[1]There is no heading to this and the following chapters in the original.—TRANSL.
[1]There is no heading to this and the following chapters in the original.—TRANSL.
[2]The speaker is a Jacobin.
[2]The speaker is a Jacobin.
When he was deep asleep an hour afterwards, he was woken up by feeling tears flow over his hand. “Oh, it is Mathilde again,” he thought, only half awake. “She has come again, faithful to her tactics of attacking my resolution by her sentimentalism.” Bored by the prospect of this new scene of hackneyed pathos he did not open his eyes. The verses of Belphgor, as he ran away from his wife, came into his mind. He heard a strange sigh. He opened his eyes. It was madame de Rênal.
“Ah, so I see you again before I die, or is it an illusion,” he exclaimed as he threw himself at her feet.
“But, forgive me, madame, you must look upon me as a mere murderer,” he said, immediately, as he recovered himself.
“Monsieur, I have come to entreat you to appeal; I know you do not want to....” her sobs choked her; she was unable to speak.
“Deign to forgive me.”
“If you want me to forgive you,” she said to him, getting up and throwing herself into his arms, “appeal immediately against your death sentence.”
Julien covered her with kisses.
“Will you come and see me every day during those two months?”
“I swear it—every day, unless my husband forbids me.”
“I will sign it,” exclaimed Julien.
“What! you really forgive me! Is it possible?”
He clasped her in his arms; he was mad. She gave a little cry.
“It is nothing,” she said to him. “You hurt me.”
“Your shoulder,” exclaimed Julien, bursting into tears. He drew back a little, and covered her hands with kisses of fire. “Who could have prophesied this, dear, the last time I saw you in your room at Verrières?”
“Who could have prophesied then that I should write that infamous letter to M. de la Mole?”
“Know that I have always loved you, and that I have never loved anyone but you.”
“Is it possible?” cried Madame de Rênal, who was delighted in her turn. She leant on Julien, who was on his knees, and they cried silently for a long time.
Julien had never experienced moments like this at any period of his whole life.
“And how about that young madame Michelet?” said Madame de Rênal, a long time afterwards when they were able to speak. “Or rather, that mademoiselle de la Mole? for I am really beginning to believe in that strange romance.”
“It is only superficially true,” answered Julien. “She is my wife, but she is not my mistress.”
After interrupting each other a hundred times over, they managed with great difficulty to explain to each other what they did not know. The letter written to M. de la Mole had been drafted by the young priest who directed Madame de Rênal’s conscience, and had been subsequently copied by her, “What a horrible thing religion has made me do,” she said to him, “and even so I softened the most awful passages in the letter.”
Julien’s ecstatic happiness proved the fulness of her forgiveness. He had never been so mad with love.
“And yet I regard myself as devout,” madame de Rênal went on to say to him in the ensuing conversation. “I believe sincerely in God! I equally believe, and I even have full proof of it, that the crime which I am committing is an awful one, and yet the very minute I see you, even after you have fired two pistol shots at me—” and at this point, in spite of her resistance, Julien covered her with kisses.
“Leave me alone,” she continued, “I want to argue with you, I am frightened lest I should forget.... The very minute I see you all my duties disappear. I have nothing but love for you, dear, or rather, the word love is too weak. I feel for you what I ought only to feel for God; a mixture of respect, love, obedience.... As a matter of fact, I don’t know what you inspire me with.... If you were to tell me to stab the gaoler with a knife, the crime would be committed before I had given it a thought. Explain this very clearly to me before I leave you. I want to see down to the bottom of my heart; for we shall take leave of each other in two months.... By the bye, shall we take leave of each other?” she said to him with a smile.
“I take back my words,” exclaimed Julien, getting up, “I shall not appeal from my death sentence, if you try, either by poison, knife, pistol, charcoal, or any other means whatsoever, to put an end to your life, or make any attempt upon it.”
Madame de Rênal’s expression suddenly changed. The most lively tenderness was succeeded by a mood of deep meditation.
“Supposing we were to die at once,” she said to him.
“Who knows what one will find in the other life,” answered Julien, “perhaps torment, perhaps nothing at all. Cannot we pass two delicious months together? Two months means a good many days. I shall never have been so happy.”
“You will never have been so happy?”
“Never,” repeated Julien ecstatically, “and I am talking to you just as I should talk to myself. May God save me from exaggerating.”
“Words like that are a command,” she said with a timid melancholy smile.
“Well, you will swear by the love you have for me, to make no attempt either direct or indirect, upon your life ... remember,” he added, “that you must live for my son, whom Mathilde will hand over to lackeys as soon as she is marquise de Croisenois.”
