The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century

by Stendhal

  M. de Frilair seemed astonished at this name. Mathilde showed him several letters from the Ministry of War addressed to M. Julien Sorel de la Vernaye.

  'As you see, sir, my father had assumed responsibility for his fortune. I married him in secret, and my father wished him to be a high-ranking officer before announcing a marriage that is somewhat unusual for a La Mole.'

  Mathilde noticed that M. de Frilair's expression of kindness and gentle gaiety faded rapidly as he made important discoveries. A look of cunning mingled with profound insincerity came over his face.

  The priest was having doubts; he slowly reread the official documents.

  What advantage can I derive from these strange confessions? he wondered. Here I am all of a sudden on intimate terms with a friend of the famous Maréchale de Fervaques, the allpowerful niece of Monsignor the Bishop of -----, * through whose offices one becomes a bishop in France. What I saw as belonging to the remote future is unexpectedly in the offing. This opportunity may bring me to the culmination of all my desires.

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  At first Mathilde was alarmed by the sudden change that had come over the features of this all-powerful man with whom she found herself alone in a remote apartment. But what of it! she said to herself in a little while, wouldn't the worst outcome have been to make no impression at all on the cold egoism of a priest sated with power and pleasure?

  Dazzled by the rapid route to a bishopric that unexpectedly opened up before his eyes, and astonished at Mathilde's talents, M. de Frilair dropped his guard for a moment. Mlle de La Mole almost had him at her feet, ambitious and keen to the point of trembling with nerves.

  Everything is becoming clear, she thought, nothing will be impossible here for a friend of Mme de Fervaques. In spite of a feeling of jealousy that was still very painful, she summoned up the courage to explain that Julien was a close friend of the maréchale's, and encountered Monsignor the Bishop of ----almost daily at her house.

  'If a list of thirty-six jurors were to be drawn by lot four or five times in succession from among the worthy inhabitants of this département,' said the vicar-general with a steely glint of ambition in his eyes and deliberate emphasis on each word, 'I should consider myself most unlucky if in each list I didn't get nine or ten friends, and the most intelligent of the bunch too. I should almost always have a majority, indeed more than that, even for a verdict of guilty; so you see, mademoiselle, it will be an easy matter for me to obtain an acquittal...'

  The priest broke off suddenly, as if amazed at the sound of his own voice; he was confiding things that are never said to the profane.

  But it was his turn to strike Mathilde speechless when he informed her that what most astonished and intrigued Besançon society about Julien's strange adventure was that he had once inspired a great passion in Mme de Rênal, and had shared it for a considerable while. M. de Frilair easily perceived the deep turmoil produced by his story.

  I've got my revenge! he thought. Here at last is a way of manipulating this most determined little lady; I was in fear and trembling of failure. Her aristocratic and headstrong manner made him doubly sensitive to the rare beauty he

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  saw almost pleading before him. He resumed all his selfcontrol and did not hesitate to turn the knife in her wounded heart.

  'I shouldn't be surprised in the end', he told her casually, 'if we were to learn that jealousy caused M. Sorel to fire two shots at this woman he once loved so much. She is far from lacking in charms, and she had recently been seeing a great deal of a certain Abbé Marquinot from Dijon, a sort of Jansenist-devoid of morals, as they all are.'

  M. de Frilair took voluptuous pleasure in inflicting slow torture on the heart of this pretty girl whose weak point he had unexpectedly discovered.

  'Why', he said, fixing his burning eyes on Mathilde, 'should M. Sorel have chosen the church, if not because precisely at that moment his rival was celebrating Mass there? Everyone credits your fortunate protégé with limitless intelligence, exceeded only by his caution. What could have been simpler than to have hidden in M. de Rênal's gardens which he knows so well? There, with virtual certainty of not being seen, caught or suspected, he could have killed the woman he was jealous of.'

  This seemingly sound argument finally succeeded in causing Mathilde to lose all control of herself. Her haughty spirit, imbued through and through, nevertheless, with all the arid caution which is taken in high society as a faithful reflection of the human heart, was constitutionally incapable of understanding in a flash the pleasure that comes from scorning all caution--an experience that can be so intense for a passionate spirit. Among the upper classes of Parisian society where Mathilde had grown up, passion only very rarely manages to divest itself of caution, and people choose the fifth floor when they decide to fling themselves out of the window.

  The Abbé de Frilair was at last sure of his hold over Mathilde. He intimated to her (lying no doubt) that he could answer fully for the public ministry in charge of bringing the prosecution against Julien.

  After the thirty-six jurors had been drawn by lot for the assizes, he would make a direct, personal approach to at least thirty of their number.

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  If Mathilde had not seemed so attractive to M. de Frilair, he would not have spoken so openly to her until the fifth or sixth interview.

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  CHAPTER 39

  Politicking

  March 3 1, 1676. He that endeavoured to kil his sister in our house, had before kild a man, & it had cost his father 500 escus to get him off, by their secret distribution gaining the favour of the Counsellors.

