Chapter 8
What Is the Decoration that Confers Distinction?
Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is thecoolest well in all the Diar Bekir.
PELLICOOne day Julien returned from the charming property of Villequier, onthe bank of the Seine, in which M. de La Mole took a special interest because, of all his estates, it was the only one that had belonged to the celebrated Boniface de La Mole. He found at the Hotel the Marquise andher daughter, who had returned from Hyeres.
Julien was now a dandy and understood the art of life in Paris. Hegreeted Mademoiselle de La Mole with perfect coolness. He appeared toremember nothing of the time when she asked him so gaily to tell her allabout his way of falling from his horse.
Mademoiselle de La Mole found him taller and paler. There was nolonger anything provincial about his figure or his attire; not so with hisconversation: this was still perceptibly too serious, too positive. In spiteof these sober qualities, and thanks to his pride, it conveyed no sense ofinferiority; one felt merely that he still regarded too many things as important. But one saw that he was a man who would stand by his word.
'He is wanting in lightness of touch, but not in intelligence,' Mademoiselle de La Mole said to her father, as she teased him over theCross he had given Julien. 'My brother has been asking you for it for thelast eighteen months, and he is a La Mole!'
'Yes; but Julien has novelty. That has never been the case with the LaMole you mention.'
M. le Duc de Retz was announced.
Mathilde felt herself seized by an irresistible desire to yawn; she recognised the antique decorations and the old frequenters of the paternal drawing-room. She formed an entirely boring picture of the life she wasgoing to resume in Paris. And yet at Hyeres she had longed for Paris.
'To think that I am nineteen!' she reflected: 'it is the age of happiness,according to all those gilt-edged idiots.' She looked at nine or tenvolumes of recent poetry that had accumulated, during her absence inProvence, on the drawing-room table. It was her misfortune to havemore intelligence than MM. de Croisenois, de Caylus, de Luz, and therest of her friends. She could imagine everything that they would say toher about the beautiful sky in Provence, poetry, the south, etc., etc.
Those lovely eyes, in which was revealed the most profound boredom,and, what was worse still, a despair of finding any pleasure, came to restupon Julien. At any rate, he was not exactly like all the rest.
'Monsieur Sorel,' she said in that short, sharp voice, with nothing feminine about it, which is used by young women of the highest rank,'Monsieur Sorel, are you coming to M. de Retz's ball tonight?'
'Mademoiselle, I have not had the honour to be presented to M. leDuc.' (One would have said that these words and the title burned the lipsof the proud provincial.)'He has asked my brother to bring you; and, if you came, you couldtell me all about Villequier; there is some talk of our going there in thespring. I should like to know whether the house is habitable, and if thecountry round it is as pretty as people say. There are so many undeserved reputations!'
Julien made no reply.
'Come to the ball with my brother,' she added, in the driest of tones.
Julien made a respectful bow. 'So, even in the middle of a ball, I mustrender accounts to all the members of the family. Am I not paid to betheir man of business?' In his ill humour, he added: 'Heaven only knowswhether what I tell the daughter may not upset the plans of her father,and brother, and mother! It is just like the court of a Sovereign Prince.
One is expected to be a complete nonentity, and at the same time give noone any grounds for complaint.
'How I dislike that great girl!' he thought, as he watched Mademoisellede La Mole cross the room, her mother having called her to introduce herto a number of women visitors. 'She overdoes all the fashions, her gownis falling off her shoulders … she is even paler than when she wentaway … What colourless hair, if that is what they call golden! You would say the light shone through it. How arrogant her way of bowing, of looking at people! What regal gestures!'
Mademoiselle de La Mole had called her brother back, as he was leaving the room.
Comte Norbert came up to Julien:
'My dear Sorel,' he began, 'where would you like me to call for you atmidnight for M. de Retz's ball? He told me particularly to bring you.'
'I know to whom I am indebted for such kindness,' replied Julien,bowing to the ground.
His ill humour, having no fault to find with the tone of politeness, indeed of personal interest, in which Norbert had addressed him, venteditself upon the reply which he himself had made to this friendly speech.
He detected a trace of servility in it.
That night, on arriving at the ball, he was struck by the magnificenceof the Hotel de Retz. The courtyard was covered with an immense crimson awning patterned with golden stars: nothing could have been moreelegant. Beneath this awning, the court was transformed into a grove oforange trees and oleanders in blossom. As their tubs had been carefullyburied at a sufficient depth, these oleanders and orange trees seemed tobe springing from the ground. The carriage drive had been sprinkledwith sand.
