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

by Stendhal

  He began to stop interpreting as emotional coldness the kind of beauty that stems from a noble bearing. He had long conversations with Mlle de La Mole, who sometimes went out into the garden with him after dinner to stroll up and down

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  outside the open windows of the drawing-room. She told him one day that she was reading D'Aubigné's * History, and Brantôme. Strange reading matter, thought Julien; and the marquise doesn't allow her to read Walter Scott's novels!

  One day, her eyes shining with the pleasure which denotes sincerity, she told him admiringly about something she had read in L'Etoile's * memoirs concerning a young woman who had lived in Henri III's reign: * finding her husband unfaithful, she had stabbed him to death.

  Julien's self-esteem was flattered. A person who was surrounded by so much respect, and who, according to the academician, ruled the entire household, deigned to speak to him in a way which could almost be taken for friendship.

  I was wrong, Julien soon thought; it isn't familiarity, I'm only the confidant in a tragedy, it's her need to talk. They take me for learned in this family. I'll go off and read Brantôme, D'Aubigné and L'Etoile. I'll be able to challenge some of the anecdotes Mlle de La Mole talks to me about. I want to get out of this role of passive confidant.

  Little by little his conversations with this young lady of such imposing and yet such relaxed bearing became more interesting. He forgot his dreary role as a rebellious plebeian. He found her learned and even sound in her ideas. Her opinions in the garden were very different from the ones she professed in the drawing-room. With him she sometimes had moments of enthusiasm and frankness which were the absolute opposite of her usual manner, so haughty and so cold.

  'The Wars of the League * were France's heroic age,' she said to him one day, her eyes glittering with inspiration and enthusiasm. 'At that time everyone fought to get the particular thing he wanted, to make his party triumph, and not just to win a boring cross like in the time of your emperor. You must agree that there was less egoism and petty-mindedness. I love that century.'

  'And Boniface de La Mole was its hero,' he said.

  'At any rate he was loved as it must perhaps be sweet to be loved. What woman alive nowadays would not be revolted to touch the head of her decapitated lover?'

  Mlle de La Mole summoned her daughter. If hypocrisy is to

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  be of service, it must remain hidden; and Julien, as you observe, had half-confessed to Mlle de La Mole his admiration for Napoleon.

  This is the tremendous advantage they have over us, said Julien to himself when he was left alone in the garden. The history of their ancestors lifts them above vulgar sentiments, and they aren't always obliged to be thinking about their livelihood! How wretched! he added bitterly, I'm not worthy to reflect on these higher matters. My life is nothing but a series of hypocritical postures, because I haven't got an income of a thousand francs to buy my bread and butter.

  'What are you dreaming of now, sir?' Mathilde asked him, running back outside.

  Julien was tired of despising himself. His pride made him tell her openly what he was thinking. He flushed deeply when speaking of his poverty to a person with so much wealth. He tried to make it clear from his dignified tone that he wasn't asking for anything. He had never struck Mathilde as more attractive; she detected in him a sensitivity and openness which he often lacked.

  Less than a month later, Julien was strolling pensively in the garden of the Hôtel de La Mole; but his face no longer showed the hardness and the philosophical arrogance stamped on it by the constant feeling of his own inferiority. He had just gone back to the door of the drawing-room with Mlle de La Mole, who maintained she had hurt her foot while dashing about with her brother.

  She leaned on my arm in a rather special way! Julien said to himself. Am I a fop, or could it be true that she rather fancies me? She listens to me with such a sweet expression, even when I'm confessing all the sufferings of my pride to her! When you think how haughty she is with everyone! They'd be pretty astonished in the drawing-room to see her with a look like that on her face. It's quite certain she doesn't wear that sweet, kind expression for anyone else.

