"He lacks lightness of touch, but not brains," said mademoiselle de la Mole to her father, as she rallied him on the cross that he had given Julien.
"My brother has been asking you for it for sixteen months, and he is a La Mole."
"Yes, but Julien has surprises, and that's what the de la Mole, whom you were referring to, has never been guilty of."
M. the duc de Retz was announced.
Mathilde felt herself seized by an irresistible attack of yawning. She knew so well the old gildings and the old habitues of her father's salon.
She conjured up an absolutely boring picture of the life which she was going to take up at Paris, and yet, when at Hyeres, she had regretted Paris.
"And yet I am nineteen," she thought.
"That's the age of happiness, say all those gilt-edged ninnies."
She looked at eight or ten new volumes of poetry which had accumulated on the table in the salon during her journey in Provence.
She had the misfortune to have more brains than M.M. de Croisnois, de Caylus, de Luz, and her other friends.
She anticipated all that they were going to tell her about the fine sky of Provence, poetry, the South, etc., etc.
These fine eyes, which were the home of the deepest ennui, and worse still, of the despair of ever finding pleasure, lingered on Julien.
At any rate, he was not exactly like the others.
"Monsieur Sorel," she said, in that short, sharp voice, destitute of all femininity, which is so frequent among young women of the upper class. "Monsieur Sorel, are you coming to-night to M. de Retz's ball?"
"Mademoiselle, I have not had the honour of being presented to M. the duke." (One would have said that these words and that title seared the mouth of the proud provincial).
"He asked my brother to take you there, and if you go, you could tell me some details about the Villequier estate. We are thinking of going there in the spring, and I would like to know if the chateau is habitable, and if the neighbouring places are as pretty as they say.
There are so many unmerited reputations."
Julien did not answer.
"Come to the ball with my brother," she added, very dryly.
Julien bowed respectfully.
"So I owe my due to the members of the family, even in the middle of a ball.
Am I not paid to be their business man?"
His bad temper added,
"God knows, moreover, if what I tell the daughter will not put out the plans of the father, brother, and mother.
It is just like the court of a sovereign prince.
You have to be absolutely negative, and yet give no one any right to complain."
"How that big girl displeases me!" he thought, as he watched the walk of Mademoiselle de la Mole, whom her mother had called to present to several women friends of hers.
She exaggerates all the fashions. Her dress almost falls down to her shoulders, she is even paler than before she went away. How nondescript her hair has grown as the result of being blonde! You would say that the light passed through it. What a haughty way of bowing and of looking at you! What queenly gestures!
Mademoiselle de la Mole had just called her brother at the moment when he was leaving the salon.
The comte de Norbert approached Julien.
"My dear Sorel," he said to him. "Where would you like me to pick you up to-night for Monsieur's ball.
He expressly asked me to bring you."
"I know well whom I have to thank for so much kindness," answered Julien bowing to the ground.
His bad temper, being unable to find anything to lay hold of in the polite and almost sympathetic tone in which Norbert had spoken to him, set itself to work on the answer he had made to that courteous invitation.
He detected in it a trace of subservience.
When he arrived at the ball in the evening, he was struck with the magnificence of the Hotel de Retz.
The courtyard at the entrance was covered with an immense tent of crimson with golden stars. Nothing could have been more elegant.
Beyond the tent, the court had been transformed into a wood of orange trees and of pink laurels in full flower.
As they had been careful to bury the vases sufficiently deep, the laurel trees and the orange trees appeared to come straight out of the ground.
The road which the carriages traversed was sanded.
All this seemed extraordinary to our provincial.
He had never had any idea of such magnificence. In a single instant his thrilled imagination had left his bad temper a thousand leagues behind.
In the carriage on their way to the ball Norbert had been happy, while he saw everything in black colours. They had scarcely entered the courtyard before the roles changed.
Norbert was only struck by a few details which, in the midst of all that magnificence, had not been able to be attended to.
He calculated the expense of each item, and Julien remarked that the nearer he got to a sum total, the more jealous and bad-tempered he appeared.
As for himself, he was fascinated and full of admiration when he reached the first of the salons where they were dancing. His emotion was so great that it almost made him nervous.
There was a crush at the door of the second salon, and the crowd was so great that he found it impossible to advance.
The decorations of the second salon presented the Alhambra of Grenada.
"That's the queen of the ball one must admit," said a young man with a moustache whose shoulder stuck into Julien's chest.
"Mademoiselle Formant who has been the prettiest all the winter, realises that she will have to go down to the second place.