The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  “It is clear they want to ruin me, or at the least make fun of me. First they wanted to ruin me by my own letters; they happen to be discreet; well, they want some act which is clearer than daylight. These handsome little gentlemen think I am too silly or too conceited. The devil! To think of climbing like this up a ladder to a storey twenty-five feet high in the finest moonlight. They would have time to see me, even from the neighbouring houses. I shall cut a pretty figure to be sure on my ladder!” Julien went up to his room again and began to pack his trunk, whistling. He had decided to leave and not even to answer.

  But this wise resolution did not give him peace of mind. “If by chance,” he suddenly said to himself after he had closed his trunk, “Mathilde is in good faith, why then I cut the figure of an arrant coward in her eyes. I have no birth myself, so I need great qualities attested straight away by speaking actions—money down—no charitable credit.”

  He spent a quarter-of-an-hour in reflecting. “What is the good of denying it?” he said at last. “She will think me a coward. I shall lose not only the most brilliant person in high society, as they all said at M. the Duke de Retz’s ball, but also the heavenly pleasure of seeing the Marquis de Croisenois, the son of a duke, who will be one day a duke himself, sacrificed to me. A charming young man who has all the qualities I lack. A happy wit, birth, fortune......

  “This regret will haunt me all my life, not on her account, ‘there are so many mistresses! . . . but there is only one honour!’ says old Don Diego. And here am I clearly and palpably shrinking from the first danger that presents itself; for the duel with M. de Beauvoisis was simply a joke. This is quite different. A servant may fire at me point blank, but that is the least danger; I may be disgraced.

  “This is getting serious, my boy,” he added with a Gascon gaiety and accent. “Honour is at stake. A poor devil flung by chance into as low a grade as I am will never find such an opportunity again. I shall have my conquests, but they will be inferior ones. . . . .”

  He reflected for a long time, he walked up and down hurriedly, and then, from time to time, would suddenly stop. A magnificent marble bust of Cardinal de Richelieu had been placed in his room. It attracted his gaze in spite of himself. This bust seemed to look at him severely as though reproaching him with the lack of that audacity which ought to be so natural to the French character. “Would I have hesitated in your age, great man?”

  “At the worst,” said Julien to himself, “suppose all this is a trap; it is pretty black and pretty compromising for a young girl. They know that I am not the man to hold my tongue. They will therefore have to kill me. That was right enough in 1574 in the days of Boniface de la Mole, but nobody to-day would ever have the pluck. They are not the same men. Mademoiselle de la Mole is the object of so much jealousy. Four hundred salons would ring with her disgrace to-morrow, and how pleased they would all be.

  “The servants gossip among themselves about the favours of which I am the recipient. I know it, I have heard them.....

  “On the other hand, they’re her letters. They may think that I have them on me. They may surprise me in her room and take them from me. I shall have to deal with two, three, or four men. How can I tell? But where are they going to find these men? Where are they to find discreet subordinates in Paris? Justice frightens them. . . . . By God! It may be the Caylus’s, the Croisenois’, the de Luz’s themselves. The idea of the ludicrous figure I should cut in the middle of them at the particular minute may have attracted them. Look out for the fate of Abailard, M. the secretary.

  “Well, by heaven, I’ll mark you. I’ll strike at your faces like Cæsar’s soldiers at Pharsalia. As for the letters, I can put them in a safe place.”

  Julien copied out the two last, hid them in a fine volume of Voltaire in the library and himself took the originals to the post.

  “What folly am I going to rush into?” he said to himself with surprise and terror when he returned. He had been a quarter of an hour without contemplating what he was to do on this coming night.

  “But if I refuse, I am bound to despise myself afterwards. This matter will always occasion me great doubt during my whole life, and to a man like me such doubts are the most poignant unhappiness. Did I not feel like that for Amanda’s lover! I think I would find it easier to forgive myself for a perfectly clear crime; once admitted, I could leave off thinking of it.

  “Why! I shall have been the rival of a man who bears one of the finest names in France, and then out of pure light-heartedness, declared myself his inferior! After all, it is cowardly not to go; these words clinch everything,” exclaimed Julien as he got up ... “besides she is quite pretty.”

  “If this is not a piece of treachery, what a folly is she not committing for my sake. If it’s a piece of mystification, by heaven, gentlemen, it only depends on me to turn the jest into earnest, and that I will do.

  “But supposing they tie my hands together at the moment I enter the room; they may have placed some ingenious machine there.

  “It’s like a duel,” he said to himself with a laugh. “Everyone makes a full parade, says my maitre d’armes, but the good God, who wishes the thing to end, makes one of them forget to parry. Besides, here’s something to answer them with.” He drew his pistols out of his pocket, and although the priming was shining, he renewed it.

  There were still several hours to wait. Julien wrote to Fouqué in order to have something to do. “My friend, do not open the enclosed letter except in the event of an accident, if you hear that something strange has happened to me. In that case, blot out the proper names in the manuscript which I am sending you; make eight copies of it, and send it to the papers of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons, Brussels, etc. Ten days later, have the manuscript printed, send the first copy to M. the Marquis de la Mole, and a fortnight after that, throw the other copies at night into the streets of Verrières.

