

Julien fearing that he might meet people during his rides on horseback,
had given out that this exercise had been prescribed by the doctors.
The abbe Pirard had taken him into several Jansenist Societies. Julien
was astonished; the idea of religion was indissolubly connected in his
mind with the ideas of hypocrisy and covetousness. He admired those
austere pious men who never gave a thought to their income. Several
Jansenists became friendly with him and would give him advice. A new
world opened before him. At the Jansenists he got to know a comte
Altamira, who was nearly six feet high, was a Liberal, a believer, and
had been condemned to death in his own country. He was struck by the
strange contrast of devoutness and love of liberty.

Julien's relations with the young comte had become cool. Norbert
had thought that he answered the jokes of his friends with too much
sharpness. Julien had committed one or two breaches of social etiquette
and vowed to himself that he would never speak to mademoiselle
Mathilde. They were always perfectly polite to him in the Hotel de
la Mole but he felt himself quite lost. His provincial common sense
explained this result by the vulgar proverb _Tout beau tout nouveau_.

He gradually came to have a little more penetration than during his
first days, or it may have been that the first glamour of Parisian
urbanity had passed off. As soon as he left off working, he fell a prey
to a mortal boredom. He was experiencing the withering effects of that
admirable politeness so typical of good society, which is so perfectly
modulated to every degree of the social hierarchy.

No doubt the provinces can be reproached with a commonness and lack of
polish in their tone; but they show a certain amount of passion, when
they answer you. Julien's self-respect was never wounded at the Hotel
de la Mole, but he often felt at the end of the day as though he would
like to cry. A cafe-waiter in the provinces will take an interest in
you if you happen to have some accident as you enter his cafe, but if
this accident has everything about it which is disagreeable to your
vanity, he will repeat ten times in succession the very word which
tortures you, as he tells you how sorry he is. At Paris they make a
point of laughing in secret, but you always remain a stranger.

We pass in silence over a number of little episodes which would have
made Julien ridiculous, if he had not been to some extent above
ridicule. A foolish sensibility resulted in his committing innumerable
acts of bad taste. All his pleasures were precautions; he practiced
pistol shooting every day, he was one of the promising pupils of the
most famous maitres d'armes. As soon as he had an instant to himself,
instead of employing it in reading as he did before, he would rush
off to the riding school and ask for the most vicious horses. When he
went out with the master of the riding school he was almost invariably
thrown.

The marquis found him convenient by reason of his persistent industry,
his silence and his intelligence, and gradually took him into his
confidence with regard to all his affairs, which were in any way
difficult to unravel. The marquis was a sagacious business man on all
those occasions when his lofty ambition gave him some respite; having
special information within his reach, he would speculate successfully
on the Exchange. He would buy mansions and forests; but he would easily
lose his temper. He would give away hundreds of louis, and would go
to law for a few hundred francs. Rich men with a lofty spirit have
recourse to business not so much for results as for distraction. The
marquis needed a chief of staff who would put all his money affairs
into clear and lucid order. Madame de la Mole, although of so even a
character, sometimes made fun of Julien. Great ladies have a horror
of those unexpected incidents which are produced by a sensitive
character; they constitute the opposite pole of etiquette. On two or
three occasions the marquis took his part. "If he is ridiculous in your
salon, he triumphs in his office." Julien on his side thought he had
caught the marquise's secret. She deigned to manifest an interest in
everything the minute the Baron de la Joumate was announced. He was a
cold individual with an expressionless physiognomy. He was tall, thin,
ugly, very well dressed, passed his life in his chateau, and generally
speaking said nothing about anything. Such was his outlook on life.
Madame de la Mole would have been happy for the first time in her life
if she could have made him her daughter's husband.

CHAPTER XXXVI

PRONUNCIATION

        If fatuity is pardonable it is in one's first youth,
        for it is then the exaggeration of an amiable thing. It
        needs an air of love, gaiety, nonchalance. But fatuity
        coupled with self-importance; fatuity with a solemn and
        self-sufficient manner! This extravagance of stupidity
        was reserved for the XIXth century. Such are the persons
        who want to unchain the _hydra of revolutions_!--LE
        JOHANNISBURG, _Pamphlet_.

Considering that he was a new arrival who was too disdainful to put any
questions, Julien did not fall into unduly great mistakes. One day when
he was forced into a cafe in the Rue St. Honore by a sudden shower,
a big man in a beaver coat, surprised by his gloomy look, looked at
him in return just as mademoiselle Amanda's lover had done before at
Besancon.

Julien had reproached himself too often for having endured the other
insult to put up with this stare. He asked for an explanation. The
man in the tail-coat immediately addressed him in the lowest and most
insulting language. All the people in the cafe surrounded them. The
passers-by stopped before the door. Julien always carried some little
pistols as a matter of precaution. His hand was grasping them nervously
in his pocket. Nevertheless he behaved wisely and confined himself to
repeating to his man "Monsieur, your address, I despise you."

The persistency in which he kept repeating these six words eventually
impressed the crowd.

"By Jove, the other who's talking all to himself ought to give him
his address," they exclaimed. The man in the tail-coat hearing this
repeated several times, flung five or six cards in Julien's face.

Fortunately none of them hit him in the face; he had mentally resolved
not to use his pistols except in the event of his being hit. The man
went away, though not without turning round from time to time to shake
his fist and hurl insults at him.

Julien was bathed in sweat. "So," he said angrily to himself, "the
meanest of mankind has it in his power to affect me as much as this.
How am I to kill so humiliating a sensitiveness?"

Where was he to find a second? He did not have a single friend. He had
several acquaintances, but they all regularly left him after six weeks
of social intercourse. "I am unsociable," he thought, and "I am now
cruelly punished for it." Finally it occurred to him to rout out an old
lieutenant of the 96th, named Lievin, a poor devil with whom he often
used to fence. Julien was frank with him.

"I am quite willing to be your second," said Lievin, "but on one
condition. If you fail to wound your man you will fight with me
straight away."

"Agreed," said Julien quite delighted; and they went to find M. de
Beauvoisis at the address indicated on his card at the end of the
Faubourg Saint Germain.

It was seven o'clock in the morning. It was only when he was being
ushered in, that Julien thought that it might quite well be the young
relation of Madame de Renal, who had once been employed at the Rome
or Naples Embassy, and who had given the singer Geronimo a letter of
introduction.

Julien gave one of the cards which had been flung at him the previous
evening together with one of his own to a tall valet.

He and his second were kept waiting for a good three-quarters of
an hour. Eventually they were ushered in to a elegantly furnished
apartment. They found there a tall young man who was dressed like a
doll. His features presented the perfection and the lack of expression
of Greek beauty. His head, which was remarkably straight, had the
finest blonde hair. It was dressed with great care and not a single
hair was out of place.

"It was to have his hair done like this, that is why this damned
fop has kept us waiting," thought the lieutenant of the 96th. The
variegated dressing gown, the morning trousers, everything down to the
embroidered slippers was correct. He was marvellously well-groomed.
His blank and aristocratic physiognomy betokened rare and orthodox
ideas; the ideal of a Metternichian diplomatist. Napoleon as well did
not like to have in his entourage officers who thought.

Julien, to whom his lieutenant of the 96th had explained, that keeping
him waiting was an additional insult after having thrown his card
so rudely in his face, entered brusquely M. de Beauvoisis' room. He
intended to be insolent, but at the same time to exhibit good form.

Julien was so astonished by the niceness of M. de Beauvoisis'
manners and by the combination of formality, self-importance, and
self-satisfaction in his demeanour, by the admirable elegance of
everything that surrounded him, that he abandoned immediately all
idea of being insolent. It was not his man of the day before. His
astonishment was so great at meeting so distinguished a person, instead
of the rude creature whom he was looking for, that he could not find a
single word to say. He presented one of the cards which had been thrown
at him.

"That's my name," said the young diplomat, not at all impressed by
Julien's black suit at seven o'clock in the morning, "but I do not
understand the honour."

His manner of pronouncing these last words revived a little of Julien's
bad temper.

"I have come to fight you, monsieur," and he explained in a few words
the whole matter.

