The young girls who have adorned this winter’s balls are certainly not lacking in prudence.
I do not think either that they can be accused of being unduly scornful of a brilliant fortune, horses, fine estates and all the guarantees of a pleasant position in society. Far from finding these advantages simply equivalent to boredom, they usually concentrate on them their most constant desires and devote to them such passion as their hearts possess.
Nor again is it love which is the dominant principle in the career of young men who, like Julien, are gifted with some talent; they attach themselves with an irresistible grip to some côterie, and when the côterie succeeds all the good things of society are rained upon them. Woe to the studious man who belongs to no côterie, even his smallest and most doubtful successes will constitute a grievance, and lofty virtue will rob him and triumph. Yes, monsieur, a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway. Sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes the mire of the pools of mud on the way, and the man who carries this mirror in his knapsack is forsooth to be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror! Rather accuse the main road where the mud is, or rather the inspector of roads who allows the water to accumulate and the mud to form.
Now that it is quite understood that Mathilde’s character is impossible in our own age, which is as discreet as it is virtuous, I am less frightened of offence by continuing the history of the follies of this charming girl.
During the whole of the following day she looked out for opportunities of convincing herself of her triumph over her mad passion. Her great aim was to displease Julien in everything; but not one of his movements escaped her.
Julien was too unhappy, and above all too agitated to appreciate so complicated a stratagem of passion. Still less was he capable of seeing how favourable it really was to him. He was duped by it. His unhappiness had perhaps never been so extreme. His actions were so little controlled by his intellect that if some mournful philosopher had said to him, “Think how to exploit as quickly as you can those symptoms which promise to be favourable to you. In this kind of head-love which is seen at Paris, the same mood cannot last more than two days,” he would not have understood him. But however ecstatic he might feel, Julien was a man of honour. Discretion was his first duty. He appreciated it. Asking advice, describing his agony to the first man who came along would have constituted a happiness analogous to that of the unhappy man who, when traversing a burning desert receives from heaven a drop of icy water. He realised the danger, was frightened of answering an indiscreet question by a torrent of tears, and shut himself up in his own room.
He saw Mathilde walking in the garden for a long time. When she at last left it, he went down there and approached the rose bush from which she had taken a flower.
The night was dark and he could abandon himself to his unhappiness without fear of being seen. It was obvious to him that mademoiselle de la Mole loved one of those young officers with whom she had chatted so gaily. She had loved him, but she had realised his little merit, “and as a matter of fact I had very little,” Julien said to himself with full conviction. “Taking me all round I am a very dull, vulgar person, very boring to others and quite unbearable to myself.” He was mortally disgusted with all his good qualities, and with all the things which he had once loved so enthusiastically; and it was when his imagination was in this distorted condition that he undertook to judge life by means of its aid. This mistake is typical of a superior man.
The idea of suicide presented itself to him several times; the idea was full of charm, and like a delicious rest; because it was the glass of iced water offered to the wretch dying of thirst and heat in the desert.
“My death will increase the contempt she has for me,” he exclaimed. “What a memory I should leave her.”
Courage is the only resource of a human being who has fallen into this last abyss of unhappiness. Julien did not have sufficient genius to say to himself, “I must dare,” but as he looked at the window of Mathilde’s room he saw through the blinds that she was putting out her light. He conjured up that charming room which he had seen, alas! once in his whole life. His imagination did not go any further.
One o’clock struck. Hearing the stroke of the clock and saying to himself, “I will climb up the ladder,” scarcely took a moment.
It was the flash of genius, good reasons crowded on his mind. “May I be more fortunate than before,” he said to himself. He ran to the ladder. The gardener had chained it up. With the help of the cock of one of his little pistols which he broke, Julien, who for the time being was animated by a superhuman force, twisted one of the links of the chain which held the ladder. He was master of it in a few minutes, and placed it against Mathilde’s window.
“She will be angry and riddle me with scornful words! What does it matter? I will give her a kiss, one last kiss. I will go up to my room and kill myself ... my lips will touch her cheek before I die.”
He flew up the ladder and knocked at the blind; Mathilde heard him after some minutes and tried to open the blind but the ladder was in the way. Julien hung to the iron hook intending to keep the blind open, and at the imminent risk of falling down, gave the ladder a violent shake which moved it a little. Mathilde was able to open the blind.
He threw himself into the window more dead than alive.
“So it is you, dear,” she said as she rushed into his arms.
The excess of Julien’s happiness was indescribable. Mathilde’s almost equalled his own.
She talked against herself to him and denounced herself.
“Punish me for my awful pride,” she said to him, clasping him in her arms so tightly as almost to choke him. “You are my master, dear, I am your slave. I must ask your pardon on my knees for having tried to rebel.” She left his arms to fall at his feet. “Yes,” she said to him, still intoxicated with happiness and with love, “you are my master, reign over me for ever. When your slave tries to revolt, punish her severely.”
In another moment she tore herself from his arms, and lit a candle, and it was only by a supreme effort that Julien could prevent her from cutting off a whole tress of her hair.
“I want to remind myself,” she said to him, “that I am your handmaid. If I am ever led astray again by my abominable pride, show me this hair and say, ‘It is not a question of the emotion which your soul may be feeling at present, you have sworn to obey, obey on your honour.’”
But it is wiser to suppress the description of so intense a transport of delirious happiness.
Julien’s unselfishness was equal to his happiness. “I must go down by the ladder,” he said to Mathilde, when he saw the dawn of day appear from the quarter of the east over the distant chimneys beyond the garden. “The sacrifice that I impose on myself is worthy of you. I deprive myself of some hours of the most astonishing happiness that a human soul can savour, but it is a sacrifice I make for the sake of your reputation. If you know my heart you will appreciate how violent is the strain to which I am putting myself. Will you always be to me what you are now? But honour speaks, it suffices. Let me tell you that since our last interview, thieves have not been the only object of suspicion. M. de la Mole has set a guard in the garden. M. Croisenois is surrounded by spies: they know what he does every night.”
Mathilde burst out laughing at this idea. Her mother and a chamber-maid were woken up, they suddenly began to speak to her through the door. Julien looked at her, she grew pale as she scolded the chamber-maid, and she did not deign to speak to her mother. “But suppose they think of opening the window, they will see the ladder,” Julien said to her.