“I swear,” she answered coldly, “but I want to take away your notice of appeal, drawn and signed by yourself. I will go myself to M. the procureur-general.”
“Be careful, you will compromise yourself.”
“After having taken the step of coming to see you in your prison, I shall be a heroine of local scandal for Besançon, and the whole of Franche-Comté,” she said very dejectedly. “I have crossed the bounds of austere modesty.... I am a woman who has lost her honour; it is true that it is for your sake....”
Her tone was so sad that Julien embraced her with a happiness which was quite novel to him. It was no longer the intoxication of love, it was extreme gratitude. He had just realised for the first time the full extent of the sacrifice which she had made for him.
Some charitable soul, no doubt informed M. de Rênal of the long visits which his wife paid to Julien’s prison; for at the end of three days he sent her his carriage with the express order to return to Verrières immediately.
This cruel separation had been a bad beginning for Julien’s day. He was informed two or three hours later that a certain intriguing priest (who had, however, never managed to make any headway among the Jesuits of Besançon) had, since the morning, established himself in the street outside the prison gates. It was raining a great deal, and the man out there was pretending to play the martyr. Julien was in a weak mood, and this piece of stupidity annoyed him deeply.
In the morning, he had already refused this priest’s visit, but the man had taken it into his head to confess Julien, and to win a name for himself among the young women of Besançon by all the confidences which he would pretend to have received from him.
He declared in a loud voice that he would pass the day and the night by the prison gates. “God has sent me to touch the heart of this apostate ...” and the lower classes, who are always curious to see a scene, began to make a crowd.
“Yes, my brothers,” he said to them, “I will pass the day here and the night, as well as all the days and all the nights which will follow. The Holy Ghost has spoken to me. I am commissioned from above; I am the man who must save the soul of young Sorel. Do you join in my prayers, etc.”
Julien had a horror of scandal, and of anything which could attract attention to him. He thought of seizing the opportunity of escaping from the world incognito; but he had some hope of seeing madame de Rênal again, and he was desperately in love.
The prison gates were situated in one of the most populous streets. His soul was tortured by the idea of this filthy priest attracting a crowd and creating a scandal—“and doubtless he is repeating my name at every single minute!” This moment was more painful than death.
He called the turnkey who was devoted to him, and sent him two or three times at intervals of one hour to see if the priest was still by the prison gates.
“Monsieur,” said the turnkey to him on each occasion, “he is on both his knees in the mud; he is praying at the top of his voice, and saying litanies for your soul.
“The impudent fellow,” thought Julien. At this moment he actually heard a dull buzz. It was the responses of the people to the litanies. His patience was strained to the utmost when he saw the turnkey himself move his lips while he repeated the Latin words.
“They are beginning to say,” added the turnkey, “that you must have a very hardened heart to refuse the help of this holy man.”
“Oh my country, how barbarous you still are!” exclaimed Julien, beside himself with anger. And he continued his train of thought aloud, without giving a thought to the turn-key’s presence.
“The man wants an article in the paper about him, and that’s a way in which he will certainly get it.
“Oh you cursed provincials! At Paris I should not be subjected to all these annoyances. There they are more skilled in their charlatanism.
“Show in the holy priest,” he said at last to the turnkey, and great streams of sweat flowed down his forehead. The turnkey made the sign of the cross and went out rejoicing.
The holy priest turned out to be very ugly, he was even dirtier than he was ugly. The cold rain intensified the obscurity and dampness of the cell. The priest wanted to embrace Julien, and began to wax pathetic as he spoke to him. The basest hypocrisy was only too palpable; Julien had never been so angry in his whole life.
A quarter of an hour after the priest had come in Julien felt an absolute coward. Death appeared horrible to him for the first time. He began to think about the state of decomposition which his body would be in two days after the execution, etc., etc.
He was on the point of betraying himself by some sign of weakness or throwing himself on the priest and strangling him with his chain, when it occurred to him to beg the holy man to go and say a good forty franc mass for him on that very day.
It was twelve o’clock, so the priest took himself off.
As soon as he had gone out Julien wept desperately and for a long time. He gradually admitted to himself that if madame de Rênal had been at Besançon he would have confessed his weakness to her. The moment when he was regretting the absence of this beloved woman he heard Mathilde’s step.
“The worst evil of being in prison,” he thought “is one’s inability to close one’s door.” All Mathilde said only irritated him.
She told him that M. de Valenod had had his nomination to the prefectship in his pocket on the day of his trial, and had consequently dared to defy M. de Frilair and give himself the pleasure of condemning him to death.