M. Charles de Beauvoisis, after mature reflection, was fairly satisfied
with the cut of Julien's black suit.

"It comes from Staub, that's clear," he said to himself, as he heard
him speak. "That waistcoat is in good taste. Those boots are all right,
but on the other hand just think of wearing a black suit in the early
morning! It must be to have a better chance of not being hit," said the
chevalier de Beauvoisis to himself.

After he had given himself this explanation he became again perfectly
polite to Julien, and almost treated him as an equal. The conversation
was fairly lengthy, for the matter was a delicate one, but eventually
Julien could not refuse to acknowledge the actual facts. The perfectly
mannered young man before him did not bear any resemblance to the
vulgar fellow who had insulted him the previous day.

Julien felt an invincible repugnance towards him. He noted the
self-sufficiency of the chevalier de Beauvoisis, for that was the name
by which he had referred to himself, shocked as he was when Julien
called him simply "Monsieur."

He admired his gravity which, though tinged with a certain modest
fatuity, he never abandoned for a single moment. He was astonished at
his singular manner of moving his tongue as he pronounced his words,
but after all, this did not present the slightest excuse for picking a
quarrel.

The young diplomatist very graciously offered to fight, but the
ex-lieutenant of the 96th, who had been sitting down for an hour with
his legs wide apart, his hands on his thigh, and his elbows stuck out,
decided that his friend, monsieur de Sorel, was not the kind to go and
pick a quarrel with a man because someone else had stolen that man's
visiting cards.

Julien went out in a very bad temper. The chevalier de Beauvoisis'
carriage was waiting for him in the courtyard before the steps. By
chance Julien raised his eyes and recognised in the coachman his man of
the day before.

Seeing him, catching hold of him by his big jacket, tumbling him down
from his seat, and horse-whipping him thoroughly took scarcely a moment.

Two lackeys tried to defend their comrade. Julien received some blows
from their fists. At the same moment, he cocked one of his little
pistols and fired on them. They took to flight. All this took about a
minute.

The chevalier de Beauvoisis descended the staircase with the most
pleasing gravity, repeating with his lordly pronunciation, "What is
this, what is this." He was manifestly very curious, but his diplomatic
importance would not allow him to evince any greater interest.

When he knew what it was all about, a certain haughtiness tried to
assert itself in that expression of slightly playful nonchalance which
should never leave a diplomatist's face.

The lieutenant of the 96th began to realise that M. de Beauvoisis was
anxious to fight. He was also diplomatic enough to wish to reserve for
his friend the advantage of taking the initiative.

"This time," he exclaimed, "there is ground for duel."

"I think there's enough," answered the diplomat.

"Turn that rascal out," he said to his lackeys. "Let someone else get
up."

The door of the carriage was open. The chevalier insisted on doing
the honours to Julien and his friend. They sent for a friend of M. de
Beauvoisis, who chose them a quiet place. The conversation on their
way went as a matter of fact very well indeed. The only extraordinary
feature was the diplomatist in a dressing-gown.

"These gentlemen, although very noble, are by no means as boring,"
thought Julien, "as the people who come and dine at M. de la Mole's,
and I can see why," he added a moment afterwards. "They allow
themselves to be indecent." They talked about the dancers that the
public had distinguished with its favour at the ballet presented
the night before. The two gentlemen alluded to some spicy anecdotes
of which Julien and his second, the lieutenant of the 96th, were
absolutely ignorant.

Julien was not stupid enough to pretend to know them. He confessed his
ignorance with a good grace. This frankness pleased the chevalier's
friend. He told him these stories with the greatest detail and
extremely well.

One thing astonished Julien inordinately. The carriage was pulled up
for a moment by an altar which was being built in the middle of the
street for the procession of Corpus Christi Day. The two gentlemen
indulged in the luxury of several jests. According to them, the cure
was the son of an archbishop. Such a joke would never have been heard
in the house of M. de la Mole, who was trying to be made a duke. The
duel was over in a minute. Julien got a ball in his arm. They bandaged
it with handkerchiefs which they wetted with brandy, and the chevalier
de Beauvoisis requested Julien with great politeness to allow him to
take him home in the same carriage that had brought him. When Julien
gave the name of M. de la Mole's hotel, the young diplomat and his
friend exchanged looks. Julien's fiacre was here, but they found these
gentlemen's conversation more entertaining than that of the good
lieutenant of the 96th.

"By Jove, so a duel is only that," thought Julien. "What luck I found
that coachman again. How unhappy I should have been if I had had to put
up with that insult as well." The amusing conversation had scarcely
been interrupted. Julien realised that the affectation of diplomatists
is good for something.

"So ennui," he said himself, "is not a necessary incident of
conversation among well-born people. These gentlemen make fun of the
Corpus Christi procession and dare to tell extremely obscene anecdotes,
and what is more, with picturesque details. The only thing they really
lack is the ability to discuss politics logically, and that lack is
more than compensated by their graceful tone, and the perfect aptness
of their expressions." Julien experienced a lively inclination for
them. "How happy I should be to see them often."

They had scarcely taken leave of each other before the chevalier de
Beauvoisis had enquiries made. They were not brilliant.

He was very curious to know his man. Could he decently pay a call on
him? The little information he had succeeded in obtaining from him was
not of an encouraging character.

"Oh, this is awful," he said to his second. "I can't possibly own up
to having fought a duel with a mere secretary of M. de la Mole, simply
because my coachman stole my visiting cards."

"There is no doubt that all this may make you look ridiculous."

That very evening the chevalier de Beauvoisis and his friend said
everywhere that this M. Sorel who was, moreover, quite a charming young
man, was a natural son of an intimate friend of the marquis de la Mole.
This statement was readily accepted. Once it was established, the young
diplomatist and friend deigned to call several times on Julien during
the fortnight. Julien owned to them that he had only been to the Opera
once in his life. "That is awful," said one, "that is the only place
one does go to. Your first visit must be when they are playing the
'_Comte Ory_.'"

The chevalier de Beauvoisis introduced him at the opera to the famous
singer Geronimo, who was then enjoying an immense success.

Julien almost paid court to the chevalier. His mixture of self-respect,
mysterious self-importance, and fatuous youthfulness fascinated him.
The chevalier, for example, would stammer a little, simply because he
had the honour of seeing frequently a very noble lord who had this
defect. Julien had never before found combined in one and the same
person the drollery which amuses, and those perfect manners which
should be the object of a poor provincial's imitation.

He was seen at the opera with the chevalier de Beauvoisis. This
association got him talked about.

"Well," said M. de la Mole to him one day, "so here you are, the
natural son of a rich gentleman of Franche-Comte, an intimate friend of
mine."

The marquis cut Julien short as he started to protest that he had not
in any way contributed to obtaining any credence for this rumour.

"M. de Beauvoisis did not fancy having fought a duel with the son of a
carpenter."

"I know it, I know it," said M. de la Mole. "It is my business now to
give some consistency to this story which rather suits me. But I have
one favour to ask of you, which will only cost you a bare half-hour of
your time. Go and watch every opera day at half-past eleven all the
people in society coming out in the vestibule. I still see you have
certain provincial mannerisms. You must rid yourself of them. Besides
it would do no harm to know, at any rate by sight, some of the great
personages to whom I may one day send you on a commission. Call in at
the box office to get identified. Admission has been secured for you."

CHAPTER XXXVII

AN ATTACK OF GOUT

     And I got advancement, not on my merit, but because my
                master had the gout.--_Bertolotti_.

The reader is perhaps surprised by this free and almost friendly tone.
We had forgotten to say that the marquis had been confined to his house
for six weeks by the gout.

Mademoiselle de la Mole and her mother were at Hyeres near the
marquise's mother. The comte Norbert only saw his father at stray
moments. They got on very well, but had nothing to say to each other.
M. de la Mole, reduced to Julien's society, was astonished to find that
he possessed ideas. He made him read the papers to him. Soon the young
secretary was competent to pick out the interesting passages. There was
a new paper which the marquis abhorred. He had sworn never to read it,
and spoke about it every day. Julien laughed. In his irritation against
the present time, the marquis made him read Livy aloud. The improvised
translation of the Latin text amused him. The marquis said one day
in that tone of excessive politeness which frequently tried Julien's
patience,

"Allow me to present you with a blue suit, my dear Sorel. When you find
it convenient to wear it and to come and see me, I shall look upon you
as the younger brother of the comte de Chaulnes, that is to say, the
son of my friend the old Duke."