He clasped her again in his arms, rushed on to the ladder, and slid, rather than climbed down; he was on the ground in a moment.
Three seconds after the ladder was in the avenue of pines, and Mathilde’s honour was saved. Julien returned to his room and found that he was bleeding and almost naked. He had wounded himself in sliding down in that dare-devil way.
Extreme happiness had made him regain all the energy of his character. If twenty men had presented themselves it would have proved at this moment only an additional pleasure to have attacked them unaided. Happily his military prowess was not put to the proof. He laid the ladder in its usual place and replaced the chain which held it. He did not forget to efface the mark which the ladder had left on the bed of exotic flowers under Mathilde’s window.
As he was moving his hand over the soft ground in the darkness and satisfying himself that the mark had entirely disappeared, he felt something fall down on his hands. It was a whole tress of Mathilde’s hair which she had cut off and thrown down to him.
She was at the window.
“That’s what your servant sends you,” she said to him in a fairly loud voice, “It is the sign of eternal gratitude. I renounce the exercise of my reason, be my master.”
Julien was quite overcome and was on the point of going to fetch the ladder again and climbing back into her room. Finally reason prevailed.
Getting back into the hôtel from the garden was not easy. He succeeded in forcing the door of a cellar. Once in the house he was obliged to break through the door of his room as silently as possible. In his agitation he had left in the little room which he had just abandoned so rapidly, the key which was in the pocket of his coat. “I only hope she thinks of hiding that fatal trophy,” he thought.
Finally fatigue prevailed over happiness, and as the sun was rising he fell into a deep sleep.
The breakfast bell only just managed to wake him up. He appeared in the dining-room. Shortly afterwards Mathilde came in. Julien’s pride felt deliciously flattered as he saw the love which shone in the eyes of this beautiful creature who was surrounded by so much homage; but soon his discretion had occasion to be alarmed.
Making an excuse of the little time that she had had to do her hair, Mathilde had arranged it in such a way that Julien could see at the first glance the full extent of the sacrifice that she had made for his sake, by cutting off her hair on the previous night.
If it had been possible to spoil so beautiful a face by anything whatsoever, Mathilde would have succeeded in doing it. A whole tress of her beautiful blonde hair was cut off to within half an inch of the scalp.
Mathilde’s whole manner during breakfast was in keeping with this initial imprudence. One might have said that she had made a specific point of trying to inform the whole world of her mad passion for Julien. Happily on this particular day M. de la Mole and the marquis were very much concerned about an approaching bestowal of “blue ribbons” which was going to take place, and in which M. de Chaulnes was not comprised. Towards the end of the meal, Mathilde, who was talking to Julien, happened to call him “My Master.” He blushed up to the whites of his eyes.
Mathilde was not left alone for an instant that day, whether by chance or the deliberate policy of madame de la Mole. In the evening when she passed from the dining-room into the salon, however, she managed to say to Julien: “You may be thinking I am making an excuse, but mamma has just decided that one of her women is to spend the night in my room.”
This day passed with lightning rapidity. Julien was at the zenith of happiness. At seven o’clock in the morning of the following day he installed himself in the library. He hoped the mademoiselle de la Mole would deign to appear there; he had written her an interminable letter. He only saw her several hours afterwards at breakfast. Her hair was done to-day with the very greatest care; a marvellous art had managed to hide the place where the hair had been cut. She looked at Julien once or twice, but her eyes were polite and calm, and there was no question of calling him “My Master.”
Julien’s astonishment prevented him from breathing—Mathilde was reproaching herself for all she had done for him. After mature reflection, she had come to the conclusion that he was a person who, though not absolutely commonplace, was yet not sufficiently different from the common ruck to deserve all the strange follies that she had ventured for his sake. To sum up she did not give love a single thought; on this particular day she was tired of loving.
As for Julien, his emotions were those of a child of sixteen. He was a successive prey to awful doubt, astonishment and despair during this breakfast which he thought would never end.
As soon as he could decently get up from the table, he flew rather than ran to the stable, saddled his horse himself, and galloped off. “I must kill my heart through sheer force of physical fatigue,” he said to himself as he galloped through the Meudon woods. “What have I done, what have I said to deserve a disgrace like this?”
“I must do nothing and say nothing to-day,” he thought as he re-entered the hôtel. “I must be as dead physically as I am morally.” Julien saw nothing any more, it was only his corpse which kept moving.
His heart does not first realise the full extremity of his unhappiness: he is more troubled than moved. But as reason returns he feels the depth of his misfortune. All the pleasures of life seem to have been destroyed, he can only feel the sharp barbs of a lacerating despair. But what is the use of talking of physical pain? What pain which is only felt by the body can be compared to this pain?—Jean Paul.
His heart does not first realise the full extremity of his unhappiness: he is more troubled than moved. But as reason returns he feels the depth of his misfortune. All the pleasures of life seem to have been destroyed, he can only feel the sharp barbs of a lacerating despair. But what is the use of talking of physical pain? What pain which is only felt by the body can be compared to this pain?—Jean Paul.
The dinner bell rang, Julien had barely time to dress: he found Mathilde in the salon. She was pressing her brother and M. de Croisenois to promise her that they would not go and spend the evening at Suresnes with madame the maréchale de Fervaques.
It would have been difficult to have shown herself more amiable or fascinating to them. M. de Luz, de Caylus and several of their friends came in after dinner. One would have said that mademoiselle de la Mole had commenced again to cultivate the most scrupulous conventionality at the same time as her sisterly affection. Although the weather was delightful this evening, she refused to go out into the garden, and insisted on their all staying near the arm-chair where madame de la Mole was sitting. The blue sofa was the centre of the group as it had been in the winter.
Mathilde was out of temper with the garden, or at any rate she found it absolutely boring: it was bound up with the memory of Julien.
Unhappiness blunts the edge of the intellect. Our hero had the bad taste to stop by that little straw chair which had formerly witnessed his most brilliant triumphs. To-day none spoke to him, his presence seemed to be unnoticed, and worse than that. Those of mademoiselle de la Mole’s friends who were sitting near him at the end of the sofa, made a point of somehow or other turning their back on him, at any rate he thought so.
