CHAPTER LI

THE SECRET NOTE

        I have seen everything I relate, and if I may have made
        a mistake when I saw it, I am certainly not deceiving
        you in telling you of it.
                                      _Letter to the author_.

The marquis summoned him; M. de la Mole looked rejuvenated, his eye was
brilliant.

"Let us discuss your memory a little," he said to Julien, "it is said
to be prodigious. Could you learn four pages by heart and go and say
them at London, but without altering a single word?"

The marquis was irritably fingering, the day's _Quotidienne_, and was
trying in vain to hide an extreme seriousness which Julien had never
noticed in him before, even when discussing the Frilair lawsuit.

Julien had already learned sufficient manners to appreciate that he
ought to appear completely taken in by the lightness of tone which was
being manifested.

"This number of the _Quotidienne_ is not very amusing possibly, but if
M. the marquis will allow me, I shall do myself the honour to-morrow
morning of reciting it to him from beginning to end."

"What, even the advertisements?"

"Quite accurately and without leaving out a word."

"You give me your word?" replied the marquis with sudden gravity.

"Yes, monsieur; the only thing which could upset my memory is the fear
of breaking my promise."

"The fact is, I forgot to put this question to you yesterday: I am
not going to ask for your oath never to repeat what you are going to
hear. I know you too well to insult you like that. I have answered for
you. I am going to take you into a salon where a dozen persons will he
assembled. You will make a note of what each one says.

"Do not be uneasy. It will not be a confused conversation by any means.
Each one will speak in his turn, though not necessarily in an orderly
manner," added the marquis falling back into that light, subtle manner
which was so natural to him. "While we are talking, you will write out
twenty pages and will come back here with me, and we will get those
twenty pages down to four, and those are the four pages you will recite
to me to-morrow morning instead of the four pages of the _Quotidienne_.
You will leave immediately afterwards. You must post about like a
young man travelling on pleasure. Your aim will be to avoid attracting
attention. You will arrive at the house of a great personage. You will
there need more skill. Your business will then be to take in all his
entourage, for among his secretaries and his servants are some people
who have sold themselves to our enemies, and who spy on our travelling
agents in order to intercept them.

"You will have an insignificant letter of introduction. At the moment
his Excellency looks at you, you will take out this watch of mine,
which I will lend you for the journey. Wear it now, it will be so much
done; at any rate give me yours.

"The duke himself will be good enough to write at your dictation the
four pages you have learnt by heart.

"Having done this, but not earlier, mind you, you can, if his
Excellency questions you, tell him about the meeting at which you are
now going to be present.

"You will be prevented from boring yourself on the journey between
Paris and the minister's residence by the thought that there are people
who would like nothing better than to fire a shot at M. the abbe Sorel.
In that case that gentleman's mission will be finished, and I see a
great delay, for how are we to know of your death, my dear friend? Even
your zeal cannot go to the length of informing us of it.

"Run straight away and buy a complete suit," went on the marquis
seriously. "Dress in the fashion of two years ago. To-night you must
look somewhat badly groomed. When you travel, on the other hand, you
will be as usual. Does this surprise you? Does your suspiciousness
guess the secret? Yes, my friend, one of the venerable personages you
are going to hear deliver his opinion, is perfectly capable of giving
information as the result of which you stand a very good chance of
being given at least opium some fine evening in some good inn where you
will have asked for supper."

"It is better," said Julien, "to do an extra thirty leagues and not
take the direct road. It is a case of Rome, I suppose...." The marquis
assumed an expression of extreme haughtiness and dissatisfaction which
Julien had never seen him wear since Bray-le-Haut.

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

"That was not one," answered Julien eagerly. "I swear, monsieur, I was
thinking quite aloud. My mind was trying to find out the safest route."

"Yes, it seems your mind was a very long way off. Remember that an
emissary, and particularly one of your age should not appear to be a
man who forces confidences."

Julien was very mortified; he was in the wrong. His vanity tried to
find an excuse and did not find one.

"You understand," added monsieur de la Mole, "that one always falls
back on one's heart when one has committed some mistake."

An hour afterwards Julien was in the marquis's ante-chamber. He looked
quite like a servant with his old clothes, a tie of a dubious white,
and a certain touch of the usher in his whole appearance. The marquis
burst out laughing as he saw him, and it was only then that Julien's
justification was complete.

"If this young man betrays me," said M. de la Mole to himself, "whom is
one to trust? And yet, when one acts, one must trust someone. My son
and his brilliant friends of the same calibre have as much courage and
loyalty as a hundred thousand men. If it were necessary to fight, they
would die on the steps of the throne. They know everything--except
what one needs in emergency. Devil take me if I can find a single one
among them who can learn four pages by heart and do a hundred leagues
without being tracked down. Norbert would know how to sell his life as
dearly as his grandfathers did. But any conscript could do as much."

The marquis fell into a profound reverie. "As for selling one's life
too," he said with a sigh, "perhaps this Sorel would manage it quite as
well as he could.

"Let us get into the carriage," said the marquis as though to chase
away an unwanted idea.

"Monsieur," said Julien, "while they were getting this suit ready for
me, I learnt the first page of to-days _Quotidienne_ by heart."

The marquis took the paper. Julien recited it without making a single
mistake. "Good," said the marquis, who this night felt very diplomatic.
"During the time he takes over this our young man will not notice the
streets through which we are passing."

They arrived in a big salon that looked melancholy enough and was
partly upholstered in green velvet. In the middle of the room
a scowling lackey had just placed a big dining-table which he
subsequently changed into a writing-table by means of an immense green
inkstained tablecloth which had been plundered from some minister.

The master of the house was an enormous man whose name was not
pronounced. Julien thought he had the appearance and eloquence of a
man who ruminated. At a sign from the marquis, Julien had remained at
the lower end of the table. In order to keep himself in countenance,
he began to cut quills. He counted out of the corner of his eye seven
visitors, but Julien could only see their backs. Two seemed to him
to be speaking to M. de la Mole on a footing of equality, the others
seemed more or less respectful.

A new person entered without being announced. "This is strange,"
thought Julien. "People are not announced in this salon. Is this
precaution taken in my honour?" Everybody got up to welcome the new
arrival. He wore the same extremely distinguished decoration as three
of the other persons who were in the salon. They talked fairly low. In
endeavouring to form an opinion of the new comer, Julien was reduced to
seeing what he could learn from his features and his appearance. He was
short and thick-set. He had a high colour and a brilliant eye and an
expression that looked like a malignant boar, and nothing else.

Julien's attention was partly distracted by the almost immediate
arrival of a very different kind of person. It was a tall very thin
man who wore three or four waistcoats. His eye was caressing, his
demeanour polite.

"He looks exactly like the old bishop of Besancon," thought Julien.
This man evidently belonged to the church, was apparently not more than
fifty to fifty-five years of age, and no one could have looked more
paternal than he did.

The young bishop of Agde appeared. He looked very astonished when,
in making a scrutiny of those present, his gaze fell upon Julien. He
had not spoken to him since the ceremony of Bray-le-Haut. His look of
surprise embarrassed and irritated Julien. "What!" he said to himself,
"will knowing a man always turn out unfortunate for me? I don't feel
the least bit intimidated by all those great lords whom I have never
seen, but the look of that young bishop freezes me. I must admit that I
am a very strange and very unhappy person."

An extremely swarthy little man entered noisily soon afterwards and
started talking as soon as he reached the door. He had a yellow
complexion and looked a little mad. As soon as this ruthless talker
arrived, the others formed themselves into knots with the apparent
object of avoiding the bother of listening to him.

As they went away from the mantelpiece they came near the lower end
of the table where Julien was placed. His countenance became more and
more embarrassed, for whatever efforts he made, he could not avoid
hearing, and in spite of all his lack of experience he appreciated
all the moment of the things which they were discussing with such
complete frankness, and the importance which the high personages whom
he apparently had under his observation must attach to their being kept
secret.

Julien had already cut twenty quills as slowly as possible; this
distraction would shortly be no longer available. He looked in vain at
M. de la Mole's eyes for an order; the marquis had forgotten him.

"What I am doing is ridiculous," he said to himself as he cut his
quills, "but persons with so mediocre an appearance and who are
handling such great interests either for themselves or for others must
be extremely liable to take offence. My unfortunate look has a certain
questioning and scarcely respectful expression, which will doubtless
irritate them. But if I palpably lower my eyes I shall look as if I
were picking up every word they said."

His embarrassment was extreme, he was listening to strange things.

CHAPTER LII

THE DISCUSSION

        The republic:--For one man to day who will sacrifice
        everything for the public welfare, there are thousands
        and millions who think of nothing except their
        enjoyments and their vanity. One is requested in Paris
        by reason of the qualities not of one's self but of
        one's carriage.
                                        --NAPOLEON, Memorial.

The footman rushed in saying "Monsieur the duke de ----"

"Hold your tongue, you are just a fool," said the duke as he entered.
He spoke these words so well, and with so much majesty, that Julien
could not help thinking this great person's accomplishments were
limited to the science of snubbing a lackey. Julien raised his
eyes and immediately lowered them. He had so fully appreciated the
significance of the new arrival that he feared that his look might be
an indiscretion.

The duke was a man of fifty dressed like a dandy and with a jerky
walk. He had a narrow head with a large nose and a face that jutted
forward; it would have been difficult to have looked at the same time
more insignificant. His arrival was the signal for the opening of the
meeting.

Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical observations by
de la Mole's voice. "I present to you M. the abbe Sorel," said the
Marquis. "He is gifted with an astonishing memory; it is scarcely an
hour ago since I spoke to him of the mission by which he might be
honoured, and he has learned the first page of the _Quotidienne_ by
heart in order to give proof of his memory."

"Ah! foreign news of that poor N--" said the master of the house. He
took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered
humorous by its own self-importance. "Speak, monsieur," he said to him.

The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited
so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines, "That is
enough." The little man who looked like a boar sat down. He was the
president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien
a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him. Julien established
himself at it with writing materials. He counted twelve persons seated
round the green table cloth.

"M. Sorel," said the Duke, "retire into next room, you will be called."

The master of the house began to look very anxious. "The shutters
are not shut," he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper. "It is no
good looking out of the window," he stupidly cried to Julien--"so
here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy," thought the latter.
"Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Greve.
Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis,
and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the
sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him."

While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded
the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory
for ever. He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard
the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken
a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way. Julien was left to
his own reflections for a long time. He was in a salon upholstered in
red velvet with large pieces of gold lace. A large ivory crucifix was
on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M.
de Maistre's book _The Pope_ was on the mantelpiece. Julien opened it
so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. From time to time they talked
loudly in the next room. At last the door was opened and he was called
in.

"Remember, gentlemen," the president was saying "that from this moment
we are talking in the presence of the duke of ----. This gentleman,"
he said, pointing to Julien, "is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred
cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily
our very slightest words."

"It is your turn to speak, Monsieur," he said pointing to the paternal
looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it
would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the
waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.

(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of
dots. "That," said his publisher, "would be clumsy and in the case of
so light a work clumsiness is death."

"Politics," replies the author, "is a stone tied round the neck of
literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the
midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a
concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not
harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give
mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half,
who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the
morning paper in its own drastic manner."

"If your characters don't talk politics," replied the publisher, "they
cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as
you claim?")

Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted
extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of
suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed
either offensive or intolerable (see the _Gazette des Tribunaux_).

The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps
a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with
a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an
unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first
before the duke ("but what duke is it?" thought Julien to himself) with
the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling
the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into
the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials
are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went
so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of
morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,

"Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal
Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution.
If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with
some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing
with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to
oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions there is nothing
decisive except personal methods."

"Ah! praising assassination again!" said the master of the house
anxiously.

"Spare us your sentimental sermons," cried the president angrily. His
boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. "Go on," he said to the
man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president
became purple.

"Noble England," replied the advocate-general, "is crushed to-day:
for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay
the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the
Jacobins. She has no more Pitt."

"She has the Duke of Wellington," said a military personage looking
very important.

"Please, gentlemen, silence," exclaimed the president. "If we are still
going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in."

"We know that monsieur has many ideas," said the duke irritably,
looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien
saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive
allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside
himself with rage.

"There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen," went on the speaker with all
the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his
listeners to reason. "If there were a new Pitt in England, you would
not dupe a nation twice over by the same means."

"That's why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward
impossible in France," exclaimed the military interrupter.

On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get
angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would
very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke
contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the
speaker was put upon his mettle.

"My audience is eager for me to finish," he said vigorously, completely
discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that
Julien thought had expressed his character so well. "It is eager for
me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to
offend nobody's ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will
be brief.

"I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with
which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he
would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English
landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost
them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases," continued the
speaker, becoming more and more animated, "I will say this to you: Help
yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with,
and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia--who will
only have courage but have no money--cannot launch more than one or two
campaigns against France.

"One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the
Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the
second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced
eyes, in the third campaign--in the third campaign I say--you will have
the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792."

At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four
quarters.

"Monsieur," said the president to Julien, "Go and make a precis in the
next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out."

Julien went out to his great regret. The speaker was just dealing
with the question of probabilities which formed the usual subject
for his meditations. "They are frightened of my making fun of them,"
he thought. When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a
seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,

"Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, 'is it god, table or tub?'
especially applicable to this unhappy people. '_It is god_' exclaims
the writer of fables. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and
profound phrase seems to apply. Act on your own initiative, and noble
France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as
our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.

"England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any
rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia
would only be able to give battle two or three times. Would that be
sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de
Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817? I do not think so."

At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes
of the whole room. It came again from the old Imperial general who
wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the
secret note.

"I do not think so," replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had
subsided. He laid stress on the "I" with an insolence which charmed
Julien.

"That's a pretty piece of acting," he said to himself, as he made his
pen almost keep pace with the marquis' words.

M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a
well turned phrase.

"It is not only on foreign powers," continued the marquis in a more
even tone, "on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military
occupation. All those young men who write inflammatory articles
in the _Globe_ will provide you with three or four thousand young
captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good
intentions of a Kleber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru."

"We did not know how to glorify him," said the president. "He should
have been immortalized."

"Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties," went on M.
de la Mole; "but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut
lines of cleavage. Let us realise what has got to be crushed. On
the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public
opinion; youth and all that admire it. While it is stupefying itself
with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of
administrating the expenditure of the budget."

At this point there was another interruption.

"As for you, monsieur," said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an
admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, "you do not spend, if the
words chokes you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to
you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from
the civil list."

"Well, monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to
take you for an example. Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint
Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty
thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what
am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready
to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their
lives in its service. You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of
a rebellion would frighten you yourselves."

"Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen,
so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of
five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French
courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.

"Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews,
of real gentlemen, in fact. Each of them will have beside him not a
little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815
turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau.
Our gentleman will have educated him, it will be his own foster brother
if it is possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth of his income in
order to form this little devoted force of five hundred men in each
department. Then you will be able to reckon on a foreign occupation.
The foreign soldier will never penetrate even as far as Dijon if he
is not certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each
department.