“Why did your friend take it into his head,” M. de Frilair just said to me, “to awaken and attack the petty vanity of that bourgeois aristocracy. Why talk about caste? He pointed out to them what they ought to do in their own political interest; the fools had not been giving it a thought and were quite ready to weep. That caste interest intervened and blinded their eyes to the horror of condemning a man to death. One must admit that M. Sorel is very inexperienced. If we do not succeed in saving him by a petition for a reprieve, his death will be a kind of suicide.”
Mathilde was careful not to tell Julien a matter concerning which she had now no longer any doubts; it was that the abbé de Frilair seeing that Julien was ruined, had thought that it would further his ambitious projects to try and become his successor.
“Go and listen to a mass for me,” he said to Mathilde, almost beside himself with vexation and impotent rage, and leave me a moment in peace. Mathilde who was already very jealous of madame de Rênal’s visits and who had just learned of her departure realised the cause of Julien’s bad temper and burst into tears.
Her grief was real; Julien saw this and was only the more irritated. He had a crying need of solitude, and how was he to get it?
Eventually Mathilde, after having tried to melt him by every possible argument, left him alone. But almost at the same moment, Fouqué presented himself.
“I need to be alone,” he said, to this faithful friend, and as he saw him hesitate: “I am composing a memorial for my petition for pardon ... one thing more ... do me a favour, and never speak to me about death. If I have need of any especial services on that day, let me be the first to speak to you about it.”
When Julien had eventually procured solitude, he found himself more prostrate and more cowardly than he had been before. The little force which this enfeebled soul still possessed had all been spent in concealing his condition from mademoiselle de la Mole.
Towards the evening he found consolation in this idea.
“If at the very moment this morning, when death seemed so ugly to me, I had been given notice of my execution, the public eye would have acted as a spur to glory, my demeanour would perhaps have had a certain stiffness about it, like a nervous fop entering a salon. A few penetrating people, if there are any amongst these provincial might have managed to divine my weakness.... But no one would have seen it.”
And he felt relieved of part of his unhappiness. “I am a coward at this very moment,” he sang to himself, “but no one will know it.”
An even more unpleasant episode awaited him on the following day. His father had been announcing that he would come and see him for some time past: the old white-haired carpenter appeared in Julien’s cell before he woke up.
Julien felt weak, he was anticipating the most unpleasant reproaches. His painful emotion was intensified by the fact that on this particular morning he felt a keen remorse for not loving his father.
“Chance placed us next to each other in the world,” he said to himself, while the turnkey was putting the cell a little in order, “and we have practically done each other all the harm we possibly could. He has come to administer the final blow at the moment of my death.”
As soon as they were without witnesses, the old man commenced his stern reproaches.
Julien could not restrain his tears. “What an unworthy weakness,” he said to himself querulously. “He will go about everywhere exaggerating my lack of courage: what a triumph for the Valenod, and for all the fatuous hypocrites who rule in Verrières! They are very great in France, they combine all the social advantages. But hitherto, I could at any rate say to myself, it is true they are in receipt of money, and that all the honours lavished on them, but I have a noble heart.
“But here is a witness whom everyone will believe, and who will testify to the whole of Verrières that I shewed weakness when confronted with death, and who will exaggerate it into the bargain! I shall be taken for a coward in an ordeal which comes home to all!”
Julien was nearly desperate. He did not know how to get rid of his father. He felt it absolutely beyond his strength to invent a ruse capable of deceiving so shrewd an old man.
His mind rapidly reviewed all the alternatives. “I have saved some money,” he suddenly exclaimed.
This inspiration produced a change in the expression of the old man and in Julien’s own condition.
“How ought I to dispose of it?” continued Julien more quietly. The result had freed him from any feeling of inferiority.
The old carpenter was burning not to let the money slip by him, but it seemed that Julien wanted to leave part of it to his brothers. He talked at length and with animation. Julien felt cynical.
“Well, the Lord has given me a message with regard to my will. I will give a thousand francs to each of my brothers and the rest to you.”
“Very good,” said the old man. “The rest is due to me: but since God has been gracious enough to touch your heart, your debts ought to be paid if you wish to die like a good Christian. There are, moreover, the expenses of your board and your education, which I advanced to you, but which you are not thinking of.”
“Such is paternal love,” repeated Julien to himself, dejectedly, when he was at last alone. Soon the gaoler appeared.
“Monsieur, I always bring my visitors a good bottle of champagne after near relations have come to see them. It is a little dear, six francs a bottle, but it rejoices the heart.”