Julien did not quite gather what it was all about, but he tried a visit
in the blue suit that very evening. The marquis treated him like an
equal. Julien had a spirit capable of appreciating true politeness, but
he had no idea of nuances. Before this freak of the marquis's he would
have sworn that it was impossible for him to have been treated with
more consideration. "What an admirable talent," said Julien to himself.
When he got up to go, the marquis apologised for not being able to
accompany him by reason of his gout.

Julien was preoccupied by this strange idea. "Perhaps he is making fun
of me," he thought. He went to ask advice of the abbe Pirard, who being
less polite than the marquis, made no other answer except to whistle
and change the subject.

Julien presented himself to the marquis the next morning in his black
suit, with his letter case and his letters for signature. He was
received in the old way, but when he wore the blue suit that evening,
the marquis's tone was quite different, and absolutely as polite as on
the previous day.

"As you are not exactly bored," said the marquis to him, "by these
visits which you are kind enough to pay to a poor old man, you must
tell him about all the little incidents of your life, but you must
be frank and think of nothing except narrating them clearly and in
an amusing way. For one must amuse oneself," continued the marquis.
"That's the only reality in life. I can't have my life saved in a
battle every day, or get a present of a million francs every day, but
if I had Rivarol here by my sofa he would rid me every day of an hour
of suffering and boredom. I saw a lot of him at Hamburg during the
emigration."

And the marquis told Julien the stories of Rivarol and the inhabitants
of Hamburg who needed the combined efforts of four individuals to
understand an epigram. M. de la Mole, being reduced to the society of
this little abbe, tried to teach him. He put Julien's pride on its
mettle. As he was asked to speak the truth, Julien resolved to tell
everything, but to suppress two things, his fanatical admiration for
the name which irritated the marquis, and that complete scepticism,
which was not particularly appropriate to a prospective cure. His
little affair with the chevalier de Beauvoisis came in very handy. The
marquis laughed till the tears came into his eyes at the scene in the
cafe in the Rue St. Honore with the coachman who had loaded him with
sordid insults. The occasion was marked by a complete frankness between
the marquis and the protege.

M. de la Mole became interested in this singular character. At the
beginning he had encouraged Julian's droll blunders in order to enjoy
laughing at them. Soon he found it more interesting to correct very
gently this young man's false outlook on life.

"All other provincials who come to Paris admire everything,"
thought the marquis. "This one hates everything. They have too much
affectation; he has not affectation enough; and fools take him for a
fool."

The attack of gout was protracted by the great winter cold and lasted
some months.

"One gets quite attached to a fine spaniel," thought the marquis. "Why
should I be so ashamed of being attached to this little abbe? He is
original. I treat him as a son. Well, where's the bother? The whim, if
it lasts, will cost me a diamond and five hundred louis in my will."
Once the marquis had realised his protege's strength of character, he
entrusted him with some new business every day.

Julien noticed with alarm that this great lord would often give him
inconsistent orders with regard to the same matter.

That might compromise him seriously. Julien now made a point whenever
he worked with him, of bringing a register with him in which he wrote
his instructions which the marquis initialled. Julien had now a clerk
who would transcribe the instructions relating to each matter in a
separate book. This book also contained a copy of all the letters.

This idea seemed at first absolutely boring and ridiculous, but in two
months the marquis appreciated its advantages. Julien suggested to him
that he should take a clerk out of a banker's who was to keep proper
book-keeping accounts of all the receipts and of all the expenses of
the estates which Julien had been charged to administer.

These measures so enlightened the marquis as to his own affairs that
he could indulge the pleasure of undertaking two or three speculations
without the help of his nominee who always robbed him.

"Take three thousand francs for yourself," he said one day to his young
steward.

"Monsieur, I should lay myself open to calumny."

"What do you want then?" retorted the marquis irritably.

"Perhaps you will be kind enough to make out a statement of account and
enter it in your own hand in the book. That order will give me a sum of
3,000 francs. Besides it's M. the abbe Pirard who had the idea of all
this exactness in accounts." The marquis wrote out his instructions in
the register with the bored air of the Marquis de Moncade listening to
the accounts of his steward M. Poisson.

Business was never talked when Julien appeared in the evening in
his blue suit. The kindness of the marquis was so flattering to the
self-respect of our hero, which was always morbidly sensitive, that
in spite of himself, he soon came to feel a kind of attachment for
this nice old man. It is not that Julien was a man of sensibility
as the phrase is understood at Paris, but he was not a monster, and
no one since the death of the old major had talked to him with so
much kindness. He observed that the marquis showed a politeness and
consideration for his own personal feelings which he had never found in
the old surgeon. He now realised that the surgeon was much prouder of
his cross than was the marquis of his blue ribbon. The marquis's father
had been a great lord.

One day, at the end of a morning audience for the transaction of
business, when the black suit was worn, Julien happened to amuse the
marquis who kept him for a couple of hours, and insisted on giving him
some banknotes which his nominee had just brought from the house.

"I hope M. le Marquis, that I am not deviating from the profound
respect which I owe you, if I beg you to allow me to say a word."

"Speak, my friend."

"M. le Marquis will deign to allow me to refuse this gift. It is not
meant for the man in the black suit, and it would completely spoil
those manners which you have kindly put up with in the man in the blue
suit." He saluted with much respect and went out without looking at his
employer.

This incident amused the marquis. He told it in the evening to the abbe
Pirard.

"I must confess one thing to you, my dear abbe. I know Julien's birth,
and I authorise you not to regard this confidence as a secret."

His conduct this morning is noble, thought the marquis, so I will
ennoble him myself.

Some time afterwards the marquis was able to go out.

"Go and pass a couple of months at London," he said to Julien.
"Ordinary and special couriers will bring you the letters I have
received, together with my notes. You will write out the answers and
send them back to me, putting each letter inside the answer. I have
ascertained that the delay will be no more than five days."

As he took the post down the Calais route, Julien was astonished at the
triviality of the alleged business on which he had been sent.

We will say nothing about the feeling of hate and almost horror with
which he touched English soil. His mad passion for Bonaparte is already
known. He saw in every officer a Sir Hudson Low, in every great
noble a Lord Bathurst, ordering the infamies of St. Helena and being
recompensed by six years of office.

At London he really got to know the meaning of sublime fatuity. He had
struck up a friendship with some young Russian nobles who initiated him.

"Your future is assured, my dear Sorel," they said to him. "You
naturally have that cold demeanour, _a thousand leagues away from the
sensation one has at the moment_, that we have been making such efforts
to acquire."

"You have not understood your century," said the Prince Korasoff to
him. "Always do the opposite of what is expected of you. On my honour
there you have the sole religion of the period. Don't be foolish or
affected, for then follies and affectations will be expected of you,
and the maxim will not longer prove true."

Julien covered himself with glory one day in the Salon of the Duke
of Fitz-Folke who had invited him to dinner together with the Prince
Korasoff. They waited for an hour. The way in which Julien conducted
himself in the middle of twenty people who were waiting is still quoted
as a precedent among the young secretaries of the London Embassy. His
demeanour was unimpeachable.

In spite of his friends, the dandies, he made a point of seeing the
celebrated Philip Vane, the one philosopher that England has had
since Locke. He found him finishing his seventh year in prison. The
aristocracy doesn't joke in this country, thought Julien. Moreover Vane
is disgraced, calumniated, etc.

Julien found him in cheery spirits. The rage of the aristocracy
prevented him from being bored. "There's the only merry man I've seen
in England," thought Julien to himself, as he left the prison.

"The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God," Vane had
said to him.

We suppress the rest of the system as being cynical.

"What amusing notion do you bring me from England?" said M. la Mole to
him on his return. He was silent. "What notion do you bring me, amusing
or otherwise?" repeated the marquis sharply.

"In the first place," said Julien, "The sanest Englishman is mad one
hour every day. He is visited by the Demon of Suicide who is the local
God.

"In the second place, intellect and genius lose twenty-five per cent.
of their value when they disembark in England.

"In the third place, nothing in the world is so beautiful, so
admirable, so touching, as the English landscapes."