  Julien made this little memoir in defence of his position as little compromising as possible for Mademoiselle de la Mole. Fouqué was only to open it in the event of an accident. It was put in the form of a story, but in fact it exactly described his situation.

  Julien had just fastened his packet when the dinner bell rang. It made his heart beat. His imagination was distracted by the story which he had just composed, and fell a prey to tragic presentiments. He saw himself seized by servants, trussed, and taken into a cellar with a gag in his mouth. A servant was stationed there, who never let him out of sight, and if the family honour required that the adventure should have a tragic end, it was easy to finish everything with those poisons which leave no trace. They could then say that he had died of an illness and would carry his dead body back into his room.

  Thrilled like a dramatic author by his own story, Julien was really afraid when he entered the dining-room. He looked at all those liveried servants—he studied their faces. “Which ones are chosen for to-night’s expedition?” he said to himself. “The memories of the court of Henri III. are so vivid in this family, and so often recalled, that if they think they have been insulted they will show more resolution than other persons of the same rank.” He looked at Mademoiselle de la Mole in order to read the family plans in her eyes; she was pale and looked quite middle-aged. He thought that she had never looked so great: she was really handsome and imposing; he almost fell in love with her. “Pallida morte futura,” he said to himself (her pallor indicates her great plans). It was in vain that after dinner he made a point of walking for a long time in the garden; mademoiselle did not appear. Speaking to her at that moment would have lifted a great weight off his heart.

  Why not admit it? he was afraid. As he had resolved to act, he was not ashamed to abandon himself to this emotion. “So long as I show the necessary courage at the actual moment,” he said to himself, “what does it matter what I feel at this particular moment?” He went to reconnoiter the situation and find out the weight of the ladder.

  “This is an instrument,” he said to himself with a smile, “which I am fated to us
e both here and at Verrières. What a difference! In those days,” he added with a sigh, “I was not obliged to distrust the person for whom I exposed myself to danger. What a difference also in the danger!”

  “There would have been no dishonour for me if I had been killed in M. de Rênal’s gardens. It would have been easy to have made my death into a mystery. But here all kinds of abominable scandal will be talked in the salons of the Hôtel de Chaulnes, the Hôtel de Caylus, de Retz, etc., everywhere in fact. I shall go down to posterity as a monster.”

  “For two or three years,” he went on with a laugh, making fun of himself; but the idea paralysed him. “And how am I going to manage to get justified? Suppose that Fouqué does print my posthumous pamphlet, it will only be taken for an additional infamy. Why! I get received into a house, and I reward the hospitality which I have received, the kindness with which I have been loaded, by printing a pamphlet about what has happened and attacking the honour of women! Nay! I’d a thousand times rather be duped.”

  The evening was awful.

  XLVI. One O’clock in the Morning

  This garden was very big, it had been planned a few years ago in perfect taste. But the trees were more than a century old. It had a certain rustic atmosphere.—Massinger

  He was going to write a countermanding letter to Fouqué when eleven o’clock struck. He noisily turned the lock of the door of his room as though he had locked himself in. He went with a sleuth-like step to observe what was happening over the house, especially on the fourth storey where the servants slept. There was nothing unusual. One of Madame de la Mole’s chambermaids was giving an entertainment; the servants were taking punch with much gaiety. “Those who laugh like that,” thought Julien, “cannot be participating in the nocturnal expedition; if they were, they would be more serious.”

  Eventually he stationed himself in an obscure corner of the garden. “If their plan is to hide themselves from the servants of the house, they will despatch the persons whom they have told off to surprise me over the garden wall.

  “If M. de Croisenois shows any sense of proportion in this matter, he is bound to find it less compromising for the young person, whom he wishes to make his wife, if he has me surprised before I enter her room.”

  He made a military and extremely detailed reconnaissance. “My honour is at stake,” he thought. “If I tumble into some pitfall it will not be an excuse in my own eyes to say, ‘I never thought of it.’”

  The weather was desperately serene. About eleven o’clock the moon rose; at half-past twelve it completely illuminated the facade of the hôtel looking out upon the garden.

  “She is mad,” Julien said to himself. As one o’clock struck there was still a light in Comte Norbert’s windows. Julien had never been so frightened in his life; he only saw the dangers of the enterprise and had no enthusiasm at all. He went and took the immense ladder, waited five minutes to give her time to tell him not to go, and five minutes after one, placed the ladder against Mathilde’s window. He mounted softly, pistol in hand, astonished at not being attacked. As he approached the window it opened noiselessly.

  “So there you are, Monsieur,” said Mathilde to him with considerable emotion. “I have been following your movements for the last hour.”

  Julien was very much embarrassed. He did not know how to conduct himself. He did not feel at all in love. He thought in his embarrassment that he ought to be venturesome. He tried to kiss Mathilde.

  “For shame,” she said to him, pushing him away.

  Extremely glad at being rebuffed, he hastened to look round him. The moon was so brilliant that the shadows which it made in Mademoiselle de la Mole’s room were black. “It’s quite possible for men to be concealed without my seeing them,” he thought.