“Bring three glasses,” said Julien to him, with a childish eagerness, “and bring in two of the prisoners whom I have heard walking about in the corridor.” The gaoler brought two men into him who had once been condemned to the gallows, and had now been convicted of the same offence again, and were preparing to return to penal servitude. They were very cheerful scoundrels, and really very remarkable by reason of their subtlety, their courage, and their coolness.
“If you give me twenty francs,” said one of them to Julien, “I will tell you the story of my life in detail. It’s rich.”
“But you will lie,” said Julien.
“Not me,” he answered, “my friend there, who is jealous of my twenty francs will give me away if I say anything untrue.”
His history was atrocious. It was evidence of a courageous heart which had only one passion—that of money.
After their departure Julien was no longer the same man. All his anger with himself had disappeared. The awful grief which had been poisoned and rendered more acute by the weakness of which he had been a victim since madame de Rênal’s departure had turned to melancholy.
“If I had been less taken in by appearances,” he said to himself, “I would have had a better chance of seeing that the Paris salons are full of honest men like my father, or clever scoundrels like those felons. They are right. The men in the salons never get up in the morning with this poignant thought in their minds, how am I going to get my dinner? They boast about their honesty and when they are summoned on the jury, they take pride in convicting the man who has stolen a silver dish because he felt starving.
“But if there is a court, and it’s a question of losing or winning a portfolio, my worthy salon people will commit crimes exactly similar to those, which the need of getting a dinner inspired those two felons to perpetrate.
“There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing more than a silly anachronism well worthy of the advocate-general who harried me the other day, and whose grandfather was enriched by one of the confiscations of Louis XIV. There is no such thing as right, except when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment.
“Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it in one word, need. No, the people whom the world honours are merely villains who have had the good fortune not to have been caught red-handed. The prosecutor whom society put on my track was enriched by an infamous act. I have committed a murder, and I am justly condemned, but the Valenod who has condemned me, is by reason alone of that very deed, a hundred times more harmful to society.
“Well,” added Julien sadly but not angrily, “in spite of his avarice, my father is worth more than all those men. He never loved me. The disgrace I bring upon him by an infamous death has proved the last straw. That fear of lacking money, that distorted view of the wickedness of mankind, which is called avarice, make him find a tremendous consolation and sense of security in a sum of three or four hundred louis, which I have been able to leave him. Some Sunday, after dinner, he will shew his gold to all the envious men in Verrières. ‘Which of you would not be delighted to have a son guillotined at a price like this,’ will be the message they will read in his eyes.”
This philosophy might be true, but it was of such a character as to make him wish for death. In this way five long days went by. He was polite and gentle to Mathilde, whom he saw was exasperated by the most violent jealousy. One evening Julien seriously thought of taking his own life. His soul was demoralised by the deep unhappiness in which madame de Rênal’s departure had thrown him. He could no longer find pleasure in anything, either in real life or in the sphere of the imagination. Lack of exercise began to affect his health, and to produce in him all the weakness and exaltation of a young German student. He began to lose that virile disdain which repels with a drastic oath certain undignified ideas which besiege the soul of the unhappy.
“I loved truth.... Where is it? Hypocrisy everywhere or at any rate charlatanism. Even in the most virtuous, even in the greatest,” and his lips assumed an expression of disgust. “No, man cannot trust man.”
“Madame de —— when she was making a collection for her poor orphans, used to tell me that such and such a prince had just given ten louis, a sheer lie. But what am I talking about. Napoleon at St. Helena ... Pure charlatanism like the proclamation in favour of the king of Rome.
“Great God! If a man like that at a time when misfortune ought to summon him sternly to his duty will sink to charlatanism, what is one to expect from the rest of the human species?”
“Where is truth? In religion. Yes,” he added, with a bitter smile of utter contempt. “In the mouth of the Maslons, the Frilairs, the Castanèdes—perhaps in that true Christianity whose priests were not paid any more than were the apostles. But St. Paul was paid by the pleasure of commanding, speaking, getting himself talked about.”
“Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am. I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair. About as comforting as a chevalier de Beauvoisis.
“But a true priest, a Massillon, a Fénelon. Massillon sacrificed Dubois. Saint-Simon’s memoirs have spoilt the illusion of Fénelon, but he was a true priest anyway. In those days, tender souls could have a place in the world where they could meet together. We should not then have been isolated. That good priest would have talked to us of God. But what God? Not the one of the Bible, a cruel petty despot, full of vindictiveness, but the God of Voltaire, just, good, infinite.”