The general effect seemed extraordinary to our provincial. He had noidea that such magnificence could exist; in an instant his imagination hadtaken wings and flown a thousand leagues away from ill humour. In thecarriage, on their way to the ball, Norbert had been happy, and he hadseen everything in dark colours; as soon as they entered the courtyardtheir moods were reversed.
Norbert was conscious only of certain details, which, in the midst of allthis magnificence, had been overlooked. He reckoned up the cost ofeverything, and as he arrived at a high total, Julien remarked that he appeared almost jealous of the outlay and began to sulk.
As for Julien, he arrived spell-bound with admiration, and almost timid with excess of emotion in the first of the saloons in which the company were dancing. Everyone was making for the door of the secondroom, and the throng was so great that he found it impossible to move.
This great saloon was decorated to represent the Alhambra of Granada.
'She is the belle of the ball, no doubt about it,' said a young man withmoustaches, whose shoulder dug into Julien's chest.
'Mademoiselle Fourmont, who has been the reigning beauty allwinter,' his companion rejoined, 'sees that she must now take the secondplace: look how strangely she is frowning.'
'Indeed she is hoisting all her canvas to attract. Look, look at that gracious smile as soon as she steps into the middle in that country dance. Itis inimitable, upon my honour.'
'Mademoiselle de La Mole has the air of being in full control of thepleasure she derives from her triumph, of which she is very well aware.
One would say that she was afraid of attracting whoever speaks to her.'
'Precisely! That is the art of seduction.'
Julien was making vain efforts to catch a glimpse of this seductive woman; seven or eight men taller than himself prevented him from seeingher.
'There is a good deal of coquetry in that noble reserve,' went on theyoung man with the moustaches.
'And those big blue eyes which droop so slowly just at the momentwhen one would say they were going to give her away,' his companionadded. 'Faith, she's a past master.'
'Look how common the fair Fourmont appears beside her,' said athird.
'That air of reserve is as much as to say: "How charming I should makemyself to you, if you were the man that was worthy of me."'
'And who could be worthy of the sublime Mathilde?' said the first:
'Some reigning Prince, handsome, clever, well made, a hero in battle, andaged twenty at the most.'
'The natural son of the Emperor of Russia, for whom, on the occasionof such a marriage, a Kingdom would be created; or simply the Comtede Thaler, with his air of a peasant in his Sunday clothes … '
The passage was now cleared, Julien was free to enter.
'Since she appears so remarkable in the eyes of these puppets, it isworth my while to study her,' he thought. 'I shall understand what perfection means to these people.'
As he was trying to catch her eye, Mathilde looked at him. 'Duty callsme,' Julien said to himself, but his resentment was now confined to hisexpression. Curiosity made him step forward with a pleasure which thelow cut of the gown on Mathilda's shoulders rapidly enhanced, in amanner, it must be admitted, by no means flattering to his self-esteem.
'Her beauty has the charm of youth,' he thought. Five or six young men,among whom Julien recognised those whom he had heard talking in thedoorway, stood between her and him.
'You can tell me, Sir, as you have been here all the winter,' she said tohim, 'is it not true that this is the prettiest ball of the season?' He made noanswer.
'This Coulon quadrille seems to me admirable; and the ladies are dancing it quite perfectly.' The young men turned round to see who the fortunate person was who was being thus pressed for an answer. It was notencouraging.
'I should hardly be a good judge, Mademoiselle; I spend my time writing: this is the first ball on such a scale that I have seen.'
The moustached young men were shocked.
'You are a sage, Monsieur Sorel,' she went on with a more marked interest; 'you look upon all these balls, all these parties, like a philosopher,like a Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These follies surprise you without tempting you.'
A chance word had stifled Julien's imagination and banished every illusion from his heart. His lips assumed an expression of disdain that wasperhaps slightly exaggerated.
'Jean-Jacques Rousseau,' he replied, 'is nothing but a fool in my eyeswhen he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understandit, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.'
'He wrote the Contrat Social,' said Mathilde in a tone of veneration.
'For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchicaltitles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.'
'Ah, yes! The Due de Luxembourg at Montmorency accompanies a M.
Coindet on the road to Paris,' replied Mademoiselle de La Mole with theimpetuous delight of a first enjoyment of pedantry. She was overjoyed ather own learning, almost like the Academician who discovered the existence of King Feretrius. Julien's eye remained penetrating and stern.