"Now it is my turn," said the marquis.

"In the first place, why do you go and say at the ball at the Russian
Ambassador's that there were three hundred thousand young men of twenty
in France who passionately desire war? Do you think that is nice for
the kings?"

"One doesn't know what to do when talking to great diplomats," said
Julien. "They have a mania for starting serious discussions. If one
confines oneself to the commonplaces of the papers, one is taken for a
fool. If one indulges in some original truth, they are astonished and
at a loss for an answer, and get you informed by the first Secretary
of the Embassy at seven o'clock next day that your conduct has been
unbecoming."

"Not bad," said the marquis laughing. "Anyway I will wager Monsieur
Deep-one that you have not guessed what you went to do in England."

"Pardon me," answered Julien. "I went there to dine once a week with
the king's ambassador, who is the most polite of men."

"You went to fetch this cross you see here," said the marquis to him.
"I do not want to make you leave off your black suit, and I have got
accustomed to the more amusing tone I have assumed with the man who
wears the blue suit. So understand this until further orders. When I
see this cross, you will be my friend, the Duke of Chaulne's younger
son, who has been employed in the diplomatic service the last six
months without having any idea of it. Observe," added the marquis
very seriously, cutting short all manifestations of thanks, "that I
do not want you to forget your place. That is always a mistake and a
misfortune both for patron and for dependent. When my lawsuits bore
you, or when you no longer suit me, I will ask a good living like that
of our good friend the abbe Pirard's for you, and nothing more," added
the marquis dryly. This put Julien's pride at its ease. He talked much
more. He did not so frequently think himself insulted and aimed at by
those phrases which are susceptible of some interpretation which is
scarcely polite, and which anybody may give utterance to in the course
of an animated conversation.

This cross earned him a singular visit. It was that of the baron de
Valenod, who came to Paris to thank the Minister for his barony, and
arrive at an understanding with him. He was going to be nominated mayor
of Verrieres, and to supersede M. de Renal.

Julien did not fail to smile to himself when M. Valenod gave him to
understand that they had just found out that M. de Renal was a Jacobin.
The fact was that the new baron was the ministerial candidate at the
election for which they were all getting ready, and that it was M. de
Renal who was the Liberal candidate at the great electoral college of
the department, which was, in fact, very ultra.

It was in vain that Julien tried to learn something about madame de
Renal. The baron seemed to remember their former rivalry, and was
impenetrable. He concluded by canvassing Julien for his father's vote
at the election which was going to take place. Julien promised to write.

"You ought, monsieur le Chevalier, to present me to M. the marquis de
la Mole."

"I ought, as a matter of fact," thought Julien. "But a rascal like
that!"

"As a matter of fact," he answered, "I am too small a personage in the
Hotel de la Mole to take it upon myself to introduce anyone." Julien
told the marquis everything. In the evening he described Valenod's
pretensions, as well as his deeds and feats since 1814.

"Not only will you present the new baron to me," replied de la Mole,
very seriously, "but I will invite him to dinner for the day after
to-morrow. He will be one of our new prefects."

"If that is the case, I ask for my father the post of director of the
workhouse," answered Julien, coldly.

"With pleasure," answered the marquis gaily. "It shall be granted. I
was expecting a lecture. You are getting on."

M. de Valenod informed Julien that the manager of the lottery office at
Verrieres had just died. Julien thought it humorous to give that place
to M. de Cholin, the old dotard whose petition he had once picked up in
de la Mole's room. The marquis laughed heartily at the petition, which
Julien recited as he made him sign the letter which requested that
appointment of the minister of finance.

M. de Cholin had scarcely been nominated, when Julien learnt that that
post had been asked by the department for the celebrated geometrician,
monsieur Gros. That generous man had an income of only 1400 francs, and
every year had lent 600 to the late manager who had just died, to help
him bring up his family.

Julien was astonished at what he had done.

"That's nothing," he said to himself. "It will be necessary to commit
several other injustices if I mean to get on, and also to conceal them
beneath pretty, sentimental speeches. Poor monsieur Gros! It is he who
deserves the cross. It is I who have it, and I ought to conform to the
spirit of the Government which gives it me."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

WHAT IS THE DECORATION WHICH CONFERS DISTINCTION?

    "Thy water refreshes me not," said the transformed genie.
    "'Tis nevertheless the freshest well in all Diar-Bekir"--_Pellico_.

One day Julien had just returned from the charming estate of Villequier
on the banks of the Seine, which was the especial subject of M. de la
Mole's interest because it was the only one of all his properties which
had belonged to the celebrated Boniface de la Mole.

He found the marquise and her daughter, who had just come back from
Hyeres, in the hotel. Julien was a dandy now, and understood the art of
Paris life. He manifested a perfect coldness towards mademoiselle de la
Mole. He seemed to have retained no recollection of the day when she
had asked him so gaily for details of his fall from his horse.

Mademoiselle de la Mole thought that he had grown taller and paler.
There was no longer anything of the provincial in his figure or his
appearance. It was not so with his conversation. Too much of the
serious and too much of the positive element were still noticeable. In
spite of these sober qualities, his conversation, thanks to his pride,
was destitute of any trace of the subordinate. One simply felt that
there were still too many things which he took seriously. But one saw
that he was the kind of man to stick to his guns.

"He lacks lightness of touch, but not brains," said mademoiselle de la
Mole to her father, as she rallied him on the cross that he had given
Julien. "My brother has been asking you for it for sixteen months, and
he is a La Mole."

"Yes, but Julien has surprises, and that's what the de la Mole, whom
you were referring to, has never been guilty of."

M. the duc de Retz was announced.

Mathilde felt herself seized by an irresistible attack of yawning. She
knew so well the old gildings and the old habitues of her father's
salon. She conjured up an absolutely boring picture of the life which
she was going to take up at Paris, and yet, when at Hyeres, she had
regretted Paris.

"And yet I am nineteen," she thought. "That's the age of happiness, say
all those gilt-edged ninnies."

She looked at eight or ten new volumes of poetry which had accumulated
on the table in the salon during her journey in Provence. She had the
misfortune to have more brains than M.M. de Croisnois, de Caylus, de
Luz, and her other friends. She anticipated all that they were going to
tell her about the fine sky of Provence, poetry, the South, etc., etc.

These fine eyes, which were the home of the deepest ennui, and worse
still, of the despair of ever finding pleasure, lingered on Julien. At
any rate, he was not exactly like the others.

"Monsieur Sorel," she said, in that short, sharp voice, destitute of
all femininity, which is so frequent among young women of the upper
class.

"Monsieur Sorel, are you coming to-night to M. de Retz's ball?"

"Mademoiselle, I have not had the honour of being presented to M. the
duke." (One would have said that these words and that title seared the
mouth of the proud provincial).

"He asked my brother to take you there, and if you go, you could
tell me some details about the Villequier estate. We are thinking of
going there in the spring, and I would like to know if the chateau is
habitable, and if the neighbouring places are as pretty as they say.
There are so many unmerited reputations."

Julien did not answer.

"Come to the ball with my brother," she added, very dryly. Julien bowed
respectfully.

"So I owe my due to the members of the family, even in the middle of a
ball. Am I not paid to be their business man?" His bad temper added,
"God knows, moreover, if what I tell the daughter will not put out the
plans of the father, brother, and mother. It is just like the court of
a sovereign prince. You have to be absolutely negative, and yet give no
one any right to complain."

"How that big girl displeases me!" he thought, as he watched the walk
of Mademoiselle de la Mole, whom her mother had called to present to
several women friends of hers. She exaggerates all the fashions. Her
dress almost falls down to her shoulders, she is even paler than before
she went away. How nondescript her hair has grown as the result of
being blonde! You would say that the light passed through it.

What a haughty way of bowing and of looking at you! What queenly
gestures! Mademoiselle de la Mole had just called her brother at the
moment when he was leaving the salon.

The comte de Norbert approached Julien.

"My dear Sorel," he said to him. "Where would you like me to pick you
up to-night for Monsieur's ball. He expressly asked me to bring you."

"I know well whom I have to thank for so much kindness," answered
Julien bowing to the ground.