  Julien tried not to let himself overestimate the significance of this strange friendship. He compared it himself to an armed encounter. Every day when they met up again, before resuming the almost intimate tones of the day before, it was as if

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  they asked themselves: shall we be friends or enemies today? Julien had realized that to let this haughty girl insult him even once with impunity would be to lose everything. If I have to quarrel with her, isn't it better for it to happen straight away, in defending the legitimate rights of my pride, rather than in rebuffing the marks of scorn that would soon follow the slightest failure to uphold what I owe to my personal dignity?

  Several times, on days when she was in a bad mood, Mathilde tried to adopt the manner of a great lady with him; she put a rare degree of subtlety into these attempts, but Julien rudely rebuffed them.

  One day he interrupted her brusquely: 'Does Mlle de La Mole have some order to give her father's secretary?' he said to her. 'He is required to listen to her orders and to carry them out with respect; but beyond that, he is not obliged to say a single word to her. He is not paid to communicate his thoughts to her.'

  This kind of behaviour, and the strange suspicions Julien was having, banished the boredom he regularly experienced in that magnificent drawing-room where people were yet afraid of everything, and it was not seemly to joke about anything.

  It'd be funny if she were in love with me! Whether or not she loves me, Julien went on, I have an intimate confidante in a girl of intelligence who has the whole household in fear and trembling before her, so I see, and the Marquis de Croisenois more than anyone else. Such a polite, gentle and brave young man, who has all the advantages of birth and fortune put together, a single one of which would more than gladden my heart! He's madly in love with her, and is due to marry her. How many letters M. de La Mole has had me write to the two solicitors to arrange the contract! And yours truly, who feels just how subordinate he is with pen in hand, finds himself, two hours later in the garden, triumphing over this agreeable young man: for after all, her preference is striking, and very marked. Perhaps, too, she hates in him the future husband. She has pride enough for that. And the kindness she shows to me is earned in my capacity as a subordinate confidant.

  Come off it! Either I'm mad, or she's making advances to me; the more coldly and respectfully I treat her, the more she

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  seeks me out. It could be deliberate policy, a sort of affectation; but I see her eyes light up when I turn up unexpectedly. Do women in Paris have the art of feigning to such a degree? What does it matter to me! Appearances are on my side, so let's enjoy appearances. Goodness, she's beautiful! I do so like her big blue eyes, seen from close up, when they gaze at me as they so often do! What a difference between this spring and last, when I lived in misery, keeping myself going by sheer will-power in the midst of those hundreds of filthy, spiteful hypocrites! I was almost as spiteful as they are.

  On days when he felt mistrustful: This girl is making fun of me, Julien thought. She's in league with her brother to mystify me. But she looks as if she so despises the lack of energy in that brother of hers! 'He's brave, but that's all there is to him,' she says to me. 'He doesn't have a single thought that dares to deviate from what's fashionable, I'm always the one who has to come to his defence.' A girl of nineteen! At that age is it possible to keep to a self-imposed hypocrisy every moment of the day?

  On the other hand, when Mlle de La Mole fixes her big blue eyes on me with that strange look in them, Count Norbert invariably goes away. I find that suspect; shouldn't he be indignant at seeing his sister single out one of their household domestics? For that's how I've heard the Duc de Chaulnes speaking of me. This memory caused anger to wipe out all other feelings. Is it just a fondness this obsessive old duke ha
s for old-fashioned ways of speaking?

  So then, she's pretty! Julien went on with the look of a tiger. I shall have her and then make my exit, and woe betide anyone who disturbs me in my flight!

  This idea became Julien's sole preoccupation; he was no longer able to think of anything else. His days passed by like hours.

  Time and time again, when he was trying to deal with some matter of serious business, his mind would let everything drop, and he would wake up a quarter of an hour later with his heart pounding and his head in turmoil, fixated on this thought: Is she in love with me?

