Chapter Chapter 44 · A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS

. A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS

What perplexity! What sleepless nights! Great God. Am I

going to make myself contemptible? He will despise me

himself. But he is leaving, he is going away.

_Alfred de Musset_

Mathilde had not written without a struggle. Whatever might have been

the beginning of her interest in Julien, it soon dominated that pride

which had reigned unchallenged in her heart since she had begun to know

herself. This cold and haughty soul was swept away for the first time

by a sentiment of passion, but if this passion dominated her pride,

it still kept faithfully to the habits of that pride. Two months of

struggles and new sensations had transformed, so to speak her whole

moral life.

Mathilde thought she was in sight of happiness. This vista,

irresistible as it is for those who combine a superior intellect with

a courageous soul, had to struggle for a long time against her self

respect and all her vulgar duties. One day she went into her mother's

room at seven o'clock in the morning and asked permission to take

refuge in Villequier. The marquise did not even deign to answer her,

and advised her to go back to bed. This was the last effort of vulgar

prudence and respect for tradition.

The fear of doing wrong and of offending those ideas which the

Caylus's, the de Luz's, the Croisenois' held for sacred had little

power over her soul. She considered such creatures incapable of

understanding her. She would have consulted them, if it had been a

matter of buying a carriage or an estate. Her real fear was that Julien

was displeased with her.

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

She abhorred lack of character; that was her one objection to the

handsome young men who surrounded her. The more they made elegant

fun of everything which deviated from the prevailing mode, or which

conformed to it but indifferently, the lower they fell in her eyes.

They were brave and that was all. "And after all in what way were they

brave?" she said to herself. "In duels, but the duel is nothing more

than a formality. The whole thing is mapped out beforehand, even the

correct thing to say when you fall. Stretched on the turf, and with

your hand on your heart, you must vouchsafe a generous forgiveness to

the adversary, and a few words for a fair lady, who is often imaginary,

or if she does exist, will go to a ball on the day of your death for

fear of arousing suspicion."

"One braves danger at the head of a squadron brilliant with steel, but

how about that danger which is solitary, strange, unforeseen and really

ugly."

"Alas," said Mathilde to herself, "it was at the court of Henri III.

that men who were great both by character and by birth were to be

found! Yes! If Julien had served at Jarnac or Moncontour, I should no

longer doubt. In those days of strength and vigour Frenchmen were not

dolls. The day of the battle was almost the one which presented the

fewest problems."

Their life was not imprisoned, like an Egyptian mummy in a covering

which was common to all, and always the same. "Yes," she added, "there

was more real courage in going home alone at eleven o'clock in the

evening when one came out of the Hôtel de Soissons where Catherine

de' Medici lived than there is nowadays in running over to Algiers.

A man's life was then a series of hazards. Nowadays civilisation has

banished hazard. There are no more surprises. If anything new appears

in any idea there are not sufficient epigrams to immortalise it, but if

anything new appears in actual life, our panic reaches the lowest depth

of cowardice. Whatever folly panic makes us commit is excused. What a

degenerate and boring age! What would Boniface de la Mole have said

if, lifting his cut-off head out of the tomb, he had seen seventeen of

his descendants allow themselves to be caught like sheep in 1793 in

order to be guillotined two days afterwards! Death was certain, but it

would have been bad form to have defended themselves and to have killed

at least one or two Jacobins. Yes! in the heroic days of France, in

the age of Boniface de la Mole, Julien would have been the chief of

a squadron, while my brother would have been the young priest with

decorous manners, with wisdom in his eyes and reason on his lips." Some

months previously Mathilde had given up all hope of meeting any being

who was a little different from the common pattern. She had found some

happiness in allowing herself to write to some young society men. This

rash procedure, which was so unbecoming and so imprudent in a young

girl, might have disgraced her in the eyes of M. de Croisenois, the

Duke de Chaulnes, his father, and the whole Hôtel de Chaulnes, who on

seeing the projected marriage broken off would have wanted to know the

reason. At that time Mathilde had been unable to sleep on those days

when she had written one of her letters. But those letters were only

answers. But now she ventured to declare her own love. She wrote first

(what a terrible word!) to a man of the lowest social grade.

This circumstance rendered her eternal disgrace quite inevitable in the

event of detection. Who of the women who visited her mother would have

dared to take her part? What official excuse could be evolved which

could successfully cope with the awful contempt of society.

Besides speaking was awful enough, but writing! "There are some

things which are not written!" Napoleon had exclaimed on learning of

the capitulation of Baylen. And it was Julien who had told her that

epigram, as though giving her a lesson that was to come in useful

subsequently.

But all this was comparatively unimportant, Mathilde's anguish had

other causes. Forgetting the terrible effect it would produce on

society, and the ineffable blot on her scutcheon that would follow such

an outrage on her own caste, Mathilde was going to write to a person

of a very different character to the Croisenois', the de Luz's, the

Caylus's.

She would have been frightened at the depth and mystery in Julien's

character, even if she had merely entered into a conventional

acquaintance with him. And she was going to make him her lover, perhaps

her master.