"The foreign kings will only listen to you when you are in a position
to announce to them that you have twenty thousand gentlemen ready to
take up arms in order to open to them the gates of France. The service
is troublesome, you say. Gentlemen, it is the only way of saving our
lives. There is war to the death between the liberty of the press and
our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers, become peasants, or
take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open
your eyes.

"'_Form your battalions_,' I would say to you in the words of the
Jacobin songs. Some noble Gustavus Adolphus will then be found who,
touched by the imminent peril of the monarchical principle, will make
a dash three hundred leagues from his own country, and will do for
you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Do you want to go
on talking without acting? In fifty years' time there will be only
presidents or republics in Europe and not one king, and with those
three letters R. O. I. you will see the last of the priests and the
gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying court to squalid
majorities.

"It is no use your saying that at the present time France has not
a single accredited general who is universally known and loved,
that the army is only known and organised in the interests of the
throne and the church, and that it has been deprived of all its old
troopers, while each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments count fifty
non-commissioned officers who have seen fire.

"Two hundred thousand young men of the middle classes are spoiling for
war--"

"A truce to disagreeable truths," said a grave personage in a pompous
tone. He was apparently a very high ecclesiastical dignitary, for M.
de la Mole smiled pleasantly, instead of getting angry, a circumstance
which greatly impressed Julien.

"A truce to unpleasant truths, let us resume, gentlemen. The man who
needs to have a gangrened leg cut off would be ill advised to say to
his surgeon, 'this disease is very healthy.' If I may use the metaphor,
gentlemen, the noble duke of ---- is our surgeon."

"So the great words have at last been uttered," thought Julien. "It is
towards the ---- that I shall gallop to-night."

CHAPTER LIII

THE CLERGY, THE FORESTS, LIBERTY

        The first law of every being, is to preserve itself and
        live. You sow hemlock, and expect to see ears of corn
        ripen.--_Machiavelli_.

The great personage continued. One could see that he knew his subject.
He proceeded to expound the following great truths with a soft and
tempered eloquence with which Julien was inordinately delighted:--

"1. England has not a guinea to help us with; economy and Hume are
the fashion there. Even the saints will not give us any money, and M.
Brougham will make fun of us.

"2. The impossibility of getting the kings of Europe to embark on more
than two campaigns without English gold; two campaigns will not be
enough to dispose of the middle classes.

"3. The necessity of forming an armed party in France. Without this,
the monarchical principle in Europe will not risk even two campaigns.

"The fourth point which I venture to suggest to you, as self-evident,
is this:

"The impossibility of forming an armed party in France without the
clergy. I am bold enough to tell you this because I will prove it to
you, gentlemen. You must make every sacrifice for the clergy.

"Firstly, because as it is occupied with its mission by day and by
night, and guided by highly capable men established far from these
storms at three hundred leagues from your frontiers----"

"Ah, Rome, Rome!" exclaimed the master of the house.

"Yes, monsieur, Rome," replied the Cardinal haughtily. "Whatever more
or less ingenious jokes may have been the fashion when you were young,
I have no hesitation in saying that in 1830 it is only the clergy,
under the guidance of Rome, who has the ear of the lower classes.

"Fifty thousand priests repeat the same words on the day appointed by
their chiefs, and the people--who after all provide soldiers--will be
more touched by the voices of its priests than by all the versifying in
the whole world." (This personality provoked some murmurs.)

"The clergy has a genius superior to yours," went on the cardinal
raising his voice. "All the progress that has been made towards this
essential point of having an armed party in France has been made by
us." At this juncture facts were introduced. "Who used eighty thousand
rifles in Vendee?" etc., etc.

"So long as the clergy is without its forests it is helpless. At
the first war the minister of finance will write to his agents that
there is no money to be had except for the cure. At bottom France
does not believe, and she loves war. Whoever gives her war will be
doubly popular, for making war is, to use a vulgar phrase, the same as
starving the Jesuits; making war means delivering those monsters of
pride--the men of France--from the menace of foreign intervention."

The cardinal had a favourable hearing. "M. de Nerval," he said, "will
have to leave the ministry, his name irritates and to no purpose."

At these words everybody got up and talked at the same time. "I will be
sent away again," thought Julien, but the sapient president himself had
forgotten both the presence and existence of Julien.

All eyes were turned upon a man whom Julien recognised. It was M. de
Nerval, the prime minister, whom he had seen at M. the duc de Retz's
ball.

The disorder was at its height, as the papers say when they talk of the
Chamber. At the end of a long quarter of an hour a little quiet was
established.

Then M. de Nerval got up and said in an apostolic tone and a singular
voice:

"I will not go so far as to say that I do not set great store on being
a minister.

"It has been demonstrated to me, gentlemen, that my name will double
the forces of the Jacobins by making many moderates divide against
us. I should therefore be willing to retire; but the ways of the Lord
are only visible to a small number; but," he added, looking fixedly
at the cardinal, "I have a mission. Heaven has said: 'You will either
loose your head on the scaffold or you will re-establish the monarchy
of France and reduce the Chambers to the condition of the parliament of
Louis XV.,' and that, gentlemen, I shall do."

He finished his speech, sat down, and there was a long silence.

"What a good actor," thought Julien. He made his usual mistake of
ascribing too much intelligence to the people. Excited by the debates
of so lively an evening, and above all by the sincerity of the
discussion, M. de Nerval did at this moment believe in his mission.
This man had great courage, but at the same time no sense.

During the silence that followed the impressive words, "I shall do it,"
midnight struck. Julien thought that the striking of the clock had in
it a certain element of funereal majesty. He felt moved.

The discussion was soon resumed with increasing energy, and above all
with an incredible naivety. "These people will have me poisoned,"
thought Julien at times. "How can they say such things before a
plebian."

They were still talking when two o'clock struck. The master of the
house had been sleeping for some time. M. de la Mole was obliged to
ring for new candles. M. de Nerval, the minister, had left at the
quarter to two, but not without having repeatedly studied Julien's face
in a mirror which was at the minister's side. His departure had seemed
to put everybody at their ease.

While they were bringing new candles, the man in the waistcoats,
whispered to his neighbour: "God knows what that man will say to the
king. He may throw ridicule upon us and spoil our future."

"One must own that he must possess an unusual self-assurance, not to
say impudence, to put in an appearance here There were signs of it
before he became a minister; but a portfolio changes everything and
swamps all a man's interests; he must have felt its effect."

The minister had scarcely left before the general of Buonaparte closed
his eyes. He now talked of his health and his wounds, consulted his
watch, and went away.

"I will wager," said the man in the waistcoats, "that the general is
running after the minister; he will apologise for having been here and
pretend that he is our leader."

"Let us now deliberate, gentlemen," said the president, after the
sleepy servants had finished bringing and lighting new candles. "Let us
leave off trying to persuade each other. Let us think of the contents
of the note which will be read by our friends outside in forty-eight
hours from now. We have heard ministers spoken of. Now that M. de
Nerval has left us, we are at liberty to say 'what we do care for
ministers.'"

The cardinal gave a subtle smile of approval.

"Nothing is easier it seems to me than summing up our position," said
the young bishop of Agde, with the restrained concentrated fire of the
most exalted fanaticism. He had kept silent up to this time; his eye,
which Julien had noticed as being soft and calm at the beginning, had
become fiery during the first hour of the discussion. His soul was now
bubbling over like lava from Vesuvius.

"England only made one mistake from 1806 to 1814," he said, "and that
was in not taking direct and personal measures against Napoleon. As
soon as that man had made dukes and chamberlains, as soon as he had
re-established the throne, the mission that God had entrusted to him
was finished. The only thing to do with him was to sacrifice him.
The scriptures teach us in more than one place how to make an end of
tyrants" (at this point there were several Latin quotations).

"To-day, gentlemen, it is not a man who has to be sacrificed, it
is Paris. What is the use of arming your five hundred men in each
department, a hazardous and interminable enterprise? What is the good
of involving France in a matter which is personal to Paris? Paris alone
has done the evil, with its journals and it salons. Let the new Babylon
perish.

"We must bring to an end the conflict between the church and Paris.
Such a catastrophe would even be in the worldly interests of the
throne. Why did not Paris dare to whisper a word under Buonaparte? Ask
the cannon of Saint-Roch?"

Julien did not leave with M. de la Mole before three o'clock in the
morning.

The marquis seemed tired and ashamed. For the first time in his life
in conversation with Julien, his tone was plaintive. He asked him for
his word never to reveal the excesses of zeal, that was his expression,
of which chance had just made him a witness. "Only mention it to our
foreign friend, if he seriously insists on knowing what our young
madmen are like. What does it matter to them if a state is overthrown,
they will become cardinals and will take refuge in Rome. As for us, we
shall be massacred by the peasants in our chateaus."

The secret note into which the marquis condensed Julien's full report
of twenty-six pages was not ready before a quarter to five.

"I am dead tired," said the marquis, "as is quite obvious from the lack
of clearness at the end of this note; I am more dissatisfied with it
than with anything I ever did in my whole life. Look here, my friend,"
he added, "go and rest for some hours, and as I am frightened you might
be kidnapped, I shall lock you up in your room."

The marquis took Julien on the following day to a lonely chateau at a
good distance from Paris. There were strange guests there whom Julien
thought were priests. He was given a passport which was made out in a
fictitious name, but indicated the real destination of his journey,
which he had always pretended not to know. He got into a carriage alone.

The marquis had no anxiety on the score of his memory. Julien
had recited the secret note to him several times but he was very
apprehensive of his being intercepted.

"Above all, mind you look like a coxcomb who is simply travelling to
kill time," he said affectionately to him when he was leaving the
salon. "Perhaps there was more than one treacherous brother in this
evening's meeting."

The journey was quick and very melancholy. Julien had scarcely got
out of the marquis's sight before he forgot his secret note and his
mission, and only thought about Mathilde's disdain.

At a village some leagues beyond Metz, the postmaster came and told him
that there were no horses. It was ten o'clock in the evening. Julien
was very annoyed and asked for supper. He walked in front of the door
and gradually without being noticed passed into the stable-yard. He did
not see any horses there.

"That man looked strange though," thought Julien to himself. "He was
scrutinizing me with his brutal eyes."

As one sees he was beginning to be slightly sceptical of all he heard.
He thought of escaping after supper, and in order to learn at any rate
something about the surrounding country, he left his room to go and
warm himself at the kitchen fire. He was overjoyed to find there the
celebrated singer, signor Geronimo.

The Neopolitan was ensconced in an armchair which he had had brought
near the fire. He was groaning aloud, and was speaking more to himself
than to the twenty dumbfounded German peasants who surrounded him.

"Those people will be my ruin," he cried to Julien, "I have promised to
sing to-morrow at Mayence. Seven sovereign princes have gone there to
hear me. Let us go and take the air," he added, meaningly.

When he had gone a hundred yards down the road, and it was impossible
to be overheard, he said to Julien:

"Do you know the real truth, the postmaster is a scoundrel. When I went
out for a walk I gave twenty sous to a little ragamuffin who told me
everything. There are twelve horses in the stable at the other end of
the village. They want to stop some courier."

"Really," said Julien innocently.

Discovering the fraud was not enough; the thing was to get away, but
Geronimo and his friends could not succeed in doing this.

"Let us wait for daybreak," said the singer at last, "they are
mistrustful of us. It is perhaps you or me whom they suspect. We will
order a good breakfast to-morrow morning, we will go for a walk while
they are getting it ready, we will then escape, we will hire horses,
and gain the next station."

"And how about your luggage?" said Julien, who thought perhaps Geronimo
himself might have been sent to intercept him. They had to have supper
and go to bed. Julien was still in his first sleep when he was woken
up with a start by the voices of two persons who were speaking in his
room with utmost freedom.

He recognised the postmaster armed with a dark lantern. The light was
turned on the carriage-seat which Julien had had taken up into his
room. Beside the postmaster was a man who was calmly searching the open
seat. Julien could see nothing except the sleeves of his coat which
were black and very tight.

"It's a cassock," he said to himself and he softly seized the little
pistol which he had placed under his pillow.

"Don't be frightened of his waking up, cure," said the postmaster, "the
wine that has been served him was the stuff prepared by yourself."

"I can't find any trace of papers," answered the cure. "A lot of linen
and essences, pommades, and vanities. It's a young man of the world
on pleasure bent. The other one who effects an Italian accent is more
likely to be the emissary."

The men approached Julien to search the pockets of his travelling coat.
He felt very tempted to kill them for thieves. Nothing could be safer
in its consequences. He was very desirous of doing so.... "I should
only be a fool," he said to himself, "I should compromise my mission."
"He is not a diplomatist," said the priest after searching his coat. He
went away and did well to do so.

"It will be a bad business for him," Julien was saying to himself, "if
he touches me in my bed. He may have quite well come to stab me, and I
won't put up with that."

The cure turned his head, Julien half opened his eyes. He was
inordinately astonished, he was the abbe Castanede. As a matter of
fact, although these two persons had made a point of talking in a
fairly low voice, he had thought from the first that he recognised one
of the voices. Julien was seized with an inordinate desire to purge the
earth of one of its most cowardly villains; "But my mission," he said
to himself.

The cure and his acolyte went out. A quarter of an hour afterwards
Julien pretended to have just woken up. He called out and woke up the
whole house.

"I am poisoned," he exclaimed, "I am suffering horribly!" He wanted an
excuse to go to Geronimo's help. He found him half suffocated by the
laudanum that had been contained in the wine.

Julien had been apprehensive of some trick of this character and had
supped on some chocolate which he had brought from Paris. He could not
wake Geronimo up sufficiently to induce him to leave.

"If they were to give me the whole kingdom of Naples," said the singer,
"I would not now give up the pleasure of sleeping."

"But the seven sovereign princes?"

"Let them wait."

Julien left alone, and arrived at the house of the great personage
without other incident. He wasted a whole morning in vainly soliciting
an audience. Fortunately about four o'clock the duke wanted to take
the air. Julien saw him go out on foot and he did not hesitate
to ask him for alms. When at two yards' distance from the great
personage he pulled out the Marquis de la Mole's watch and exhibited
it ostentatiously. "_Follow me at a distance_," said the man without
looking at him.

At a quarter of a league's distance the duke suddenly entered a little
_coffee-house_. It was in a room of this low class inn that Julien had
the honour of reciting his four pages to the duke. When he had finished
he was told to "_start again and go more slowly_."

The prince took notes. "Reach the next posting station on foot. Leave
your luggage and your carriage here. Get to Strasbourg as best you can
and at half-past twelve on the twenty-second of the month (it was at
present the tenth) come to this same coffee-house. Do not leave for
half-an-hour. Silence!"

These were the only words which Julien heard. They sufficed to inspire
him with the highest admiration. "That is the way," he thought, "that
real business is done; what would this great statesman say if he were
to listen to the impassioned ranters heard three days ago?"

Julien took two days to reach Strasbourg. He thought he would have
nothing to do there. He made a great detour. "If that devil of an abbe
Castanede has recognised me he is not the kind of man to loose track
of me easily.... And how he would revel in making a fool of me, and
causing my mission to fail."

Fortunately the abbe Castanede, who was chief of the congregational
police on all the northern frontier had not recognised him. And the
Strasbourg Jesuits, although very zealous, never gave a thought to
observing Julien, who with his cross and his blue tail-coat looked
like a young military man, very much engrossed in his own personal
appearance.