His bad temper, being unable to find anything to lay hold of in the
polite and almost sympathetic tone in which Norbert had spoken to
him, set itself to work on the answer he had made to that courteous
invitation. He detected in it a trace of subservience.

When he arrived at the ball in the evening, he was struck with the
magnificence of the Hotel de Retz. The courtyard at the entrance was
covered with an immense tent of crimson with golden stars. Nothing
could have been more elegant. Beyond the tent, the court had been
transformed into a wood of orange trees and of pink laurels in full
flower. As they had been careful to bury the vases sufficiently deep,
the laurel trees and the orange trees appeared to come straight out of
the ground. The road which the carriages traversed was sanded.

All this seemed extraordinary to our provincial. He had never had any
idea of such magnificence. In a single instant his thrilled imagination
had left his bad temper a thousand leagues behind. In the carriage on
their way to the ball Norbert had been happy, while he saw everything
in black colours. They had scarcely entered the courtyard before the
roles changed.

Norbert was only struck by a few details which, in the midst of all
that magnificence, had not been able to be attended to. He calculated
the expense of each item, and Julien remarked that the nearer he got
to a sum total, the more jealous and bad-tempered he appeared.

As for himself, he was fascinated and full of admiration when he
reached the first of the salons where they were dancing. His emotion
was so great that it almost made him nervous. There was a crush at the
door of the second salon, and the crowd was so great that he found it
impossible to advance. The decorations of the second salon presented
the Alhambra of Grenada.

"That's the queen of the ball one must admit," said a young man with a
moustache whose shoulder stuck into Julien's chest.

"Mademoiselle Formant who has been the prettiest all the winter,
realises that she will have to go down to the second place. See how
strange she looks."

"In truth she is straining every nerve to please. Just look at that
gracious smile now that she is doing the figure in that quadrille all
alone. On my honour it is unique."

"Mademoiselle de la Mole looks as if she controlled the pleasure which
she derives from her triumph, of which she is perfectly conscious. One
might say that she fears to please anyone who talks to her."

"Very good. That is the art of alluring."

Julien vainly endeavoured to catch sight of the alluring woman. Seven
or eight men who were taller than he prevented him from seeing her.

"There is quite a lot of coquetry in that noble reserve," said the
young man with a moustache.

"And in those big blue eyes, which are lowered so slowly when one would
think they were on the point of betraying themselves," answered his
neighbour. "On my faith, nothing could be cleverer."

"See the pretty Formant looking quite common next to her," said the
first.

"That air of reserve means how much sweetness would I spend on you if
you were the man who was worthy of me."

"And who could be worthy of the sublime Mathilde," said the first man.
"Some sovereign prince, handsome, witty, well-made, a hero in war, and
twenty years old at the most."

"The natural son of the Emperor of Russia ... who would be made a
sovereign in honour of his marriage, or quite simply the comte de
Thaler, who looks like a dressed-up peasant."

The door was free, and Julien could go in.

"Since these puppets consider her so remarkable, it is worth while
for me to study her," he thought. "I shall then understand what these
people regard as perfection."

As his eyes were trying to find her, Mathilde looked at him. "My duty
calls me," said Julien to himself. But it was only his expression which
was bad-humoured.

His curiosity made him advance with a pleasure which the extremely low
cut dress on Mathilde's shoulder very quickly accentuated, in a manner
which was scarcely flattering for his own self-respect. "Her beauty has
youth," he thought. Five or six people, whom Julien recognised as those
who had been speaking at the door were between her and him.

"Now, Monsieur, you have been here all the winter," she said to him.
"Is it not true that this is the finest ball of the season."

He did not answer.

"This quadrille of Coulon's strikes me as admirable, and those ladies
dance it perfectly." The young men turned round to see who was the
happy man, an answer from whom was positively insisted on. The answer
was not encouraging.

"I shall not be able to be a good judge, mademoiselle, I pass my life
in writing. This is the first ball of this magnificence which I have
ever seen."

The young men with moustaches were scandalised.

"You are a wise man, Monsieur Sorel," came the answer with a more
marked interest. "You look upon all these balls, all these festivities,
like a philosopher, like J. J. Rousseau. All these follies astonish
without alluring you."

Julien's imagination had just hit upon an epigram which banished all
illusions from his mind. His mouth assumed the expression of a perhaps
slightly exaggerated disdain.

"J. J. Rousseau," he answered, "is in my view only a fool when he takes
it upon himself to criticise society. He did not understand it, and
he went into it with the spirit of a lackey who has risen above his
station."

"He wrote the _Contrat Social_," answered Mathilde reverently.

"While he preaches the Republic, and the overthrow of monarchical
dignities, the parvenu was intoxicated with happiness if a duke would
go out of his way after dinner to one of his friends."

"Oh yes, the Duke of Luxembourg at Montmorency, used to accompany a
Coindet from the neighbourhood of Paris," went on Mademoiselle de
la Mole, with all the pleasure and enthusiasm of her first flush of
pedantry. She was intoxicated with her knowledge, almost like the
academician who discovered the existence of King Feretrius.

Julien's look was still penetrating and severe. Mathilde had had
a moment's enthusiasm. Her partner's coldness disconcerted her
profoundly. She was all the more astonished, as it was she who was
accustomed to produce that particular effect on others.

At this moment the marquis de Croisenois was advancing eagerly towards
mademoiselle de la Mole. He was for a moment three yards away from her.
He was unable to get closer because of the crowd. He smiled at the
obstacle. The young marquise de Rouvray was near her. She was a cousin
of Mathilde. She was giving her arm to her husband who had only married
her a fortnight ago. The marquis de Rouvray, who was also very young,
had all the love which seizes a man who, having contracted a marriage
of convenience exclusively arranged by the notaries, finds a person who
is ideally pretty. M. de Rouvray would be a duke on the death of a very
old uncle.

While the marquis de Croisenois was struggling to get through the
crowd, and smiling at Mathilde she fixed her big divinely blue eyes
on him and his neighbours. "Could anything be flatter," she said to
herself. "There is Croisenois who wants to marry me, he is gentle and
polite, he has perfect manners like M. de Rouvray. If they did not
bore, those gentlemen would be quite charming. He too, would accompany
me to the ball with that smug limited expression. One year after the
marriage I shall have my carriage, my horses, my dresses, my chateau
twenty leagues from Paris. All this would be as nice as possible, and
enough to make a Countess de Roiville, for example, die of envy and
afterwards--"

Mathilde bored herself in anticipation. The marquis de Croisenois
managed to approach her and spoke to her, but she was dreaming and
did not listen to him. The noise of his words began to get mixed
with the buzz of the ball. Her eye mechanically followed Julien who
had gone away, with an air which, though respectful, was yet proud
and discontented. She noticed in a corner far from the moving crowd,
the comte Altamira who had been condemned to death in his own country
and whom the reader knows already. One of his relatives had married a
Prince de Conti in the reign of Louis XIV. This historical fact was
some protection against the police of the congregation.

"I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said
Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought."

"Why, that's an epigram, I just said, what a pity it did not come at a
moment when I could have reaped all the credit for it." Mathilde had
too much taste to work into the conversation a prepared epigram but
at the same time she was too vain not to be extremely pleased with
herself. A happy expression succeeded the palpable boredom of her face.
The marquis de Croisenois, who had never left off talking, saw a chance
of success and waxed twice as eloquent.

"What objection could a caviller find with my epigram," said Mathilde
to herself. "I would answer my critic in this way: The title of baron
or vicomte is to be bought; a cross, why it is a gift. My brother
has just got one. What has he done? A promotion, why that can be
obtained by being ten years in a garrison or have the minister of war
for a relative, and you'll be a chief of a squadron like Norbert. A
great fortune! That's rather more difficult, and consequently more
meritorious. It is really quite funny. It's the opposite of what
the books say. Well, to win a fortune why you marry M. Rothschild's
daughter. Really my epigram is quite deep. Being condemned to death is
still the one privilege which one has never thought of canvassing."

"Do you know the comte Altamira," she said to M. de Croisenois.

Her thoughts seemed to have been so far away, and this question had
so little connection with all that the poor marquis had been saying
for the last five minutes, that his good temper was ruffled. He was
nevertheless a man of wit and celebrated for being so.