He was troubled by all the memories of that Bible which he knew by heart. “But how on earth, when the deity is three people all at the same time, is one to believe in the great name of GOD, after the frightful way in which our priests have abused it.”
“Living alone. What a torture.”
“I am growing mad and unreasonable,” said Julien to himself, striking his forehead. “I am alone here in this cell, but I have not lived alone on earth. I had the powerful idea of duty. The duty which rightly or wrongly I laid down for myself, has been to me like the trunk of a solid tree which I could lean on during the storm, I stumbled, I was agitated. After all I was only a man, but I was not swept away.
“It must be the damp air of this cell which made me think of being alone.
“Why should I still play the hypocrite by cursing hypocrisy? It is neither death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, but madame de Rênal’s absence which prostrates me. If, in order to see her at Verrières, I had to live whole weeks at Verrières concealed in the cellars of her house, would I complain?”
“The influence of my contemporaries wins the day,” he said aloud, with a bitter laugh. “Though I am talking to myself and within an ace of death, I still play the hypocrite. Oh you nineteenth century! A hunter fires a gun shot in the forest, his quarry falls, he hastens forward to seize it. His foot knocks against a two-foot anthill, knocks down the dwelling place of the ants, and scatters the ants and their eggs far and wide. The most philosophic among the ants will never be able to understand that black, gigantic and terrifying body, the hunter’s boot, which suddenly invaded their home with incredible rapidity, preceded by a frightful noise, and accompanied by flashes of reddish fire.”
“In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o’clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o’clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word ‘night’?”
“Give it five more hours of existence, and it will see night, and understand its meaning.”
“So, in my case, I shall die at the age of twenty-three. Give me five more years of life in order to live with madame de Rênal.”
He began to laugh like Mephistopheles. How foolish to debate these great problems.
“(1). I am as hypocritical as though there were someone there to listen to me.
“(2). I am forgetting to live and to love when I have so few days left to live. Alas, madame de Rênal is absent; perhaps her husband will not let her come back to Besançon any more, to go on compromising her honour.”
“That is what makes me lonely, and not the absence of a God who is just, good and omnipotent, devoid of malice, and in no wise greedy of vengeance.”
“Oh, if He did exist. Alas I should fall at His feet. I have deserved death, I should say to Him, but oh Thou great God, good God, indulgent God, give me back her whom I love!”
By this time the night was far advanced. After an hour or two of peaceful sleep, Fouqué arrived.
Julien felt strongly resolute, like a man who sees to the bottom of his soul.
“I cannot play such a trick on that poor abbé Chas-Bernard, as to summon him,” he said to Fouqué: “it would prevent him from dining for three whole days.—But try and find some Jansenist who is a friend of M. Pirard.”
Fouqué was impatiently waiting for this suggestion. Julien acquitted himself becomingly of all the duty a man owes to provincial opinion. Thanks to M. the abbé de Frilair, and in spite of his bad choice of a confessor, Julien enjoyed in his cell the protection of the priestly congregation; with a little more diplomacy he might have managed to escape. But the bad air of the cell produced its effect, and his strength of mind diminished. But this only intensified his happiness at madame de Rênal’s return.
“My first duty is towards you, my dear,” she said as she embraced him; “I have run away from Verrières.”
Julien felt no petty vanity in his relations with her, and told her all his weaknesses. She was good and charming to him.
In the evening she had scarcely left the prison before she made the priest, who had clung on to Julien like a veritable prey, go to her aunt’s: as his only object was to win prestige among the young women who belonged to good Besançon society, madame de Rênal easily prevailed upon him to go and perform a novena at the abbey of Bray-le-Haut.
No words can do justice to the madness and extravagance of Julien’s love.
By means of gold, and by using and abusing the influence of her aunt, who was devout, rich and well-known, madame de Rênal managed to see him twice a day.
At this news, Mathilde’s jealousy reached a pitch of positive madness. M. de Frilair had confessed to her that all his influence did not go so far as to admit of flouting the conventions by allowing her to see her sweetheart more than once every day. Mathilde had madame de Rênal followed so as to know the smallest thing she did. M. de Frilair exhausted all the resources of an extremely clever intellect in order to prove to her that Julien was unworthy of her.
Plunged though she was in all these torments, she only loved him the more, and made a horrible scene nearly every day.
Julien wished, with all his might, to behave to the very end like an honourable man towards this poor young girl whom he had so strangely compromised, but the reckless love which he felt for madame de Rênal swept him away at every single minute. When he could not manage to persuade Mathilde of the innocence of her rival’s visits by all his thin excuses, he would say to himself: “at any rate the end of the drama ought to be quite near. The very fact of not being able to lie better will be an excuse for me.”