  LOCKE, Travels in France *

  ON leaving the bishop's palace, Mathilde did not hesitate to send a missive to Mme de Fervaques; fear of compromising herself did not hold her back for a single second. She entreated her rival to procure a letter for M. de Frilair, written from start to finish in the hand of Monsignor the Bishop of -----. She went so far as to beseech her to come with all speed in person to Besançon. This was a heroic action on the part of a jealous and proud spirit.

  Acting on Fouqué's advice, she had been prudent enough not to tell Julien about the steps she was taking. Her presence was disturbing enough for him as it was. More of a gentleman now that death was near than he had been in his lifetime, he felt remorse not only about M. de La Mole, but also for Mathilde.

  How dreadful! he said to himself, when I'm with her I find my mind wandering at times, and even getting bored. She's sacrificing her reputation for me, and this is how I reward her! So does this mean I'm a swine? The question would scarcely have bothered him when he was ambitious; at that time the only thing he regarded as shameful was not achieving success.

  His moral unease in Mathilde's company was all the more pronounced as he inspired in her at that moment the most outlandish and demented passion. She talked of nothing else but the strange sacrifices she wanted to make to save him.

  Uplifted by a sentiment she was proud of, and one which quite got the better of her arrogance, she would have liked to let no moment of her life go by without filling it with some

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  remarkable act. The strangest projects entailing great risk to herself filled her long conversations with Julien. The polers, well paid, let her reign supreme in the prison. Mathilde's ideas did not stop at the sacrifice of her own reputation; she didn't care if she proclaimed her condition to the whole of society. Flinging herself on her knees in front of the king's galloping horses to beg for Julien's reprieve, attracting the monarch's attention at the repeated risk of being trampled to death, was one of the lesser flights of fancy of this exalted and fearless imagination. With the aid of her friends in the king's service, she was certain to be allowed into the reserved areas in the park at Saint-Cloud.

  Julien felt himself most unworthy of such devotion; he was in all honesty tired of heroism. It would have taken tenderness of a straightforward, innocent, almost timid variety to have touched him, whereas on the contrar
y the notion of an audience--of other people--was indispensable to Mathilde's haughty spirit.

  In the midst of all her anguish, of all her fears for the life of this lover whom she had no desire to survive, she felt a secret need to amaze the public by the excess of her love and the sublime character of her exploits.

  Julien was getting irritated at not finding himself moved by all this heroism. Just think what would have happened if he had found out about all the crazy ideas with which Mathilde assailed the mind of the devoted but eminently reasonable and essentially limited Fouqué!

  Fouqué did not quite know what to criticize in Mathilde's devotion; for he would himself have sacrificed the whole of his fortune and exposed his life to the greatest of risks to save Julien. He was flabbergasted at the amount of gold that Mathilde flung away. For the first few days, the sums she spent like this made a deep impression on Fouqué, who regarded money with all the veneration of a provincial.

  In the end he found out that Mlle de La Mole's plans frequently altered, and to his great relief he hit upon an epithet to denigrate this character he found so tiring: she was changeable. From this qualification to the term unsound--the greatest anathema in the provinces--there is but one small step.

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  It's most odd, Julien said to himself one day as Mathilde was leaving his prison, that such an ardent passion, and one directed at me, should leave me so cold! And I adored her two months ago! I had indeed read that the approach of death detaches you from everything; but it's awful to feel ungrateful and not to be able to do anything about it. Does it mean I'm an egoist?' He subjected himself to the most humiliating reproaches on this score.

  Ambition had died in his heart, and another passion had risen from its ashes there; he called it remorse at having murdered Mme de Rênal.

  In actual fact, he was desperately in love with her. He felt an extraordinary happiness when, left entirely alone with no fear of interruption, he could give himself over completely to the memory of the happy days he had spent long ago in Verrières or at Vergy. The most minor incidents from those times that had flown by too fast had an irresistible freshness and charm for him. He never thought of his successes in Paris; they made him feel uncomfortable.

  The drift of Julien's emotions, which grew rapidly more marked, was half-perceived by Mathilde in her jealousy. She could see very clearly that she had to fight his love of solitude. Sometimes in a voice of terror she uttered the name of Mme de Rênal. She saw Julien tremble. Her passion from then on knew no limits or measure.

  If he dies, I die after him, she said to herself with all possible sincerity. What would the Paris salons say on seeing a girl of my rank carry to such a point her adoration of a lover destined to die? To find sentiments like this, you have to go back to the heroic age; it was passions of this sort that made hearts throb in the century of Charles IX and Henri III.

  In the midst of the most intense moments of rapture, when she was clasping Julien's head to her heart: Oh how dreadful! she said to herself in horror, can this lovely head be destined to roll! Well, she added, burning with a heroism not devoid of happiness, these lips of mine, now pressed to these pretty locks, will be stone cold less than twenty-four hours afterwards.

