by Stendhal
Julien was sharply interrupted by M. de la Mole’s old valet. “The marquis wants to see you at once, dressed or not dressed.” The valet added in a low voice, as he walked by Julien’s side, “He is beside himself: look out!”
LXIII. The Hell of Weakness
A clumsy lapidary, in cutting this diamond, deprived it of some of its most brilliant facets. In the middle ages, nay, even under Richelieu, the Frenchman had force of will.—Mirabeau
Julien found the marquis furious. For perhaps the first time in his life this nobleman showed bad form. He loaded Julien with all the insults that came to his lips. Our hero was astonished, and his patience was tried, but his gratitude remained unshaken.
“The poor man now sees the annihilation, in a single minute, of all the fine plans which he has long cherished in his heart. But I owe it to him to answer. My silence tends to increase his anger.” The part of Tartuffe supplied the answer.
“I am not an angel.... I served you well; you paid me generously.. . . I was grateful, but I am twenty-two. . . . Only you and that charming person understood my thoughts in this household.”
“Monster,” exclaimed the marquis. “Charming! Charming, to be sure! The day when you found her charming you ought to have fled.”
“I tried to. It was then that I asked permission to leave for Languedoc.”
Tired of stampeding about and overcome by his grief, the marquis threw himself into an arm-chair. Julien heard him whispering to himself, “No, no, he is not a wicked man.”
“No, I am not, towards you,” exclaimed Julien, falling on his knees. But he felt extremely ashamed of this manifestation, and very quickly got up again.
The marquis was really transported. When he saw this movement, he began again to load him with abominable insults, which were worthy of the driver of a fiacre. The novelty of these oaths perhaps acted as a distraction.
“What! is my daughter to go by the name of Madame Sorel? What! is my daughter not to be a duchess?” Each time that these two ideas presented themselves in all their clearness, M. de la Mole was a prey to torture, and lost all power over the movements of his mind.
Julien was afraid of being beaten.
In his lucid intervals, when he was beginning to get accustomed to his unhappiness, the marquis addressed to Julien reproaches which were reasonable enough. “You should have fled, sir,” he said to him. “Your duty was to flee. You are the lowest of men.”
Julien approached the table and wrote:
“I have found my life unbearable for a long time; I am putting an end to it. I request monsieur the marquis to accept my apologies (together with the expression of my infinite gratitude) for any embarrassment that may be occasioned by my death in his hôtel.”
“Kindly run your eye over this paper, M. the marquis,” said Julien. “Kill me, or have me killed by your valet. It is one o’clock in the morning. I will go and walk in the garden in the direction of the wall at the bottom.”
“Go to the devil,” cried the marquis, as he went away.
“I understand,” thought Julien. “He would not be sorry if I were to spare his valet the trouble of killing me. . . .
“Let him kill me, if he likes; it is a satisfaction which I offer him. . . . But, by heaven, I love life. I owe it to my son.”
This idea, which had not previously presented itself with so much definiteness to his imagination, completely engrossed him during his walk after the first few minutes which he had spent thinking about his danger.
This novel interest turned him into a prudent man. “I need advice as to how to behave towards this infuriated man. . . . He is devoid of reason; he is capable of everything. Fouqué is too far away; besides, he would not understand the emotions of a heart like the marquis’s.”
“Count Altamira . . . am I certain of eternal silence? My request for advice must not be a fresh step which will raise still further complications. Alas! I have no one left but the gloomy Abbé Pirard. His mind is crabbed by Jansenism. . . . A damned Jesuit would know the world, and would be more in my line. M. Pirard is capable of beating me at the very mention of my crime.”
The genius of Tartuffe came to Julien’s help. “Well, I will go and confess to him.” This was his final resolution after having walked about in the garden for two good hours. He no longer thought about being surprised by a gun shot. He was feeling sleepy.
Very early the next day, Julien was several leagues away from Paris and knocked at the door of the severe Jansenist. He found to his great astonishment that he was not unduly surprised at his confidence.
“I ought perhaps to reproach myself,” said the Abbé, who seemed more anxious than irritated. “I thought I guessed that love. My affection for you, my unhappy boy, prevented me from warning the father.”
“What will he do?” said Julien keenly.
At that moment he loved the Abbé, and would have found a scene between them very painful.
“I see three alternatives,” continued Julien.
“M. de la Mole can have me put to death,” and he mentioned the suicide letter which he had left with the Marquis; (2) He can get Count Norbert to challenge me to a duel, and shoot at me point blank.”
“You would accept?” said the Abbé furiously as he got up.
“You do not let me finish. I should certainly never fire upon my benefactor’s son. (3) He can send me away. If he says go to Edinburgh or New York, I will obey him. They can then conceal Mademoiselle de la Mole’s condition, but I will never allow them to suppress my son.”
“Have no doubt about it, that will be the first thought of that depraved man.”
At Paris, Mathilde was in despair. She had seen her father about seven o’clock. He had shown her Julien’s letter. She feared that he might have considered it noble to put an end to his life; “and without my permission?” she said to herself with a pain due solely to her anger.