CHAPTER LIV

STRASBOURG

        Fascination! Love gives thee all his love, energy and
        all his power of suffering unhappiness. It is only
        his enchanting pleasures, his sweet delights, which
        are outside thy sphere. When I saw her sleep I was
        made to say "With all her angelic beauty and her sweet
        weaknesses she is absolutely mine! There she is, quite
        in my power, such as Heaven made her in its pity in
        order to ravish a man's heart."--_Ode of Schiller_.

Julien was compelled to spend eight days in Strasbourg and tried to
distract himself by thoughts of military glory and patriotic devotion.
Was he in love then? he could not tell, he only felt in his tortured
soul that Mathilde was the absolute mistress both of his happiness
and of his imagination. He needed all the energy of his character
to keep himself from sinking into despair. It was out of his power
to think of anything unconnected with mademoiselle de la Mole. His
ambition and his simple personal successes had formerly distracted him
from the sentiments which madame de Renal had inspired. Mathilde was
all-absorbing; she loomed large over his whole future.

Julien saw failure in every phase of that future. This same individual
whom we remember to have been so presumptuous and haughty at Verrieres,
had fallen into an excess of grotesque modesty.

Three days ago he would only have been too pleased to have killed the
abbe Castanede, and now, at Strasbourg, if a child had picked a quarrel
with him he would have thought the child was in the right. In thinking
again about the adversaries and enemies whom he had met in his life he
always thought that he, Julien, had been in the wrong. The fact was
that the same powerful imagination which had formerly been continuously
employed in painting a successful future in the most brilliant colours
had now been transformed into his implacable enemy.

The absolute solicitude of a traveller's life increased the ascendancy
of this sinister imagination. What a boon a friend would have been!
But Julien said to himself, "Is there a single heart which beats with
affection for me? And even if I did have a friend, would not honour
enjoin me to eternal silence?"

He was riding gloomily in the outskirts of Kehl; it is a market town
on the banks of the Rhine and immortalised by Desaix and Gouvion
Saint-Cyr. A German peasant showed him the little brooks, roads and
islands of the Rhine, which have acquired a name through the courage of
these great generals. Julien was guiding his horse with his left hand,
while he held unfolded in his right the superb map which adorns the
_Memoirs of the Marshal Saint Cyr_. A merry exclamation made him lift
his head.

It was the Prince Korasoff, that London friend of his, who had
initiated him some months before into the elementary rules of high
fatuity. Faithful to his great art, Korasoff, who had just arrived at
Strasbourg, had been one hour in Kehl and had never read a single line
in his whole life about the siege of 1796, began to explain it all to
Julien. The German peasant looked at him in astonishment; for he knew
enough French to appreciate the enormous blunders which the prince was
making. Julien was a thousand leagues away from the peasant's thoughts.
He was looking in astonishment at the handsome young man and admiring
his grace in sitting a horse.

"What a lucky temperament," he said to himself, "and how his trousers
suit him and how elegantly his hair is cut! Alas, if I had been like
him, it might have been that she would not have come to dislike me
after loving me for three days."

When the prince had finished his siege of Kehl, he said to Julien,
"You look like a Trappist, you are carrying to excess that principle
of gravity which I enjoined upon you in London. A melancholy manner
cannot be good form. What is wanted is an air of boredom. If you are
melancholy, it is because you lack something, because you have failed
in something."

"That means showing one's own inferiority; if, on the other hand you
are bored, it is only what has made an unsuccessful attempt to please
you, which is inferior. So realise, my dear friend, the enormity of
your mistake."

Julien tossed a crown to the gaping peasant who was listening to them.

"Good," said the prince, "that shows grace and a noble disdain, very
good!" And he put his horse to the gallop. Full of a stupid admiration,
Julien followed him.

"Ah! if I have been like that, she would not have preferred Croisenois
to me!" The more his reason was offended by the grotesque affectations
of the prince the more he despised himself for not having them. It was
impossible for self-disgust to be carried further.

The prince still finding him distinctly melancholy, said to him as they
re-entered Strasbourg, "Come, my dear fellow, have you lost all your
money, or perhaps you are in love with some little actress.

"The Russians copy French manners, but always at an interval of fifty
years. They have now reached the age of Louis XV."

These jests about love brought the tears to Julien's eyes. "Why should
I not consult this charming man," he suddenly said to himself.

"Well, yes, my dear friend," he said to the prince, "you see in me a
man who is very much in love and jilted into the bargain. A charming
woman who lives in a neighbouring town has left me stranded here after
three passionate days, and the change kills me."

Using fictitious names, he described to the prince Mathilde's conduct
and character.

"You need not finish," said Korasoff. "In order to give you confidence
in your doctor, I will finish the story you have confided to me. This
young woman's husband enjoys an enormous income, or even more probably,
she belongs herself to the high nobility of the district. She must be
proud about something."

Julien nodded his head, he had no longer the courage to speak. "Very
good," said the prince, "here are three fairly bitter pills that you
will take without delay.

"1. See madame ----. What is her name, any way?"

"Madame de Dubois."

"What a name!" said the prince bursting into laughter. "But forgive me,
you find it sublime. Your tactics must be to see Madame de Dubois every
day; above all do not appear to be cold and piqued. Remember the great
principle of your century: be the opposite of what is expected. Be
exactly as you were the week before you were honoured by her favours."

"Ah! I was calm enough then," exclaimed Julien in despair, "I thought I
was taking pity on her...."

"The moth is burning itself at the candle," continued the prince using
a metaphor as old as the world.

"1. You will see her every day.

"2. You will pay court to a woman in her own set, but without
manifesting a passion, do you understand? I do not disguise from
you that your role is difficult; you are playing a part, and if she
realises you are playing it you are lost."

"She has so much intelligence and I have so little, I shall be lost,"
said Julien sadly.

"No, you are only more in love than I thought. Madame de Dubois is
preoccupied with herself as are all women who have been favoured
by heaven either with too much pedigree or too much money. She
contemplates herself instead of contemplating you, consequently she
does not know you. During the two or three fits of love into which she
managed to work herself for your especial benefit, she saw in you the
hero of her dreams, and not the man you really are.

"But, deuce take it, this is elementary, my dear Sorel, are you an
absolute novice?

"Oddslife! Let us go into this shop. Look at that charming black
cravat, one would say it was made by John Anderson of Burlington
Street. Be kind enough to take it and throw far away that awful black
cord which you are wearing round your neck."

"And now," continued the prince as they came out of the shop of the
first hosier of Strasbourg, "what is the society in which madame de
Dubois lives? Great God, what a name, don't be angry, my dear Sorel, I
can't help it.... Now, whom are you going to pay court to?"

"To an absolute prude, the daughter of an immensely rich
stocking-merchant. She has the finest eyes in the world and they please
me infinitely; she doubtless holds the highest place in the society
of the district, but in the midst of all her greatness she blushes
and becomes positively confused if anyone starts talking about trade
or shops. And, unfortunately, her father was one of the best known
merchants in Strasbourg."

"So," said the prince with a laugh, "you are sure that when one talks
about trade your fair lady thinks about herself and not about you. This
silly weakness is divine and extremely useful, it will prevent you
from yielding to a single moment's folly when near her sparkling eyes.
Success is assured."

Julien was thinking of madame the marechale de Fervaques who often
came to the Hotel de la Mole. She was a beautiful foreigner who had
married the marechal a year before his death. The one object of her
whole life seemed to be to make people forget that she was the daughter
of a manufacturer. In order to cut some figure in Paris she had placed
herself at the head of the party of piety.

Julien sincerely admired the prince; what would he not have given to
have possessed his affectations! The conversation between the two
friends was interminable. Korasoff was delighted: No Frenchman had ever
listened to him for so long. "So I have succeeded at last," said the
prince to himself complacently, "in getting a proper hearing and that
too through giving lessons to my master."

"So we are quite agreed," he repeated to Julien for the tenth time.
"When you talk to the young beauty, I mean the daughter of the
Strasbourg stocking merchant in the presence of madame de Dubois, not
a trace of passion. But on the other hand be ardently passionate when
you write. Reading a well-written love-letter is a prude's supremest
pleasure. It is a moment of relaxation. She leaves off posing and dares
to listen to her own heart; consequently two letters a day."

"Never, never," said Julien despondently, "I would rather be ground in
a mortar than make up three phrases. I am a corpse, my dear fellow,
hope nothing from me. Let me die by the road side."

"And who is talking about making up phrases? I have got six volumes
of copied-out love-letters in my bag. I have letters to suit every
variation of feminine character, including the most highly virtuous.
Did not Kalisky pay court at Richmond-on-the-Thames at three leagues
from London, you know, to the prettiest Quakeress in the whole of
England?"

Julien was less unhappy when he left his friend at two o'clock in the
morning.

The prince summoned a copyist on the following day, and two days
afterwards Julien was the possessor of fifty-three carefully numbered
love-letters intended for the most sublime and the most melancholy
virtue.

"The reason why there is not fifty-four," said the prince "is because
Kalisky allowed himself to be dismissed. But what does it matter to
you, if you are badly treated by the stocking-merchant's daughter since
you only wish to produce an impression upon madame de Dubois' heart."

They went out riding every day, the prince was mad on Julien. Not
knowing how else to manifest his sudden friendship, he finished up by
offering him the hand of one of his cousins, a rich Moscow heiress;
"and once married," he added, "my influence and that cross of yours
will get you made a Colonel within two years."

"But that cross was not given me by Napoleon, far from it."

"What does it matter?" said the prince, "didn't he invent it. It is
still the first in Europe by a long way."

Julien was on the point of accepting; but his duty called him back to
the great personage. When he left Korasoff he promised to write. He
received the answer to the secret note which he had brought, and posted
towards Paris; but he had scarcely been alone for two successive days
before leaving France, and Mathilde seemed a worse punishment than
death. "I will not marry the millions Korasoff offers me," he said to
himself, "and I will follow his advice.

"After all the art of seduction is his speciality. He has thought about
nothing else except that alone for more than fifteen years, for he is
now thirty.

"One can't say that he lacks intelligence; he is subtle and cunning;
enthusiasm and poetry are impossible in such a character. He is an
attorney: an additional reason for his not making a mistake.

"I must do it, I will pay court to madame de Fervaques.

"It is very likely she will bore me a little, but I will look at her
beautiful eyes which are so like those other eyes which have loved me
more than anyone in the world.

"She is a foreigner; she is a new character to observe.

"I feel mad, and as though I were going to the devil. I must follow the
advice of a friend and not trust myself."

CHAPTER LV

THE MINISTRY OF VIRTUE

        But if I take this pleasure with so much prudence
        and circumspection I shall no longer find it a
        pleasure.--_Lope de Vega_.

As soon as our hero had returned to Paris and had come out of the
study of the marquis de La Mole, who seemed very displeased with the
despatches that were given him, he rushed off for the comte Altamira.
This noble foreigner combined with the advantage of having once been
condemned to death a very grave demeanour together with the good
fortune of a devout temperament; these two qualities, and more than
anything, the comte's high birth, made an especial appeal to madame de
Fervaques who saw a lot of him.

Julien solemnly confessed to him that he was very much in love with her.

"Her virtue is the purest and the highest," answered Altamira, "only it
is a little Jesuitical and dogmatic.

"There are days when, though I understand each of the expressions which
she makes use of, I never understand the whole sentence. She often
makes me think that I do not know French as well as I am said to. But
your acquaintance with her will get you talked about; it will give you
weight in the world. But let us go to Bustos," said Count Altamira
who had a methodical turn of mind; "he once paid court to madame la
marechale."

Don Diego Bustos had the matter explained to him at length, while he
said nothing, like a barrister in his chambers. He had a big monk-like
face with black moustaches and an inimitable gravity; he was, however,
a good carbonaro.

"I understand," he said to Julien at last. "Has the marechale de
Fervaques had lovers, or has she not? Have you consequently any hope
of success? That is the question. I don't mind telling you, for my own
part, that I have failed. Now that I am no more piqued I reason it out
to myself in this way; she is often bad tempered, and as I will tell
you in a minute, she is quite vindictive.

"I fail to detect in her that bilious temperament which is the sign of
genius, and shows as it were a veneer of passion over all its actions.
On the contrary, she owes her rare beauty and her fresh complexion to
the phlegmatic, tranquil character of the Dutch."

Julien began to lose patience with the phlegmatic slowness of the
imperturbable Spaniard; he could not help giving vent to some
monosyllables from time to time.

"Will you listen to me?" Don Diego Bustos gravely said to him.

"Forgive the _furia franchese_; I am all ears," said Julien.

"The marechale de Fervaques then is a great hater; she persecutes
ruthlessly people she has never seen--advocates, poor devils of men of
letters who have composed songs like Colle, you know?

    "J'ai la marotte
     D'aimer Marote, etc."

And Julien had to put up with the whole quotation.

The Spaniard was very pleased to get a chance of singing in French.

That divine song was never listened to more impatiently. When it was
finished Don Diego said--"The marechale procured the dismissal of the
author of the song:

    "Un jour l'amour au cabaret."

Julien shuddered lest he should want to sing it. He contented himself
with analysing it. As a matter of fact, it was blasphemous and somewhat
indecent.

"When the marechale become enraged against that song," said Don Diego,
"I remarked to her that a woman of her rank ought not to read all the
stupid things that are published. Whatever progress piety and gravity
may make France will always have a cabaret literature.

"'Be careful,' I said to madame de Fervaques when she had succeeded
in depriving the author, a poor devil on half-pay, of a place worth
eighteen hundred francs a year, 'you have attacked this rhymster with
your own arms, he may answer you with his rhymes; he will make a song
about virtue. The gilded salons will be on your side; but people who
like to laugh will repeat his epigrams.' Do you know, monsieur, what
the marechale answered? 'Let all Paris come and see me walking to my
martyrdom for the sake of the Lord. It will be a new spectacle for
France. The people will learn to respect the quality. It will be the
finest day of my life.' Her eyes never looked finer."

"And she has superb ones," exclaimed Julien.

"I see that you are in love. Further," went on Don Diego Bustos
gravely, "she has not the bilious constitution which causes
vindictiveness. If, however, she likes to do harm, it is because she is
unhappy, I suspect some secret misfortune. May it not be quite well a
case of prude tired of her role?"

The Spaniard looked at him in silence for a good minute.

"That's the whole point," he added gravely, "and that's what may give
you ground for some hope. I have often reflected about it during the
two years that I was her very humble servant. All your future, my
amorous sir, depends on this great problem. Is she a prude tired of her
role and only malicious because she is unhappy?"

"Or," said Altamira emerging at last from his deep silence, "can it be
as I have said twenty times before, simply a case of French vanity; the
memory of her father, the celebrated cloth merchant, constitutes the
unhappiness of this frigid melancholy nature. The only happiness she
could find would be to live in Toledo and to be tortured by a confessor
who would show her hell wide open every day."

"Altamira informs me you are one of us," said Don Diego, whose
demeanour was growing graver and graver to Julien as he went out. "You
will help us one day in re-winning our liberty, so I would like to help
you in this little amusement. It is right that you should know the
marechale's style; here are four letters in her hand-writing."

