by Stendhal
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 hôtel. 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 Rênal’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 Rênal 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 p
eriod 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, inasmuch 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 maréchale.
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 Smollett 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 by his 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 forever.”
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 Verrières’ 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 Hyères, ‘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 whenever 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 Besançon, 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 régime, 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?”