The Red and the Black/Chapter 41
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-Héredité, 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 Heloise, 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 Medicis 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 fend 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."