"I will copy them out," exclaimed Julien, "and bring them back to you."

"And you will never let anyone know a word of what we have been
saying."

"Never, on my honour," cried Julien.

"Well, God help you," added the Spaniard, and he silently escorted
Altamira and Julien as far as the staircase.

This somewhat amused our hero; he was on the point of smiling. "So
we have the devout Altamira," he said to himself, "aiding me in an
adulterous enterprise."

During Don Diego's solemn conversation Julien had been attentive to the
hours struck by the clock of the Hotel d'Aligre.

The dinner hour was drawing near, he was going to see Mathilde again.
He went in and dressed with much care.

"Mistake No. 1," he said to himself as he descended the staircase: "I
must follow the prince's instructions to the letter."

He went up to his room again and put on a travelling suit which was as
simple as it could be. "All I have to do now," he thought, "is to keep
control of my expression." It was only half-past five and they dined at
six. He thought of going down to the salon which he found deserted. He
was moved to the point of tears at the sight of the blue sofa. "I must
make an end of this foolish sensitiveness," he said angrily, "it will
betray me." He took up a paper in order to keep himself in countenance
and passed three or four times from the salon into the garden.

It was only when he was well concealed by a large oak and was trembling
all over, that he ventured to raise his eyes at mademoiselle de la
Mole's window. It was hermetically sealed; he was on the point of
fainting and remained for a long time leaning against the oak; then
with a staggering step he went to have another look at the gardener's
ladder.

The chain which he had once forced asunder--in, alas, such different
circumstances--had not yet been repaired. Carried away by a moment of
madness, Julien pressed it to his lips.

After having wandered about for a long time between the salon and the
garden, Julien felt horribly tired; he was now feeling acutely the
effects of a first success. My eyes will be expressionless and will not
betray me! The guests gradually arrived in the salon; the door never
opened without instilling anxiety into Julien's heart.

They sat down at table. Mademoiselle de la Mole, always faithful to her
habit of keeping people waiting, eventually appeared. She blushed a
great deal on seeing Julien, she had not been told of his arrival. In
accordance with Prince Korasoff's recommendation, Julien looked at his
hands. They were trembling. Troubled though he was beyond words by this
discovery, he was sufficiently happy to look merely tired.

M. de la Mole sang his praises. The marquise spoke to him a minute
afterwards and complimented him on his tired appearance. Julien said to
himself at every minute, "I ought not to look too much at mademoiselle
de la Mole, I ought not to avoid looking at her too much either. I must
appear as I was eight days before my unhappiness----" He had occasion
to be satisfied with his success and remained in the salon. Paying
attention for the first time to the mistress of the house, he made
every effort to make the visitors speak and to keep the conversation
alive.

His politeness was rewarded; madame la marechale de Fervaques was
announced about eight o'clock. Julien retired and shortly afterwards
appeared dressed with the greatest care. Madame de la Mole was
infinitely grateful to him for this mark of respect and made a point
of manifesting her satisfaction by telling madame de Fervaques about
his journey. Julien established himself near the marechale in such a
position that Mathilde could not notice his eyes. In this position he
lavished in accordance with all the rules in the art of love, the most
abject admiration on madame de Fervaques. The first of the 53 letters
with which Prince Korasoff had presented him commenced with a tirade on
this sentiment.

The marechale announced that she was going to the Opera-Bouffe. Julien
rushed there. He ran across the Chevalier de Beauvoisis who took him
into a box occupied by Messieurs the Gentlemen of the Chamber, just
next to madame de Fervaques's box. Julien constantly looked at her. "I
must keep a siege-journal," he said to himself as he went back to the
hotel, "otherwise I shall forget my attacks." He wrote two or three
pages on this boring theme, and in this way achieved the admirable
result of scarcely thinking at all about mademoiselle de la Mole.

Mathilde had almost forgotten him during his journey. "He is simply
a commonplace person after all," she thought, "his name will always
recall to me the greatest mistake in my life. I must honestly go back
to all my ideas about prudence and honour; a woman who forgets them has
everything to lose." She showed herself inclined to allow the contract
with the marquis de Croisenois, which had been prepared so long ago, to
be at last concluded. He was mad with joy; he would have been very much
astonished had he been told that there was an element of resignation at
the bottom of those feelings of Mathilde which made him so proud.

All mademoiselle de la Mole's ideas changed when she saw Julien. "As a
matter of fact he is my husband," she said to herself. "If I am sincere
in my return to sensible notions, he is clearly the man I ought to
marry."

She was expecting importunities and airs of unhappiness on the part of
Julien; she commenced rehearsing her answers, for he would doubtless
try to address some words to her when they left the dinner table. Far
from that he remained stubbornly in the salon and did not even look in
the direction of the garden, though God knows what pain that caused him!

"It is better to have this explanation out all at once," thought
mademoiselle de la Mole; she went into the garden alone, Julien did not
appear. Mathilde went and walked near the salon window. She found him
very much occupied in describing to madame de Fervaques the old ruined
chateau which crown the banks along the Rhine and invest them with so
much atmosphere. He was beginning to acquit himself with some credit
in that sentimental picturesque jargon which is called wit in certain
salons. Prince Korasoff would have been very proud if he had been at
Paris. This evening was exactly what he had predicted.

He would have approved the line of conduct which Julien followed on the
subsequent days.

An intrigue among the members of the secret government was going to
bestow a few blue ribbons; madame marechale de Fervaques was insisting
on her great uncle being made a chevalier of the order. The marquis de
la Mole had the same pretensions for his father-in-law; they joined
forces and the marechale came to the Hotel de la Mole nearly every day.
It was from her that Julien learned that the marquis was going to be
a minister. He was offering to the _Camarilla_ a very ingenious plan
for the annihilation of the charter within three years without any
disturbance.

If M. de la Mole became a minister, Julien could hope for a bishopric:
but all these important interests seemed to be veiled and hazy. His
imagination only perceived them very vaguely, and so to speak, in
the far distance. The awful unhappiness which was making him into a
madman could find no other interest in life except the character of his
relations with mademoiselle de la Mole. He calculated that after five
or six careful years he would manage to get himself loved again.

This cold brain had been reduced, as one sees, to a state of complete
disorder. Out of all the qualities which had formerly distinguished
him, all that remained was a little firmness. He was literally faithful
to the line of conduct which prince Korasoff had dictated, and placed
himself every evening near madame Fervaques' armchair, but he found it
impossible to think of a word to say to her.

The strain of making Mathilde think that he had recovered exhausted his
whole moral force, and when he was with the marechale he seemed almost
lifeless; even his eyes had lost all their fire, as in cases of extreme
physical suffering.

As madame de la Mole's views were invariably a counterpart of the
opinions of that husband of hers who could make her into a Duchess, she
had been singing Julien's praises for some days.

CHAPTER LVI

MORAL LOVE

    There also was of course in Adeline
    That calm patrician polish in the address,
    Which ne'er can pass the equinoctial line
    Of anything which Nature would express;
    Just as a Mandarin finds nothing fine.
    At least his manner suffers not to guess
    That anything he views can greatly please.
                            _Don Juan, c. xiii. st._ 84.

"There is an element of madness in all this family's way of looking at
things," thought the marechale; "they are infatuated with their young
abbe, whose only accomplishment is to be a good listener, though his
eyes are fine enough, it is true."

Julien, on his side, found in the marechale's manners an almost perfect
instance of that patrician calm which exhales a scrupulous politeness;
and, what is more, announces at the same time the impossibility of
any violent emotion. Madame de Fervaques would have been as much
scandalised by any unexpected movement or any lack of self-control, as
by a lack of dignity towards one's inferiors. She would have regarded
the slightest symptom of sensibility as a kind of moral drunkenness
which puts one to the blush and was extremely prejudicial to what a
person of high rank owed to herself. Her great happiness was to talk of
the king's last hunt; her favourite book, was the Memoirs of the Duke
de Saint Simon, especially the genealogical part.

Julien knew the place where the arrangement of the light suited madame
de Fervaques' particular style of beauty. He got there in advance, but
was careful to turn his chair in such a way as not to see Mathilde.

Astonished one day at this consistent policy of hiding himself from
her, she left the blue sofa and came to work by the little table near
the marechale's armchair. Julien had a fairly close view of her over
madame de Fervaques' hat.

Those eyes, which were the arbiters of his fate, frightened him, and
then hurled him violently out of his habitual apathy. He talked, and
talked very well.

He was speaking to the marechale, but his one aim was to produce an
impression upon Mathilde's soul. He became so animated that eventually
madame de Fervaques did not manage to understand a word he said.

This was a prime merit. If it had occurred to Julien to follow it up by
some phrases of German mysticism, lofty religion, and Jesuitism, the
marechale would have immediately given him a rank among the superior
men whose mission it was to regenerate the age.

"Since he has bad enough taste," said mademoiselle de la Mole, "to talk
so long and so ardently to madame de Fervaques, I shall not listen to
him any more." She kept her resolution during the whole latter part of
the evening, although she had difficulty in doing so.

At midnight, when she took her mother's candle to accompany her to
her room, madame de la Mole stopped on the staircase to enter into an
exhaustive eulogy of Julien. Mathilde ended by losing her temper. She
could not get to sleep. She felt calmed by this thought: "the very
things which I despise in a man may none the less constitute a great
merit in the eyes of the marechale."

As for Julien, he had done something, he was less unhappy; his eyes
chanced to fall on the Russian leather portfolio in which prince
Korasoff had placed the fifty-three love letters which he had presented
to him. Julien saw a note at the bottom of the first letter: No. 1 is
sent eight days after the first meeting.

"I am behind hand," exclaimed Julien. "It is quite a long time since I
met madame de Fervaques." He immediately began to copy out this first
love letter. It was a homily packed with moral platitudes and deadly
dull. Julien was fortunate enough to fall asleep at the second page.

Some hours afterwards he was surprised to see the broad daylight as he
lent on his desk. The most painful moments in his life were those when
he woke up every morning to realise his unhappiness. On this particular
day he finished copying out his letter in a state verging on laughter.
"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that there ever lived a young
man who actually wrote like that." He counted several sentences of nine
lines each. At the bottom of the original he noticed a pencilled note.
"These letters are delivered personally, on horseback, black cravat,
blue tail-coat. You give the letter to the porter with a contrite air;
expression of profound melancholy. If you notice any chambermaid, dry
your eyes furtively and speak to her."

All this was duly carried out.

"I am taking a very bold course!" thought Julien as he came out of the
Hotel de Fervaques, "but all the worse for Korasoff. To think of daring
to write to so virtuous a celebrity. I shall be treated with the utmost
contempt, and nothing will amuse me more. It is really the only comedy
that I can in any way appreciate. Yes, it will amuse me to load with
ridicule that odious creature whom I call myself. If I believed in
myself, I would commit some crime to distract myself."

The moment when Julien brought his horse back to the stable was the
happiest he had experienced for a whole month. Korasoff had expressly
forbidden him to look at the mistress who had left him, on any pretext
whatsoever. But the step of that horse, which she knew so well, and
Julien's way of knocking on the stable door with his riding-whip to
call a man, sometimes attracted Mathilde to behind the window-curtain.
The muslin was so light that Julien could see through it. By looking
under the brim of his hat in a certain way, he could get a view of
Mathilde's figure without seeing her eyes. "Consequently," he said to
himself, "she cannot see mine, and that is not really looking at her."

In the evening madame de Fervaques behaved towards him, exactly as
though she had never received the philosophic mystical and religious
dissertation which he had given to her porter in the morning with so
melancholy an air. Chance had shown Julien on the preceding day how
to be eloquent; he placed himself in such a position that he could
see Mathilde's eyes. She, on her side, left the blue sofa a minute
after the marechale's arrival; this involved abandoning her usual
associates. M. de Croisenois seemed overwhelmed by this new caprice:
his palpable grief alleviated the awfulness of Julien's agony.

This unexpected turn in his life made him talk like an angel, and
inasmuch as a certain element of self-appreciation will insinuate
itself even into those hearts which serve as a temple for the
most august virtue, the marechale said to herself as she got into
her carriage, "Madame de la Mole is right, this young priest has
distinction. My presence must have overawed him at first. As a matter
of fact, the whole tone of this house is very frivolous; I can see
nothing but instances of virtue helped by oldness, and standing in
great need of the chills of age. This young man must have managed to
appreciate the difference; he writes well, but I fear very much that
this request of his in his letter for me to enlighten him with my
advice, is really nothing less than an, as yet, unconscious sentiment.

"Nevertheless how many conversions have begun like that! What makes me
consider this a good omen is the difference between his style and that
of the young people whose letters I have had an opportunity of seeing.
One cannot avoid recognising unction, profound seriousness, and much
conviction in the prose of this young acolyte; he has no doubt the
sweet virtue of a Massillon."

CHAPTER LVII

THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH

    Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a coterie.
                                               _Telemaque_.

The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of
Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her
disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not
struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly
limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify
it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When
he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture
and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce
harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.

"I have a hard task before me today," he said to himself as he came in
with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us
hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."

It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished
up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.

"It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official
documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made
me copy out at London."

It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which
he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos.
He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of
the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant
everything and nothing. "It's the AEolian harp of style," thought
Julien. "The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty
thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable
fear of ridicule."

The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen
days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary
on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it
the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope
of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, going in the evening
to the opera on those evenings when madame de Fervaques did not come
to the Hotel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien's
life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the
marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde's eyes underneath
a feather of the marechale's hat, and he would wax eloquent. His
picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was
both more striking and more elegant.

He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde's eyes, but
he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. "The falser my
speeches are the more I ought to please," thought Julien, and he then
had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own
character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the
eyes of the marechale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational
ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand
eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes
of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.

Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were
passed in inaction.

"But," he said to himself one evening, "here I am copying out the
fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have
been duly delivered to the marechale's porter. I shall have the honour
of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me
as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my
constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that
Russian friend of Korasoff's who was in love with the pretty Quakeress
of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more
overwhelming."

Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the
manoeuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack
executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl.
The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness
for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived
a life of inordinate boredom, had to be induced to contract the habit
of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid than her
everyday life.

One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms
of madame la Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which
would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an
invitation to dinner.

He rushed to prince Korasoffs instructions. Unfortunately the young
Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just
when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able
to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the
marechale's dinner.

The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de
Diane in the Tuileries with panelled oil-paintings.

There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that
the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in
decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. "What a moral
century!" he thought.

He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present
at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of
---- the marechale's uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical
patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. "What
immense progress I have made," said Julien to himself with a melancholy
smile, "and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the
famous bishop of ----."

The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.

"It's like the small talk in a bad book," thought Julien. "All the
greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening
for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater--the speaker's
bombast, or his abominable ignorance?"

The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named
Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be
professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of
the Hotel de la Mole with his base calumnies.

It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though,
madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an
indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau's
sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien's success; "but
since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the
same time any more than a fool," said the future professor to himself,
"if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime marechale, she will obtain
some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of
him in the Hotel de la Mole."

M. the abbe Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his
success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy
between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous marechale
which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.

CHAPTER LVIII

MANON LESCAUT

        Accordingly once he was thoroughly convinced of the
        asinine stupidity of the prior, he would usually succeed
        well enough by calling white black, and black white.
        _Lichtenberg_.