"What will his pretensions not be, if he is ever in a position to do

everything with me? Well! I shall say, like Medea: _Au milieu de tant

de périls il me reste Moi_." She believed that Julien had no respect

for nobility of blood. What was more, he probably did not love her.

In these last moments of awful doubt her feminine pride suggested to

her certain ideas. "Everything is bound to be extraordinary in the life

of a girl like me," exclaimed Mathilde impatiently. The pride, which

had been drilled into her since her cradle, began to struggle with her

virtue. It was at this moment that Julien's departure precipitated

everything.

(Such characters are luckily very rare.)

Very late in the evening, Julien was malicious enough to have a very

heavy trunk taken down to the porter's lodge. He called the valet, who

was courting mademoiselle de la Mole's chambermaid, to move it. "This

manœuvre cannot result in anything," he said to himself, "but if it

does succeed, she will think that I have gone." Very tickled by this

humorous thought, he fell asleep. Mathilde did not sleep a wink.

Julien left the hôtel very early the next morning without being seen,

but he came back before eight o'clock.

He had scarcely entered the library before M. de la Mole appeared

on the threshold. He handed her his answer. He thought that it was

his duty to speak to her, it was certainly perfectly feasible, but

mademoiselle de la Mole would not listen to him and disappeared. Julien

was delighted. He did not know what to say.

"If all this is not a put up job with comte Norbert, it is clear that

it is my cold looks which have kindled the strange love which this

aristocratic girl chooses to entertain for me. I should be really

too much of a fool if I ever allowed myself to take a fancy to that

big blonde doll." This train of reasoning left him colder and more

calculating than he had ever been.

"In the battle for which we are preparing," he added, "pride of birth

will be like a high hill which constitutes a military position between

her and me. That must be the field of the manœuvres. I made a great

mistake in staying in Paris; this postponing of my departure cheapens

and exposes me, if all this is simply a trick. What danger was there in

leaving? If they were making fun of me, I was making fun of them. If

her interest for me was in any way real, I was making that interest a

hundred times more intense."

Mademoiselle de la Mole's letter had given Julien's vanity so keen a

pleasure, that wreathed as he was in smiles at his good fortune he had

forgotten to think seriously about the propriety of leaving.

It was one of the fatal elements of his character to be extremely

sensitive to his own weaknesses. He was extremely upset by this one,

and had almost forgotten the incredible victory which had preceded this

slight check, when about nine o'clock mademoiselle de la Mole appeared

on the threshold of the library, flung him a letter and ran away.

"So this is going to be the romance by letters," he said as he picked

it up. "The enemy makes a false move; I will reply by coldness and

virtue."

He was asked with a poignancy which merely increased his inner gaiety

to give a definite answer. He indulged in the pleasure of mystifying

those persons who he thought wanted to make fun of him for two pages,

and it was out of humour again that he announced towards the end of his

answer his definite departure on the following morning.

"The garden will be a useful place to hand her the letter," he thought

after he had finished it, and he went there. He looked at the window of

mademoiselle de la Mole's room.

It was on the first storey, next to her mother's apartment, but there

was a large ground floor.

This latter was so high that, as Julien walked under the avenue

of pines with his letter in his hands, he could not be seen from

mademoiselle de la Mole's window. The dome formed by the well clipped

pines intercepted the view. "What!" said Julien to himself angrily,

"another indiscretion! If they have really begun making fun of me,

showing myself with a letter is playing into my enemy's hands."

Norbert's room was exactly above his sister's and if Julien came out

from under the dome formed by the clipped branches of the pine, the

comte and his friend could follow all his movements.

Mademoiselle de la Mole appeared behind her window; he half showed his

letter; she lowered her head, then Julien ran up to his own room and

met accidentally on the main staircase the fair Mathilde, who seized

the letter with complete self-possession and smiling eyes.

"What passion there was in the eyes of that poor madame de Rênal," said

Julien to himself, "when she ventured to receive a letter from me,

even after six months of intimate relationship! I don't think she ever

looked at me with smiling eyes in her whole life."

He did not formulate so precisely the rest of his answer; was he

perhaps ashamed of the triviality of the motive which were actuating

him?

"But how different too," he went on to think, "are her elegant morning

dress and her distinguished appearance! A man of taste on seeing

mademoiselle de la Mole thirty yards off would infer the position which

she occupies in society. That is what can be called a specific merit."

In spite of all this humorousness, Julien was not yet quite honest with

himself; madame de Rênal had no marquis de Croisenois to sacrifice to

him. His only rival was that grotesque sub-prefect, M. Charcot, who

assumed the name of Maugiron, because there were no Maugirons left in

France.

At five o'clock Julien received a third letter. It was thrown to him

from the library door. Mademoiselle de la Mole ran away again. "What

a mania for writing," he said to himself with a laugh, "when one can

talk so easily. The enemy wants my letters, that is clear, and many of

them." He did not hurry to open this one. "More elegant phrases," he

thought; but he paled as he read it. There were only eight lines.

"I need to speak to you; I must speak to you this evening. Be in

the garden at the moment when one o'clock is striking. Take the big

gardeners' ladder near the well; place it against my window, and climb

up to my room. It is moonlight; never mind."