The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  What was easier than to meet in the library, and there make all arrangements?

  “I can appear in all parts of the hôtel,” added Julien, “without rousing suspicion almost, in fact, in Madame de la Mole’s own room.” It was absolutely necessary to go through it in order to reach her daughter’s room. If Mathilde thought it preferable for him always to come by a ladder, then he would expose himself to that paltry danger with a heart intoxicated with joy.

  As she listened to him speaking, Mathilde was shocked by this air of triumph. “So he is my master,” she said to herself; she was already a prey to remorse. Her reason was horrified at the signal folly which she had just committed. If she had had the power she would have annihilated both herself and Julien. When for a few moments she managed by sheer will-power to silence her pangs of remorse, she was rendered very unhappy by her timidity and wounded shame. She had quite failed to foresee the awful plight in which she now found herself.

  “I must speak to him, however,” she said at last. “That is the proper thing to do. One does talk to one’s lover.” And then with a view of accomplishing a duty, and with a tenderness which was manifested rather in the words which she employed than in the inflection of her voice, she recounted various resolutions which she had made concerning him during the last few days.

  She had decided that if he should dare to come to her room by the help of the gardener’s ladder according to his instructions, she would be entirely his. But never were such tender passages spoken in a more polite and frigid tone. Up to the present this assignation had been icy. It was enough to make one hate the name of love. What a lesson in morality for a young and imprudent girl! Is it worth while to ruin one’s future for moments such as this?

  After long fits of hesitation which a superficial observer might have mistaken for the result of the most emphatic hate (so great is the difficulty which a woman’s self-respect finds in yielding even to so firm a will as hers) Mathilde became eventually a charming mistress.

  In point of fact, these ecstasies were a little artificial. Passionate love was still more the model which they imitated than a real actuality.

  Mademoiselle de la Mole thought she was fulfilling a duty towards herself and towards her lover. “The poor boy,” she said to herself, “has shewn a consummate bravery. He deserves to be happy or it is really I who will be showing a lack of character.” But she would have been glad to have redeemed the cruel necessity in which she found herself even at the price of an eternity of unhappiness.

  In spite of the awful violence she was doing to herself, she was completely mistress of her words.

  No regret and no reproach spoiled that night which Julien found extraordinary rather than happy. Great heavens! what a difference to his last twenty-four hours’ stay in Verrières. These fine Paris manners manage to spoil everything, even love, he said to himself, quite unjustly.

  He abandoned himself to these reflections as he stood upright in one of the great mahogany cupboards into which he had been put at the sign of the first sounds of movement in the neighbouring apartment, which was Madame de la Mole’s. Mathilde followed her mother to mass, the servants soon left the apartment and Julien easily escaped before they came back to finish their work.

  He mounted a horse and tried to find the most solitary spots in one of the forests near Paris. He was more astonished than happy. The happiness which filled his soul from time to time resembled that of a young sub-lieutenant who, as the result of some surprising feat, has just been made a full-fledged colonel by the commander-in-chief; he felt himself lifted up to an immense height. Everything which was above him the day before was now on a level with him or even below him. Little by little Julien’s happiness increased in proportion as he got further away from Paris.

  If there was no tenderness in his soul, the reason was that, however strange it may appear to say so, Mathilde had in everything she had done, simply accomplished a duty. The only thing she had not foreseen in all the events of that night, was the shame and unhappiness which she had experienced instead of that absolute felicity which is found in novels.

  “Can I have made a mistake, and not be in love with him?” she said to herself.

  XLVII. An Old Sword

  I now mean to be serious; it is time

  Since laughter now-a-days is deemed too serious.

  A jest at vice by virtue’s called a crime.

  Don Juan, c. xiii.

  She did not appear at dinner. She came for a minute into the salon in the evening, but did not look at Julien. He considered this behaviour strange, “but,” he thought, “I do not know their usages. She will give me some good reason for all this.” None the less he was a prey to the most extreme curiosity; he studied the expression of Mathilde’s features; he was bound to own to himself that she looked cold and malicious. It was evidently not the same woman who on the preceding night had had, or pretended to have, transports of happiness which were too extravagant to be genuine.

  The day after, and the subsequent day, she showed the same coldness; she did not look at him, she did not notice his existence. Julien was devoured by the keenest anxiety and was a thousand leagues removed from that feeling of triumph which had been his only emotion on the first day. “Can it be by chance,” he said to himself, “a return to virtue?” But this was a very bourgeois word to apply to the haughty Mathilde.

  “Placed in an ordinary position in life she would disbelieve in religion,” thought Julien, “she only likes it in so far as it is very useful to the interests of her class.”

  But perhaps she may, as a mere matter of delicacy, be keenly reproaching herself for the mistake which she has committed. Julien believed that he was her first lover.

  “But,” he said to himself at other moments, “I must admit that there is no trace of naiveté, simplicity, or tenderness in her own demeanour; I have never seen her more haughty; can she despise me? It would be worthy of her to reproach herself simply because of my low birth, for what she has done for me.”