Mademoiselle de La Mole learnt of the death of the marquis de Croisenois. The rich M. de Thaler had indulged in some unpleasant remarks concerning Mathilde’s disappearance: M. de Croisenois went and asked him to recant them: M. de Thaler showed him some anonymous letters which had been sent to him, and which were full of details so artfully put together that the poor marquis could not help catching a glimpse of the truth.
M. de Thaler indulged in some jests which were devoid of all taste. Maddened by anger and unhappiness, M. de Croisenois demanded such unqualified satisfaction, that the millionaire preferred to fight a duel. Stupidity triumphed, and one of the most lovable of men met with his death before he was twenty-four.
This death produced a strange and morbid impression on Julien’s demoralised soul.
“Poor Croisenois,” he said to Mathilde, “really behaved very reasonably and very honourably towards us; he had ample ground for hating me and picking a quarrel with me, by reason of your indiscretion in your mother’s salon; for the hatred which follows on contempt is usually frenzied.”
M. de Croisenois’ death changed all Julien’s ideas concerning Mathilde’s future. He spent several days in proving to her that she ought to accept the hand of M. de Luz. “He is a nervous man, not too much of a Jesuit, and will doubtless be a candidate,” he said to her. “He has a more sinister and persevering ambition than poor Croisenois, and as there has never been a dukedom in his family, he will be only too glad to marry Julien Sorel’s widow.”
“A widow, though, who scorns the grand passions,” answered Mathilde coldly, “for she has lived long enough to see her lover prefer to her after six months another woman who was the origin of all their unhappiness.”
“You are unjust! Madame de Rênal’s visits will furnish my advocate at Paris, who is endeavouring to procure my pardon, with the subject matter for some sensational phrases; he will depict the murderer honoured by the attention of his victim. That may produce an impression, and perhaps some day or other, you will see me provide the plot of some melodrama or other, etc., etc.”
A furious and impotent jealousy, a prolonged and hopeless unhappiness (for even supposing Julien was saved, how was she to win back his heart?), coupled with her shame and anguish at loving this unfaithful lover more than ever had plunged mademoiselle de la Mole into a gloomy silence, from which all the careful assiduity of M. de Frilair was as little able to draw her as the rugged frankness of Fouqué.
As for Julien, except in those moments which were taken up by Mathilde’s presence, he lived on love with scarcely a thought for the future.
“In former days,” Julien said to her, “when I might have been so happy, during our walks in the wood of Vergy, a frenzied ambition swept my soul into the realms of imagination. Instead of pressing to my heart that charming arm which is so near my lips, the thoughts of my future took me away from you; I was engaged in countless combats which I should have to sustain in order to lay the foundations of a colossal fortune. No, I should have died without knowing what happiness was if you had not come to see me in this prison.”
Two episodes ruffled this tranquil life. Julien’s confessor, Jansenist though he was, was not proof against an intrigue of the Jesuits, and became their tool without knowing it.
He came to tell him one day that unless he meant to fall into the awful sin of suicide, he ought to take every possible step to procure his pardon. Consequently, as the clergy have a great deal of influence with the minister of Justice at Paris, an easy means presented itself; he ought to become converted with all publicity.
“With publicity,” repeated Julien. “Ha, Ha! I have caught you at it—I have caught you as well, my father, playing a part like any missionary.”
“Your youth,” replied the Jansenist gravely, “the interesting appearance which Providence has given you, the still unsolved mystery of the motive for your crime, the heroic steps which mademoiselle de la Mole has so freely taken on your behalf, everything, up to the surprising affection which your victim manifests towards you, has contributed to make you the hero of the young women of Besançon. They have forgotten everything, even politics, on your account. Your conversion will reverberate in their hearts and will leave behind it a deep impression. You can be of considerable use to religion, and I was about to hesitate for the trivial reason that in a similar circumstance the Jesuits would follow a similar course. But if I did, even in the one case which has escaped their greedy clutches they would still be exercising their mischief. The tears which your conversation will cause to be shed will annul the poisonous effect of ten editions of Voltaire’s works.”
“And what will be left for me,” answered Julien, coldly, “if I despise myself? I have been ambitious; I do not mean to blame myself in any way. Further, I have acted in accordance with the code of the age. Now I am living from day to day. But I should make myself very unhappy if I were to yield to what the locality would regard as a piece of cowardice....”