The Russian instructions peremptorily forbade the writer from ever
contradicting in conversation the recipient of the letters. No pretext
could excuse any deviation from the role of that most ecstatic
admiration. The letters were always based on that hypothesis.

One evening at the opera, when in madame de Fervaques' box, Julien
spoke of the ballet of _Manon Lescaut_ in the most enthusiastic terms.
His only reason for talking in that strain was the fact that he thought
it insignificant.

The marechale said that the ballet was very inferior to the abbe
Prevost's novel.

"The idea," thought Julien, both surprised and amused, "of so highly
virtuous a person praising a novel! Madame de Fervaques used to profess
two or three times a week the most absolute contempt for those writers,
who, by means of their insipid works, try to corrupt a youth which is,
alas! only too inclined to the errors of the senses."

"_Manon Lescaut_" continued the marechale, "is said to be one of the
best of this immoral and dangerous type of book. The weaknesses and the
deserved anguish of a criminal heart are, they say, portrayed with a
truth which is not lacking in depth; a fact which does not prevent your
Bonaparte from stating at St. Helena that it is simply a novel written
for lackeys."

The word Bonaparte restored to Julien all the activity of his mind.
"They have tried to ruin me with the marechale; they have told her of
my enthusiasm for Napoleon. This fact has sufficiently piqued her to
make her yield to the temptation to make me feel it." This discovery
amused him all the evening, and rendered him amusing. As he took leave
of the marechale in the vestibule of the opera, she said to him,
"Remember, monsieur, one must not like Bonaparte if you like me; at
the best he can only be accepted as a necessity imposed by Providence.
Besides, the man did not have a sufficiently supple soul to appreciate
masterpieces of art."

"When you like me," Julien kept on repeating to himself, "that means
nothing or means everything. Here we have mysteries of language which
are beyond us poor provincials." And he thought a great deal about
madame de Renal, as he copied out an immense letter destined for the
marechale.

"How is it," she said to him the following day, with an assumed
indifference which he thought was clumsily assumed, "that you talk to
me about London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, I
think, when you came back from the opera?"

Julien was very embarrassed. He had copied line by line without
thinking about what he was writing, and had apparently forgotten to
substitute Paris and Saint Cloud for the words London and Richmond
which occurred in the original. He commenced two or three sentences,
but found it impossible to finish them. He felt on the point of
succumbing to a fit of idiotic laughter. Finally by picking his words
he succeeded in formulating this inspiration: "Exalted as I was by the
discussion of the most sublime and greatest interests of the human
soul, my own soul may have been somewhat absent in my letter to you."

"I am making an impression," he said to himself, "so I can spare myself
the boredom of the rest of the evening." He left the Hotel de Fervaques
at a run. In the evening he had another look at the original of the
letter which he had copied out on the previous night, and soon came to
the fatal place where the young Russian made mention of London and of
Richmond. Julien was very astonished to find this letter almost tender.

It had been the contrast between the apparent lightness of his
conversation, and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of
his letters which had marked him out for favour. The marechale was
particularly pleased by the longness of the sentences; this was very
far from being that sprightly style which that immoral man Voltaire
had brought into fashion. Although our hero made every possible human
effort to eliminate from his conversation any symptom of good sense, it
still preserved a certain anti-monarchical and blasphemous tinge which
did not escape madame de Fervaques. Surrounded as she was by persons
who, though eminently moral, had very often not a single idea during a
whole evening, this lady was profoundly struck by anything resembling
a novelty, but at the same time she thought she owed it to herself to
be offended by it. She called this defect: Keeping the imprint of the
lightness of the age.

But such salons are only worth observing when one has a favour to
procure. The reader doubtless shares all the ennui of the colourless
life which Julien was leading. This period represents the steppes of
our journey.

Mademoiselle de la Mole needed to exercise her self-control to avoid
thinking of Julien during the whole period filled by the de Fervaques
episode. Her soul was a prey to violent battles; sometimes she piqued
herself on despising that melancholy young man, but his conversation
captivated her in spite of herself. She was particularly astonished by
his absolute falseness. He did not say a single word to the marechale
which was not a lie, or at any rate, an abominable travesty of his own
way of thinking, which Mathilde knew so perfectly in every phase. This
Machiavellianism impressed her. "What subtlety," she said to herself.
"What a difference between the bombastic coxcombs, or the common
rascals like Tanbeau who talk in the same strain."

Nevertheless Julien went through awful days. It was only to accomplish
the most painful of duties that he put in a daily appearance in the
marechale's salon.

The strain of playing a part ended by depriving his mind of all its
strength. As he crossed each night the immense courtyard of the Hotel
de Fervaques, it was only through sheer force in character and logic
that he succeeded in keeping a little above the level of despair.

"I overcame despair at the seminary," he said, "yet what an awful
prospect I had then. I was then either going to make my fortune or
come to grief just as I am now. I found myself obliged to pass all my
life in intimate association with the most contemptible and disgusting
things in the whole world. The following spring, just eleven short
months later, I was perhaps the happiest of all young people of my own
age."

But very often all this fine logic proved unavailing against the awful
reality. He saw Mathilde every day at breakfast and at dinner. He knew
from the numerous letters which de la Mole dictated to him that she was
on the eve of marrying de Croisenois. This charming man already called
twice a day at the Hotel de la Mole; the jealous eye of a jilted lover
was alive to every one of his movements. When he thought he had noticed
that mademoiselle de la Mole was beginning to encourage her intended,
Julien could not help looking tenderly at his pistols as he went up to
his room.

"Ah," he said to himself, "would it not be much wiser to take the marks
out of my linen and to go into some solitary forest twenty leagues from
Paris to put an end to this atrocious life? I should be unknown in the
district, my death would remain a secret for a fortnight, and who would
bother about me after a fortnight?"

This reasoning was very logical. But on the following day a glimpse of
Mathilde's arm between the sleeve of her dress and her glove sufficed
to plunge our young philosopher into memories which, though agonising,
none the less gave him a hold on life. "Well," he said to himself, "I
will follow this Russian plan to the end. How will it all finish?"

"So far as the marechale is concerned, after I have copied out these
fifty-three letters, I shall not write any others.

"As for Mathilde, these six weeks of painful acting will either leave
her anger unchanged, or will win me a moment of reconciliation. Great
God! I should die of happiness." And he could not finish his train of
thought.

After a long reverie he succeeded in taking up the thread of his
argument. "In that case," he said to himself, "I should win one day of
happiness, and after that her cruelties which are based, alas, on my
lack of ability to please her will recommence. I should have nothing
left to do, I should be ruined and lost for ever. With such a character
as hers what guarantee can she give me? Alas! My manners are no doubt
lacking in elegance, and my style of speech is heavy and monotonous.
Great God, why am I myself?"

CHAPTER LIX

ENNUI

        Sacrificing one's self to one's passions, let it pass;
        but sacrificing one's self to passions which one has not
        got! Oh! melancholy nineteenth century!
                                            _Girodet_.

Madame de Fervaques had begun reading Julien's long letters without any
pleasure, but she now began to think about them; one thing, however,
grieved her. "What a pity that M. Sorel was not a real priest! He could
then be admitted to a kind of intimacy; but in view of that cross,
and that almost lay dress, one is exposed to cruel questions and what
is one to answer?" She did not finish the train of thought, "Some
malicious woman friend may think, and even spread it about that he is
some lower middle-class cousin or other, a relative of my father, some
tradesman who has been decorated by the National Guard." Up to the
time which she had seen Julien, madame de Fervaque's greatest pleasure
had been writing the word marechale after her name. Consequently a
morbid parvenu vanity, which was ready to take umbrage at everything,
combatted the awakening of her interest in him. "It would be so easy
for me," said the marechale, "to make him a grand vicar in some diocese
near Paris! but plain M. Sorel, and what is more, a man who is the
secretary of M. de la Mole! It is heart-breaking."

For the first time in her life this soul, which was afraid of
everything, was moved by an interest which was alien to its own
pretensions to rank and superiority. Her old porter noticed that
whenever he brought a letter from this handsome young man, who always
looked so sad, he was certain to see that absent, discontented
expression, which the marechale always made a point of assuming on the
entry of any of her servants, immediately disappear. The boredom of a
mode of life whose ambitions were concentrated on impressing the public
without her having at heart any real faculty of enjoyment for that kind
of success, had become so intolerable since she had begun to think of
Julien that, all that was necessary to prevent her chambermaids being
bullied for a whole day, was that their mistress should have passed
an hour in the society of this strange young man on the evening of
the preceding day. His budding credit was proof against very cleverly
written anonymous letters. It was in vain that Tanbeau supplied M. de
Luz, de Croisenois, de Caylus, with two or three very clever calumnies
which these gentlemen were only too glad to spread, without making
too many enquiries of the actual truth of the charges. The marechale,
whose temperament was not calculated to be proof against these vulgar
expedients related her doubts to Mathilde, and was always consoled by
her.

One day, madame de Fervaques, after having asked three times if there
were any letters for her, suddenly decided to answer Julien. It was a
case of the triumph of ennui. On reaching the second letter in his name
the marechale almost felt herself pulled up sharp by the unbecomingness
of writing with her own hand so vulgar an address as to M. Sorel, care
of M. le Marquis de la Mole.

"You must bring me envelopes with your address on," she said very drily
to Julien in the evening. "Here I am appointed lover and valet in one,"
thought Julien, and he bowed, amused himself by wrinkling his face up
like Arsene, the old valet of the marquis.

He brought the envelopes that very evening, and he received the third
letter very early on the following day: he read five or six lines at
the beginning, and two or three towards the end. There were four pages
of a small and very close writing. The lady gradually developed the
sweet habit of writing nearly every day. Julien answered by faithful
copies of the Russian letters; and such is the advantage of the
bombastic style that madame de Fervaques was not a bit astonished by
the lack of connection between his answers and her letters. How gravely
irritated would her pride have been if the little Tanbeau who had
constituted himself a voluntary spy on all Julien's movements had been
able to have informed her that all these letters were left unsealed and
thrown haphazard into Julien's drawer.

One morning the porter was bringing into the library a letter to him
from the marechale. Mathilde met the man, saw the letter together with
the address in Julien's handwriting. She entered the library as the
porter was leaving it, the letter was still on the edge of the table.
Julien was very busy with his work and had not yet put it in his drawer.

"I cannot endure this," exclaimed Mathilde, as she took possession
of the letter, "you are completely forgetting me, me your wife, your
conduct is awful, monsieur."

At these words her pride, shocked by the awful unseemliness of her
proceeding, prevented her from speaking. She burst into tears, and soon
seemed to Julien scarcely able to breathe.

Julien was so surprised and embarrassed that he did not fully
appreciate how ideally fortunate this scene was for himself. He helped
Mathilde to sit down; she almost abandoned herself in his arms.

The first minute in which he noticed this movement, he felt an extreme
joy. Immediately afterwards, he thought of Korasoff: "I may lose
everything by a single word."

The strain of carrying out his tactics was so great that his arms
stiffened. "I dare not even allow myself to press this supple, charming
frame to my heart, or she will despise me or treat me badly. What an
awful character!" And while he cursed Mathilde's character, he loved
her a hundred times more. He thought he had a queen in his arms.

Julien's impassive coldness intensified the anguished pride which was
lacerating the soul of mademoiselle de la Mole. She was far from having
the necessary self-possession to try and read in his eyes what he felt
for her at that particular moment. She could not make up her mind to
look at him. She trembled lest she might encounter a contemptuous
expression.

Seated motionless on the library divan, with her head turned in the
opposite direction to Julien, she was a prey to the most poignant
anguish that pride and love can inflict upon a human soul. What an
awful step had she just slipped into taking! "It has been reserved
for me, unhappy woman that I am, to see my most unbecoming advances
rebuffed! and rebuffed by whom?" added her maddened and wounded pride;
"rebuffed by a servant of my father's! That's more than I will put up
with," she said aloud, and rising in a fury, she opened the drawer of
Julien's table, which was two yards in front of her.

She stood petrified with horror when she saw eight or ten unopened
letters, completely like the one the porter had just brought up. She
recognised Julien's handwriting, though more or less disguised, on all
the addresses.

"So," she cried, quite beside herself, "you are not only on good terms
with her, but you actually despise her. You, a nobody, despise madame
la marechale de Fervaques!"

"Oh, forgive me, my dear," she added, throwing herself on her knees;
"despise me if you wish, but love me. I cannot live without your love."
And she fell down in a dead faint.

"So our proud lady is lying at my feet," said Julien to himself.

CHAPTER LX

A BOX AT THE BOUFFES

   As the blackest sky
Foretells the heaviest tempest
               _Don Juan, c._ 1. _st_.76.

In the midst of these great transports Julien felt more surprised than
happy. Mathilde's abuse proved to him the shrewdness of the Russian
tactics. "'Few words, few deeds,' that is my one method of salvation."
He picked up Mathilde, and without saying a word, put her back on the
divan. She was gradually being overcome by tears.

In order to keep herself in countenance, she took madame de Fervaques'
letters in her hands, and slowly broke the seals. She gave a noticeable
nervous movement when she recognised the marechale's handwriting. She
turned over the pages of these letters without reading them. Most of
them were six pages.

"At least answer me," Mathilde said at last, in the most supplicatory
tone, but without daring to look at Julien: "You know how proud I am.
It is the misfortune of my position, and of my temperament, too, I
confess. Has madame de Fervaques robbed me of your heart? Has she made
the sacrifices to which my fatal love swept me?"

A dismal silence was all Julien's answer. "By what right," he thought,
"does she ask me to commit an indiscretion unworthy of an honest man?"
Mathilde tried to read the letters; her eyes were so wet with tears
that it was impossible for her to do so. She had been unhappy for a
month past, but this haughty soul had been very far from owning its own
feelings even to itself. Chance alone had brought about this explosion.
For one instant jealousy and love had won a victory over pride. She
was sitting on the divan, and very near him. He saw her hair and her
alabaster neck. For a moment he forgot all he owed to himself. He
passed his arm around her waist, and clasped her almost to his breast.

She slowly turned her head towards him. He was astonished by the
extreme anguish in her eyes. There was not a trace of their usual
expression.

Julien felt his strength desert him. So great was the deadly pain of
the courageous feat which he was imposing on himself.

"Those eyes will soon express nothing but the coldest disdain," said
Julien to himself, "if I allow myself to be swept away by the happiness
of loving her." She, however, kept repeatedly assuring him at this
moment, in a hushed voice, and in words which she had scarcely the
strength to finish, of all her remorse for those steps which her
inordinate pride had dictated.

"I, too, have pride," said Julien to her, in a scarcely articulate
voice, while his features portrayed the lowest depths of physical
prostration.

Mathilde turned round sharply towards him. Hearing his voice was a
happiness which she had given up hoping. At this moment her only
thought of her haughtiness was to curse it. She would have liked to
have found out some abnormal and incredible actions, in order to prove
to him the extent to which she adored him and detested herself.

"That pride is probably the reason," continued Julien, "why you singled
me out for a moment. My present courageous and manly firmness is
certainly the reason why you respect me. I may entertain love for the
marechale."

