An Old SwordI now mean to be serious:—it is time, Since laughter nowadays isdeem'd too serious. A jest at Vice by Virtue's call'd a crime.
Don Juan, XIII.
She did not appear at dinner. In the evening she came to the drawing-room for a moment, but did not look at Julien. This behaviour seemed tohim strange; 'but,' he thought, 'I do not know the ways of good society,she will give me some good reason for all this.' At the same time, urgedby the most intense curiosity, he studied the expression on Mathilde'sfeatures; he could not conceal from himself that she had a sharp andmalevolent air. Evidently this was not the same woman who, the nightbefore, had felt or pretended to feel transports of joy too excessive to begenuine.
Next day, and the day after, the same coldness on her part; she neveronce looked at him, she seemed unaware of his existence. Julien, devoured by the keenest anxiety, was a thousand leagues from the feelingof triumph which alone had animated him on the first day. 'Can it, byany chance,' he asked himself, 'be a return to the path of virtue?' But thatwas a very middle-class expression to use of the proud Mathilde.
'In the ordinary situations of life she has no belief in religion,' thoughtJulien; 'she values it as being very useful to the interests of her caste.
'But out of simple delicacy may she not be bitterly reproaching herselfwith the mistake that she has made?' Julien assumed that he was her firstlover.
'But,' he said to himself at other moments, 'one must admit that thereis nothing artless, simple, tender, in her attitude; never have I seen herlooking so haughty. Can she despise me? It would be like her to reproach herself with what she has done for me, solely on account of myhumble birth.'
While Julien, steeped in the prejudices he had derived from books andfrom memories of Verrieres, was pursuing the chimera of a tender mistress who never gives a thought to her own existence the moment shehas gratified the desires of her lover, Mathilde in her vanity was furiouswith him.
As she had ceased to be bored for the last two months, she was nolonger afraid of boredom; so, albeit he could not for a moment suspect it,Julien was deprived of his strongest advantage.
'I have given myself a master!' Mademoiselle de La Mole was saying toherself, in the grip of the blackest despond. 'He may be the soul of honour; but if I goad his vanity to extremes, he will have his revenge bymaking public the nature of our relations.' Mathilde had never had a lover, and at this epoch in life, which gives certain tender illusions to eventhe most sterile hearts, she was a prey to the bitterest reflections.
'He has an immense power over me, since he reigns by terror and caninflict a fearful punishment on me if I drive him to extremes.' This idea,by itself, was enough to provoke Mathilde to insult him. Courage wasthe fundamental quality in her character. Nothing was capable of givingher any excitement and of curing her of an ever-present tendency toboredom, but the idea that she was playing heads or tails with her wholeexistence.
On the third day, as Mademoiselle de La Mole persisted in not lookingat him, Julien followed her after dinner, to her evident annoyance, intothe billiard room.
'Well, Sir; you must imagine yourself to have acquired some verypowerful hold over me,' she said to him, with ill-controlled rage, 'since inopposition to my clearly expressed wishes, you insist on speaking to me?
Are you aware that nobody in the world has ever been sopresumptuous?'
Nothing could be more entertaining than the dialogue between thesetwo lovers; unconsciously they were animated by a mutual sentiment ofthe keenest hatred. As neither of them had a consistent nature, asmoreover they were used to the ways of good society, it was not long before they both declared in plain terms that they had quarrelled for ever.
'I swear to you eternal secrecy,' said Julien; 'I would even add that Iwill never address a word to you again, were it not that your reputationmight be injured by too marked a change.' He bowed respectfully andleft her.
He performed without undue difficulty what he regarded as a duty;he was far from imagining himself to be deeply in love with Mademoiselle de La Mole. No doubt he had not been in love with her three daysearlier, when he had been concealed in the great mahogany wardrobe.
But everything changed rapidly in his heart from the moment when hesaw himself parted from her for ever.
His pitiless memory set to work reminding him of the slightest incidents of that night which in reality had left him so cold.
During the very night after their vow of eternal separation, Juliennearly went mad when he found himself forced to admit that he was inlove with Mademoiselle de La Mole.
A ghastly conflict followed this discovery: all his feelings were throwninto confusion.
Two days later, instead of being haughty with M. de Croisenois, hecould almost have burst into tears and embraced him.
The force of continued unhappiness gave him a glimmer of commonsense; he decided to set off for Languedoc, packed his trunk and went tothe posting house.
He almost fainted when, on reaching the coach office, he was informedthat, by mere chance, there was a place vacant next day in the Toulousemail. He engaged it and returned to the Hotel de La Mole to warn theMarquis of his departure.
M. de La Mole had gone out. More dead than alive, Julien went to waitfor him in the library. What were his feelings on finding Mademoisellede La Mole there?
On seeing him appear, she assumed an air of malevolence which itwas impossible for him to misinterpret,Carried away by his misery, dazed by surprise, Julien was weakenough to say to her, in the tenderest of tones and one that sprang fromthe 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 mediaevalsword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.
His grief, which he had believed to be intense at the moment of hisspeaking to Mademoiselle de La Mole, had now been increased an hundredfold by the tears of shame which he saw her shed. He wouldhave 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, advancedproudly towards him; her tears had ceased to flow.
The thought of the Marquis de La Mole, his benefactor, arose vividlyin 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, andas 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 bronzefrom which he had taken it.
This series of actions, very deliberate towards the end, occupied fully aminute; Mademoiselle de La Mole gazed at him in astonishment. 'So Ihave 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 CharlesIX 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 mustbe admitted that she was very attractive at that moment, certainly nowoman 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 himso firmly.' She fled.
'My God! How beautiful she is!' said Julien, as he watched her runfrom the room: 'that is the creature who flung herself into my arms withsuch frenzy not a week ago … And those moments will never comeagain! 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! … Imust admit that I was born with a very dull and unhappy nature.'
The Marquis appeared; Julien made haste to inform him of hisdeparture.
'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 confineyou to your quarters. You will oblige me by never being absent for morethan two or three hours, I may need you at any moment.'
Julien bowed, and withdrew without uttering a word, leaving theMarquis greatly astonished; he was incapable of speech, and shut himself up in his room. There, he was free to exaggerate all the iniquity of hislot.
'And so,' he thought, 'I cannot even go away! God knows for howmany days the Marquis is going to keep me in Paris; great God! What isto become of me? And not a friend that I can consult; the abbe Pirardwould not let me finish my first sentence, Conte Altamira would offer toenlist 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?'