Madame de Rênal was responsible for the other episode which affected Julien in quite another way. Some intriguing woman friend or other had managed to persuade this naïve and timid soul that it was her duty to leave for St. Cloud, and go and throw herself at the feet of King Charles X.
She had made the sacrifice of separating from Julien, and after a strain as great as that, she no longer thought anything of the unpleasantness of making an exhibition of herself, though in former times she would have thought that worse than death.
“I will go to the king. I will confess freely that you are my lover. The life of a man, and of a man like Julien, too, ought to prevail over every consideration. I will tell him that it was because of jealousy that you made an attempt upon my life. There are numerous instances of poor young people who have been saved in such a case by the clemency of the jury or of the king.”
“I will leave off seeing you; I will shut myself up in my prison,” exclaimed Julien, “and you can be quite certain that if you do not promise me to take no step which will make a public exhibition of us both, I will kill myself in despair the day afterwards. This idea of going to Paris is not your own. Tell me the name of the intriguing woman who suggested it to you.
“Let us be happy during the small number of days of this short life. Let us hide our existence; my crime was only too self-evident. Mademoiselle de la Mole enjoys all possible influence at Paris. Take it from me that she has done all that is humanly possible. Here in the provinces I have all the men of wealth and prestige against me. Your conduct will still further aggravate those rich and essentially moderate people to whom life comes so easy.... Let us not give the Maslons, the Valenods, and the thousand other people who are worth more than they, anything to laugh about.”
Julien came to find the bad air of the cell unbearable. Fortunately, nature was rejoicing in a fine sunshine on the day when they announced to him that he would have to die, and he was in a courageous vein. He found walking in the open air as delicious a sensation as the navigator, who has been at sea for a long time, finds walking on the ground. “Come on, everything is going all right,” he said to himself. “I am not lacking in courage.”
His head had never looked so poetical as at that moment when it was on the point of falling. The sweet minutes which he had formerly spent in the woods of Vergy crowded back upon his mind with extreme force.
Everything went off simply, decorously, and without any affectation on his part.
Two days before he had said to Fouqué: “I cannot guarantee not to show some emotion. This dense, squalid cell gives me fits of fever in which I do not recognise myself, but fear?—no! I shall not be seen to flinch.”
He had made his arrangements in advance for Fouqué to take Mathilde and madame de Rênal away on the morning of his last day.
“Drive them away in the same carriage,” he had said. “Do you see that the post-horses do not leave off galloping. They will either fall into each other’s arms, or manifest towards each other a mortal hatred. In either case the poor women will have something to distract them a little from their awful grief.”
Julien had made madame de Rênal swear that she would live to look after Mathilde’s son.
“Who knows? Perhaps we have still some sensations after our death,” he had said one day to Fouqué. “I should like to rest, for rest is the right word, in that little grotto in the great mountain which dominates Verrières. Many a time, as I have told you, I have spent the night alone in that grotto, and as my gaze would plunge far and wide over the richest provinces of France, ambition would inflame my heart. In those days it was my passion.... Anyway, I hold that grotto dear, and one cannot dispute that its situation might well arouse the desires of the philosopher’s soul.... Well, you know! those good priests of Besançon will make money out of everything. If you know how to manage it, they will sell you my mortal remains.”
Fouqué succeeded in this melancholy business. He was passing the night alone in his room by his friend’s body when, to his great surprise, he saw Mathilde come in. A few hours before he had left her ten leagues from Besançon. Her face and eyes looked distraught.
“I want to see him,” she said.
Fouqué had not the courage either to speak or get up. He pointed with his finger to a big blue cloak on the floor; there was wrapped in it all that remained of Julien.
She threw herself on her knees. The memory of Boniface de la Mole, and of Marguerite of Navarre gave her, no doubt, a superhuman courage. Her trembling hands undid the cloak. Fouqué turned away his eyes.
He heard Mathilde walking feverishly about the room. She lit several candles. When Fouqué could bring himself to look at her, she had placed Julien’s head on a little marble table in front of her, and was kissing it on the forehead.
Mathilde followed her lover to the tomb which he had chosen. A great number of priests convoyed the bier, and, alone in her draped carriage, without anyone knowing it, she carried on her knees the head of the man whom she had loved so much.
When they arrived in this way at the most elevated peak of the high mountains of the Jura, twenty priests celebrated the service of the dead in the middle of the night in this little grotto, which was magnificently illuminated by a countless number of wax candles. Attracted by this strange and singular ceremony, all the inhabitants of the little mountain villages which the funeral had passed through, followed it.