“It is a court disgrace,” he thought. He tried to study for a moment the people who were endeavouring to overwhelm him with their contempt. M. de Luz had an important post in the King’s suite, the result of which was that the handsome officer began every conversation with every listener who came along by telling him this special piece of information. His uncle had started at seven o’clock for St. Cloud and reckoned on spending the night there. This detail was introduced with all the appearance of good nature but it never failed to be worked in. As Julien scrutinized M. de Croisenois with a stern gaze of unhappiness, he observed that this good amiable young man attributed a great influence to occult causes. He even went so far as to become melancholy and out of temper if he saw an event of the slightest importance ascribed to a simple and perfectly natural cause.
“There is an element of madness in this,” Julien said to himself. This man’s character has a striking analogy with that of the Emperor Alexander, such as the Prince Korasoff described it to me. During the first year of his stay in Paris poor Julien, fresh from the seminary and dazzled by the graces of all these amiable young people, whom he found so novel, had felt bound to admire them. Their true character was only beginning to become outlined in his eyes.
“I am playing an undignified rôle here,” he suddenly thought. The question was, how he could leave the little straw chair without undue awkwardness. He wanted to invent something, and tried to extract some novel excuse from an imagination which was otherwise engrossed. He was compelled to fall back on his memory, which was, it must be owned, somewhat poor in resources of this kind.
The poor boy was still very much out of his element, and could not have exhibited a more complete and noticeable awkwardness when he got up to leave the salon. His misery was only too palpable in his whole manner. He had been playing, for the last three quarters of an hour, the rôle of an officious inferior from whom one does not take the trouble to hide what one really thinks.
The critical observations he had just made on his rivals prevented him, however, from taking his own unhappiness too tragically. His pride could take support in what had taken place the previous day. “Whatever may be their advantages over me,” he thought, as he went into the garden alone, “Mathilde has never been to a single one of them what, twice in my life, she has deigned to be to me!” His penetration did not go further. He absolutely failed to appreciate the character of the extraordinary person whom chance had just made the supreme mistress of all his happiness.
He tried, on the following day, to make himself and his horse dead tired with fatigue. He made no attempt in the evening to go near the blue sofa to which Mathilde remained constant. He noticed that comte Norbert did not even deign to look at him when he met him about the house. “He must be doing something very much against the grain,” he thought; “he is naturally so polite.”
Sleep would have been a happiness to Julien. In spite of his physical fatigue, memories which were only too seductive commenced to invade his imagination. He had not the genius to see that, inasmuch as his long rides on horseback over forests on the outskirts of Paris only affected him, and had no affect at all on Mathilde’s heart or mind, he was consequently leaving his eventual destiny to the caprice of chance. He thought that one thing would give his pain an infinite relief: it would be to speak to Mathilde. Yet what would he venture to say to her?
He was dreaming deeply about this at seven o’clock one morning when he suddenly saw her enter the library.
“I know, monsieur, that you are anxious to speak to me.”
“Great heavens! who told you?”
“I know, anyway; that is enough. If you are dishonourable, you can ruin me, or at least try to. But this danger, which I do not believe to be real, will certainly not prevent me from being sincere. I do not love you any more, monsieur, I have been led astray by my foolish imagination.”
Distracted by love and unhappiness, as a result of this terrible blow, Julien tried to justify himself. Nothing could have been more absurd. Does one make any excuses for failure to please? But reason had no longer any control over his actions. A blind instinct urged him to get the determination of his fate postponed. He thought that, so long as he kept on speaking, all could not be over. Mathilde had not listened to his words; their sound irritated her. She could not conceive how he could have the audacity to interrupt her.
She was rendered equally unhappy this morning by remorseful virtue and remorseful pride. She felt to some extent pulverised by the idea of having given a little abbé, who was the son of a peasant, rights over her. “It is almost,” she said to herself, in those moments when she exaggerated her own misfortune, “as though I had a weakness for one of my footmen to reproach myself with.” In bold, proud natures there is only one step from anger against themselves to wrath against others. In these cases the very transports of fury constitute a vivid pleasure.
In a single minute mademoiselle de la Mole reached the point of loading Julien with the signs of the most extreme contempt. She had infinite wit, and this wit was always triumphant in the art of torturing vanity and wounding it cruelly.
For the first time in his life Julien found himself subjected to the energy of a superior intellect, which was animated against him by the most violent hate. Far from having at present the slightest thought of defending himself, he came to despise himself. Hearing himself overwhelmed with such marks of contempt which were so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinion that he might have of himself, he thought that Mathilde was right, and that she did not say enough.
As for her, she found it deliciously gratifying to her pride to punish in this way both herself and him for the adoration that she had felt some days previously.
She did not have to invent and improvise the cruel remarks which she addressed to him with so much gusto.
All she had to do was to repeat what the advocate of the other side had been saying against her love in her own heart for the last eight days.
Each word intensified a hundredfold Julien’s awful unhappiness. He wanted to run away, but mademoiselle de la Mole took hold of his arm authoritatively.
“Be good enough to remark,” he said to her, “that you are talking very loud. You will be heard in the next room.”
“What does it matter?” mademoiselle de la Mole answered haughtily. “Who will dare to say they have heard me? I want to cure your miserable vanity once and for all of any ideas you may have indulged in on my account.”
When Julien was allowed to leave the library he was so astonished that he was less sensitive to his unhappiness. “She does not love me any more,” he repeated to himself, speaking aloud as though to teach himself how he stood. “It seems that she has loved me eight or ten days, but I shall love her all my life.”
“Is it really possible she was nothing to me, nothing to my heart so few days back?”
Mathilde’s heart was inundated by the joy of satisfied pride. So she had been able to break with him for ever! So complete a triumph over so strong an inclination rendered her completely happy. “So this little gentleman will understand, once and for all, that he has not, and will never have, any dominion over me.” She was so happy that in reality she ceased to love at this particular moment.
In a less passionate being than Julien love would have become impossible after a scene of such awful humiliation. Without deviating for a single minute from the requirements of her own self-respect, mademoiselle de la Mole had addressed to him some of those unpleasant remarks which are so well thought out that they may seem true, even when remembered in cold blood.
The conclusion which Julien drew in the first moment of so surprising a scene, was that Mathilde was infinitely proud. He firmly believed that all was over between them for ever, and none the less, he was awkward and nervous towards her at breakfast on the following day. This was a fault from which up to now he had been exempt.