"Mathilde is eccentric," he thought, "that's a nuisance, but she will
give her husband such a fine social position. I don't know how the
marquis de la Mole manages. He is connected with all that is best in
all parties. He is a man who is bound to come out on top. And, besides,
this eccentricity of Mathilde's may pass for genius. Genius when allied
with good birth and a large fortune, so far from being ridiculous, is
highly distinguished. She has wit, moreover, when she wants to, that
mixture in fact of brains, character, and ready wit which constitute
perfection."

As it is difficult to do two things at the same time, the marquis
answered Mathilde with a vacant expression as though he were reciting a
lesson.

"Who does not know that poor Altamira?" and he told her the history of
his conspiracy, abortive, ridiculous and absurd.

"Very absurd," said Mathilde as if she were talking to herself, "but he
has done something. I want to see a man; bring him to me," she said to
the scandalized marquis.

Comte Altamira was one of the most avowed admirers of mademoiselle de
la Mole's haughty and impertinent manner. In his opinion she was one of
the most beautiful persons in Paris.

"How fine she would be on a throne," he said to M. de Croisenois; and
made no demur at being taken up to Mathilde.

There are a good number of people in society who would like to
establish the fact that nothing is in such bad form as a conspiracy, in
the nineteenth century; it smacks of Jacobinism. And what could be more
sordid than unsuccessful Jacobinism.

Mathilde's expression made fun a little of Altamira and M. de
Croisenois, but she listened to him with pleasure.

"A conspirator at a ball, what a pretty contrast," she thought. She
thought that this man with his black moustache looked like a lion at
rest, but she soon perceived that his mind had only one point of view:
_utility, admiration for utility_.

The young comte thought nothing worthy his attention except what tended
to give his country two chamber government. He left Mathilde, who was
the prettiest person at the ball, with alacrity, because he saw a
Peruvian general come in. Desparing of Europe such as M. de Metternich
had arranged it, poor Altamira had been reduced to thinking that when
the States of South America had become strong and powerful they could
restore to Europe the liberty which Mirabeau has given it.

A crowd of moustachised young men had approached Mathilde. She realized
that Altamira had not felt allured, and was piqued by his departure.
She saw his black eye gleam as he talked to the Peruvian general.
Mademoiselle de la Mole looked at the young Frenchmen with that
profound seriousness which none of her rivals could imitate, "which
of them," she thought, "could get himself condemned to death, even
supposing he had a favourable opportunity?"

This singular look flattered those who were not very intelligent, but
disconcerted the others. They feared the discharge of some stinging
epigram that would be difficult to answer.

"Good birth vouchsafes a hundred qualities whose absence would offend
me. I see as much in the case of Julien," thought Mathilde, "but it
withers up those qualities of soul which make a man get condemned to
death."

At that moment some one was saying near her: "Comte Altamira is the
second son of the Prince of San Nazaro-Pimentel; it was a Pimentel who
tried to save Conradin, was beheaded in 1268. It is one of the noblest
families in Naples."

"So," said Mathilde to herself, "what a pretty proof this is of my
maxim, that good birth deprives a man of that force of character
in default of which a man does not get condemned to death. I seem
doomed to reason falsely to-night. Since I am only a woman like any
other, well I must dance." She yielded to the solicitations of M. de
Croisenois who had been asking for a gallop for the last hour. To
distract herself from her failure in philosophy, Mathilde made a point
of being perfectly fascinating. M. de Croisenois was enchanted. But
neither the dance nor her wish to please one of the handsomest men at
court, nor anything at all, succeeded in distracting Mathilde. She
could not possibly have been more of a success. She was the queen of
the ball. She coldly appreciated the fact.

"What a blank life I shall pass with a person like Croisenois," she
said to herself as he took her back to her place an hour afterwards.
"What pleasure do I get," she added sadly, "if after an absence of
six months I find myself at a ball which all the women of Paris were
mad with jealousy to go to? And what is more I am surrounded by the
homage of an ideally constituted circle of society. The only bourgeois
are some peers and perhaps one or two Juliens. And yet," she added
with increasing sadness, "what advantages has not fate bestowed upon
me! Distinction, fortune, youth, everything except happiness. My most
dubious advantages are the very ones they have been speaking to me
about all the evening. Wit, I believe I have it, because I obviously
frighten everyone. If they venture to tackle a serious subject, they
will arrive after five minutes of conversation and as though they had
made a great discovery at a conclusion which we have been repeating to
them for the last hour. I am beautiful, I have that advantage for which
madame de Stael would have sacrificed everything, and yet I'm dying of
boredom. Shall I have reason to be less bored when I have changed my
name for that of the marquis de Croisenois?

"My God though," she added, while she almost felt as if she would like
to cry, "isn't he really quite perfect? He's a paragon of the education
of the age; you can't look at him without his finding something
charming and even witty to say to you; he is brave. But that Sorel is
strange," she said to herself, and the expression of her eyes changed
from melancholy to anger. "I told him that I had something to say to
him and he hasn't deigned to reappear."

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE BALL

        The luxurious dresses, the glitter of the candles; all
        those pretty arms and fine shoulders; the bouquets,
        the intoxicating strains of Rossini, the paintings of
        Ciceri. I am beside myself.--_Journeys of Useri_.

"You are in a bad temper," said the marquise de la Mole to her; "let me
caution you, it is ungracious at a ball."

"I only have a headache," answered Mathilde disdainfully, "it is too
hot here."

At this moment the old Baron Tolly became ill and fell down, as though
to justify mademoiselle de la Mole's remark. They were obliged to carry
him away. They talked about apoplexy. It was a disagreeable incident.

Mathilde did not bother much about it.

She made a point of never looking at old men, or at anyone who had the
reputation of being bad company.

She danced in order to escape the conversation about the apoplexy,
which was not apoplexy inasmuch as the baron put in an appearance the
following day.

"But Sorel does not come," she said to herself after she had danced.
She was almost looking round for him when she found him in another
salon. Astonishing, but he seemed to have lost that impassive coldness
that was so natural to him; he no longer looked English.

"He is talking to comte Altamira who was sentenced to death," said
Mathilde to herself. "His eye is full of a sombre fire; he looks like a
prince in disguise; his haughtiness has become twice as pronounced."

Julien came back to where she was, still talking to Altamira. She
looked at Altamira fixedly, studying his features in order to trace
those lofty qualities which can earn a man the honour of being
condemned to death.

"Yes," he was saying to comte Altamira as he passed by her, "Danton was
a real man."

"Heavens can he be a Danton?" said Mathilde to herself, "but he has
so noble a face, and that Danton was so horribly ugly, a butcher I
believe." Julien was still fairly near her. She did not hesitate to
call him; she had the consciousness and the pride of putting a question
that was unusual for a young girl.

"Was not Danton a butcher?" she said to him.

"Yes, in the eyes of certain persons," Julien answered her with the
most thinly disguised expression of contempt. His eyes were still
ardent from his conversation with Altamira, "but unfortunately for
the people of good birth he was an advocate at Mery-sur-Seine, that
is to say, mademoiselle," he added maliciously, "he began like many
peers whom I see here. It was true that Danton laboured under a great
disadvantage in the eyes of beauty; he was ugly."

These last few words were spoken rapidly in an extraordinary and indeed
very discourteous manner.

Julien waited for a moment, leaning slightly forward and with an air of
proud humility. He seemed to be saying, "I am paid to answer you and I
live on my pay." He did not deign to look up at Mathilde. She looked
like his slave with her fine eyes open abnormally wide and fixed on
him. Finally as the silence continued he looked at her, like a valet
looking at his master to receive orders. Although his eyes met the full
gaze of Mathilde which were fixed on him all the time with a strange
expression, he went away with a marked eagerness.

"To think of a man who is as handsome as he is," said Mathilde to
herself as she emerged from her reverie, "praising ugliness in such a
way, he is not like Caylus or Croisenois. This Sorel has something like
my father's look when he goes to a fancy dress ball as Napoleon." She
had completely forgotten Danton. "Yes, I am decidedly bored to-night."
She took her brother's arm and to his great disgust made him take
her round the ball-room. The idea occurred to her of following the
conversation between Julien and the man who had been condemned to
death.