  While Julien, full of those preconceived ideas which he had found in books and in his memories of Verrières, was chasing the phantom of a tender mistress, who from the minute when she has made her lover happy no longer thinks of her own existence, Mathilde’s vanity was infuriated against him.

  As for the last two months she had no longer been bored, she was not frightened of boredom; consequently, without being able to have the slightest suspicion of it, Julien had lost his greatest advantage.

  “I have given myself a master,” said Mademoiselle de la Mole to herself, a prey to the blackest sorrow. “Luckily he is honour itself, but if I offend his vanity, he will revenge himself by making known the nature of our relations.” Mathilde had never had a lover, and though passing through a stage of life which affords some tender illusions even to the coldest souls, she fell a prey to the most bitter reflections.

  “He has an immense dominion over me since his reign is one of terror, and he is capable, if I provoke him, of punishing me with an awful penalty.” This idea alone was enough to induce Mademoiselle de la Mole to insult him. Courage was the primary quality in her character. The only thing which could give her any thrill and cure her of a fundamental and chronically recurring ennui was the idea that she was staking her entire existence on a single throw.

  As Mademoiselle de la Mole obstinately refused to look at him, Julien on the third day, in spite of her evident objection, followed her into the billiard-room after dinner.

  “Well, sir, you think you have acquired some very strong rights over me?” she said to him with scarcely controlled anger, “since you venture to speak to me, in spite of my very clearly manifested wish? Do you know that no one in the world has had such effrontery?”

  The dialogue of these two lovers was incomparably humourous. Without suspecting it, they were animated by mutual sentiments of the most vivid hate. As neither the one nor the other had a meekly patient character, while they were both disciples of good form, they soon came to
informing each other quite clearly that they would break for ever.

  “I swear eternal secrecy to you,” said Julien. “I should like to add that I would never address a single word to you, were it not that a marked change might perhaps jeopardise your reputation.” He saluted respectfully and left.

  He accomplished easily enough what he believed to be a duty; he was very far from thinking himself much in love with Mademoiselle de la Mole. He had certainly not loved her three days before, when he had been hidden in the big mahogany cupboard. But the moment that he found himself estranged from her forever, his mood underwent a complete and rapid change.

  His memory tortured him by going over the least details in that night, which had, as a matter of fact, left him so cold. In the very night that followed this announcement of a final rupture, Julien almost went mad at being obliged to own to himself that he loved Mademoiselle de la Mole.

  This discovery was followed by awful struggles: all his emotions were overwhelmed.

  Two days later, instead of being haughty towards M. de Croisenois, he could have almost burst out into tears and embraced him.

  His habituation to unhappiness gave him a gleam of common sense. He decided to leave for Languedoc, packed his trunk and went to the post.

  He felt he would faint, when on arriving at the office of the mails, he was told that by a singular chance there was a place in the Toulouse mail. He booked it and returned to the Hôtel de la Mole to announce his departure to the marquis.

  M. de la Mole had gone out. More dead than alive, Julien went into the library to wait for him. What was his emotion when he found Mademoiselle de la Mole there?

  As she saw him come, she assumed a malicious expression which it was impossible to mistake.

  In his unhappiness and surprise Julien lost his head and was weak enough to say to her in a tone of the most heartfelt tenderness, “So you love me no more.”

  “I am horrified at having given myself to the first man who came along,” said Mathilde crying with rage against herself.

  “The first man who came along,” cried Julien, and he made for an old mediaeval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.

  His grief—which he thought was at its maximum at the moment when he had spoken to Mademoiselle de la Mole—had been rendered a hundred times more intense by the tears of shame which he saw her shedding.

  He would have been the happiest of men if he had been able to kill her.

  When he was on the point of drawing the sword with some difficulty from its ancient scabbard, Mathilde, rendered happy by so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him; her tears were dry.

  The thought of his benefactor—the Marquis de la Mole—presented itself vividly to Julien. “Shall I kill his daughter?” he said to himself, “how horrible.” He made a movement to throw down the sword. “She will certainly,” he thought, “burst out laughing at the sight of such a melodramatic pose;” that idea was responsible for his regaining all his self-possession. He looked curiously at the blade of the old sword as though he had been looking for some spot of rust, then put it back in the scabbard and replaced it with the utmost tranquillity on the gilt bronze nail from which it hung.

  The whole manœuvre, which towards the end was very slow, lasted quite a minute; Mademoiselle de la Mole looked at him in astonishment. “So I have been on the verge of being killed by my lover,” she said to herself.

  This idea transported her into the palmiest days of the age of Charles IX. and of Henri III.

  She stood motionless before Julien, who had just replaced the sword; she looked at him with eyes whose hatred had disappeared. It must be owned that she was very fascinating at this moment, certainly no woman looked less like a Parisian doll (this expression symbolised Julien’s great objection to the women of this city).