Mathilde shuddered; a strange expression came into her eyes. She was
going to hear her sentence pronounced. This shudder did not escape
Julien. He felt his courage weaken.

"Ah," he said to himself, as he listened to the sound of the vain words
which his mouth was articulating, as he thought it were some strange
sound, "if I could only cover those pale cheeks with kisses without
your feeling it."

"I may entertain love for the marechale," he continued, while his voice
became weaker and weaker, "but I certainly have no definite proof of
her interest in me."

Mathilde looked at him. He supported that look. He hoped, at any rate,
that his expression had not betrayed him. He felt himself bathed in a
love that penetrated even into the most secret recesses of his heart.
He had never adored her so much; he was almost as mad as Mathilde. If
she had mustered sufficient self-possession and courage to manoeuvre, he
would have abandoned all his play-acting, and fallen at her feet. He
had sufficient strength to manage to continue speaking: "Ah, Korasoff,"
he exclaimed mentally, "why are you not here? How I need a word from
you to guide me in my conduct." During this time his voice was saying,

"In default of any other sentiment, gratitude would be sufficient to
attach me to the marechale. She has been indulgent to me; she has
consoled me when I have been despised. I cannot put unlimited faith
in certain appearances which are, no doubt, extremely flattering, but
possibly very fleeting."

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed Mathilde.

"Well, what guarantee will you give me?" replied Julien with a sharp,
firm intonation, which seemed to abandon for a moment the prudent forms
of diplomacy. "What guarantee, what god will warrant that the position
to which you seem inclined to restore me at the present moment will
last more than two days?"

"The excess of my love, and my unhappiness if you do not love me," she
said to him, taking his hands and turning towards him.

The spasmodic movement which she had just made had slightly displaced
her tippet; Julien caught a view of her charming shoulders. Her
slightly dishevelled hair recalled a delicious memory....

He was on the point of succumbing. "One imprudent word," he said to
himself, "and I have to start all over again that long series of days
which I have passed in despair. Madame de Renal used to find reasons
for doing what her heart dictated. This young girl of high society
never allows her heart to be moved except when she has proved to
herself by sound logic that it ought to be moved."

He saw this proof in the twinkling of an eye, and in the twinkling
of an eye too, he regained his courage. He took away his hands which
Mathilde was pressing in her own, and moved a little away from her with
a marked respect.

Human courage could not go further. He then busied himself with
putting together madame de Fervaque's letters which were spread out on
the divan, and it was with all the appearance of extreme politeness
that he cruelly exploited the psychological moment by adding,

"Mademoiselle de la Mole will allow me to reflect over all this." He
went rapidly away and left the library; she heard him shut all the
doors one after the other.

"The monster is not the least bit troubled," she said to herself. "But
what am I saying? Monster? He is wise, prudent, good. It is I myself
who have committed more wrong than one can imagine."

This point of view lasted. Mathilde was almost happy today, for she
gave herself up to love unreservedly. One would have said that this
soul had never been disturbed by pride (and what pride!)

She shuddered with horror when a lackey announced madame le Fervaques
into the salon in the evening. The man's voice struck her as sinister.
She could not endure the sight of the marechale, and stopped suddenly.
Julien who had felt little pride over his painful victory, had feared
to face her, and had not dined at the Hotel de la Mole.

His love and his happiness rapidly increased in proportion to the time
that elapsed from the moment of the battle. He was blaming himself
already. "How could I resist her?" he said to himself. "Suppose she
were to go and leave off loving me! One single moment may change that
haughty soul, and I must admit that I have treated her awfully."

In the evening he felt that it was absolutely necessary to put in
an appearance at the Bouffes in madame de Fervaques' box. She had
expressly invited him. Mathilde would be bound to know of his presence
or his discourteous absence. In spite of the clearness of this logic,
he could not at the beginning of the evening bring himself to plunge
into society. By speaking he would lose half his happiness. Ten o'clock
struck and it was absolutely necessary to show himself. Luckily he
found the marechale's box packed with women, and was relegated to a
place near the door where he was completely hidden by the hats. This
position saved him from looking ridiculous; Caroline's divine notes of
despair in the _Matrimonio Segreto_ made him burst into tears. Madame
de Fervaques saw these tears. They represented so great a contrast
with the masculine firmness of his usual expression that the soul
of the old-fashioned lady, saturated as it had been for many years
with all the corroding acid of parvenu haughtiness, was none the less
touched. Such remnants of a woman's heart as she still possessed
impelled her to speak: she wanted to enjoy the sound of his voice at
this moment.

"Have you seen the de la Mole ladies?" she said to him. "They are
in the third tier." Julien immediately craned out over the theatre,
leaning politely enough on the front of the box. He saw Mathilde; her
eyes were shining with tears.

"And yet it is not their Opera day," thought Julien; "how eager she
must be!"

Mathilde had prevailed on her mother to come to the Bouffes in spite
of the inconveniently high tier of the box, which a lady friend of the
family had hastened to offer her. She wanted to see if Julien would
pass the evening with the marechale.

CHAPTER LXI

FRIGHTEN HER

        So this is the fine miracle of your civilisation; you
        have turned love into an ordinary business.--_Barnave_.

Julien rushed into madame de la Mole's box. His eyes first met the
tearful eyes of Mathilde; she was crying without reserve. There were
only insignificant personages present, the friend who had leant her
box, and some men whom she knew. Mathilde placed her hand on Julien's;
she seemed to have forgotten all fear of her mother. Almost stifled as
she was by her tears, she said nothing but this one word: "Guarantees!"

"So long as I don't speak to her," said Julien to himself. He was
himself very moved, and concealed his eyes with his hand as best
he could under the pretext of avoiding the dazzling light of the
third tier of boxes. "If I speak she may suspect the excess of my
emotion, the sound of my voice will betray me. All may yet be lost."
His struggles were more painful than they had been in the morning,
his soul had had the time to become moved. He had been frightened at
seeing Mathilde piqued with vanity. Intoxicated as he was with love and
pleasure he resolved not to speak.

In my view this is one of the finest traits in his character, an
individual capable of such an effort of self-control may go far si
_fata sinant_.

Mademoiselle de la Mole insisted on taking Julien back to the hotel.
Luckily it was raining a great deal, but the marquise had him placed
opposite her, talked to him incessantly, and prevented him saying a
single word to her daughter. One might have thought that the marquise
was nursing Julien's happiness for him; no longer fearing to lose
everything through his excessive emotion, he madly abandoned himself to
his happiness.

Shall I dare to say that when he went back to his room Julien fell
on his knees and covered with kisses the love letters which prince
Korasoff had given him.

"How much I owe you, great man," he exclaimed in his madness. Little
by little he regained his self-possession. He compared himself to a
general who had just won a great battle. "My advantage is definite and
immense," he said to himself, "but what will happen to-morrow? One
instant may ruin everything."

With a passionate gesture he opened the _Memoirs_ which Napoleon had
dictated at St. Helena and for two long hours forced himself to read
them. Only his eyes read; no matter, he made himself do it. During this
singular reading his head and his heart rose to the most exalted level
and worked unconsciously. "Her heart is very different from madame de
Renal's," he said to himself, but he did not go further.

"Frighten her!" he suddenly exclaimed, hurling away the book. "The
enemy will only obey me in so far as I frighten him, but then he will
not dare to show contempt for me."

Intoxicated with joy he walked up and down his little room. In point of
fact his happiness was based rather on pride than on love.

"Frighten her!" he repeated proudly, and he had cause to be proud.

"Madame de Renal always doubted even in her happiest moments if my
love was equal to her own. In this case I have to subjugate a demon,
consequently I must subjugate her." He knew quite well that Mathilde
would be in the library at eight o'clock in the morning of the
following day. He did not appear before nine o'clock. He was burning
with love, but his head dominated his heart.

Scarcely a single minute passed without his repeating to himself. "Keep
her obsessed by this great doubt. Does he love me?" Her own brilliant
position, together with the flattery of all who speak to her, tend a
little too much to make her reassure herself.

He found her sitting on the divan pale and calm, but apparently
completely incapable of making a single movement. She held out her
hand,

"Dear one, it is true I have offended you, perhaps you are angry with
me."

Julien had not been expecting this simple tone. He was on the point of
betraying himself.

"You want guarantees, my dear, she added after a silence which she had
hoped would be broken. Take me away, let us leave for London. I shall
be ruined, dishonoured for ever." She had the courage to take her hand
away from Julien to cover her eyes with it.

All her feelings of reserve and feminine virtue had come back into her
soul. "Well, dishonour me," she said at last with a sigh, "that will be
a guarantee."

"I was happy yesterday, because I had the courage to be severe with
myself," thought Julien. After a short silence he had sufficient
control over his heart to say in an icy tone,

"Once we are on the road to London, once you are dishonoured, to employ
your own expression, who will answer that you will still love me? that
my very presence in the post-chaise will not seem importunate? I am not
a monster; to have ruined your reputation will only make me still more
unhappy. It is not your position in society which is the obstacle, it
is unfortunately your own character. Can you yourself guarantee that
you will love me for eight days?"

"Ah! let her love me for eight days, just eight days," whispered
Julien to himself, "and I will die of happiness. What do I care for
the future, what do I care for life? And yet if I wish that divine
happiness can commence this very minute, it only depends on me."

Mathilde saw that he was pensive.

"So I am completely unworthy of you," she said to him, taking his hand.

Julien kissed her, but at the same time the iron hand of duty gripped
his heart. If she sees how much I adore her I shall lose her. And
before leaving her arms, he had reassumed all that dignity which is
proper to a man.

He managed on this and the following days to conceal his inordinate
happiness. There were moments when he even refused himself the pleasure
of clasping her in his arms. At other times the delirium of happiness
prevailed over all the counsels of prudence.

He had been accustomed to station himself near a bower of honeysuckle
in the garden arranged in such a way so as to conceal the ladder when
he had looked up at Mathilde's blind in the distance, and lamented her
inconstancy. A very big oak tree was quite near, and the trunk of that
tree prevented him from being seen by the indiscreet.

As he passed with Mathilde over this very place which recalled his
excessive unhappiness so vividly, the contrast between his former
despair and his present happiness proved too much for his character.
Tears inundated his eyes, and he carried his sweetheart's hand to his
lips: "It was here I used to live in my thoughts of you, it was from
here that I used to look at that blind, and waited whole hours for the
happy moment when I would see that hand open it."

His weakness was unreserved. He portrayed the extremity of his former
despair in genuine colours which could not possibly have been invented.
Short interjections testified to that present happiness which had put
an end to that awful agony.

"My God, what am I doing?" thought Julien, suddenly recovering himself.
"I am ruining myself."

In his excessive alarm he thought that he already detected a diminution
of the love in mademoiselle de la Mole's eyes. It was an illusion, but
Julien's face suddenly changed its expression and became overspread
by a mortal pallor. His eyes lost their fire, and an expression of
haughtiness touched with malice soon succeeded to his look of the most
genuine and unreserved love.

"But what is the matter with you, my dear," said Mathilde to him, both
tenderly and anxiously.

"I am lying," said Julien irritably, "and I am lying to you. I am
reproaching myself for it, and yet God knows that I respect you
sufficiently not to lie to you. You love me, you are devoted to me, and
I have no need of praises in order to please you."

"Great heavens! are all the charming things you have been telling me
for the last two minutes mere phrases?"

"And I reproach myself for it keenly, dear one. I once made them up for
a woman who loved me, and bored me--it is the weakness of my character.
I denounce myself to you, forgive me."

Bitter tears streamed over Mathilde's cheeks.

"As soon as some trifle offends me and throws me back on my
meditation," continued Julien, "my abominable memory, which I curse at
this very minute, offers me a resource, and I abuse it."

"So I must have slipped, without knowing it, into some action which has
displeased you," said Mathilde with a charming simplicity.

"I remember one day that when you passed near this honeysuckle you
picked a flower, M. de Luz took it from you and you let him keep it. I
was two paces away."

"M. de Luz? It is impossible," replied Mathilde with all her natural
haughtiness. "I do not do things like that."

"I am sure of it," Julien replied sharply.

"Well, my dear, it is true," said Mathilde, as she sadly lowered her
eyes. She knew positively that many months had elapsed since she had
allowed M. de Luz to do such a thing.

Julien looked at her with ineffable tenderness, "No," he said to
himself, "she does not love me less."

In the evening she rallied him with a laugh on his fancy for madame de
Fervaques. "Think of a bourgeois loving a parvenu, those are perhaps
the only type of hearts that my Julien cannot make mad with love. She
has made you into a real dandy," she said playing with his hair.

During the period when he thought himself scorned by Mathilde, Julien
had become one of the best dressed men in Paris. He had, moreover,
a further advantage over other dandies, in as much as once he had
finished dressing he never gave a further thought to his appearance.

One thing still piqued Mathilde, Julien continued to copy out the
Russian letters and send them to the marechale.

CHAPTER LXII

THE TIGER

        Alas, why these things and not other
        things?--_Beaumarchais_.

An English traveller tells of the intimacy in which he lived with a
tiger. He had trained it and would caress it, but he always kept a
cocked pistol on his table.

Julien only abandoned himself to the fulness of his happiness in those
moments when Mathilde could not read the expression in his eyes. He
scrupulously performed his duty of addressing some harsh word to her
from time to time.

When Mathilde's sweetness, which he noticed with some surprise,
together with the completeness of her devotion were on the point of
depriving him of all self-control, he was courageous enough to leave
her suddenly.

Mathilde loved for the first time in her life.

Life had previously always dragged along at a tortoise pace, but now it
flew.

As, however, her pride required to find a vent in some way or other,
she wished to expose herself to all the dangers in which her love could
involve her. It was Julien who was prudent, and it was only when it was
a question of danger that she did not follow her own inclination; but
submissive, and almost humble as she was when with him, she only showed
additional haughtiness to everyone in the house who came near her,
whether relatives or friends.

In the evening she would call Julien to her in the salon in the
presence of sixty people, and have a long and private conversation with
him.

The little Tanbeau installed himself one day close to them. She
requested him to go and fetch from the library the volume of Smollet
which deals with the revolution of 1688, and when he hesitated, added
with an expression of insulting haughtiness, which was a veritable balm
to Julien's soul, "Don't hurry."

"Have you noticed that little monster's expression?" he said to her.

"His uncle has been in attendance in this salon for ten or twelve
years, otherwise I would have had him packed off immediately."

Her behaviour towards MM. de Croisenois, de Luz, etc., though outwardly
perfectly polite, was in reality scarcely less provocative. Mathilde
keenly reproached herself for all the confidential remarks about them
which she had formerly made to Julien, and all the more so since she
did not dare to confess that she had exaggerated to him the, in fact,
almost absolutely innocent manifestations of interest of which these
gentlemen had been the objects. In spite of her best resolutions her
womanly pride invariably prevented her from saying to Julien, "It was
because I was talking to you that I found a pleasure in describing my
weakness in not drawing my hand away, when M. de Croisenois had placed
his on a marble table and had just touched it."

But now, as soon as one of these gentlemen had been speaking to her for
some moments, she found she had a question to put to Julien, and she
made this an excuse for keeping him by her side.

