The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
by the words "you must," which had been tactlessly pronounced by his
first physician, and yet Louis XV. was not a parvenu.
An hour afterwards a footman gave Julien a letter. It was quite simply
a declaration of love.
"The style is too affected," said Julien to himself, as he endeavoured
to control by his literary criticism the joy which was spreading over
his cheeks and forcing him to smile in spite of himself.
At last his passionate exultation was too strong to be controlled. "So
I," he suddenly exclaimed, "I, the poor peasant, get a declaration of
love from a great lady."
"As for myself, I haven't done so badly," he added, restraining his
joy as much as he could. "I have managed to preserve my self-respect.
I did not say that I loved her." He began to study the formation of
the letters. Mademoiselle de la Mole had a pretty little English
handwriting. He needed some concrete occupation to distract him from a
joy which verged on delirium.
"Your departure forces me to speak.... I could not bear not to see you
again."
A thought had just struck Julien like a new discovery. It interrupted
his examination of Mathilde's letter, and redoubled his joy. "So I
score over the marquis de Croisenois," he exclaimed. "Yes, I who could
only talk seriously! And he is so handsome. He has a moustache and a
charming uniform. He always manages to say something witty and clever
just at the psychological moment."
Julien experienced a delightful minute. He was wandering at random in
the garden, mad with happiness.
Afterwards he went up to his desk, and had himself ushered in to the
marquis de la Mole, who was fortunately still in. He showed him several
stamped papers which had come from Normandy, and had no difficulty
in convincing him that he was obliged to put off his departure for
Languedoc in order to look after the Normandy lawsuits.
"I am very glad that you are not going," said the marquis to him, when
they had finished talking business. "I like seeing you." Julien went
out; the words irritated him.
"And I--I am going to seduce his daughter! and perhaps render
impossible that marriage with the marquis de Croisenois to which the
marquis looks forward with such delight. If he does not get made a
duke, at any rate his daughter will have a coronet." Julien thought of
leaving for Languedoc in spite of Mathilde's letter, and in spite of
the explanation he had just given to the marquis. This flash of virtue
quickly disappeared.
"How kind it is of me," he said to himself, "me ... a plebeian, takes
pity on a family of this rank! Yes, me, whom the duke of Chaulnes
calls a servant! How does the marquis manage to increase his immense
fortune? By selling stock when he picks up information at the castle
that there will be a panic of a _coup d'état_ on the following day.
And shall I, who have been flung down into the lowest class by a cruel
providence--I, whom providence has given a noble heart but not an
income of a thousand francs, that is to say, not enough to buy bread
with, literally not enough to buy bread with--shall I refuse a pleasure
that presents itself? A limpid fountain which will quench my thirst in
this scorching desert of mediocrity which I am traversing with such
difficulty! Upon my word, I am not such a fool! Each man for himself in
that desert of egoism which is called life."
And he remembered certain disdainful looks which madame de la Mole, and
especially her lady friends, had favoured him with.
The pleasure of scoring over the marquis de Croisenois completed the
rout of this echo of virtue.
"How I should like to make him angry," said Julien. "With what
confidence would I give him a sword thrust now!" And he went through
the segoon thrust. "Up till now I have been a mere usher, who exploited
basely the little courage he had. After this letter I am his equal.
"Yes," he slowly said to himself, with an infinite pleasure, "the
merits of the marquis and myself have been weighed in the balance, and
it is the poor carpenter from the Jura who turns the scale.
"Good!" he exclaimed, "this is how I shall sign my answer. Don't
imagine, mademoiselle de la Mole, that I am forgetting my place. I will
make you realise and fully appreciate that it is for a carpenter's son
that you are betraying a descendant of the famous Guy de Croisenois who
followed St. Louis to the Crusade."
Julien was unable to control his joy. He was obliged to go down into
the garden. He had locked himself in his room, but he found it too
narrow to breathe in.
"To think of it being me, the poor peasant from the Jura," he kept
on repeating to himself, "to think of it being me who am eternally
condemned to wear this gloomy black suit! Alas twenty years ago I would
have worn a uniform like they do! In those days a man like me either
got killed or became a general at thirty-six. The letter which he held
clenched in his hand gave him a heroic pose and stature. Nowadays, it
is true, if one sticks to this black suit, one gets at forty an income
of a hundred thousand francs and the blue ribbon like my lord bishop of
Beauvais.
"Well," he said to himself with a Mephistophelian smile, "I have more
brains than they. I am shrewd enough to choose the uniform of my
century. And he felt a quickening of his ambition and of his attachment
to his ecclesiastical dress. What cardinals of even lower birth than
mine have not succeeded in governing! My compatriot Granvelle, for
instance."
Julien's agitation became gradually calmed! Prudence emerged to the
top. He said to himself like his master Tartuffe whose part he knew by
heart:
Je puis croire ces mots, un artifice honnête.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Je ne me firai point à des propos si doux,
Qu'un peu de ses faveurs après quoi je soupire
Ne vienne m'assurer tout ce qu'ils m'ont pudire.