Both in small things as in big it was his habit to know what he ought and wanted to do, and he used to act accordingly.
The same day after breakfast madame de la Mole asked him for a fairly rare, seditious pamphlet which her curé had surreptitiously brought her in the morning, and Julien, as he took it from a bracket, knocked over a blue porcelain vase which was as ugly as it could possibly be.
Madame de la Mole got up, uttering a cry of distress, and proceeded to contemplate at close quarters the ruins of her beloved vase. “It was old Japanese,” she said. “It came to me from my great aunt, the abbess of Chelles. It was a present from the Dutch to the Regent, the Duke of Orleans, who had given it to his daughter....”
Mathilde had followed her mother’s movements, and felt delighted at seeing that the blue vase, that she had thought horribly ugly, was broken. Julien was taciturn, and not unduly upset. He saw mademoiselle de la Mole quite near him.
“This vase,” he said to her, “has been destroyed for ever. The same is the case with the sentiment which was once master of my heart. I would ask you to accept my apologies for all the pieces of madness which it has made me commit.” And he went out.
“One would really say,” said madame de la Mole, as he went out of the room, “that this M. Sorel is quite proud of what he has just done.”
These words went right home to Mathilde’s heart. “It is true,” she said to herself; “my mother has guessed right. That is the sentiment which animates him.” It was only then that she ceased rejoicing over yesterday’s scene. “Well, it is all over,” she said to herself, with an apparent calm. “It is a great lesson, anyway. It is an awful and humiliating mistake! It is enough to make me prudent all the rest of my life.”
“Why didn’t I speak the truth?” thought Julien. “Why am I still tortured by the love which I once had for that mad woman?”
Far, however, from being extinguished as he had hoped it would be, his love grew more and more rapidly. “She is mad, it is true,” he said to himself. “Is she any the less adorable for that? Is it possible for anyone to be prettier? Is not mademoiselle de la Mole the ideal quintessence of all the most vivid pleasures of the most elegant civilisation?” These memories of a bygone happiness seized hold of Julien’s mind, and quickly proceeded to destroy all the work of his reason.
It is in vain that reason wrestles with memories of this character. Its stern struggles only increase the fascination.
Twenty-four hours after the breaking of the Japanese vase, Julien was unquestionably one of the most unhappy men in the world.
I have seen everything I relate, and if I may have made a mistake when I saw it, I am certainly not deceiving you in telling you of it.Letter to the author.
I have seen everything I relate, and if I may have made a mistake when I saw it, I am certainly not deceiving you in telling you of it.Letter to the author.
The marquis summoned him; M. de la Mole looked rejuvenated, his eye was brilliant.
“Let us discuss your memory a little,” he said to Julien, “it is said to be prodigious. Could you learn four pages by heart and go and say them at London, but without altering a single word?”
The marquis was irritably fingering, the day’sQuotidienne, and was trying in vain to hide an extreme seriousness which Julien had never noticed in him before, even when discussing the Frilair lawsuit.
Julien had already learned sufficient manners to appreciate that he ought to appear completely taken in by the lightness of tone which was being manifested.
“This number of theQuotidienneis not very amusing possibly, but if M. the marquis will allow me, I shall do myself the honour to-morrow morning of reciting it to him from beginning to end.”
“What, even the advertisements?”
“Quite accurately and without leaving out a word.”
“You give me your word?” replied the marquis with sudden gravity.
“Yes, monsieur; the only thing which could upset my memory is the fear of breaking my promise.”
“The fact is, I forgot to put this question to you yesterday: I am not going to ask for your oath never to repeat what you are going to hear. I know you too well to insult you like that. I have answered for you. I am going to take you into a salon where a dozen persons will he assembled. You will make a note of what each one says.
“Do not be uneasy. It will not be a confused conversation by any means. Each one will speak in his turn, though not necessarily in an orderly manner,” added the marquis falling back into that light, subtle manner which was so natural to him. “While we are talking, you will write out twenty pages and will come back here with me, and we will get those twenty pages down to four, and those are the four pages you will recite to me to-morrow morning instead of the four pages of theQuotidienne. You will leave immediately afterwards. You must post about like a young man travelling on pleasure. Your aim will be to avoid attracting attention. You will arrive at the house of a great personage. You will there need more skill. Your business will then be to take in all his entourage, for among his secretaries and his servants are some people who have sold themselves to our enemies, and who spy on our travelling agents in order to intercept them.
“You will have an insignificant letter of introduction. At the moment his Excellency looks at you, you will take out this watch of mine, which I will lend you for the journey. Wear it now, it will be so much done; at any rate give me yours.
“The duke himself will be good enough to write at your dictation the four pages you have learnt by heart.
“Having done this, but not earlier, mind you, you can, if his Excellency questions you, tell him about the meeting at which you are now going to be present.
“You will be prevented from boring yourself on the journey between Paris and the minister’s residence by the thought that there are people who would like nothing better than to fire a shot at M. the abbé Sorel. In that case that gentleman’s mission will be finished, and I see a great delay, for how are we to know of your death, my dear friend? Even your zeal cannot go to the length of informing us of it.
“Run straight away and buy a complete suit,” went on the marquis seriously. “Dress in the fashion of two years ago. To-night you must look somewhat badly groomed. When you travel, on the other hand, you will be as usual. Does this surprise you? Does your suspiciousness guess the secret? Yes, my friend, one of the venerable personages you are going to hear deliver his opinion, is perfectly capable of giving information as the result of which you stand a very good chance of being given at least opium some fine evening in some good inn where you will have asked for supper.”
“It is better,” said Julien, “to do an extra thirty leagues and not take the direct road. It is a case of Rome, I suppose....” The marquis assumed an expression of extreme haughtiness and dissatisfaction which Julien had never seen him wear since Bray-le-Haut.
“That is what you will know, monsieur, when I think it proper to tell you. I do not like questions.”
“That was not one,” answered Julien eagerly. “I swear, monsieur, I was thinking quite aloud. My mind was trying to find out the safest route.”
“Yes, it seems your mind was a very long way off. Remember that an emissary, and particularly one of your age should not appear to be a man who forces confidences.”