  The memories of these moments of heroism and appalling

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  ecstasy held her in an invincible grip. The idea of suicide, so absorbing in itself, and hitherto so remote from this haughty spirit, infiltrated it and soon reigned with absolute power. No, the blood of my ancestors hasn't come down to me lukewarm, Mathilde said to herself with pride.

  'I have a favour to ask you,' her lover said to her one day: 'put your child out to nurse in Verrières, and Mme de Rênal will keep an eye on the nurse.'

  'What you are saying there is very hard...' And Mathilde turned pale.

  'So it is, and I apologize a thousand times, my love,' exclaimed Julien coming out of his daydream and clasping her in his arms.

  After drying her tears, he returned to his idea, but more skilfully. He had steered the conversation into melancholy philosophizing. He was talking of a future that was shortly to be cut off for him.

  'One has to admit, my dearest, that passions are an accident of life, but this accident only occurs with superior spirits... The death of my son would really be a blessing for your family's pride, this is what subordinates will sense. Negligence will be the lot of this child of misfortune and shame... I hope that at a time I don't wish to specify, but have the courage to perceive, you will obey my last requests: you will marry the Marquis de Croisenois.'

  'What! Dishonoured!'

  'Dishonour won't get a hold on a name like yours. You'll be a widow, a madman's widow, that's all. I'll go further: not having money as its motive, my crime will not entail any dishonour. Perhaps by that time some enlightened legislator will have wrested from the prejudices of his contemporaries the suppression of the death penalty. * Some friendly voice will then say, to quote an example: "Look, Mlle de La Mole's first husband was a madman, but not a wicked man or a criminal. It was absurd to cut off his head..." And then my memory won't be infamous; at least not after a while. Your position in society, your fortune and, allow me to say so, your genius, will enable M. de Croisenois, once he's your husband, to play a role he couldn't aspire to on his own. He only possesses birth

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  and bravery, and these qualities by themselves, which produced a man of accomplishment in 1729, are an anachronism a century later, and only give rise to pretensions. You need other things besides to become a leader of the youth of France.

  'You will put your resolute and enterprising character to the service of the political party in which you choose to launch your husband. You will be able to succeed the Chevreuses and the Longuevilles of the Fronde * ... But by then, my dear, the celestial fire which blazes within you at this moment will have died down a bit.

  'Allow me to say this to you,' he added after a good many other preparatory remarks, 'in fifteen years' time you will regard the love you once felt for me as an excusable moment of folly, but as folly nevertheless...'

  All of a sudden he broke off and became wistful. He found himself once again contemplating a thought that was utterly shocking in regard to Mathilde: in fifteen years' time Mme de Rênal will adore my son, and you will have forgotten him.

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  CHAPTER 40

  Tranquility

  It is because I was mad then that today I am wise. O philosopher, you who take an instantaneous view of things, how short are your perspectives! Your eye is not designed to follow the underground workings of passions.

  W. GOETHE

  THIS conversation was interrupted by a formal interrogation followed by a meeting with the counsel for the defence.

  These moments were the only wholly disagreeable ones in a life free of care and filled with tender dreaming.

  'It's a case of murder, and murder with premeditation,' Julien said to both the magistrate and the barrister. 'I'm extremely sorry about it, gentlemen,' he added with a smile, 'but this reduces your task to a very small matter.'

  When it comes down to it, Julien reflected when he had managed to get rid of these two individuals, I must be brave, and braver it seems than these two men. They regard this duel, with its fatal outcome, as the ultimate in misfortune, as the king of terrors, * and I shall only think seriously about it on the day itself.

  It's because I've experienced a greater misfortune, Julien continued his inner philosophizing. I suffered in an altogether different way during my first journey to Strasburg, when I thought Mathilde had abandoned me... And to think that I so passionately desired the perfect intimacy that leaves me so cold today!... In fact I'm happier alone than when this beautiful girl shares my solitude...

  The barrister, a man guided by rules and formalities, thought he was mad, and believed along with the public that jealousy was what had made him take up a pistol. One day he risked hinting to Julien that this allegation, true or false, would be a
n excellent basis for the defence. But the accused instantly became passionate and incisive again.

  'If you value your life, sir,' exclaimed Julien, beside himself,

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  'remember never to utter this abominable lie again.' The cautious barrister feared for a moment that he was going to be murdered.

  He was preparing his speech, because the day of decision was rapidly approaching. Besançon and the whole département talked of nothing but this cause célèbre. Julien was unaware of this detail; he had requested that no one should ever mention this sort of thing to him.

  That day, when Fouqué and Mathilde had wanted to inform him of certain public rumours of a kind, so they thought, to give rise to hope, Julien had cut them short at the very first mention.

  'Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way. What do I care about other people? My ties with other people are going to be abruptly severed. For pity's sake, don't talk to me about any of them' any more: it's quite enough to see the judge and the barrister.'

  In fact, he said to himself, it seems that my destiny is to die dreaming. A nonentity like myself, who is sure to be forgotten in a fortnight's time, would be a real sucker, you have to admit, to get all theatrical...

  It's strange all the same that I've only understood the art of enjoying life since seeing the end so close at hand.