_Tartuffe, act iv. Scene v_.
"Tartuffe, too, was ruined by a woman, and he was as good as most
men.... My answer may be shown.... and the way out of that is this," he
added pronouncing his words slowly with an intonation of deliberate and
restrained ferocity. "We will begin by quoting the most vivid passages
from the letter of the sublime Mathilde."
"Quite so, but M. de Croisenois' lackeys will hurl themselves upon me
and snatch the original away."
"No, they won't, for I am well armed, and as we know I am accustomed to
firing on lackeys."
"Well, suppose one of them has courage, and hurls himself upon me. He
has been promised a hundred napoleons. I kill him, or wound him, good,
that's what they want. I shall be thrown into prison legally. I shall
be had up in the police court and the judges will send me with all
justice and all equity to keep Messieurs Fontan and Magalon company
in Poissy. There I shall be landed in the middle of four hundred
scoundrels.... And am I to have the slightest pity on these people,"
he exclaimed getting up impetuously! "Do they show any to persons of
the third estate when they have them in their power!" With these words
his gratitude to M. de la Mole, which had been in spite of himself
torturing his conscience up to this time, breathed its last.
"Softly, gentlemen, I follow this little Machiavellian trick, the abbé
Maslon or M. Castanède of the seminary could not have done better. You
will take the provocative letter away from me and I shall exemplify the
second volume of Colonel Caron at Colmar."
"One moment, gentlemen, I will send the fatal letter in a well-sealed
packet to M. the abbé Pirard to take care of. He's an honest man, a
Jansenist, and consequently incorruptible. Yes, but he will open the
letters.... Fouqué is the man to whom I must send it."
We must admit that Julien's expression was awful, his countenance
ghastly; it breathed unmitigated criminality. It represented the
unhappy man at war with all society.
"To arms," exclaimed Julien. And he bounded up the flight of steps
of the hotel with one stride. He entered the stall of the street
scrivener; he frightened him. "Copy this," he said, giving him
mademoiselle de la Mole's letter.
While the scrivener was working, he himself wrote to Fouqué. He asked
him to take care of a valuable deposit. "But he said to himself,"
breaking in upon his train of thought, "the secret service of the
post-office will open my letter, and will give you gentlemen the one
you are looking for ... not quite, gentlemen." He went and bought an
enormous Bible from a Protestant bookseller, skillfully hid Mathilde's
letter in the cover, and packed it all up. His parcel left by the
diligence addressed to one of Fouqué's workmen, whose name was known to
nobody at Paris.
This done, he returned to the Hôtel de la Mole, joyous and buoyant.
Now it's our turn he exclaimed as he locked himself into the room and
threw off his coat.
"What! mademoiselle," he wrote to Mathilde, "is it mademoiselle de la
Mole who gets Arsène her father's lackey to hand an only too flattering
letter to a poor carpenter from the Jura, in order no doubt to make
fun of his simplicity?" And he copied out the most explicit phrases in
the letter which he had just received. His own letter would have done
honour to the diplomatic prudence of M. the Chevalier de Beauvoisis.
It was still only ten o'clock when Julien entered the Italian opera,
intoxicated with happiness and that feeling of his own power which was
so novel for a poor devil like him. He heard his friend Geronimo sing.
Music had never exalted him to such a pitch.
CHAPTER XLIV
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS
What perplexity! What sleepless nights! Great God. Am I
going to make myself contemptible? He will despise me
himself. But he is leaving, he is going away.
_Alfred de Musset_
Mathilde had not written without a struggle. Whatever might have been
the beginning of her interest in Julien, it soon dominated that pride
which had reigned unchallenged in her heart since she had begun to know
herself. This cold and haughty soul was swept away for the first time
by a sentiment of passion, but if this passion dominated her pride,
it still kept faithfully to the habits of that pride. Two months of
struggles and new sensations had transformed, so to speak her whole
moral life.
Mathilde thought she was in sight of happiness. This vista,
irresistible as it is for those who combine a superior intellect with
a courageous soul, had to struggle for a long time against her self
respect and all her vulgar duties. One day she went into her mother's
room at seven o'clock in the morning and asked permission to take
refuge in Villequier. The marquise did not even deign to answer her,
and advised her to go back to bed. This was the last effort of vulgar
prudence and respect for tradition.
The fear of doing wrong and of offending those ideas which the
Caylus's, the de Luz's, the Croisenois' held for sacred had little
power over her soul. She considered such creatures incapable of
understanding her. She would have consulted them, if it had been a
matter of buying a carriage or an estate. Her real fear was that Julien
was displeased with her.
"Perhaps he, too, has only the appearance of a superior man?"
She abhorred lack of character; that was her one objection to the
handsome young men who surrounded her. The more they made elegant
fun of everything which deviated from the prevailing mode, or which
conformed to it but indifferently, the lower they fell in her eyes.
They were brave and that was all. "And after all in what way were they
brave?" she said to herself. "In duels, but the duel is nothing more
than a formality. The whole thing is mapped out beforehand, even the
correct thing to say when you fall. Stretched on the turf, and with