Mathilde appeared in their midst in long mourning garments, and had several thousands of five-franc pieces thrown to them at the end of the service.
When she was left alone with Fouqué, she insisted on burying her lover’s head with her own hands. Fouqué nearly went mad with grief.
Mathilde took care that this wild grotto should be decorated with marble monuments that had been sculpted in Italy at great expense.
Madame de Rênal kept her promise. She did not try to make any attempt upon her life; but she died embracing her children, three days after Julien.
The inconvenience of the reign of public opinion is that though, of course, it secures liberty, it meddles with what it has nothing to do with—private life, for example. Hence the gloominess of America and England. In order to avoid infringing on private life, the author has invented a little town—Verrières, and when he had need of a bishop, a jury, an assize court, he placed all this in Besançon, where he has never been.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONCHAPTER IA SMALL TOWNCHAPTER IIA MAYORCHAPTER IIITHE POOR FUNDCHAPTER IVA FATHER AND A SONCHAPTER VA NEGOTIATIONCHAPTER VIENNUICHAPTER VIITHE ELECTIVE AFFINITIESCHAPTER VIIILITTLE EPISODESCHAPTER IXAN EVENING IN THE COUNTRYCHAPTER XA GREAT HEART AND A SMALL FORTUNECHAPTER XIAN EVENINGCHAPTER XIIA JOURNEYCHAPTER XIIITHE OPEN WORK STOCKINGSCHAPTER XIVTHE ENGLISH SCISSORSCHAPTER XVTHE COCK’S SONGCHAPTER XVITHE DAY AFTERCHAPTER XVIITHE FIRST DEPUTYCHAPTER XVIIIA KING AT VERRIÈRESCHAPTER XIXTHINKING PRODUCES SUFFERINGCHAPTER XXANONYMOUS LETTERSCHAPTER XXIDIALOGUE WITH A MASTERCHAPTER XXIIMANNERS OF PROCEDURE IN 1830CHAPTER XXIIISORROWS OF AN OFFICIALCHAPTER XXIVA CAPITALCHAPTER XXVTHE SEMINARYCHAPTER XXVITHE WORLD, OR WHAT THE RICH LACKCHAPTER XXVIIFIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFECHAPTER XXVIIIA PROCESSIONCHAPTER XXIXTHE FIRST PROMOTIONCHAPTER XXXAN AMBITIOUS MANCHAPTER XXXITHE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRYCHAPTER XXXIIENTRY INTO SOCIETYCHAPTER XXXIIITHE FIRST STEPSCHAPTER XXXIVTHE HÔTEL DE LA MOLECHAPTER XXXVSENSIBILITY AND A GREAT PIOUS LADYCHAPTER XXXVIPRONUNCIATIONCHAPTER XXXVIIAN ATTACK OF GOUTCHAPTER XXXVIIIWHAT IS THE DECORATION WHICH CONFERS DISTINCTION?CHAPTER XXXIXTHE BALLCHAPTER XLQUEEN MARGUERITECHAPTER XLIA YOUNG GIRL’S DOMINIONCHAPTER XLIIIS HE A DANTON?CHAPTER XLIIIA PLOTCHAPTER XLIVA YOUNG GIRL’S THOUGHTSCHAPTER XLVIS IT A PLOT?CHAPTER XLVIONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNINGCHAPTER XLVIIAN OLD SWORDCHAPTER XLVIIICRUEL MOMENTSCHAPTER XLIXTHE OPERA BOUFFECHAPTER LTHE JAPANESE VASECHAPTER LITHE SECRET NOTECHAPTER LIITHE DISCUSSIONCHAPTER LIIITHE CLERGY, THE FORESTS, LIBERTYCHAPTER LIVSTRASBOURGCHAPTER LVTHE MINISTRY OF VIRTUECHAPTER LVIMORAL LOVECHAPTER LVIITHE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCHCHAPTER LVIIIMANON LESCAUTCHAPTER LIXENNUICHAPTER LXA BOX AT THE BOUFFESCHAPTER LXIFRIGHTEN HERCHAPTER LXIITHE TIGERCHAPTER LXIIITHE HELL OF WEAKNESSCHAPTER LXIVA MAN OF INTELLECTCHAPTER LXVA STORMCHAPTER LXVISAD DETAILSCHAPTER LXVIIA TURRETCHAPTER LXVIIIA POWERFUL MANCHAPTER LXIXTHE INTRIGUECHAPTER LXXTRANQUILITYCHAPTER LXXITHE TRIALCHAPTER LXXIICHAPTER LXXIIICHAPTER LXXIVCHAPTER LXXV