She discovered that she was _enceinte_ and joyfully informed Julien of
the fact.

"Do you doubt me now? Is it not a guarantee? I am your wife for ever."

This announcement struck Julien with profound astonishment. He was on
the point of forgetting the governing principle of his conduct. How am
I to be deliberately cold and insulting towards this poor young girl,
who is ruining herself for my sake. And if she looked at all ill,
he could not, even on those days when the terrible voice of wisdom
made itself heard, find the courage to address to her one of those
harsh remarks which his experience had found so indispensable to the
preservation of their love.

"I will write to my father," said Mathilde to him one day, "he is
more than a father to me, he is a friend; that being so, I think it
unworthy both of you and of myself to try and deceive him, even for a
single minute."

"Great heavens, what are you going to do?" said Julien in alarm.

"My duty," she answered with eyes shining with joy.

She thought she was showing more nobility than her lover.

"But he will pack me off in disgrace."

"It is his right to do so, we must respect it. I will give you my arm,
and we will go out by the front door in full daylight."

Julien was thunderstruck and requested her to put it off for a week.

"I cannot," she answered, "it is the voice of honour, I have seen my
duty, I must follow it, and follow it at once."

"Well, I order you to put it off," said Julien at last. "Your honour
is safe for the present. I am your husband. The position of us will be
changed by this momentous step. I too am within my rights. To-day is
Tuesday, next Tuesday is the duke de Retz's at home; when M. de la Mole
comes home in the evening the porter will give him the fatal letter.
His only thought is to make you a duchess, I am sure of it. Think of
his unhappiness."

"You mean, think of his vengeance?"

"It may be that I pity my benefactor, and am grieved at injuring him,
but I do not fear, and shall never fear anyone."

Mathilde yielded. This was the first occasion, since she had informed
Julien of her condition, that he had spoken to her authoritatively.
She had never loved him so much. The tender part of his soul had
found happiness in seizing on Mathilde's condition as an excuse
for refraining from his cruel remarks to her. The question of the
confession to M. de la Mole deeply moved him. Was he going to be
separated from Mathilde? And, however grieved she would be to see him
go, would she have a thought for him after his departure?

He was almost equally horrified by the thought of the justified
reproaches which the marquis might address to him.

In the evening he confessed to Mathilde the second reason for his
anxiety, and then led away by his love, confessed the first as well.

She changed colour. "Would it really make you unhappy," she said to
him, "to pass six months far away from me?"

"Infinitely so. It is the only thing in the world which terrifies me."

Mathilde was very happy. Julien had played his part so assiduously that
he had succeeded in making her think that she was the one of the two
who loved the more.

The fatal Tuesday arrived. When the marquis came in at midnight he
found a letter addressed to him, which was only to be opened himself
when no one was there:--

        "My father,

        "All social ties have been broken between us, only those
        of nature remain. Next to my husband, you are and always
        will be the being I shall always hold most dear. My
        eyes are full of tears, I am thinking of the pain that
        I am causing you, but if my shame was to be prevented
        from becoming public, and you were to be given time to
        reflect and act, I could not postpone any longer the
        confession that I owe you. If your affection for me,
        which I know is extremely deep, is good enough to grant
        me a small allowance, I will go and settle with my
        husband anywhere you like, in Switzerland, for instance.
        His name is so obscure that no one would recognize
        in Madame Sorel, the daughter-in-law of a Verrieres
        carpenter, your daughter. That is the name which I have
        so much difficulty in writing. I fear your wrath against
        Julien, it seems so justified. I shall not be a duchess,
        my father; but I knew it when I loved him; for I was
        the one who loved him first, it was I who seduced him.
        I have inherited from you too lofty a soul to fix my
        attention on what either is or appears to be vulgar. It
        is in vain that I thought of M. Croisenois with a view
        to pleasing you. Why did you place real merit under my
        eyes? You told me yourself on my return from Hyeres,
        'that young Sorel is the one person who amuses me,' the
        poor boy is as grieved as I am if it is possible, at the
        pain this letter will give you. I cannot prevent you
        being irritated as a father, but love me as a friend.

        "Julien respected me. If he sometimes spoke to me,
        it was only by reason of his deep gratitude towards
        yourself, for the natural dignity of his character
        induces him to keep to his official capacity in any
        answers he may make to anyone who is so much above
        him. He has a keen and instinctive appreciation of the
        difference of social rank. It was I (I confess it with a
        blush to my best friend, and I shall never make such a
        confession to anyone else) who clasped his arm one day
        in the garden.

        "Why need you be irritated with him, after twenty-four
        hours have elapsed? My own lapse is irreparable. If you
        insist on it, the assurance of his profound respect and
        of his desperate grief at having displeased you, can
        be conveyed to you through me. You need not see him at
        all, but I shall go and join him wherever he wishes.
        It is his right and it is my duty. He is the father of
        my child. If your kindness will go so far as to grant
        us six thousand francs to live on, I will receive it
        with gratitude; if not, Julien reckons on establishing
        himself at Besancon, where he will set up as a Latin and
        literature master. However low may have been the station
        from which he springs, I am certain he will raise
        himself. With him I do not fear obscurity. If there is
        a revolution, I am sure that he will play a prime part.
        Can you say as much for any of those who have asked
        for my hand? They have fine estates, you say. I cannot
        consider that circumstance a reason for admiring them.
        My Julien would attain a high position, even under the
        present regime, if he had a million and my father's
        protection...."

Mathilde, who knew that the marquis was a man who always abandoned
himself to his first impulse, had written eight pages.

"What am I to do?" said Julien to himself while M. de la Mole was
reading this letter. "Where is (first) my duty; (second) my interest?
My debt to him is immense. Without him I should have been a menial
scoundrel, and not even enough of a scoundrel to be hated and
persecuted by the others. He has made me a man of the world. The
villainous acts which I now have to do are (first) less frequent;
(second) less mean. That is more than as if he had given me a million.
I am indebted to him for this cross and the reputation of having
rendered those alleged diplomatic services, which have lifted me out of
the ruck.

"If he himself were writing instructions for my conduct, what would he
prescribe?"

Julien was sharply interrupted by M. de la Mole's old valet. "The
marquis wants to see you at once, dressed or not dressed." The valet
added in a low voice, as he walked by Julien's side, "He is beside
himself: look out!"

CHAPTER LXIII

THE HELL OF WEAKNESS

        A clumsy lapidary, in cutting this diamond, deprived
        it of some of its most brilliant facets. In the middle
        ages, nay, even under Richelieu, the Frenchman had
        _force of will_.--_Mirabeau_.

Julien found the marquis furious. For perhaps the first time in his
life this nobleman showed bad form. He loaded Julien with all the
insults that came to his lips. Our hero was astonished, and his
patience was tried, but his gratitude remained unshaken.

"The poor man now sees the annihilation, in a single minute, of all
the fine plans which he has long cherished in his heart. But I owe it
to him to answer. My silence tends to increase his anger." The part of
Tartuffe supplied the answer;

"I am not an angel.... I served you well; you paid me generously.... I
was grateful, but I am twenty-two.... Only you and that charming person
understood my thoughts in this household."

"Monster," exclaimed the marquis. "Charming! Charming, to be sure! The
day when you found her charming you ought to have fled."

"I tried to. It was then that I asked permission to leave for
Languedoc."

Tired of stampeding about and overcome by his grief, the marquis threw
himself into an arm-chair. Julien heard him whispering to himself, "No,
no, he is not a wicked man."

"No, I am not, towards you," exclaimed Julien, falling on his knees.
But he felt extremely ashamed of this manifestation, and very quickly
got up again.

The marquis was really transported. When he saw this movement, he
began again to load him with abominable insults, which were worthy of
the driver of a fiacre. The novelty of these oaths perhaps acted as a
distraction.

"What! is my daughter to go by the name of madame Sorel? What! is my
daughter not to be a duchess?" Each time that these two ideas presented
themselves in all their clearness M. de la Mole was a prey to torture,
and lost all power over the movements of his mind.

Julien was afraid of being beaten.

In his lucid intervals, when he was beginning to get accustomed to his
unhappiness, the marquis addressed to Julien reproaches which were
reasonable enough. "You should have fled, sir," he said to him. "Your
duty was to flee. You are the lowest of men."

Julien approached the table and wrote:

        "I have found my life unbearable for a long time; I am
        putting an end to it. I request monsieur the marquis to
        accept my apologies (together with the expression of my
        infinite gratitude) for any embarrassment that may be
        occasioned by my death in his hotel."

"Kindly run your eye over this paper, M. the marquis," said Julien.
"Kill me, or have me killed by your valet. It is one o'clock in the
morning. I will go and walk in the garden in the direction of the wall
at the bottom."

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

"I understand," thought Julien. "He would not be sorry if I were to
spare his valet the trouble of killing me....

"Let him kill me, if he likes; it is a satisfaction which I offer
him.... But, by heaven, I love life. I owe it to my son."

This idea, which had not previously presented itself with so much
definiteness to his imagination, completely engrossed him during his
walk after the first few minutes which he had spent thinking about his
danger.

This novel interest turned him into a prudent man. "I need advice as to
how to behave towards this infuriated man.... He is devoid of reason;
he is capable of everything. Fouque is too far away; besides, he would
not understand the emotions of a heart like the marquis's."

"Count Altamira ... am I certain of eternal silence? My request
for advice must not be a fresh step which will raise still further
complications. Alas! I have no one left but the gloomy abbe Pirard. His
mind is crabbed by Jansenism.... A damned Jesuit would know the world,
and would be more in my line. M. Pirard is capable of beating me at the
very mention of my crime."

The genius of Tartuffe came to Julien's help. "Well, I will go and
confess to him." This was his final resolution after having walked
about in the garden for two good hours. He no longer thought about
being surprised by a gun shot. He was feeling sleepy.

Very early the next day, Julien was several leagues away from Paris
and knocked at the door of the severe Jansenist. He found to his great
astonishment that he was not unduly surprised at his confidence.

"I ought perhaps to reproach myself," said the abbe, who seemed more
anxious than irritated. "I thought I guessed that love. My affection
for you, my unhappy boy, prevented me from warning the father."

"What will he do?" said Julien keenly.

At that moment he loved the abbe, and would have found a scene between
them very painful.

"I see three alternatives," continued Julien.

"M. de la Mole can have me put to death," and he mentioned the suicide
letter which he had left with the Marquis; (2) "He can get Count
Norbert to challenge me to a duel, and shoot at me point blank."

"You would accept?" said the abbe furiously as he got up.

"You do not let me finish. I should certainly never fire upon my
benefactor's son. (3) He can send me away. If he says go to Edinburgh
or New York, I will obey him. They can then conceal mademoiselle de la
Mole's condition, but I will never allow them to suppress my son."

"Have no doubt about it, that will be the first thought of that
depraved man."

At Paris, Mathilde was in despair. She had seen her father about seven
o'clock. He had shown her Julien's letter. She feared that he might
have considered it noble to put an end to his life; "and without my
permission?" she said to herself with a pain due solely to her anger.

"If he dies I shall die," she said to her father. "It will be you
who will be the cause of his death.... Perhaps you will rejoice at
it but I swear by his shades that I shall at once go into mourning,
and shall publicly appear as _Madame the widow Sorel_, I shall send
out my invitations, you can count on it.... You will find me neither
pusillanimous nor cowardly."

Her love went to the point of madness. M. de la Mole was flabbergasted
in his turn.

He began to regard what had happened with a certain amount of logic.
Mathilde did not appear at breakfast. The marquis felt an immense
weight off his mind, and was particularly flattered when he noticed
that she had said nothing to her mother.

Julien was dismounting from his horse. Mathilde had him called and
threw herself into his arms almost beneath the very eyes of her
chambermaid. Julien was not very appreciative of this transport. He had
come away from his long consultation with the abbe Pirard in a very
diplomatic and calculating mood. The calculation of possibilities had
killed his imagination. Mathilde told him, with tears in her eyes, that
she had read his suicide letter.

"My father may change his mind; do me the favour of leaving for
Villequier this very minute. Mount your horse again, and leave the
hotel before they get up from table."

When Julien's coldness and astonishment showed no sign of abatement,
she burst into tears.

"Let me manage our affairs," she exclaimed ecstatically, as she clasped
him in her arms. "You know, dear, it is not of my own free will that
I separate from you. Write under cover to my maid. Address it in a
strange hand-writing, I will write volumes to you. Adieu, flee."

This last word wounded Julien, but he none the less obeyed. "It will
be fatal," he thought "if, in their most gracious moments these
aristocrats manage to shock me."

Mathilde firmly opposed all her father's prudent plans. She would
not open negotiations on any other basis except this. She was to be
Madame Sorel, and was either to live with her husband in poverty in
Switzerland, or with her father in Paris. She rejected absolutely the
suggestion of a secret accouchement. "In that case I should begin to
be confronted with a prospect of calumny and dishonour. I shall go
travelling with my husband two months after the marriage, and it will
be easy to pretend that my son was born at a proper time."

This firmness though at first received with violent fits of anger,
eventually made the marquis hesitate.

"Here," he said to his daughter in a moment of emotion, "is a gift of
ten thousand francs a year. Send it to your Julien, and let him quickly
make it impossible for me to retract it."

In order to obey Mathilde, whose imperious temper he well knew, Julien
had travelled forty useless leagues; he was superintending the accounts
of the farmers at Villequier. This act of benevolence on the part of
the marquis occasioned his return. He went and asked asylum of the abbe
Pirard, who had become Mathilde's most useful ally during his absence.
Every time that he was questioned by the marquis, he would prove to him
that any other course except public marriage would be a crime in the
eyes of God.

"And happily," added the abbe, "worldly wisdom is in this instance in
agreement with religion. Could one, in view of Mdlle. de la Mole's
passionate character, rely for a minute on her keeping any secret which
she did not herself wish to preserve? If one does not reconcile oneself
to the frankness of a public marriage, society will concern itself much
longer with this strange mesalliance__. Everything must be said all
at once without either the appearance or the reality of the slightest
mystery."

"It is true," said the marquis pensively.

Two or three friends of M. de la Mole were of the same opinion as the
abbe Pirard. The great obstacle in their view was Mathilde's decided
character. But in spite of all these fine arguments the marquis's soul
could not reconcile itself to giving up all hopes of a coronet for his
daughter.

He ransacked his memory and his imagination for all the variations of
knavery and duplicity which had been feasible in his youth. Yielding to
necessity and having fear of the law seemed absurd and humiliating for
a man in his position. He was paying dearly now for the luxury of those
enchanting dreams concerning the future of his cherished daughter in
which he had indulged for the last ten years.

"Who could have anticipated it?" he said to himself. "A girl of so
proud a character, of so lofty a disposition, who is even prouder than
I am of the name she bears? A girl whose hand has already been asked
for by all the cream of the nobility of France."

"We must give up all faith in prudence. This age is made to confound
everything. We are marching towards chaos."

CHAPTER LXIV

A MAN OF INTELLECT

        The prefect said to himself as he rode along the highway
        on horseback, "why should I not be a minister, a
        president of the council, a duke? This is how I should
        make war.... By these means I should have all the
        reformers put in irons."--_The Globe_.