Julien was very mortified; he was in the wrong. His vanity tried to find an excuse and did not find one.
“You understand,” added monsieur de la Mole, “that one always falls back on one’s heart when one has committed some mistake.”
An hour afterwards Julien was in the marquis’s ante-chamber. He looked quite like a servant with his old clothes, a tie of a dubious white, and a certain touch of the usher in his whole appearance. The marquis burst out laughing as he saw him, and it was only then that Julien’s justification was complete.
“If this young man betrays me,” said M. de la Mole to himself, “whom is one to trust? And yet, when one acts, one must trust someone. My son and his brilliant friends of the same calibre have as much courage and loyalty as a hundred thousand men. If it were necessary to fight, they would die on the steps of the throne. They know everything—except what one needs in emergency. Devil take me if I can find a single one among them who can learn four pages by heart and do a hundred leagues without being tracked down. Norbert would know how to sell his life as dearly as his grandfathers did. But any conscript could do as much.”
The marquis fell into a profound reverie. “As for selling one’s life too,” he said with a sigh, “perhaps this Sorel would manage it quite as well as he could.
“Let us get into the carriage,” said the marquis as though to chase away an unwanted idea.
“Monsieur,” said Julien, “while they were getting this suit ready for me, I learnt the first page of to-daysQuotidienneby heart.”
The marquis took the paper. Julien recited it without making a single mistake. “Good,” said the marquis, who this night felt very diplomatic. “During the time he takes over this our young man will not notice the streets through which we are passing.”
They arrived in a big salon that looked melancholy enough and was partly upholstered in green velvet. In the middle of the room a scowling lackey had just placed a big dining-table which he subsequently changed into a writing-table by means of an immense green inkstained tablecloth which had been plundered from some minister.
The master of the house was an enormous man whose name was not pronounced. Julien thought he had the appearance and eloquence of a man who ruminated. At a sign from the marquis, Julien had remained at the lower end of the table. In order to keep himself in countenance, he began to cut quills. He counted out of the corner of his eye seven visitors, but Julien could only see their backs. Two seemed to him to be speaking to M. de la Mole on a footing of equality, the others seemed more or less respectful.
A new person entered without being announced. “This is strange,” thought Julien. “People are not announced in this salon. Is this precaution taken in my honour?” Everybody got up to welcome the new arrival. He wore the same extremely distinguished decoration as three of the other persons who were in the salon. They talked fairly low. In endeavouring to form an opinion of the new comer, Julien was reduced to seeing what he could learn from his features and his appearance. He was short and thick-set. He had a high colour and a brilliant eye and an expression that looked like a malignant boar, and nothing else.
Julien’s attention was partly distracted by the almost immediate arrival of a very different kind of person. It was a tall very thin man who wore three or four waistcoats. His eye was caressing, his demeanour polite.
“He looks exactly like the old bishop of Besançon,” thought Julien. This man evidently belonged to the church, was apparently not more than fifty to fifty-five years of age, and no one could have looked more paternal than he did.
The young bishop of Agde appeared. He looked very astonished when, in making a scrutiny of those present, his gaze fell upon Julien. He had not spoken to him since the ceremony of Bray-le-Haut. His look of surprise embarrassed and irritated Julien. “What!” he said to himself, “will knowing a man always turn out unfortunate for me? I don’t feel the least bit intimidated by all those great lords whom I have never seen, but the look of that young bishop freezes me. I must admit that I am a very strange and very unhappy person.”
An extremely swarthy little man entered noisily soon afterwards and started talking as soon as he reached the door. He had a yellow complexion and looked a little mad. As soon as this ruthless talker arrived, the others formed themselves into knots with the apparent object of avoiding the bother of listening to him.
As they went away from the mantelpiece they came near the lower end of the table where Julien was placed. His countenance became more and more embarrassed, for whatever efforts he made, he could not avoid hearing, and in spite of all his lack of experience he appreciated all the moment of the things which they were discussing with such complete frankness, and the importance which the high personages whom he apparently had under his observation must attach to their being kept secret.
Julien had already cut twenty quills as slowly as possible; this distraction would shortly be no longer available. He looked in vain at M. de la Mole’s eyes for an order; the marquis had forgotten him.
“What I am doing is ridiculous,” he said to himself as he cut his quills, “but persons with so mediocre an appearance and who are handling such great interests either for themselves or for others must be extremely liable to take offence. My unfortunate look has a certain questioning and scarcely respectful expression, which will doubtless irritate them. But if I palpably lower my eyes I shall look as if I were picking up every word they said.”
His embarrassment was extreme, he was listening to strange things.
The republic:—For one man to day who will sacrifice everything for the public welfare, there are thousands and millions who think of nothing except their enjoyments and their vanity. One is requested in Paris by reason of the qualities not of one’s self but of one’s carriage.—NAPOLEON, Memorial.
The republic:—For one man to day who will sacrifice everything for the public welfare, there are thousands and millions who think of nothing except their enjoyments and their vanity. One is requested in Paris by reason of the qualities not of one’s self but of one’s carriage.—NAPOLEON, Memorial.
The footman rushed in saying “Monsieur the duke de ——”
“Hold your tongue, you are just a fool,” said the duke as he entered. He spoke these words so well, and with so much majesty, that Julien could not help thinking this great person’s accomplishments were limited to the science of snubbing a lackey. Julien raised his eyes and immediately lowered them. He had so fully appreciated the significance of the new arrival that he feared that his look might be an indiscretion.
The duke was a man of fifty dressed like a dandy and with a jerky walk. He had a narrow head with a large nose and a face that jutted forward; it would have been difficult to have looked at the same time more insignificant. His arrival was the signal for the opening of the meeting.
Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical observations by de la Mole’s voice. “I present to you M. the abbé Sorel,” said the Marquis. “He is gifted with an astonishing memory; it is scarcely an hour ago since I spoke to him of the mission by which he might be honoured, and he has learned the first page of theQuotidienneby heart in order to give proof of his memory.”
“Ah! foreign news of that poor N—” said the master of the house. He took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered humorous by its own self-importance. “Speak, monsieur,” he said to him.
The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines, “That is enough.” The little man who looked like a boar sat down. He was the president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him. Julien established himself at it with writing materials. He counted twelve persons seated round the green table cloth.