Mathilde had felt a momentary enthusiasm; her partner's coldness disconcerted her profoundly. She was all the more astonished inasmuch asit was she who was in the habit of producing this effect upon otherpeople.
At that moment, the Marquis de Croisenois advanced eagerly towardsMademoiselle de La Mole. He stopped for a moment within a few feet of her, unable to approach her on account of the crowd. He looked at her,with a smile at the obstacle. The young Marquise de Rouvray was closebeside him; she was a cousin of Mathilde. She gave her arm to her husband, who had been married for only a fortnight. The Marquis de Rouvray, who was quite young also, showed all that fatuous love which seizesa man, who having made a 'suitable' marriage entirely arranged by thefamily lawyers, finds that he has a perfectly charming spouse. M. deRouvray would be a Duke on the death of an uncle of advanced years.
While the Marquis de Croisenois, unable to penetrate the throng,stood gazing at Mathilde with a smiling air, she allowed her large, sky-blue eyes to rest upon him and his neighbours. 'What could be duller,'
she said to herself, 'than all that group! Look at Croisenois who hopes tomarry me; he is nice and polite, he has perfect manners like M. de Rouvray. If they did not bore me, these gentlemen would be quite charming.
He, too, will come to balls with me with that smug, satisfied air. A yearafter we are married, my carriage, my horses, my gowns, my countryhouse twenty leagues from Paris, everything will be as perfect as possible, just what is needed to make an upstart burst with envy, aComtesse de Roiville for instance; and after that?
Mathilde let her mind drift into the future. The Marquis de Croisenoissucceeded in reaching her, and spoke to her, but she dreamed onwithout listening. The sound of his voice was lost in the hubbub of theball. Her eye mechanically followed Julien, who had moved away with arespectful, but proud and discontented air. She saw in a corner, alooffrom the moving crowd, Conte Altamira, who was under sentence ofdeath in his own country, as the reader already knows. Under Louis XIV,a lady of his family had married a Prince de Conti; this antecedent protected him to some extent from the police of the Congregation.
'I can see nothing but a sentence of death that distinguishes a man,'
thought Mathilde: 'it is the only thing that is not to be bought.
'Ah! There is a witty saying that I have wasted on myself! What a pitythat it did not occur to me when I could have made the most of it!' Mathilde had too much taste to lead up in conversation to a witticism prepared beforehand; but she had also too much vanity not to be delightedwith her own wit. An air of happiness succeeded the appearance of boredom in her face. The Marquis de Croisenois, who was still addressingher, thought he saw a chance of success, and doubled his loquacity.
'What fault would anyone have to find with my remark?' Mathildeasked herself. 'I should answer my critic: "A title of Baron, or Viscount, that can be bought; a Cross, that is given; my brother has just had one,what has he ever done? A step in promotion, that is obtained. Ten yearsof garrison duty, or a relative as Minister for War, and one becomes asquadron-commander, like Norbert. A great fortune! That is still themost difficult thing to secure, and therefore the most meritorious. Now isnot that odd? It is just the opposite to what all the books say … Well, tosecure a fortune, one marries M. Rothschild's daughter."'My remark is really subtle. A death sentence is still the only thing forwhich no one has ever thought of asking.
'Do you know Conte Altamira?' she asked M. de Croisenois.
She had the air of having come back to earth from so remote an abstraction, and this question bore so little relation to all that the poor Marquis had been saying to her for the last five minutes, that his friendlyfeelings were somewhat disconcerted. He was, however, a man of readywit, and highly esteemed in that capacity.
'Mathilde is certainly odd,' he thought; 'it is a drawback, but she givesher husband such a splendid social position! I cannot think how the Marquis de La Mole manages it; he is on intimate terms with the best peoplein every party, he is a man who cannot fall. Besides, this oddity in Mathilde may pass for genius. Given noble birth and an ample fortune, geniusis not to be laughed at, and then, what distinction! She has such a command, too, when she pleases, of that combination of wit, character andaptness, which makes conversation perfect… ' As it is hard to do twothings well at the same time, the Marquis answered Mathilde with a vacant air, and as though repeating a lesson:
'Who does not know poor Altamira?' and he told her the story of theabsurd, abortive conspiracy.
'Most absurd!' said Mathilde, as though speaking to herself, 'but he hasdone something. I wish to see a man; bring him to me,' she said to theMarquis, who was deeply shocked.
Conte Altamira was one of the most openly professed admirers of thehaughty and almost impertinent air of Mademoiselle de La Mole; shewas, according to him, one of the loveliest creatures in Paris.