The crowd was enormous. She managed to find them, however, at the
moment when two yards in front of her Altamira was going near a
dumb-waiter to take an ice. He was talking to Julien with his body half
turned round. He saw an arm in an embroidered coat which was taking an
ice close by. The embroidery seemed to attract his attention. He turned
round to look at the person to whom the arm belonged. His noble and yet
simple eyes immediately assumed a slightly disdainful expression.

"You see that man," he said to Julien in a low voice; "that is the
Prince of Araceli Ambassador of ----. He asked M. de Nerval, your
Minister for Foreign Affairs, for my extradition this morning. See,
there he is over there playing whist. Monsieur de Nerval is willing
enough to give me up, for we gave up two or three conspirators to you
in 1816. If I am given up to my king I shall be hanged in twenty-four
hours. It will be one of those handsome moustachioed gentlemen who will
arrest me."

"The wretches!" exclaimed Julien half aloud.

Mathilde did not lose a syllable of their conversation. Her ennui had
vanished.

"They are not scoundrels," replied Count Altamira. "I talk to you about
myself in order to give you a vivid impression. Look at the Prince of
Araceli. He casts his eyes on his golden fleece every five minutes; he
cannot get over the pleasure of seeing that decoration on his breast.
In reality the poor man is really an anachronism. The fleece was a
signal honour a hundred years ago, but he would have been nowhere
near it in those days. But nowadays, so far as people of birth are
concerned, you have to be an Araceli to be delighted with it. He had a
whole town hanged in order to get it."

"Is that the price he had to pay?" said Julien anxiously.

"Not exactly," answered Altamira coldly, "he probably had about thirty
rich landed proprietors in his district who had the reputation of being
Liberals thrown into the river."

"What a monster!" pursued Julien.

Mademoiselle de la Mole who was leaning her head forward with keenest
interest was so near him that her beautiful hair almost touched his
shoulder.

"You are very young," answered Altamira. "I was telling you that I had
a married sister in Provence. She is still pretty, good and gentle; she
is an excellent mother, performs all her duties faithfully, is pious
but not a bigot."

"What is he driving at?" thought mademoiselle de la Mole.

"She is happy," continued the comte Altamira; "she was so in 1815. I
was then in hiding at her house on her estate near the Antibes. Well
the moment she learnt of marshall Ney's execution she began to dance."

"Is it possible?" said Julien, thunderstruck.

"It's party spirit," replied Altamira. "There are no longer any real
passions in the nineteenth century: that's why one is so bored in
France. People commit acts of the greatest cruelty, but without any
feeling of cruelty."

"So much the worse," said Julien, "when one does commit a crime one
ought at least to take pleasure in committing it; that's the only good
thing they have about them and that's the only way in which they have
the slightest justification."

Mademoiselle de la Mole had entirely forgotten what she owed to herself
and placed herself completely between Altamira and Julien. Her brother,
who was giving her his arm, and was accustomed to obey her, was
looking at another part of the room, and in order to keep himself in
countenance was pretending to be stopped by the crowd.

"You are right," Altamira went on, "one takes pleasure in nothing one
does, and one does not remember it: this applies even to crimes. I can
show you perhaps ten men in this ballroom who have been convicted of
murder. They have forgotten all about it and everybody else as well."

"Many are moved to the point of tears if their dog breaks a paw.
When you throw flowers on their grave at Pere-la-Chaise, as you say
so humorously in Paris, we learn they united all the virtues of the
knights of chivalry, and we speak about the noble feats of their
great-grandfather who lived in the reign of Henri IV. If, in spite of
the good offices of the Prince de Araceli, I escape hanging and I ever
manage to enjoy the use of my money in Paris, I will get you to dine
with eight or ten of these respected and callous murderers.

"At that dinner you and I will be the only ones whose blood is pure,
but I shall be despised and almost hated as a monster, while you will
be simply despised as a man of the people who has pushed his way into
good society."

"Nothing could be truer," said mademoiselle de la Mole.

Altamira looked at her in astonishment; but Julien did not deign to
look at her.

"Observe that the revolution, at whose head I found myself," continued
the comte Altamira, "only failed for the one reason that I would not
cut off three heads and distribute among our partisans seven or eight
millions which happened to be in a box of which I happened to have the
key. My king, who is burning to have me hanged to-day, and who called
me by my christian name before the rebellion, would have given me the
great ribbon of his order if I had had those three heads cut off and
had had the money in those boxes distributed; for I should have had at
least a semi-success and my country would have had a charta like ----.
So wags the world; it's a game of chess."

"At that time," answered Julien with a fiery eye, "you did not know the
game; now...."

"You mean I would have the heads cut off, and I would not be a
Girondin, as you said I was the other day? I will give you your
answer," said Altamira sadly, "when you have killed a man in a duel--a
far less ugly matter than having him put to death by an executioner."

"Upon my word," said Julien, "the end justifies the means. If instead
of being an insignificant man I had some power I would have three men
hanged in order to save four men's lives."

His eyes expressed the fire of his own conscience; they met the eyes of
mademoiselle de la Mole who was close by him, and their contempt, so
far from changing into politeness seemed to redouble.

She was deeply shocked; but she found herself unable to forget Julien;
she dragged her brother away and went off in a temper.

"I must take some punch and dance a lot," she said to herself. "I will
pick out the best partner and cut some figure at any price. Good, there
is that celebrated cynic, the comte de Fervaques." She accepted his
invitation; they danced. "The question is," she thought, "which of us
two will be the more impertinent, but in order to make absolute fun
of him, I must get him to talk." Soon all the other members of the
quadrille were dancing as a matter of formality, they did not want to
lose any of Mathilde's cutting reparte. M. de Fervaques felt uneasy and
as he could only find elegant expressions instead of ideas, began to
scowl. Mathilde, who was in a bad temper was cruel, and made an enemy
of him. She danced till daylight and then went home terribly tired.
But when she was in the carriage the little vitality she had left, was
still employed in making her sad and unhappy. She had been despised by
Julien and could not despise him.

Julien was at the zenith of his happiness. He was enchanted without
his knowing it by the music, the flowers, the pretty women, the
general elegance, and above all by his own imagination which dreamt of
distinctions for himself and of liberty for all.

"What a fine ball," he said to the comte. "Nothing is lacking."

"Thought is lacking" answered Altamira, and his face betrayed that
contempt which is only more deadly from the very fact that a manifest
effort is being made to hide it as a matter of politeness.

"You are right, monsieur the comte, there isn't any thought at all, let
alone enough to make a conspiracy."

"I am here because of my name, but thought is hated in your salons.
Thought must not soar above the level of the point of a Vaudeville
couplet: it is then rewarded. But as for your man who thinks, if he
shows energy and originality we call him a cynic. Was not that name
given by one of your judges to Courier. You put him in prison as
well as Beranger. The priestly congregation hands over to the police
everyone who is worth anything amongst you individually; and good
society applauds.

"The fact is your effete society prizes conventionalism above
everything else. You will never get beyond military bravery. You will
have Murats, never Washingtons. I can see nothing in France except
vanity. A man who goes on speaking on the spur of the moment may easily
come to make an imprudent witticism and the master of the house thinks
himself insulted."

As he was saying this, the carriage in which the comte was seeing
Julien home stopped before the Hotel de la Mole. Julien was in love
with his conspirator. Altamira had paid him this great compliment which
was evidently the expression of a sound conviction. "You have not got
the French flippancy and you understand the principle of _utility_."
It happened that Julien had seen the day before _Marino Faliero_, a
tragedy, by Casmir Delavigne.

"Has not Israel Bertuccio got more character than all those noble
Venetians?" said our rebellious plebeian to himself, "and yet those
are the people whose nobility goes back to the year seven hundred, a
century before Charlemagne, while the cream of the nobility at M. de
Ritz's ball to-night only goes back, and that rather lamely, to the
thirteenth century. Well, in spite of all the noble Venetians whose
birth makes so great, it is Israel Bertuccio whom one remembers.

"A conspiracy annihilates all titles conferred by social caprice.
There, a man takes for his crest the rank that is given him by the way
in which he faces death. The intellect itself loses some of its power.

"What would Danton have been to-day in this age of the Valenods and the
Renals? Not even a deputy for the Public Prosecutor.