  “I shall relapse into some weakness for him,” thought Mathilde; “it is quite likely that he will think himself my lord and master after a relapse like that, at the very moment that I have been talking to him so firmly.” She ran away.

  “By heaven, she is pretty,” said Julien as he watched her run, “and that’s the creature who threw herself into my arms with so much passion scarcely a week ago . . . and to think that those moments will never come back. And that it’s my fault, to think of my being lacking in appreciation at the very moment when I was doing something so extraordinarily interesting! I must own that I was born with a very dull and unfortunate character.”

  The marquis appeared; Julien hastened to announce his departure.

  “Where to?” said M. de la Mole.

  “For Languedoc.”

  “No, if you please, you are reserved for higher destinies. If you leave it will be for the North.... In military phraseology I actually confine you in the hôtel. You will promise me to be never more than two or three hours away. I may have need of you at any moment.”

  Julien bowed and retired without a word, leaving the marquis in a state of great astonishment. He was incapable of speaking. He shut himself up in his room. He was there free to exaggerate to himself all the awfulness of his fate.

  “So,” he thought, “I cannot even get away. God knows how many days the marquis will keep me in Paris. Great God, what will become of me, and not a friend whom I can consult? The Abbé Pirard will never let me finish my first sentence, while the Comte Altamira will propose enlisting me in some conspiracy. And yet I am mad; I feel it, I am mad. Who will be able to guide me, what will become of me?”

  XLVIII. Cruel Moments

  And she confesses it to me! She goes into even the smallest details! Her beautiful eyes fixed on mine, and describes the love which she felt for another.—Schiller

  The delighted Mademoiselle de la Mole thought of nothing but the happiness of having been nearly killed. She went so far as to say to herself, “he is worthy of being my master since he was on the point of killing me. How many handsome young society men would have to be melted together before they were capable of so passionate a transport?”

  “I must admit that he was very handsome at the time when he climbed up on the chair to replace the sword in the same picturesque position in which the decorator hung it! After all it was not so foolish of me to love him.”

  If at that moment some honourable means of reconciliation had presented itself, she would have embraced it with pleasure. Julien, locked in his room, was a prey to the most violent despair. He thought in his madness of throwing himself at her feet. If, instead of hiding himself in an out of the way place, he had wandered about the garden of the hôtel so as to keep within reach of any opportunity, he would perhaps have changed in a single moment his awful unhappiness into the keenest happiness.

  But the tact for whose lack we are now reproaching him would have been incompatible with that sublime seizure of the sword, which at the present time rendered him so handsome in the eyes of Mademoiselle de la Mole. This whim in Julien’s favour lasted the whole day; Mathilde conjured up a charming image of the short moments during which she had loved him: she regretted them.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said to herself, “my passion for this poor boy can, from his point of view, only have lasted from one hour after midnight when I saw him arrive by his ladder with all his pistols in his coat pocket, till eight o’clock in the morning. It was a quarter of an hour after that as I listened to mass at Sainte-Valère that I began to think that he might very well try to terrify me into obedience.”

  After dinner Mademoiselle de la Mole, so far from avoiding Julien, spoke to him and made him promise to follow her into the garden. He obeyed. It was a new experience.

  Without suspecting it Mathilde was yielding to the love which she was now feeling for him again. She found an extreme pleasure in walking by his side, and she looked curiously at those hands which had seized the sword to kill her that very morning.

  After such an action, after all that had taken place, some of the former conversation was out of the question.

  Mathilde gradually b
egan to talk confidentially to him about the state of her heart. She found a singular pleasure in this kind of conversation; she even went so far as to describe to him the fleeting moments of enthusiasm which she had experienced for M. de Croisenois, for M. de Caylus——

  “What! M. de Caylus as well!” exclaimed Julien, and all the jealousy of a discarded lover burst out in those words. Mathilde thought as much, but did not feel at all insulted.

  She continued torturing Julien by describing her former sentiments with the most picturesque detail and the accent of the most intimate truth. He saw that she was portraying what she had in her mind’s eye. He had the pain of noticing that as she spoke she made new discoveries in her own heart.

  The unhappiness of jealousy could not be carried further.

  It is cruel enough to suspect that a rival is loved, but there is no doubt that to hear the woman one adores confess in detail the love which rivals inspire, is the utmost limit of anguish.

  Oh, how great a punishment was there now for those impulses of pride which had induced Julien to place himself as superior to the Caylus and the Croisenois! How deeply did he feel his own unhappiness as he exaggerated to himself their most petty advantages. With what hearty good faith he despised himself.

  Mathilde struck him as adorable. All words are weak to express his excessive admiration. As he walked beside her he looked surreptitiously at her hands, her arms, her queenly bearing. He was so completely overcome by love and unhappiness as to be on the point of falling at her feet and crying “pity.”

  “Yes, and that person who is so beautiful, who is so superior to everything and who loved me once, will doubtless soon love M. de Caylus.”