“M. Sorel,” said the Duke, “retire into next room, you will be called.”
The master of the house began to look very anxious. “The shutters are not shut,” he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper. “It is no good looking out of the window,” he stupidly cried to Julien—“so here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy,” thought the latter. “Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Grève. Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis, and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him.”
While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory for ever. He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way. Julien was left to his own reflections for a long time. He was in a salon upholstered in red velvet with large pieces of gold lace. A large ivory crucifix was on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M. de Maistre’s bookThe Popewas on the mantelpiece. Julien opened it so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. From time to time they talked loudly in the next room. At last the door was opened and he was called in.
“Remember, gentlemen,” the president was saying “that from this moment we are talking in the presence of the duke of ——. This gentleman,” he said, pointing to Julien, “is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily our very slightest words.”
“It is your turn to speak, Monsieur,” he said pointing to the paternal looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.
(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of dots. “That,” said his publisher, “would be clumsy and in the case of so light a work clumsiness is death.”
“Politics,” replies the author, “is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half, who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the morning paper in its own drastic manner.”
“If your characters don’t talk politics,” replied the publisher, “they cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as you claim?”)
Julien’s record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed either offensive or intolerable (see theGazette des Tribunaux).
The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first before the duke (“but what duke is it?” thought Julien to himself) with the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,
“Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution. If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions there is nothing decisive except personal methods.”
“Ah! praising assassination again!” said the master of the house anxiously.
“Spare us your sentimental sermons,” cried the president angrily. His boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. “Go on,” he said to the man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president became purple.
“Noble England,” replied the advocate-general, “is crushed to-day: for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the Jacobins. She has no more Pitt.”
“She has the Duke of Wellington,” said a military personage looking very important.
“Please, gentlemen, silence,” exclaimed the president. “If we are still going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in.”
“We know that monsieur has many ideas,” said the duke irritably, looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside himself with rage.
“There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen,” went on the speaker with all the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his listeners to reason. “If there were a new Pitt in England, you would not dupe a nation twice over by the same means.”
“That’s why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward impossible in France,” exclaimed the military interrupter.
On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the speaker was put upon his mettle.
“My audience is eager for me to finish,” he said vigorously, completely discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that Julien thought had expressed his character so well. “It is eager for me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to offend nobody’s ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will be brief.
“I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases,” continued the speaker, becoming more and more animated, “I will say this to you: Help yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia—who will only have courage but have no money—cannot launch more than one or two campaigns against France.
“One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes, in the third campaign—in the third campaign I say—you will have the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792.”
At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four quarters.
“Monsieur,” said the president to Julien, “Go and make a précis in the next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out.”
Julien went out to his great regret. The speaker was just dealing with the question of probabilities which formed the usual subject for his meditations. “They are frightened of my making fun of them,” he thought. When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,
“Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, ‘is it god, table or tub?’ especially applicable to this unhappy people. ‘It is god’ exclaims the writer of fables. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and profound phrase seems to apply. Act on your own initiative, and noble France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.
“England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia would only be able to give battle two or three times. Would that be sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817? I do not think so.”
At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes of the whole room. It came again from the old Imperial general who wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the secret note.
“I do not think so,” replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had subsided. He laid stress on the “I” with an insolence which charmed Julien.
“That’s a pretty piece of acting,” he said to himself, as he made his pen almost keep pace with the marquis’ words.
M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a well turned phrase.
“It is not only on foreign powers,” continued the marquis in a more even tone, “on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military occupation. All those young men who write inflammatory articles in theGlobewill provide you with three or four thousand young captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good intentions of a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru.”
“We did not know how to glorify him,” said the president. “He should have been immortalized.”
“Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties,” went on M. de la Mole; “but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut lines of cleavage. Let us realise what has got to be crushed. On the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public opinion; youth and all that admire it. While it is stupefying itself with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of administrating the expenditure of the budget.”
At this point there was another interruption.
“As for you, monsieur,” said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, “you do not spend, if the words chokes you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from the civil list.”
“Well, monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to take you for an example. Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their lives in its service. You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of a rebellion would frighten you yourselves.”
“Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen, so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.
“Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews, of real gentlemen, in fact. Each of them will have beside him not a little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815 turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau. Our gentleman will have educated him, it will be his own foster brother if it is possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth of his income in order to form this little devoted force of five hundred men in each department. Then you will be able to reckon on a foreign occupation. The foreign soldier will never penetrate even as far as Dijon if he is not certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each department.
“The foreign kings will only listen to you when you are in a position to announce to them that you have twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms in order to open to them the gates of France. The service is troublesome, you say. Gentlemen, it is the only way of saving our lives. There is war to the death between the liberty of the press and our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers, become peasants, or take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open your eyes.
“‘Form your battalions,’ I would say to you in the words of the Jacobin songs. Some noble Gustavus Adolphus will then be found who, touched by the imminent peril of the monarchical principle, will make a dash three hundred leagues from his own country, and will do for you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Do you want to go on talking without acting? In fifty years’ time there will be only presidents or republics in Europe and not one king, and with those three letters R. O. I. you will see the last of the priests and the gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying court to squalid majorities.
“It is no use your saying that at the present time France has not a single accredited general who is universally known and loved, that the army is only known and organised in the interests of the throne and the church, and that it has been deprived of all its old troopers, while each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments count fifty non-commissioned officers who have seen fire.
“Two hundred thousand young men of the middle classes are spoiling for war—”
“A truce to disagreeable truths,” said a grave personage in a pompous tone. He was apparently a very high ecclesiastical dignitary, for M. de la Mole smiled pleasantly, instead of getting angry, a circumstance which greatly impressed Julien.
“A truce to unpleasant truths, let us resume, gentlemen. The man who needs to have a gangrened leg cut off would be ill advised to say to his surgeon, ‘this disease is very healthy.’ If I may use the metaphor, gentlemen, the noble duke of —— is our surgeon.”
“So the great words have at last been uttered,” thought Julien. “It is towards the —— that I shall gallop to-night.”
The first law of every being, is to preserve itself and live. You sow hemlock, and expect to see ears of corn ripen.—Machiavelli.
The first law of every being, is to preserve itself and live. You sow hemlock, and expect to see ears of corn ripen.—Machiavelli.