“If he dies I shall die,” she said to her father. “It will be you who will be the cause of his death.... Perhaps you will rejoice at it but I swear by his shades that I shall at once go into mourning, and shall publicly appear as Madame the widow Sorel, I shall send out my invitations, you can count on it . . . You will find me neither pusillanimous nor cowardly.”
Her love went to the point of madness. M. de la Mole was flabbergasted in his turn.
He began to regard what had happened with a certain amount of logic. Mathilde did not appear at breakfast. The marquis felt an immense weight off his mind, and was particularly flattered when he noticed that she had said nothing to her mother.
Julien was dismounting from his horse. Mathilde had him called and threw herself into his arms almost beneath the very eyes of her chambermaid. Julien was not very appreciative of this transport. He had come away from his long consultation with the Abbé Pirard in a very diplomatic and calculating mood. The calculation of possibilities had killed his imagination. Mathilde told him, with tears in her eyes, that she had read his suicide letter.
“My father may change his mind; do me the favour of leaving for Villequier this very minute. Mount your horse again, and leave the hôtel before they get up from table.”
When Julien’s coldness and astonishment showed no sign of abatement, she burst into tears.
“Let me manage our affairs,” she exclaimed ecstatically, as she clasped him in her arms. “You know, dear, it is not of my own free will that I separate from you. Write under cover to my maid. Address it in a strange hand-writing, I will write volumes to you. Adieu, flee.”
This last word wounded Julien, but he none the less obeyed. “It will be fatal,” he thought, “if, in their most gracious moments these aristocrats manage to shock me.”
Mathilde firmly opposed all her father’s prudent plans. She would not open negotiations on any other basis except this. She was to be Madame Sorel, and was either to live with her husband in poverty in Switzerland, or with her father in Paris. She rejected absolutely the suggestion of a secret accouchement. “In that case I sh
ould begin to be confronted with a prospect of calumny and dishonour. I shall go traveling with my husband two months after the marriage, and it will be easy to pretend that my son was born at a proper time.”
This firmness though at first received with violent fits of anger, eventually made the marquis hesitate.
“Here,” he said to his daughter in a moment of emotion, “is a gift of ten thousand francs a year. Send it to your Julien, and let him quickly make it impossible for me to retract it.”
In order to obey Mathilde, whose imperious temper he well knew, Julien had travelled forty useless leagues; he was superintending the accounts of the farmers at Villequier. This act of benevolence on the part of the marquis occasioned his return. He went and asked asylum of the Abbé Pirard, who had become Mathilde’s most useful ally during his absence. Every time that he was questioned by the marquis, he would prove to him that any other course except public marriage would be a crime in the eyes of God.
“And happily,” added the Abbé, “worldly wisdom is in this instance in agreement with religion. Could one, in view of Mlle. de la Mole’s passionate character, rely for a minute on her keeping any secret which she did not herself wish to preserve? If one does not reconcile oneself to the frankness of a public marriage, society will concern itself much longer with this strange mésalliance. Everything must be said all at once without either the appearance or the reality of the slightest mystery.”
“It is true,” said the marquis pensively.
Two or three friends of M. de la Mole were of the same opinion as the Abbé Pirard. The great obstacle in their view was Mathilde’s decided character. But in spite of all these fine arguments the marquis’s soul could not reconcile itself to giving up all hopes of a coronet for his daughter.
He ransacked his memory and his imagination for all the variations of knavery and duplicity which had been feasible in his youth. Yielding to necessity and having fear of the law seemed absurd and humiliating for a man in his position. He was paying dearly now for the luxury of those enchanting dreams concerning the future of his cherished daughter, in which he had indulged for the last ten years.
“Who could have anticipated it?” he said to himself. “A girl of so proud a character, of so lofty a disposition, who is even prouder than I am of the name she bears? A girl whose hand has already been asked for by all the cream of the nobility of France.
“We must give up all faith in prudence. This age is made to confound everything. We are marching towards chaos.”
LXIV. A Man of Intellect
The prefect said to himself as he rode along the highway on horseback, “Why should I not be a minister, a president of the council, a duke? This is how I should make war . . . By these means I should have all the reformers put in irons.”—The Globe
No argument will succeed in destroying the paramount influence of ten years of agreeable dreaming. The marquis thought it illogical to be angry, but could not bring himself to forgive. “If only this Julien could die by accident,” he sometimes said to himself. It was in this way that his depressed imagination found a certain relief in running after the most absurd chimæras. They paralysed the influence of the wise arguments of the Abbé Pirard. A month went by in this way without negotiations advancing one single stage.
The marquis had in this family matter, just as he had in politics, brilliant ideas over which he would be enthusiastic for two or three days. And then a line of tactics would fail to please him because it was based on sound arguments, while arguments only found favour in his eyes in so far as they were based on his favourite plan. He would work for three days with all the ardour and enthusiasm of a poet on bringing matters to a certain stage; on the following day he would not give it a thought.