  “What have you got in your pocket at the side of your coat?” Mathilde said to him, delighted at finding something to talk about. She was suffering strangely; all those sentiments of reserve and timidity which were so natural to a girl of good birth, had reasserted their dominion and were torturing her.

  “I have all kinds of arms and pistols,” answered Julien, equally glad at having something to say.

  “You must take the ladder away,” said Mathilde.

  “It is very big, and may break the windows of the salon down below or the room on the ground floor.”

  “You must not break the windows,” replied Mathilde, making a vain effort to assume an ordinary conversational tone; “it seems to me you can lower the ladder by tying a cord to the first rung. I have always a supply of cords at hand.”

  “So this is a woman in love,” thought Julien. “She actually dares to say that she is in love. So much self-possession and such shrewdness in taking precautions are sufficient indications that I am not triumphing over M. de Croisenois as I foolishly believed, but that I am simply succeeding him. As a matter of fact, what does it matter to me? Do I love her? I am triumphing over the marquis in so far as he would be very angry at having a successor, and angrier still at that successor being myself. How haughtily he looked at me this evening in the Café Tortoni when he pretended not to recognise me! And how maliciously he bowed to me afterwards, when he could not get out of it.”

  Julien had tied the cord to the last rung of the ladder. He lowered it softly and leant far out of the balcony in order to avoid its touching the window pane. “A fine opportunity to kill me,” he thought, “if anyone is hidden in Mathilde’s room;” but a profound silence continued to reign everywhere.

  The ladder touched the ground. Julien succeeded in laying it on the border of the exotic flowers along side the wall.

  “What will my mother say,” said Mathilde, “when she sees her beautiful plants all crushed? You must throw down the cord,” she added with great self-possession. “If it were noticed going up to the balcony, it would be a difficult circumstance to explain.”

  “And how am I to get away?” said Julien in a jesting tone affecting the Creole accent. (One of the chambermaids of the household had been born in Saint-Domingo.)

  “You? Why you will leave by the door,” said Mathilde, delighted at the idea.

  “Ah! how worthy this man is of all my love,” she thought.

  Julien had just let the cord fall into the garden; Mathilde grasped his arm. He thought he had been seized by an enemy and turned round sharply, drawing a dagger. She had thought that she had heard a window opening. They remained motionless and scarcely breathed. The moonlight lit up everything. The noise was not renewed and there was no more cause for anxiety.

  Then their embarrassment began again; it was great on both sides. Julien assured himself that the door was completely locked; he thought of looking under the bed, but he did not dare; “they might have stationed one or two lackeys there.” Finally he feared that he might reproach himself in the future for this lack of prudence, and did look.

  Mathilde had fallen into all the anguish of the most extreme timidity. She was horrified at her position.

  “What have you done with my letters?” she said at last.

  “What a good opportunity to upset these gentlemen, if they are eavesdropping, and thus avoid the battle,” thought Julien.

  “The first is hid in a big Protestant Bible, which last night’s diligence is taking far away from here.”

  He spoke very distinctly as he went into these details, so as to be heard by any persons who might be concealed in two large mahogany cupboards which he had not dared to inspect.

  “The other two are in the post and are bound for the same destination as the first.”

  “Heavens, why all these precautions?” said Mathilde in alarm.

  “What is the good of my lying?” thought Julien, and he confessed all his suspicions.

  “So that’s the cause for the coldness of your letters, dear,” exclaimed Mathilde in a tone of madness rather than of tenderness.

  Julien did not notice that nuance. The endearment made him lose his head, or at any rate his suspicions vanished. He dared to clasp in his
arms that beautiful girl who inspired him with such respect. He was only partially rebuffed. He fell back on his memory as he had once at Besançon with Armanda Binet, and recited by heart several of the finest phrases out of the Nouvelle Heloise.

  “You have the heart of a man,” was the answer she made without listening too attentively to his phrases; “I wanted to test your courage, I confess it. Your first suspicions and your resolutions show you even more intrepid, dear, than I had believed.”

  Mathilde had to make an effort to call him “dear,” and was evidently paying more attention to this strange method of speech than to the substance of what she was saying. Being called “dear” without any tenderness in the tone afforded no pleasure to Julien; he was astonished at not being happy, and eventually fell back on his reasoning in order to be so. He saw that he was respected by this proud young girl who never gave undeserved praise; by means of this reasoning he managed to enjoy the happiness of satisfied vanity.

  It was not, it was true, that soulful pleasure which he had sometimes found with Madame de Rênal. There was no element of tenderness in the feelings of these first few minutes. It was the keen happiness of a gratified ambition, and Julien was, above all, ambitious. He talked again of the people whom he had suspected and of the precautions which he had devised. As he spoke, he thought of the best means of exploiting his victory.

  Mathilde was still very embarrassed and seemed paralysed by the steps which she had taken. She appeared delighted to find a topic of conversation. They talked of how they were to see each other again. Julien extracted a delicious joy from the consciousness of the intelligence and the courage, of which he again proved himself possessed during this discussion. They had to reckon with extremely sharp people; the little Tanbeau was certainly a spy, but Mathilde and himself as well had their share of cleverness.