The great personage continued. One could see that he knew his subject. He proceeded to expound the following great truths with a soft and tempered eloquence with which Julien was inordinately delighted:—
“1. England has not a guinea to help us with; economy and Hume are the fashion there. Even the saints will not give us any money, and M. Brougham will make fun of us.
“2. The impossibility of getting the kings of Europe to embark on more than two campaigns without English gold; two campaigns will not be enough to dispose of the middle classes.
“3. The necessity of forming an armed party in France. Without this, the monarchical principle in Europe will not risk even two campaigns.
“The fourth point which I venture to suggest to you, as self-evident, is this:
“The impossibility of forming an armed party in France without the clergy. I am bold enough to tell you this because I will prove it to you, gentlemen. You must make every sacrifice for the clergy.
“Firstly, because as it is occupied with its mission by day and by night, and guided by highly capable men established far from these storms at three hundred leagues from your frontiers——”
“Ah, Rome, Rome!” exclaimed the master of the house.
“Yes, monsieur, Rome,” replied the Cardinal haughtily. “Whatever more or less ingenious jokes may have been the fashion when you were young, I have no hesitation in saying that in 1830 it is only the clergy, under the guidance of Rome, who has the ear of the lower classes.
“Fifty thousand priests repeat the same words on the day appointed by their chiefs, and the people—who after all provide soldiers—will be more touched by the voices of its priests than by all the versifying in the whole world.” (This personality provoked some murmurs.)
“The clergy has a genius superior to yours,” went on the cardinal raising his voice. “All the progress that has been made towards this essential point of having an armed party in France has been made by us.” At this juncture facts were introduced. “Who used eighty thousand rifles in Vendée?” etc., etc.
“So long as the clergy is without its forests it is helpless. At the first war the minister of finance will write to his agents that there is no money to be had except for the curé. At bottom France does not believe, and she loves war. Whoever gives her war will be doubly popular, for making war is, to use a vulgar phrase, the same as starving the Jesuits; making war means delivering those monsters of pride—the men of France—from the menace of foreign intervention.”
The cardinal had a favourable hearing. “M. de Nerval,” he said, “will have to leave the ministry, his name irritates and to no purpose.”
At these words everybody got up and talked at the same time. “I will be sent away again,” thought Julien, but the sapient president himself had forgotten both the presence and existence of Julien.
All eyes were turned upon a man whom Julien recognised. It was M. de Nerval, the prime minister, whom he had seen at M. the duc de Retz’s ball.
The disorder was at its height, as the papers say when they talk of the Chamber. At the end of a long quarter of an hour a little quiet was established.
Then M. de Nerval got up and said in an apostolic tone and a singular voice:
“I will not go so far as to say that I do not set great store on being a minister.
“It has been demonstrated to me, gentlemen, that my name will double the forces of the Jacobins by making many moderates divide against us. I should therefore be willing to retire; but the ways of the Lord are only visible to a small number; but,” he added, looking fixedly at the cardinal, “I have a mission. Heaven has said: ‘You will either loose your head on the scaffold or you will re-establish the monarchy of France and reduce the Chambers to the condition of the parliament of Louis XV.,’ and that, gentlemen, I shall do.”
He finished his speech, sat down, and there was a long silence.
“What a good actor,” thought Julien. He made his usual mistake of ascribing too much intelligence to the people. Excited by the debates of so lively an evening, and above all by the sincerity of the discussion, M. de Nerval did at this moment believe in his mission. This man had great courage, but at the same time no sense.
During the silence that followed the impressive words, “I shall do it,” midnight struck. Julien thought that the striking of the clock had in it a certain element of funereal majesty. He felt moved.
The discussion was soon resumed with increasing energy, and above all with an incredible naivety. “These people will have me poisoned,” thought Julien at times. “How can they say such things before a plebian.”
They were still talking when two o’clock struck. The master of the house had been sleeping for some time. M. de la Mole was obliged to ring for new candles. M. de Nerval, the minister, had left at the quarter to two, but not without having repeatedly studied Julien’s face in a mirror which was at the minister’s side. His departure had seemed to put everybody at their ease.
While they were bringing new candles, the man in the waistcoats, whispered to his neighbour: “God knows what that man will say to the king. He may throw ridicule upon us and spoil our future.”
“One must own that he must possess an unusual self-assurance, not to say impudence, to put in an appearance here There were signs of it before he became a minister; but a portfolio changes everything and swamps all a man’s interests; he must have felt its effect.”
The minister had scarcely left before the general of Buonaparte closed his eyes. He now talked of his health and his wounds, consulted his watch, and went away.
“I will wager,” said the man in the waistcoats, “that the general is running after the minister; he will apologise for having been here and pretend that he is our leader.”
“Let us now deliberate, gentlemen,” said the president, after the sleepy servants had finished bringing and lighting new candles. “Let us leave off trying to persuade each other. Let us think of the contents of the note which will be read by our friends outside in forty-eight hours from now. We have heard ministers spoken of. Now that M. de Nerval has left us, we are at liberty to say ‘what we do care for ministers.’”
The cardinal gave a subtle smile of approval.
“Nothing is easier it seems to me than summing up our position,” said the young bishop of Agde, with the restrained concentrated fire of the most exalted fanaticism. He had kept silent up to this time; his eye, which Julien had noticed as being soft and calm at the beginning, had become fiery during the first hour of the discussion. His soul was now bubbling over like lava from Vesuvius.
“England only made one mistake from 1806 to 1814,” he said, “and that was in not taking direct and personal measures against Napoleon. As soon as that man had made dukes and chamberlains, as soon as he had re-established the throne, the mission that God had entrusted to him was finished. The only thing to do with him was to sacrifice him. The scriptures teach us in more than one place how to make an end of tyrants” (at this point there were several Latin quotations).
“To-day, gentlemen, it is not a man who has to be sacrificed, it is Paris. What is the use of arming your five hundred men in each department, a hazardous and interminable enterprise? What is the good of involving France in a matter which is personal to Paris? Paris alone has done the evil, with its journals and it salons. Let the new Babylon perish.
“We must bring to an end the conflict between the church and Paris. Such a catastrophe would even be in the worldly interests of the throne. Why did not Paris dare to whisper a word under Buonaparte? Ask the cannon of Saint-Roch?”