Julien was at first disconcerted by the slowness of the marquis; but, after some weeks, he began to surmise that M. de la Mole had no definite plan with regard to this matter. Madame de la Mole and the whole household believed that Julien was travelling in the provinces in connection with the administration of the estates; he was in hiding in the parsonage of the Abbé Pirard and saw Mathilde every day; every morning she would spend an hour with her father, but they would sometimes go for weeks on end without talking of the matter which engrossed all their thoughts.
“I don’t want to know where the man is,” said the marquis to her one day. “Send him this letter.” Mathilde read:
“The Languedoc estates bring in 20,600 francs. I give 10,600 francs to my daughter, and 10,000 francs to M. Julien Sorel. It is understood that I give the actual estates. Tell the notary to draw up two separate deeds of gift, and to bring them to me to-morrow; after this there are to be no more relations between us. Ah, Monsieur, could I have expected all this? The Marquis de la Mole.”
“I thank you very much,” said Mathilde gaily. “We will go and settle in the Château d’Aiguillon, between Agen and Marmande. The country is said to be as beautiful as Italy.”
This gift was an extreme surprise to Julien. He was no longer the cold, severe man whom we have hitherto known. His thoughts were engrossed in advance by his son’s destiny. This unexpected fortune, substantial as it was for a man as poor as himself, made him ambitious. He pictured a time when both his wife and himself would have an income of 36,600 francs. As for Mathilde, all her emotions were concentrated on her adoration for her husband, for that was the name by which her pride insisted on calling Julien. Her one great ambition was to secure the recognition of her marriage. She passed her time in exaggerating to herself the consummate prudence which she had manifested in linking her fate to that of a superior man. The idea of personal merit became a positive craze with her.
Julien’s almost continuous absence, coupled with the complications of business matters and the little time available in which to talk love, completed the good effect produced by the wise tactics which Julien had previously discovered.
Mathilde finished by losing patience at seeing so little of the man whom she had come really to love.
In a moment of irritation she wrote to her father and commenced her letter like Othello:
“My very choice is sufficient proof that I have preferred Julien to all the advantages which society offered to the daughter of the Marquis de la Mole. Such pleasures, based as they are on prestige and petty vanity mean nothing to me. It is now nearly six weeks since I have lived separated from my husband. That is sufficient to manifest my respect for yourself. Before next Thursday I shall leave the paternal house. Your acts of kindness have enriched us. No one knows my secret except the venerable Abbé Pirard. I shall go to him: he will marry us, and an hour after the ceremony we shall be on the road to Languedoc, and we will never appear again in Paris except by your instructions. But what cuts me to the quick is that all this will provide the subject matter for piquant anecdotes against me and against yourself. May not the epigrams of a foolish public compel our excellent Norbert to pick a quarrel with Julien? Under such circumstances I know I should have no control over him. We should discover in his soul the mark of the rebel plebeian. Oh father, I entreat you on my knees, come and be present at my marriage in M. Pirard’s church next Thursday. It will blunt the sting of malignant scandal and will guarantee the life’s happiness of your only daughter, and of that of my husband, etc., etc.”
This letter threw the marquis’s soul into a strange embarrassment. He must at last take a definite line. All his little habits: all his vulgar friends had lost their influence.
In these strange circumstances the great lines of his character, which had been formed by the events of his youth, reassumed all their original force. The misfortunes of the emigration had made him into an imaginative man. After having enjoyed for two years an immense fortune and all the distinctions of the court, 1790 had flung him into the awful miseries of the emigration. This hard schooling had changed the character of a spirit of twenty-two. In essence, he was not so much dominated by his present riches as encamped in their midst. But that very imagination which had preserved his
soul from the taint of avarice, had made him a victim of a mad passion for seeing his daughter decorated by a fine title.
During the six weeks which had just elapsed, the marquis had felt at times impelled by a caprice for making Julien rich. He considered poverty mean, humiliating for himself, M. de la Mole, and impossible in his daughter’s husband; he was ready to lavish money. On the next day his imagination would go off on another tack, and he would think that Julien would read between the lines of this financial generosity, change his name, exile himself to America, and write to Mathilde that he was dead for her. M. de la Mole imagined this letter written, and went so far as to follow its effect on his daughter’s character.
The day when he was awakened from these highly youthful dreams by Mathilde’s actual letter, after he had been thinking for a long time of killing Julien or securing his disappearance, he was dreaming of building up a brilliant position for him. He would make him take the name of one of his estates, and why should he not make him inherit a peerage? His father-in-law, M. the Duke de Chaulnes, had, since the death of his own son in Spain, frequently spoken to him about his desire to transmit his title to Norbert. . . .
“One cannot help owning that Julien has a singular aptitude for affairs, has boldness, and is possibly even brilliant,” said the marquis to himself . . . “but I detect at the root of his character a certain element which alarms me. He produces the same impression upon everyone, consequently there must be something real in it,” and the more difficult this reality was to seize hold of, the more it alarmed the imaginative mind of the old marquis.
“My daughter expressed the same point very neatly the other day (in a suppressed letter).
“Julien has not joined any salon or any côterie. He has nothing to support himself against me, and has absolutely no resource if I abandon him. Now is that ignorance of the actual state of society? I have said to him two or three times, the only real and profitable candidature is the candidature of the salons.
