Chương Chương 41 · A YOUNG GIRL'S DOMINION

. A YOUNG GIRL'S DOMINION

I admire her beauty but I fear her intellect.--_Mérimée_.

If Julien had employed the time which he spent in exaggerating

Matilde's beauty or in working himself up into a rage against that

family haughtiness which she was forgetting for his sake in examining

what was going on in the salon, he would have understood the secret of

her dominion over all that surrounded her.

When anyone displeased mademoiselle de La Mole she managed to punish

the offender by a jest which was so guarded, so well chosen, so polite

and so neatly timed, that the more the victim thought about it, the

sorer grew the wound. She gradually became positively terrible to

wounded vanity. As she attached no value to many things which the

rest of her family very seriously wanted, she always struck them as

self-possessed. The salons of the aristocracy are nice enough to brag

about when you leave them, but that is all; mere politeness alone only

counts for something in its own right during the first few days. Julien

experienced this after the first fascination and the first astonishment

had passed off. "Politeness," he said to himself "is nothing but the

absence of that bad temper which would be occasioned by bad manners."

Mathilde was frequently bored; perhaps she would have been bored

anywhere. She then found a real distraction and real pleasure in

sharpening an epigram.

It was perhaps in order to have more amusing victims than her great

relations, the academician and the five or six other men of inferior

class who paid her court, that she had given encouragement to the

marquis de Croisenois, the comte Caylus and two or three other young

men of the highest rank. They simply represented new subjects for

epigrams.

We will admit with reluctance, for we are fond of Mathilde, that she

had received many letters from several of them and had sometimes

answered them. We hasten to add that this person constitutes an

exception to the manners of the century. Lack of prudence is not

generally the fault with which the pupils of the noble convent of the

Sacred Heart can be reproached.

One day the marquis de Croisenois returned to Mathilde a fairly

compromising letter which she had written the previous night. He

thought that he was thereby advancing his cause a great deal by taking

this highly prudent step. But the very imprudence of her correspondence

was the very element in it Mathilde liked. Her pleasure was to stake

her fate. She did not speak to him again for six weeks.

She amused herself with the letters of these young men, but in her view

they were all like each other. It was invariably a case of the most

profound, the most melancholy, passion.

"They all represent the same perfect man, ready to leave for

Palestine," she exclaimed to her cousin. "Can you conceive of anything

more insipid? So these are the letters I am going to receive all my

life! There can only be a change every twenty years according to the

kind of vogue which happens to be fashionable. They must have had more

colour in them in the days of the Empire. In those days all these young

society men had seen or accomplished feats which really had an element

of greatness. The Duke of N---- my uncle was at Wagram."

"What brains do you need to deal a sabre blow? And when they have had

the luck to do that they talk of it so often!" said mademoiselle de

Sainte-Hérédité, Mathilde's cousin.

"Well, those tales give me pleasure. Being in a real battle, a battle

of Napoleon, where six thousand soldiers were killed, why, that's proof

of courage. Exposing one's self to danger elevates the soul and saves

it from the boredom in which my poor admirers seem to be sunk; and that

boredom is contagious. Which of them ever thought of doing anything

extraordinary? They are trying to win my hand, a pretty business to

be sure! I am rich and my father will procure advancement for his

son-in-law. Well! I hope he'll manage to find someone who is a little

bit amusing."

Mathilde's keen, sharp and picturesque view of life spoilt her language

as one sees. An expression of hers would often constitute a blemish

in the eyes of her polished friends. If she had been less fashionable

they would almost have owned that her manner of speaking was, from the

standpoint of feminine delicacy, to some extent unduly coloured.

She, on her side, was very unjust towards the handsome cavaliers who

fill the Bois de Boulogne. She envisaged the future not with terror,

that would have been a vivid emotion, but with a disgust which was very

rare at her age.

What could she desire? Fortune, good birth, wit, beauty, according to

what the world said, and according to what she believed, all these

things had been lavished upon her by the hands of chance.

So this was the state of mind of the most envied heiress of the

faubourg Saint-Germain when she began to find pleasure in walking with

Julien. She was astonished at his pride; she admired the ability of the

little bourgeois. "He will manage to get made a bishop like the abbé

Mouray," she said to herself.

Soon the sincere and unaffected opposition with which our hero received

several of her ideas filled her mind; she continued to think about

it, she told her friend the slightest details of the conversation,

but thought that she would never succeed in fully rendering all their

meaning.

An idea suddenly flashed across her; "I have the happiness of loving,"

she said to herself one day with an incredible ecstasy of joy. "I am in

love, I am in love, it is clear! Where can a young, witty and beautiful

girl of my own age find sensations if not in love? It is no good. I

shall never feel any love for Croisenois, Caylus, and _tutti quanti_.

They are unimpeachable, perhaps too unimpeachable; any way they bore

me."

She rehearsed in her mind all the descriptions of passion which she

had read in _Manon Lescaut_, the _Nouvelle Héloise_, the _Letters of

a Portuguese Nun_, etc., etc. It was only a question of course of the

grand passion; light love was unworthy of a girl of her age and birth.

She vouchsafed the name of love to that heroic sentiment which was met

with in France in the time of Henri III. and Bassompierre. That love

did not basely yield to obstacles, but, far from it, inspired great

deeds. "How unfortunate for me that there is not a real court like that

of Catherine de' Medici or of Louis XIII. I feel equal to the boldest

and greatest actions. What would I not make of a king who was a man of

spirit like Louis XIII. if he were sighing at my feet! I would take

him to the Vendée, as the Baron de Tolly is so fond of saying, and

from that base he would re-conquer his kingdom; then no more about a

charter--and Julien would help me. What does he lack? name and fortune.

He will make a name, he will win a fortune.

"Croisenois lacks nothing, and he will never be anything else all his

life but a duke who is half 'ultra' and half Liberal, an undecided

being who never goes to extremes and consequently always plays second

fiddle.

"What great action is not an extreme at the moment when it is

undertaken? It is only after accomplishment that it seems possible to

commonplace individuals. Yes, it is love with all its miracles which

is going to reign over my heart; I feel as much from the fire which is

thrilling me. Heaven owed me this boon. It will not then have lavished

in vain all its bounties on one single person. My happiness will be

worthy of me. Each day will no longer be the cold replica of the day

before. There is grandeur and audacity in the very fact of daring to

love a man, placed so far beneath me by his social position. Let us see

what happens, will he continue to deserve me? I will abandon him at the

first sign of weakness which I detect. A girl of my birth and of that

mediæval temperament which they are good enough to ascribe to me (she

was quoting from her father) must not behave like a fool.

"But should I not be behaving like a fool if I were to love the marquis

de Croisenois? I should simply have a new edition over again of that

happiness enjoyed by my girl cousins which I so utterly despise. I

already know everything the poor marquis would say to me and every

answer I should make. What's the good of a love which makes one

yawn? One might as well be in a nunnery. I shall have a celebration

of the signing of a contract just like my younger cousin when the

grandparents all break down, provided of course that they are not

annoyed by some condition introduced into the contract at the eleventh

hour by the notary on the other side."