you can, and on the twenty-second of the month’— it was now the tenth —‘be in this coffee-house here at half-past twelve. Do not leave here for half an hour. Silence!’
Such were the only words that Julien heard said. They sufficed to fill him with the deepest admiration. ‘It is thus,’ he thought, ‘that one handles affairs; what would this great statesman say if he had heard those hotheaded chatterboxes three days ago?’
Julien took two days to reach Strasbourg, he felt that there was nothing for him to do there. He made a wide circuit. ‘If that devil, the abbe Castanede has recognised me, he is not the man to be easily shaken off . . . And what a joy to him to make a fool of me, and to spoil my mission!’
The abbe Castanede, Chief of Police to the Congregation along the whole of the Northern frontier, had mercifully not recognised him. And the Jesuits of Strasbourg, albeit most zealous, never thought of keeping an eye on Julien, who, with his Cross and his blue greatcoat, had the air of a young soldier greatly concerned with his personal appearance.
Chapter 24
STRASBOURG
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Fascination! Thou sharest with love all its energy, all its capacity for suffering. Its enchanting pleasures, its sweet delights are alone beyond thy sphere. I could not say, as I saw her asleep: She is all mine with her angelic beauty and her sweet frailties! Behold her delivered into my power, as heaven made her in its compassion to enchant a man’s heart.
Ode by SCHILLER
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OBLIGED TO SPEND A week in Strasbourg, Julien sought to distract himself with thoughts of martial glory and of devotion to his country. Was he in love, then? He could not say, only he found in his bruised heart Mathilde the absolute mistress of his happiness as of his imagination. He required all his natural energy to keep himself from sinking into despair. To think of anything that bore no relation to Mademoiselle de La Mole was beyond his power. Ambition, the mere triumphs of vanity, had I distracted him in the past from the sentiments that Madame de Renal inspired in him. Mathilde had absorbed all; he found her everywhere in his future.
On every hand, in this future, Julien foresaw failure. This creature whom we saw at Verrieres so filled with presumption, so arrogant, had fallen into an absurd extreme of modesty.
Three days earlier he would have killed the abbe Castanede with pleasure, and at Strasbourg, had a boy picked a quarrel with him, he would have offered the boy an apology. In thinking over the adversaries, the enemies whom he had encountered in the course of his life, he found that invariably he, Julien, had been in the wrong.
The fact was that he had now an implacable enemy in that powerful imagination, which before had been constantly employed in painting such brilliant successes for him in the future.
The absolute solitude of a traveller’s existence strengthened the power of this dark imagination. What a treasure would a friend have been! ‘But,’ Julien asked himself, ‘is there a heart in the world that beats for me? And if I had a friend, does not honour impose on me an eternal silence?’
He took a horse and rode sadly about the neighbourhood of Kehl; it is a village on the bank of the Rhine, immortalised by Desaix and Gouvion Saint–Cyr. A German peasant pointed out to him the little streams, the roads, the islands in the Rhine which the valour of those great Generals has made famous. Julien, holding the reins in his left hand, was carrying spread out in his right the superb map which illustrates the Memoirs of Marshal Saint–Cyr. A joyful exclamation made him raise his head.
It was Prince Korasoff, his London friend, who had expounded to him some months earlier the first principles of high fatuity. Faithful to this great art, Korasoff, who had arrived in Strasbourg the day before, had been an hour at Kehl, and had never in his life read a line about the siege of 1796, began to explain it all to Julien. The German peasant gazed at him in astonishment; for he knew enough French to make out the enormous blunders into which the Prince fell. Julien’s thoughts were a thousand leagues away from the peasant’s, he was looking with amazement at this handsome young man, and admiring his grace in the saddle.
‘A happy nature!’ he said to himself. ‘How well his breeches fit him, how elegantly his hair is cut! Alas, if I had been like that, perhaps after loving me for three days she would not have taken a dislike to me.’
When the Prince had come to an end of his version of the siege of Kehl: ‘You look like a Trappist,’ he said to Julien, ‘you are infringing the principle of gravity I taught you in London. A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded.
‘It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior. Realise, my dear fellow, what a grave mistake you are making.’
Julien flung a crown to the peasant who stood listening to them, open-mouthed.
‘Good,’ said the Prince, ‘that is graceful, a noble disdain! Very good!’ And he put his horse into a gallop. Julien followed him, filled with a stupefied admiration.
‘Ah! If I had been like that, she would not have preferred Croisenois to me!’ The more his reason was shocked by the absurdities of the Prince, the more he despised himself for not admiring them, and deemed himself unfortunate in not sharing them. Self-contempt can be carried no farther.
The Prince found him decidedly melancholy: ‘Ah, my dear fellow,’ he said to him, as they rode into Strasbourg, ‘have you lost all your money, or can you be in love with some little actress?’
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. They have now reached the days of Louis XV.
These jests, at the expense of love, filled Julien’s eyes with tears: ‘Why should not I consult so friendly a man?’ he asked himself suddenly.
‘Well, yes, my friend,’ he said to the Prince, ‘you find me in Strasbourg, madly in love, indeed crossed in love. A charming woman, who lives in a neighbouring town, has abandoned me after three days of passion, and the change is killing me.’
He described to the Prince, under an assumed name, the actions and character of Mathilde.
‘Do not go on,’ said Korasoff: ‘to give you confidence in your physician, I am going to cut short your confidences. This young woman’s husband possesses an enormous fortune, or, what is more likely, she herself belongs to the highest nobility of the place. She must be proud of something.’
Julien nodded his head, he had no longer the heart to speak.
‘Very good,’ said the Prince, ‘here are three medicines, all rather bitter, which you are going to take without delay:
‘First: You must every day see Madame —— what do you call her?’
‘Madame de Dubois.’
‘What a name!’ said the Prince, with a shout of laughter; ‘but forgive me, to you it is sublime. It is essential that you see Madame de Dubois every day; above all do not appear to her cold and cross; remember the great principle of your age: be the opposite to what people expect of you. Show yourself precisely as you were a week before you were honoured with her favours.’
‘Ah! I was calm then,’ cried Julien, in desperation, ‘I thought that I pitied her . . . ’
‘The moth singes its wings in the flame of the candle,’ the Prince continued, ‘a metaphor as old as the world.
‘First of all: you will see her every day.