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  CHAPTER II

  The power of a young lady

  I admire her beauty, but I live in fear of her mind

  MÉRIMÉE *

  IF Julien had spent as much time studying what went on in the drawing-room as he devoted to exaggerating Mathilde's beauty, or to working himself into a passion against the innate haughtiness of her family--which she laid aside on his account--he would have understood what constituted her power over her entourage. As soon as anyone displeased Mlle de La Mole, she had a way of punishing the offender with a joke that was so measured, so well chosen, so seemly on the surface, and so appositely delivered, that the wound grew greater every moment, the more you thought about it. It gradually became unbearable to the afflicted self-esteem. As she laid no store by many of the things that were genuinely desired by the rest of the family, she always appeared imperturbable in their eyes. Aristocratic salons are a fine source of quotations once you've stepped outside, but that's all; politeness in itself doesn't impress after the first few days. Julien experienced this--after the first enchantment, the first astonishment. Politeness, he told himself, is only an absence of the anger that would be occasioned by bad manners. Mathilde was often bored, she would perhaps have been bored anywhere. So sharpening an epigram was a distraction and a real pleasure for her.

  It was perhaps in a bid to find some slightly more amusing victims than her immediate family, the academician and the five or six other subordinates who curried favour with them, that she had kindled hopes in the Marquis de Croisenois, the Comte de Caylus and two or three other young men of the greatest distinction. For her, they were nothing more than fresh targets for her epigrams.

  We shall admit with some distress, for we like Mathilde,

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  that she had received letters from several of them, and had on occasion replied. We hasten to add she is a character who constitutes an exception to the mores of this century. Lack of prudence is not generally a reproach to be levelled at pupils of the noble convent of the Sacred Heart.

  One day the Marquis de Croisenois handed back to Mathilde a rather compromising letter she had written him the day before. He was hoping by this mark of the highest prudence to advance his affairs considerably. But imprudence was what. Mathilde relished in her correspondence. She took pleasure in gambling with her fate. She did not speak to him for six weeks afterwards.

  She was amused by these young men's letters; but in her opinion, they were all alike. It was always the deepest of passions, and the most melancholy.

  'They're all the same perfect man, ready to set off for Palestine,' she said to her cousin. 'Can you think of anything more insipid? So these are the letters I shall be getting all my life! Letters like that can only change every twenty years, according to the kind of occupation in fashion. They must have been less colourless at the time of the Empire. Then, an those young men from high society had seen or engaged in actions that really were heroic. The Duc de N-----, my uncle, was at Wagram.' *

  'What wit do you need to strike someone with a sabre? And when this has happened to them, they talk about it so much!' said Mlle de Sainte-Hérédité, Mathilde's cousin.

  'Well! I enjoy these accounts. Being in a real battle, one of Napoleon's battles, where ten thousand soldiers got killed, that proves courage. Exposing yourself to danger elevates the soul and saves it from the boredom which seems to engulf my poor worshippers; and it's catching, this boredom is. Which one of them has it in mind to do something out of the ordinary? They're striving to win my hand, big deal! I'm rich, and my father will see to his son-in-law's advancement. Ah! would that he might find one who was the slightest bit amusing!'

  Mathilde's lively, trenchant and picturesque way of looking at things ruined her style, as you can see. Often one of her expressions was felt to be a blot by her exquisitely polite

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  friends. They would almost have admitted to themselves, if she had been less in fashion, that her speech was just a bit too colourful for feminine delicacy.

  She, for her part, was most unjust towards the good-looking cavaliers who frequent the Bois de Boulogne. She viewed the future not with terror--that would have been a strong sentiment--but with a repugnance rare at her age.

  What more could she wish for? Fortune, noble birth, intelligence, beauty--so they said and so she believed--had all been heaped upon her by the hand of Fate.

  These were the thoughts of the most highly envied heiress of the Faubourg Saint-Germain when she began to take pleasure in going for walks with Julien. She was astonished at his pride; she admired the canniness of this ordinary commoner. He'll work his way up to becoming a bishop like the Abbé Maury, * she said to herself.

