Julien could not breathe for astonishment . . . Mathilde found fault with herself for almost everything that she had done for him.
On mature reflection, she had decided that he was a creature, if not altogether common, at any rate not sufficiently conspicuous to deserve all the strange follies which she had ventured to commit for him. On the whole, she no longer thought of love; she was tired of love that day.
As for Julien, the emotions of his heart were those of a boy of sixteen. Harrowing doubt, bewilderment, despair, seized upon him by turns during this luncheon, which seemed to him to be everlasting.
As soon as he could decently rise from table, he flew rather than ran to the stable, saddled his horse himself and was off at a gallop; he was afraid of disgracing himself by some sign of weakness. ‘I must kill my heart by physical exhaustion,’ he said to himself as he galloped through the woods of Meudon. ‘What have I done, what have I said to deserve such disgrace?
‘I must do nothing, say nothing today,’ he decided as he returned to the house, ‘be dead in body as I am in spirit. Julien no longer lives, it is his corpse that is still stirring.’
Chapter 20
THE JAPANESE VASE
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His heart does not at first realise the whole extent of his misery: he is more disturbed than moved. But in proportion as his reason returns, he feels the depth of his misfortune. All the pleasures in life are as nothing to him, he can feel only the sharp points of the despair that is rending him. But what is the good of speaking of physical pain? What pain felt by the body alone is comparable to this?
JEAN-PAUL
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THE DINNER BELL RANG, Julien had barely time to dress; he found Mathilde in the drawing-room urging her brother and M. de Croisenois not to go and spend the evening with Madame la Marechale de Fervaques.
She could hardly have been more seductive and charming with them. After dinner they were joined by M. de Luz, M. de Caylus and several of their friends. One would have said that Mademoiselle de La Mole had resumed, together with the observance of sisterly affection, that of the strictest conventions. Although the weather that evening was charming, she insisted that they should not go out to the garden; she was determined not to be lured away from the armchair in which Madame de La Mole was enthroned. The blue sofa was the centre of the group, as in winter.
Mathilde was out of humour with the garden, or at least it seemed to her to be utterly boring: it was associated with the memory of Julien.
Misery destroys judgment. Our hero made the blunder of clinging to that little cane chair which in the past had witnessed such brilliant triumphs. This evening, nobody spoke to him; his presence passed as though unperceived or worse. Those of Mademoiselle de La Mole’s friends who were seated near him at the end of the sofa made an affectation of turning their backs on him, or so he thought.
‘It is a courtier’s disgrace,’ he concluded. He decided to study for a moment the people who were trying to crush him with their disdain.
M. de Luz’s uncle held an important post in the King’s Household, the consequence of which was that this gallant officer opened his conversation with each fresh arrival with the following interesting detail: His uncle had set off at seven o’clock for Saint–Cloud, and expected to spend the night there. This piece of news was introduced in the most casual manner, but it never failed to come out.
Upon observing M. de Croisenois with the severe eye of misery, Julien remarked the enormous influence which this worthy and amiable young man attributed to occult causes. So much so that he became moody and cross if he heard an event of any importance set down to a simple and quite natural cause. ‘There is a trace of madness there,’ Julien told himself. ‘This character bears a striking resemblance to that of the Emperor Alexander, as Prince Korasoff described him to me.’ During the first year of his stay in Paris, poor Julien, coming fresh from the Seminary, dazzled by the graces, so novel to him, of all these agreeable young men, could do nothing but admire them. Their true character was only now beginning to outline itself before his eyes.
‘I am playing an undignified part here,’ he suddenly decided. The next thing was how to leave his little cane chair in a fashion that should not be too awkward. He tried to think of one, he called for something original upon an imagination that was fully occupied elsewhere. He was obliged to draw upon his memory, which, it must be confessed, was by no means rich in resources of this order; the boy was still a thorough novice, so that his awkwardness was complete and attracted everyone’s attention when he rose to leave the drawing-room. Misery was all too evident in his whole deportment. He had been playing the part for three quarters of an hour of a troublesome inferior from whom people do not take the trouble to conceal what they think of him.
The critical observations which he had been making at the expense of his rivals prevented him, however, from taking his misfortune too seriously; he retained, to give support to his pride, the memory of what had occurred the night before last. ‘Whatever the advantages they may have over me,’ he thought as he went into the garden by himself, ‘Mathilde has not been to any of them what, on two occasions in my life, she has deigned to be to me.’
His sagacity went no farther. He failed entirely to understand the character of the singular person whom chance had now made absolute mistress of his whole happiness.
He devoted the next day to killing himself and his horse with exhaustion. He made no further attempt, that evening, to approach the blue sofa to which Mathilde was faithful. He remarked that Comte Norbert did not so much as deign to look at him when they met in the house. ‘He must be making an extraordinary effort,’ he thought, ‘he who is naturally so polite.’
For Julien, sleep would have meant happiness. Despite his bodily exhaustion, memories of a too seductive kind began to invade his whole imagination. He had not the intelligence to see that by his long rides through the forests round Paris, acting only upon himself and in no way upon the heart or mind of Mathilde, he was leaving the arrangement of his destiny to chance.
It seemed to him that one thing would supply boundless comfort to his grief: namely to speak to Mathilde. And yet what could he venture to say to her?
This was the question upon which one morning at seven o’clock he was pondering deeply, when suddenly he saw her enter the library.
‘I know, Sir, that you desire to speak to me.’
‘Great God! Who told you that?’
‘I know it, what more do you want? If you are lacking in honour, you may ruin me, or at least attempt to do so; but this danger, which I do not regard as real, will certainly not prevent me from being sincere. I no longer love you, Sir; my wild imagination misled me . . . ’
On receiving this terrible blow, desperate with love and misery, Julien tried to excuse himself. Nothing could be more absurd. Does one excuse oneself for failing to please? But reason no longer held any sway over his actions. A blind instinct urged him to postpone the decision of his fate. It seemed to him that so long as he was still speaking, nothing was definitely settled. Mathilde did not listen to his words, the sound of them irritated her, she could not conceive how he had the audacity to interrupt her.
The twofold remorse of her virtue and her pride made her, that morning, equally unhappy. She was more or less crushed by the frightful