No argument will succeed in destroying the paramount influence of ten
years of agreeable dreaming. The marquis thought it illogical to be
angry, but could not bring himself to forgive. "If only this Julien
could die by accident," he sometimes said to himself. It was in this
way that his depressed imagination found a certain relief in running
after the most absurd chimaeras. They paralysed the influence of the
wise arguments of the abbe Pirard. A month went by in this way without
negotiations advancing one single stage.

The marquis had in this family matter, just as he had in politics,
brilliant ideas over which he would be enthusiastic for two or three
days. And then a line of tactics would fail to please him because it
was based on sound arguments, while arguments only found favour in his
eyes in so far as they were based on his favourite plan. He would work
for three days with all the ardour and enthusiasm of a poet on bringing
matters to a certain stage; on the following day he would not give it a
thought.

Julien was at first disconcerted by the slowness of the marquis;
but, after some weeks, he began to surmise that M. de La Mole had no
definite plan with regard to this matter. Madame de La Mole and the
whole household believed that Julien was travelling in the provinces
in connection with the administration of the estates; he was in hiding
in the parsonage of the abbe Pirard and saw Mathilde every day;
every morning she would spend an hour with her father, but they would
sometimes go for weeks on end without talking of the matter which
engrossed all their thoughts.

"I don't want to know where the man is," said the marquis to her one
day. "Send him this letter." Mathilde read:

"The Languedoc estates bring in 20,600 francs. I give 10,600 francs to
my daughter, and 10,000 francs to M. Julien Sorel. It is understood
that I give the actual estates. Tell the notary to draw up two separate
deeds of gift, and to bring them to me to-morrow, after this there are
to be no more relations between us. Ah, Monsieur, could I have expected
all this? The marquis de La Mole."

"I thank you very much," said Mathilde gaily. "We will go and settle in
the Chateau d'Aiguillon, between Agen and Marmande. The country is said
to be as beautiful as Italy."

This gift was an extreme surprise to Julien. He was no longer the cold,
severe man whom we have hitherto known. His thoughts were engrossed in
advance by his son's destiny. This unexpected fortune, substantial as
it was for a man as poor as himself, made him ambitious. He pictured
a time when both his wife and himself would have an income of 36,000
francs. As for Mathilde, all her emotions were concentrated on her
adoration for her husband, for that was the name by which her pride
insisted on calling Julien. Her one great ambition was to secure the
recognition of her marriage. She passed her time in exaggerating to
herself the consummate prudence which she had manifested in linking her
fate to that of a superior man. The idea of personal merit became a
positive craze with her.

Julien's almost continuous absence, coupled with the complications of
business matters and the little time available in which to talk love,
completed the good effect produced by the wise tactics which Julien had
previously discovered.

Mathilde finished by losing patience at seeing so little of the man
whom she had come really to love.

In a moment of irritation she wrote to her father and commenced her
letter like Othello:

"My very choice is sufficient proof that I have preferred Julien to all
the advantages which society offered to the daughter of the marquis
de la Mole. Such pleasures, based as they are on prestige and petty
vanity mean nothing to me. It is now nearly six weeks since I have
lived separated from my husband. That is sufficient to manifest my
respect for yourself. Before next Thursday I shall leave the paternal
house. Your acts of kindness have enriched us. No one knows my secret
except the venerable abbe Pirard. I shall go to him: he will marry us,
and an hour after the ceremony we shall be on the road to Languedoc,
and we will never appear again in Paris except by your instructions.
But what cuts me to the quick is that all this will provide the subject
matter for piquant anecdotes against me and against yourself. May not
the epigrams of a foolish public compel our excellent Norbert to pick a
quarrel with Julien, under such circumstances I know I should have no
control over him. We should discover in his soul the mark of the rebel
plebian. Oh father, I entreat you on my knees, come and be present at
my marriage in M. Pirard's church next Thursday. It will blunt the
sting of malignant scandal and will guarantee the life's happiness of
your only daughter, and of that of my husband, etc., etc."

This letter threw the marquis's soul into a strange embarrassment.
He must at last take a definite line. All his little habits: all his
vulgar friends had lost their influence.

In these strange circumstances the great lines of his character,
which had been formed by the events of his youth, reassumed all their
original force. The misfortunes of the emigration had made him into
an imaginative man. After having enjoyed for two years an immense
fortune and all the distinctions of the court, 1790 had flung him into
the awful miseries of the emigration. This hard schooling had changed
the character of a spirit of twenty-two. In essence, he was not so
much dominated by his present riches as encamped in their midst. But
that very imagination which had preserved his soul from the taint of
avarice, had made him a victim of a mad passion for seeing his daughter
decorated by a fine title.

During the six weeks which had just elapsed, the marquis had felt at
times impelled by a caprice for making Julien rich. He considered
poverty mean, humiliating for himself, M. de la Mole, and impossible
in his daughter's husband; he was ready to lavish money. On the next
day his imagination would go off on another tack, and he would think
that Julien would read between the lines of this financial generosity,
change his name, exile himself to America, and write to Mathilde that
he was dead for her. M. de la Mole imagined this letter written, and
went so far as to follow its effect on his daughter's character.

The day when he was awakened from these highly youthful dreams by
Mathilde's actual letter after he had been thinking for along time
of killing Julien or securing his disappearance he was dreaming of
building up a brilliant position for him. He would make him take the
name of one of his estates, and why should he not make him inherit a
peerage? His father-in-law, M. the duke de Chaulnes, had, since the
death of his own son in Spain, frequently spoken to him about his
desire to transmit his title to Norbert....

"One cannot help owning that Julien has a singular aptitude for
affairs, had boldness, and is possibly even brilliant," said the
marquis to himself ... "but I detect at the root of his character a
certain element which alarms me. He produces the same impression upon
everyone, consequently there must be something real in it," and the
more difficult this reality was to seize hold of, the more it alarmed
the imaginative mind of the old marquis.

"My daughter expressed the same point very neatly the other day (in a
suppressed letter).

"Julien has not joined any salon or any coterie. He has nothing to
support himself against me, and has absolutely no resource if I abandon
him. Now is that ignorance of the actual state of society? I have said
to him two or three times, the only real and profitable candidature is
the candidature of the salons.

"No, he has not the adroit, cunning genius of an attorney who never
loses a minute or an opportunity. He is very far from being a character
like Louis XL. On the other hand, I have seen him quote the most
ungenerous maxims ... it is beyond me. Can it be that he simply repeats
these maxims in order to use them as a _dam_ against his passions?

"However, one thing comes to the surface; he cannot bear contempt,
that's my hold on him.

"He has not, it is true, the religious reverence for high birth. He
does not instinctively respect us.... That is wrong; but after all,
the only things which are supposed to make the soul of a seminary
student impatient are lack of enjoyment and lack of money. He is quite
different, and cannot stand contempt at any price."

Pressed as he was by his daughter's letter, M. de la Mole realised the
necessity for making up his mind. "After all, the great question is
this:--Did Julien's audacity go to the point of setting out to make
advances to my daughter because he knows I love her more than anything
else in the world, and because I have an income of a hundred thousand
crowns?"

Mathilde protests to the contrary.... "No, monsieur Julien, that is a
point on which I am not going to be under any illusion.

"Is it really a case of spontaneous and authentic love? or is it just
a vulgar desire to raise himself to a fine position? Mathilde is
far-seeing; she appreciated from the first that this suspicion might
ruin him with me--hence that confession of hers. It was she who took
upon herself to love him the first.

"The idea of a girl of so proud a character so far forgetting herself
as to make physical advances! To think of pressing his arm in the
garden in the evening! How horrible! As though there were not a hundred
other less unseemly ways of notifying him that he was the object of her
favour.

"_Qui s'excuse s'accuse_; I distrust Mathilde." The marquis's reasoning
was more conclusive to-day than it was usually. Nevertheless, force
of habit prevailed, and he resolved to gain time by writing to his
daughter, for a correspondence was being carried on between one wing
of the hotel and the other. M. de la Mole did not dare to discuss
matters with Mathilde and to see her face to face. He was frightened of
clinching the whole matter by yielding suddenly.

        "Mind you commit no new acts of madness; here is
        a commission of lieutenant of Hussars for M. the
        chevalier, Julien Sorel de la Vernaye. You see what I
        am doing for him. Do not irritate me. Do not question
        me. Let him leave within twenty-four hours and present
        himself at Strasbourg where his regiment is. Here is an
        order on my banker. Obey me."

Mathilde's love and joy were unlimited. She wished to profit by her
victory and immediately replied.

        "If M. de la Vernaye knew all that you are good enough
        to do for him, he would be overwhelmed with gratitude
        and be at your feet. But amidst all this generosity, my
        father has forgotten me; your daughter's honour is in
        peril. An indiscretion may produce an everlasting blot
        which an income of twenty thousand crowns could not
        put right. I will only send the commission to M. de la
        Vernaye if you give me your word that my marriage will
        be publicly celebrated at Villequier in the course of
        next month. Shortly after that period, which I entreat
        you not to prolong, your daughter will only be able to
        appear in public under the name of Madame de la Vernaye.
        How I thank you, dear papa, for having saved me from the
        name of Sorel, etc., etc."

The reply was unexpected:

        "Obey or I retract everything. Tremble, you imprudent
        young girl. I do not yet know what your Julien is,
        and you yourself know less than I. Let him leave for
        Strasbourg, and try to act straightly. I will notify him
        from here of my wishes within a fortnight."

Mathilde was astonished by this firm answer. _I do not know Julien_.
These words threw her into a reverie which soon finished in the most
fascinating suppositions; but she believed in their truth. My Julien's
intellect is not clothed in the petty mean uniform of the salons, and
my father refuses to believe in his superiority by reason of the very
fact which proves it.

All the same, if I do not obey this whim of his, I see the possibility
of a public scene; a scandal would lower my position in society, and
might render me less fascinating in Julien's eyes. After the scandal
... ten years of poverty; and the only thing which can prevent marrying
for merit becoming ridiculous is the most brilliant wealth. If I live
far away from my father, he is old and may forget me.... Norbert will
marry some clever, charming woman; old Louis XIV. was seduced by the
duchess of Burgundy.

She decided to obey, but refrained from communicating her father's
letter to Julien. It might perhaps have been that ferocious character
driven to some act of madness.

Julien's joy was unlimited when she informed him in the evening that
he was a lieutenant of Hussars. Its extent can be imagined from the
fact that this had constituted the ambition of his whole life, and
also from the passion which he now had for his son. The change of name
struck him with astonishment.

"After all," he thought, "I have got to the end of my romance, and I
deserve all the credit. I have managed to win the love of that monster
of pride," he added, looking at Mathilde. "Her father cannot live
without her, nor she without me."

Julien tries to divert his attention from Mathilde. He goes on a secret mission for the Marquis to help organize a conservative conspiracy that will strengthen the political power of the clergy in France. The Marquis, along with some of the most powerful men in France, wants to organize an army controlled by the Vatican. Julien's excellent powers of memorization impress the Marquis and his associates, so they send him around France to deliver their message to co- conspirators. Nevertheless, a group of conservative priests finds out about the conspiracy, forcing Julien to disguise himself as a soldier. Upon his return to Paris, Julien decides to make Mathilde jealous. He begins writing copied love letters to an extremely religious member of the Marquis's salon, Mme. de Fervaques. Julien knows that she is too pious to even understand his fake declarations of love, and is just using her attention to upset Mathilde. He is still very much in love with Mathilde. For the two months that he forces himself to avoid her, he is miserable. During this period, Julien becomes an expert dresser and even manages to make Mme. de Fervaques begin to like him. Mathilde cannot help but notice Julien's surge in popularity, and blushes whenever they are in the same room. Julien's ploy to make Mathilde jealous works perfectly. She finds out about the letters to Mme. de Fervaques and falls at Julien's feet proclaiming her undying love. Julien is madly in love with her too, but has learned how volatile Mathilde's emotions can be. He decides to say little and do little until he has guarantees from Mathilde that she will not change her mind. Julien now knows how to manipulate Mathilde's emotions, and succeeds in making her completely devoted to him. They resume their relationship, but Julien is careful not too show too much emotion in order to keep Mathilde interested in him. However, she soon finds out that she is pregnant and wants Julien to become her husband. Mathilde immediately confesses everything to her father, blaming herself for seducing Julien in the first place. The Marquis is enraged but will not have Julien killed. He cannot imagine his daughter having the last name Sorel, and tries to think of some way to get rid of Julien. Instead, after a month of negotiations and the help of M. Pirard, the Marquis both gives Julien a large income and ennobles him as Julien de La Vernaye. Julien is also made a lieutenant in the army. Having made Julien a man of rank and wealth, the Marquis finally consents to Julien's marriage to Mathilde.

Commentary Julien's hypocrisy finally comes full circle as he finds himself working as an agent for a conservative conspiracy. Stendhal uses this political interlude to separate Julien and Mathilde as well as mock both liberal and conservative politics. Writing immediately following the bourgeois liberal Revolution of 1830, Stendhal replaces the liberal conspiracy with a conservative one, cynically suggesting that the two parties are really interchangeable. He further ridicules conservative politics when he introduces a second conservative conspiracy that attempts to thwart the first plot. Revealingly, nothing Julien does on his mission matters or has any effect. Just like during the king's visit to Verrieres, Julien switches from the black clothes of the clergy to the red uniform of a soldier to avoid being recognized. Like liberal and conservative politics, the red and the black are really not that different from each other. Stendhal suggests that, like Julien's forgotten conspiracy, French politics are more comedy than drama. Julien finally masters the psychological power of triangular desire in this section. The first part of his affair with Mathilde is hampered by her inability to decide whether she loves him or not. She especially cannot forget Julien's humble social status. However, Julien soon figures out that jealousy is the best way to win her devotion. Forming a love triangle with Mme. de Fervaques as an intermediary, he succeeds in making Mathilde completely fall in love with him and give him assurances of her devotion. Yet Julien is careful not to immediately declare his own love, making sure that he keeps Mathilde dependent on him and not the other way around. More so than ever, he evokes the example of Napoleon and treats her like an enemy on a battlefield that must be intimidated. Stendhal notes that Mathilde is pregnant in a very brief sentence that does not fit well with the surrounding text. Did Julien get her pregnant on purpose to further his ambitions? Stendhal's reticence on this subject does seem to suggest some intent on Julien's part, but Julien is very shocked that Mathilde wants to tell her father. The Marquis's choices in this matter are clear: he must either have Julien killed or ennoble him. Julien still feels a deep obligation to the Marquis and offers to commit suicide, a declaration that makes Mathilde love him even more. Her ensuing argument with her father raises an interesting question regarding Julien's character. Neither of them feels that they know him very well. Indeed, Julien himself does not seem to know who he really is and what he really wants in life. Both Mathilde and the Marquis feel that Julien's political ambitions present a danger to the aristocracy and decide that the best way to engender his trust is to make him one of them; he could otherwise prove to be a revolutionary leader. Julien's lack of identity is thus molded into the title of de la Vernaye. Even though she is in love with Julien, Mathilde can not get over his low birth, and thus spreads a rumor that he is the illegitimate son of a nobleman. But his new title and army commission are the realization of Julien's dreams only in name: he has been acting like an aristocrat and a soldier since the beginning of the novel.