Julien did not leave with M. de la Mole before three o’clock in the morning.
The marquis seemed tired and ashamed. For the first time in his life in conversation with Julien, his tone was plaintive. He asked him for his word never to reveal the excesses of zeal, that was his expression, of which chance had just made him a witness. “Only mention it to our foreign friend, if he seriously insists on knowing what our young madmen are like. What does it matter to them if a state is overthrown, they will become cardinals and will take refuge in Rome. As for us, we shall be massacred by the peasants in our châteaus.”
The secret note into which the marquis condensed Julien’s full report of twenty-six pages was not ready before a quarter to five.
“I am dead tired,” said the marquis, “as is quite obvious from the lack of clearness at the end of this note; I am more dissatisfied with it than with anything I ever did in my whole life. Look here, my friend,” he added, “go and rest for some hours, and as I am frightened you might be kidnapped, I shall lock you up in your room.”
The marquis took Julien on the following day to a lonely château at a good distance from Paris. There were strange guests there whom Julien thought were priests. He was given a passport which was made out in a fictitious name, but indicated the real destination of his journey, which he had always pretended not to know. He got into a carriage alone.
The marquis had no anxiety on the score of his memory. Julien had recited the secret note to him several times but he was very apprehensive of his being intercepted.
“Above all, mind you look like a coxcomb who is simply travelling to kill time,” he said affectionately to him when he was leaving the salon. “Perhaps there was more than one treacherous brother in this evening’s meeting.”
The journey was quick and very melancholy. Julien had scarcely got out of the marquis’s sight before he forgot his secret note and his mission, and only thought about Mathilde’s disdain.
At a village some leagues beyond Metz, the postmaster came and told him that there were no horses. It was ten o’clock in the evening. Julien was very annoyed and asked for supper. He walked in front of the door and gradually without being noticed passed into the stable-yard. He did not see any horses there.
“That man looked strange though,” thought Julien to himself. “He was scrutinizing me with his brutal eyes.”
As one sees he was beginning to be slightly sceptical of all he heard. He thought of escaping after supper, and in order to learn at any rate something about the surrounding country, he left his room to go and warm himself at the kitchen fire. He was overjoyed to find there the celebrated singer, signor Geronimo.
The Neopolitan was ensconced in an armchair which he had had brought near the fire. He was groaning aloud, and was speaking more to himself than to the twenty dumbfounded German peasants who surrounded him.
“Those people will be my ruin,” he cried to Julien, “I have promised to sing to-morrow at Mayence. Seven sovereign princes have gone there to hear me. Let us go and take the air,” he added, meaningly.
When he had gone a hundred yards down the road, and it was impossible to be overheard, he said to Julien:
“Do you know the real truth, the postmaster is a scoundrel. When I went out for a walk I gave twenty sous to a little ragamuffin who told me everything. There are twelve horses in the stable at the other end of the village. They want to stop some courier.”
“Really,” said Julien innocently.
Discovering the fraud was not enough; the thing was to get away, but Geronimo and his friends could not succeed in doing this.
“Let us wait for daybreak,” said the singer at last, “they are mistrustful of us. It is perhaps you or me whom they suspect. We will order a good breakfast to-morrow morning, we will go for a walk while they are getting it ready, we will then escape, we will hire horses, and gain the next station.”
“And how about your luggage?” said Julien, who thought perhaps Geronimo himself might have been sent to intercept him. They had to have supper and go to bed. Julien was still in his first sleep when he was woken up with a start by the voices of two persons who were speaking in his room with utmost freedom.
He recognised the postmaster armed with a dark lantern. The light was turned on the carriage-seat which Julien had had taken up into his room. Beside the postmaster was a man who was calmly searching the open seat. Julien could see nothing except the sleeves of his coat which were black and very tight.
“It’s a cassock,” he said to himself and he softly seized the little pistol which he had placed under his pillow.
“Don’t be frightened of his waking up, curé,” said the postmaster, “the wine that has been served him was the stuff prepared by yourself.”
“I can’t find any trace of papers,” answered the curé. “A lot of linen and essences, pommades, and vanities. It’s a young man of the world on pleasure bent. The other one who effects an Italian accent is more likely to be the emissary.”
The men approached Julien to search the pockets of his travelling coat. He felt very tempted to kill them for thieves. Nothing could be safer in its consequences. He was very desirous of doing so.... “I should only be a fool,” he said to himself, “I should compromise my mission.” “He is not a diplomatist,” said the priest after searching his coat. He went away and did well to do so.
“It will be a bad business for him,” Julien was saying to himself, “if he touches me in my bed. He may have quite well come to stab me, and I won’t put up with that.”
The curé turned his head, Julien half opened his eyes. He was inordinately astonished, he was the abbé Castanède. As a matter of fact, although these two persons had made a point of talking in a fairly low voice, he had thought from the first that he recognised one of the voices. Julien was seized with an inordinate desire to purge the earth of one of its most cowardly villains; “But my mission,” he said to himself.
The curé and his acolyte went out. A quarter of an hour afterwards Julien pretended to have just woken up. He called out and woke up the whole house.
“I am poisoned,” he exclaimed, “I am suffering horribly!” He wanted an excuse to go to Geronimo’s help. He found him half suffocated by the laudanum that had been contained in the wine.
Julien had been apprehensive of some trick of this character and had supped on some chocolate which he had brought from Paris. He could not wake Geronimo up sufficiently to induce him to leave.
“If they were to give me the whole kingdom of Naples,” said the singer, “I would not now give up the pleasure of sleeping.”
“But the seven sovereign princes?”
“Let them wait.”
Julien left alone, and arrived at the house of the great personage without other incident. He wasted a whole morning in vainly soliciting an audience. Fortunately about four o’clock the duke wanted to take the air. Julien saw him go out on foot and he did not hesitate to ask him for alms. When at two yards’ distance from the great personage he pulled out the Marquis de la Mole’s watch and exhibited it ostentatiously. “Follow me at a distance,” said the man without looking at him.
At a quarter of a league’s distance the duke suddenly entered a littlecoffee-house. It was in a room of this low class inn that Julien had the honour of reciting his four pages to the duke. When he had finished he was told to “start again and go more slowly.”