  Soon the genuine, unfeigned resistance with which our hero greeted several of her ideas began to preoccupy her; she kept thinking about it; she related to her friend and confidante the finest details of their conversations, and felt that she never managed to convey their full Ravour properly.

  She had a sudden illumination: I'm fortunate enough to be in love, she said to herself one day, in a fit of unbelievable joy. I'm in love, I'm in love, it's obvious! At my age, where else should a young, beautiful and witty girl experience strong emotion, if not in love? It's no use, I'll never feel love for Croisenois, Caylus and tutti quanti. They're perfect, maybe too perfect; anyway, they bore me.

  She ran through in her mind all the descriptions of passion she had read in Manon Lescaut, * La Nouvelle Héloise, the Letters from a Portuguese Nun, etc. etc. There was no question, of course, of anything other than a grand passion: a passing fancy was unworthy of a girl of her age and her birth. She only bestowed the name of love on that heroic sentiment encountered in France in the days of Henri III and Bassompierre. * That kind of love did not yield basely before obstacles; quite the opposite, it caused great deeds to be done. What a misfortune for me that there isn't a real Court like Catherine de Medici's or Louis XIII's! * I feel ready for the boldest and

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  the greatest ventures. What would I not do with a valiant king like Louis XIII sighing at my feet! I'd lead him into the Vendée, * as the Baron de Tolly is always saying, and from there he'd recapture his kingdom; and then no more Charter * ... and Julien would help me. What's he lacking? A name and a fortune. He'd make a name for himself, and he'd acquire a fortune.

  Croisenois lacks nothing; and he'll never be more than a half-Ultra, half-liberal duke all his life, an indecisive creature always keeping away from extremes, and consequently in second place everywhere.

  What great action isn't an extreme at the moment when it is undertaken? Only when it is accomplished does it seems possible to ordinary mortals. Yes, it's love with all its miracles that's going to reign in my heart; I can feel it from the fire burning within me. Heaven owed me this favour. It won't have heaped all these advantages on a single individual in vain. My happiness will be worthy of me. Each one of my days will cease to be a cold replica of the one before. There's already proof of greatness and daring in being bold enough to love a man so far removed from me on the social scale. We shall see: will he continue to be worthy of me? At the first sign of weakness I see in him, I shall abandon him. A girl of my birth, with the chivalrous character too that people are good enough to credit me with (this was one of her father's expressions), must not behave like a silly fool.

  Isn't that precisely the role I'd be playing if I lov
ed the Marquis de Croisenois? I'd have a new edition of my cousins' happiness, which I despise so utterly. I know in advance everything the poor marquis would say to me, and everything I'd have to reply to him. What sort of a love is it that makes you yawn? Might as well go in for religion. I'd have a celebration to mark the signing of the contract, just like my youngest cousin had, with the grandparents getting all sentimental--that is, if they weren't miffed because of a last-minute condition that had been slipped into the contract the day before by the other party's solicitor.

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  CHAPTER 12

  Might he be a Danton?

  The need to be on edge: such was the character of the fair Marguerite de Valois, my aunt who soon married the King of Navarre, whom we now see reigning in France under the name of Henri IV. Her need to gamble was the key to this amiable princess's character; whence her quarrels and her reconciliations, starting with her brothers from the age of sixteen. Now what does a young lady have to gamble with? Her most precious possession: her reputation, the basis of esteem for the rest of her life.

  Memoirs of the DUC D'ANGOULÉME *

  natural son of Charles IX

  JULIEN and I have no signed contract between us, no solicitor, everything is heroic, everything will be born of chance. Apart from noble birth, which he lacks, this is Marguerite de Valois's love for young La Mole, the most distinguished man of his time. Is it my fault if the young men at Court are such staunch followers of the conventional, and turn pale at the mere idea of any adventure in the least bit out of the ordinary? A little trip to Greece or Africa * is the height of daring for them, and even then they only know how to march with their troops. As soon as they find themselves alone they're afraid, not of Bedouin spears but of ridicule, and this fear drives them mad.