'How beautiful she would be on a throne!' he said to M. de Croisenois,and made no difficulty about allowing himself to be led to her.
There are not wanting in society people who seek to establish the principle that nothing is in such bad tone as a conspiracy; it reeks of Jacobinism. And what can be more vile than an unsuccessful Jacobin?
Mathilde's glance derided Altamira's Liberalism to M. de Croisenois,but she listened to him with pleasure.
'A conspirator at a ball, it is a charming contrast,' she thought. In thisconspirator, with his black moustaches, she detected a resemblance to alion in repose; but she soon found that his mind had but one attitude:
utility, admiration for utility.
Excepting only what might bring to his country Two Chamber government, the young Count felt that nothing was worthy of his attention. Heparted from Mathilde, the most attractive person at the ball, with pleasure because he had seen a Peruvian General enter the room.
Despairing of Europe, poor Altamira had been reduced to hoping that,when the States of South America became strong and powerful, theymight restore to Europe the freedom which Mirabeau had sent to them.
10A swarm of young men with moustaches had gathered round Mathilde. She had seen quite well that Altamira was not attracted, and feltpiqued by his desertion of her; she saw his dark eye gleam as he spoke tothe Peruvian General. Mademoiselle de La Mole studied the youngFrenchmen with that profound seriousness which none of her rivals wasable to imitate. 'Which of them,' she thought, 'could ever be sentenced todeath, even allowing him the most favourable conditions?'
This singular gaze flattered those who had little intelligence, but disturbed the rest. They feared the explosion of some pointed witticismwhich it would be difficult to answer.
'Good birth gives a man a hundred qualities the absence of whichwould offend me: I see that in Julien's case,' thought Mathilde; 'but itdestroys those qualities of the spirit which make people be sentenced todeath.'
At that moment someone remarked in her hearing: 'That ConteAltamira is the second son of the Principe di San Nazaro-Pimentel; it wasa Pimentel who attempted to save Conradin, beheaded in 1268. They areone of the noblest families of Naples.'
'There,' Mathilde said to herself, 'is an excellent proof of my maxim:
Good birth destroys the strength of character without which people do10.This page, written on July 25, 1830, was printed on August 4. (Publisher's note.)—Le Rouge et le Noir was published in 1831. It was an order of July 25, 1830, dissolving the Chamber, which provoked the Revolution of the following days, the abdication of Charles X, and the accession of Louis-Phillippe—C. K. S. M.
not incur sentences of death. I seem fated to go wrong this evening. SinceI am only a woman like any other, well, I must dance.' She yielded to thepersistence of the Marquis de Croisenois, who for the last hour had beenpleading for a galop. To distract her thoughts from her philosophicalfailure, Mathilde chose to be perfectly bewitching; M. de Croisenois wasin ecstasies.
But not the dance, nor the desire to please one of the handsomest menat court, nothing could distract Mathilde. She could not possibly haveenjoyed a greater triumph. She was the queen of the ball, she knew it,but she remained cold.
'What a colourless life I shall lead with a creature like Croisenois,' shesaid to herself, as he led her back to her place an hour later … 'Whatpleasure can there be for me,' she went on sadly, 'if after an absence ofsix months, I do not find any in a ball which is the envy of all the womenin Paris? And moreover I am surrounded by the homage of a societywhich could not conceivably be more select. There is no plebeian element here except a few peers and a Julien or two perhaps. And yet,' sheadded, with a growing melancholy, 'what advantages has not fate bestowed on me! Birth, wealth, youth! Everything, alas, but happiness.
'The most dubious of my advantages are those of which they havebeen telling me all evening. Wit, I know I have, for obviously I frightenthem all. If they venture to broach a serious subject, after five minutes ofconversation they all arrive out of breath, and as though making a greatdiscovery, at something which I have been repeating to them for the lasthour. I am beautiful, I have that advantage for which Madame de Staelwould have sacrificed everything, and yet the fact remains that I am dying of boredom. Is there any reason why I should be less bored when Ihave changed my name to that of the Marquis de Croisenois?
'But, Lord!' she added, almost in tears, 'is he not a perfect man? He isthe masterpiece of the education of the age; one cannot look at himwithout his thinking of something pleasant, and even clever, to say toone; he is brave … But that Sorel is a strange fellow,' she said to herself,and the look of gloom in her eye gave place to a look of anger. 'I told himthat I had something to say to him, and he does not condescend toreturn!'