On seeing him appear, she assumed an air of malevolence which it was impossible for him to misinterpret,
Carried away by his misery, dazed by surprise, Julien was weak enough to say to her, in the tenderest of tones and one that sprang from the heart: ‘Then, you no longer love me?’
‘I am horrified at having given myself to the first comer,’ said Mathilde, weeping with rage at herself.
‘To the first comer!’ cried Julien, and he snatched up an old mediaeval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.
His grief, which he had believed to be intense at the moment of his speaking to Mademoiselle de La Mole, had now been increased an hundredfold by the tears of shame which he saw her shed. He would have been the happiest of men had it been possible to kill her.
Just as he had drawn the sword, with some difficulty, from its antiquated scabbard, Mathilde, delighted by so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him; her tears had ceased to flow.
The thought of the Marquis de La Mole, his benefactor, arose vividly in Julien’s mind. ‘I should be killing his daughter!’ he said to himself; ‘how horrible!’ He made as though to fling away the sword. ‘Certainly,’ he thought, ‘she will now burst out laughing at the sight of this melodramatic gesture’: thanks to this consideration, he entirely regained his self-possession. He examined the blade of the old sword with curiosity, and as though he were looking for a spot of rust, then replaced it in its scabbard, and with the utmost calm hung it up on the nail of gilded bronze from which he had taken it.
This series of actions, very deliberate towards the end, occupied fully a minute; Mademoiselle de La Mole gazed at him in astonishment. ‘So I have been within an inch of being killed by my lover!’ she said to herself.
This thought carried her back to the bravest days of the age of Charles IX and Henri III.
She stood motionless before Julien who had now replaced the sword, she gazed at him with eyes in which there was no more hatred. It must be admitted that she was very attractive at that moment, certainly no woman had ever borne less resemblance to a Parisian doll (this label expressed Julien’s chief objection to the women of that city).
‘I am going to fall back into a fondness for him,’ thought Mathilde; ‘and then at once he would suppose himself to be my lord and master, after a relapse, and at the very moment when I have just spoken to him so firmly.’ She fled.
‘My God! How beautiful she is!’ said Julien, as he watched her run from the room: ‘that is the creature who flung herself into my arms with such frenzy not a week ago . . . And those moments will never come again! And it is my fault! And, at the moment of so extraordinary an action, and one that concerned me so closely, I was not conscious of it! . . . I must admit that I was born with a very dull and unhappy nature.’
The Marquis appeared; Julien made haste to inform him of his departure.
‘For where?’ said M. de La Mole.
‘For Languedoc.’
‘No, if you please, you are reserved for a higher destiny; if you go anywhere, it will be to the North . . . Indeed, in military parlance, I confine you to your quarters. You will oblige me by never being absent for more than two or three hours, I may need you at any moment.’
Julien bowed, and withdrew without uttering a word, leaving the Marquis greatly astonished; he was incapable of speech, and shut himself up in his room. There, he was free to exaggerate all the iniquity of his lot.
‘And so,’ he thought, ‘I cannot even go away! God knows for how many days the Marquis is going to keep me in Paris; great God! What is to become of me? And not a friend that I can consult; the abbe Pirard would not let me finish my first sentence, Conte Altamira would offer to enlist me in some conspiracy.
‘And meanwhile I am mad, I feel it; I am mad!
‘Who can guide me, what is to become of me?’
Chapter 18
PAINFUL MOMENTS
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And she admits it to me! She goes into the minutest details! Her lovely eye fixed on mine reveals the love that she felt for another!
Schiller
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MADEMOISELLE DE LA Mole, in an ecstasy, could think only of the felicity of having come within an inch of being killed. She went so far as to say to herself: ‘He is worthy to be my master, since he has been on the point of killing me. How many of the good-looking young men in society would one have to fuse together to arrive at such an impulse of passion?
‘One must admit that he did look handsome when he climbed on the chair, to replace the sword, precisely in the picturesque position which the decorator had chosen for it! After all, I was not such a fool to fall in love with him.’
At that moment, had any honourable way of renewing their relations presented itself, she would have seized it with pleasure. Julien, locked and double-locked in his room, was a prey to the most violent despair. In the height of his folly, he thought of flinging himself at her feet. If, instead of remaining hidden in a remote corner, he had wandered through the house and into the garden, so as to be within reach of any opportunity, he might perhaps in a single instant have converted his fearful misery into the keenest happiness.
But the adroitness with the want of which we are reproaching him would have debarred the sublime impulse of seizing the sword which, at that moment, made him appear so handsome in the eyes of Mademoiselle de La Mole. This caprice, which told in Julien’s favour, lasted for the rest of the day; Mathilde formed a charming impression of the brief moments during which she had loved him, and looked back on them with regret.
‘Actually,’ she said to herself, ‘my passion for that poor boy lasted, in his eyes, only from one o’clock in the morning, when I saw him arrive by his ladder, with all his pistols in the side pocket of his coat, until eight. It was at a quarter past eight, when hearing mass at Sainte–Valere, that it first occurred to me that he would imagine himself to be my master, and might try to make me obey him by force of terror.’
After dinner, Mademoiselle de La Mole, far from avoiding Julien, spoke to him, and almost ordered him to accompany her to the garden; he obeyed. This proved too much for her self-control. Mathilde yielded, almost unconsciously, to the love which she began to feel for him. She found an intense pleasure in strolling by his side, it was with curiosity that she gazed at his hands which that morning had seized the sword to kill her.
After such an action, after all that had passed, there could no longer be any question of their conversing on the same terms as before.
Gradually Mathilde began to talk to him with an intimate confidence of the state of her heart. She found a strange delight in this kind of conversation; she proceeded to tell him of the fleeting impulses of enthusiasm which she had felt for M. de Croisenois, for M. de Caylus . . .
‘What! For M. de Caylus as well!’ cried Julien; and all the bitter jealousy of a past jilted lover was made manifest in his words. Mathilde received them in that light, and was not offended.
She continued to torture Julien, detailing her past feelings in the most picturesque fashion, and in accents of the most absolute sincerity. He saw that she was describing what was present before her eyes. He had the grief of remarking that as she spoke she made fresh discoveries in her own heart.
The agony of jealousy can go no farther.
The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in