"What am I saying? He would have sold himself to the priests, he
would have been a minister, for after all the great Danton did steal.
Mirabeau also sold himself. Napoleon stole millions in Italy, otherwise
he would have been stopped short in his career by poverty like
Pichegru. Only La Fayette refrained from stealing. Ought one to steal,
ought one to sell oneself?" thought Julien. This question pulled him up
short. He passed the rest of the night in reading the history of the
revolution.

When he wrote his letters in the library the following day, his mind
was still concentrated on his conversation with count Altamira.

"As a matter of fact," he said to himself after a long reverie, "If the
Spanish Liberals had not injured their nation by crimes they would not
have been cleared out as easily as they were.

"They were haughty, talkative children--just like I am!" he suddenly
exclaimed as though waking up with a start.

"What difficulty have I surmounted that entitles me to judge such
devils who, once alive, dared to begin to act. I am like a man who
exclaims at the close of a meal, 'I won't dine to-morrow; but that
won't prevent me from feeling as strong and merry like I do to-day.'
Who knows what one feels when one is half-way through a great action?"

These lofty thoughts were disturbed by the unexpected arrival in
the library of mademoiselle de la Mole. He was so animated by his
admiration for the great qualities of such invincibles as Danton,
Mirabeau, and Carnot that, though he fixed his eyes on mademoiselle de
la Mole, he neither gave her a thought nor bowed to her, and scarcely
even saw her. When finally his big, open eyes realized her presence,
their expression vanished. Mademoiselle de la Mole noticed it with
bitterness.

It was in vain that she asked him for Vely's History of France which
was on the highest shelf, and thus necessitated Julien going to fetch
the longer of the two ladders. Julien had brought the ladder and had
fetched the volume and given it to her, but had not yet been able to
give her a single thought. As he was taking the ladder back he hit
in his hurry one of the glass panes in the library with his elbow;
the noise of the glass falling on the floor finally brought him to
himself. He hastened to apologise to mademoiselle de la Mole. He tried
to be polite and was certainly nothing more. Mathilde saw clearly that
she had disturbed him, and that he would have preferred to have gone
on thinking about what he had been engrossed in before her arrival,
to speaking to her. After looking at him for some time she went
slowly away. Julien watched her walk. He enjoyed the contrast of her
present dress with the elegant magnificence of the previous night. The
difference between the two expressions was equally striking. The young
girl who had been so haughty at the Duke de Retz's ball, had, at the
present moment, an almost plaintive expression. "As a matter of fact,"
said Julien to himself, "that black dress makes the beauty of her
figure all the more striking. She has a queenly carriage; but why is
she in mourning?"

"If I ask someone the reason for this mourning, they will think I am
putting my foot in it again." Julien had now quite emerged from the
depth of his enthusiasm. "I must read over again all the letters I have
written this morning. God knows how many missed out words and blunders
I shall find. As he was forcing himself to concentrate his mind on the
first of these letters he heard the rustle of a silk dress near him.
He suddenly turned round, mademoiselle de la Mole was two yards from
his table, she was smiling. This second interruption put Julien into a
bad temper. Mathilde had just fully realized that she meant nothing to
this young man. Her smile was intended to hide her embarrassment; she
succeeded in doing so.

"You are evidently thinking of something very interesting, Monsieur
Sorel. Is it not some curious anecdote about that conspiracy which
is responsible for comte Altamira being in Paris? Tell me what it is
about, I am burning to know. I will be discreet, I swear it." She was
astonished at hearing herself utter these words. What! was she asking a
favour of an inferior! Her embarrassment increased, and she added with
a little touch of flippancy,

"What has managed to turn such a usually cold person as yourself, into
an inspired being, a kind of Michael Angelo prophet?"

This sharp and indiscreet question wounded Julien deeply, and rendered
him madder than ever.

"Was Danton right in stealing?" he said to her brusquely in a manner
that grew more and more surly. "Ought the revolutionaries of Piedmont
and of Spain to have injured the people by crimes? To have given all
the places in the army and all the orders to undeserving persons? Would
not the persons who wore these orders have feared the return of the
king? Ought they to have allowed the treasure of Turin to be looted?
In a word, mademoiselle," he said, coming near her with a terrifying
expression, "ought the man who wishes to chase ignorance and crime from
the world to pass like the whirlwind and do evil indiscriminately?"

Mathilde felt frightened, was unable to stand his look, and retreated a
couples of paces. She looked at him a moment, and then ashamed of her
own fear, left the library with a light step.

Julien instantly feels like a noble when he arrives in Paris. While buying boots, he is registered as Julien de Sorel. M. Pirard warns him against becoming a Parisian fop. He cautions that Julien's provincial background will be a source of ridicule for many of the Parisian aristocrats he will meet. But Julien pays no attention to Pirard, completely overwhelmed by the beauty and luxury of the Hotel de la Mole. Pirard's advice does prove helpful, since Julien must immediately impress the eclectic group of Parisians at the Marquis de la Mole's salon. But Julien soon realizes that he does not fit in. He tries to go riding with Comte Norbert, the Marquis'ss son, but falls off his horse. His social blunders make him feel isolated and resented by the servants of the house. Julien begins to distrust the members of the salon, who have been asking favors of the Marquis for years and soon see Julien as an enemy. He also grows bored with these members of Parisian society, but notices that Mathilde, the Marquis's daughter, is often yawning too. To overcome his boredom, Julien tries to lead an aristocratic lifestyle. He learns to fence, shoot, and ride expensive horses. He soon grows arrogant and, because of an argument in a cafe, ends up fighting a duel with a famous nobleman, M. de Beauvoisis. Julien is wounded in the arm, but de Beauvoisis is so embarrassed after discovering that Julien is just a carpenter's son that he spreads a rumor that Julien is the illegitimate son of one of the Marquis de la Mole's close friends. This turn of events ironically brings Julien and the Marquis closer together. After the latter has an attack of gout, Julien spends a great deal of time with him and they become friends. Although the Marquis gives Julien advice on how to succeed in Paris, he only treats Julien as an equal when Julien is dressed properly. When Julien wears his habitual black suit instead of the blue one given to him by the Marquis, he remains a simple secretary. However, Julien does rise in the family's esteem. While dancing at a ball, Julien and Mathilde begin to attract each other's attention.

Commentary In Stendhal's time, Paris was not just the capital of France, but the world. Julien has spent his whole life preparing for his grand entrance on the Parisian stage. However, his provincial background proves to be an even greater impediment than his "low" birth. He is thus not ready for two major aspects of Parisian life: ridicule and boredom. Julien is able to fend off a number of witticisms at the salon but still ends up being ridiculed when he falls off his horse. Boredom is also a significant theme in the novel. Stendhal claims that, since Napoleon's fall in 1814, France became a passionless society. He felt that the Restoration, with its hypocritical emphasis on piety, had taken all the pleasure out of day-to-day interactions. As a result, most of the Parisian aristocrats are terribly bored, something which takes a provincial man like Julien by surprise. This proves to be an advantage to Julien, since many of the nobles he meets, and especially Mathilde, find him to be very interesting. Everyone seems to be scheming about how to best impress the Marquis. Julien even meets M. Valenod at the salon, who has been made a baron by the Marquis. Stendhal's use of irony to condemn modern French politics is especially strong in this passage, when Valenod tells Julien that M. de Renal is no longer the mayor of Verrieres and is suspected of being a liberal. The ease with which M. Valenod and M. de Renal have changed parties reveals the farcical natures of Restoration politics and French society. But Julien stands out among the "den of thieves intriguers" who make up the Marquis's salon. Despite his ambitious nature, he doesn't try to flatter the Marquis. However, Julien's hard work does impress the Marquis, and he soon begins to treat Julien like a surrogate son. He gives Julien a blue suit to wear when they spend time together. Unlike Julien's previous father-figures, such as M. Chelan and M. Pirard, the Marquis does take account of Julien's social class. Whenever Julien wears his own black suit, the Marquis treats him like an employee. Stendhal is not only criticizing the aristocracy's inherent snobbishness, but the superficial nature of French society during the Restoration: people are defined by the clothes they wear. Just as Julien can be a soldier one minute and a priest the next simply by changing his clothes, the Marquis sees Julien differently based on the color of his suit.