Julien had realised that to allow himself to be insulted with impunity even once by this haughty girl would mean the loss of everything.
"If I have got to quarrel would it not be better that it should be straight away in defending the rights of my own pride, than in parrying the expressions of contempt which would follow the slightest abandonment of my duty to my own self-respect?"
On many occasions, on days when she was in a bad temper Mathilde, tried to play the great lady with him. These attempts were extremely subtle, but Julien rebuffed them roughly.
One day he brusquely interrupted her.
"Has mademoiselle de la Mole any orders to give her father's secretary?" he said to her. "If so he must listen to her orders, and execute them, but apart from that he has not a single word to say to her.
He is not paid to tell her his thoughts."
This kind of life, together with the singular surmises which it occasioned, dissipated the boredom which he had been accustomed to experience in that magnificent salon, where everyone was afraid, and where any kind of jest was in bad form.
"It would be humorous if she loved me but whether she loves me or not," went on Julien,
"I have for my confidential friend a girl of spirit before whom I see the whole household quake, while the marquis de Croisenois does so more than anyone else.
Yes, to be sure, that same young man who is so polite, so gentle, and so brave, and who has combined all those advantages of birth and fortune a single one of which would put my heart at rest—he is madly in love with her, he ought to marry her.
How many letters has M. de la Mole made me write to the two notaries in order to arrange the contract?
And I, though I am an absolute inferior when I have my pen in my hand, why, I triumph over that young man two hours afterwards in this very garden; for, after all, her preference is striking and direct.
Perhaps she hates him because she sees in him a future husband. She is haughty enough for that.
As for her kindness to me, I receive it in my capacity of confidential servant.
"But no, I am either mad or she is making advances to me; the colder and more respectful I show myself to her, the more she runs after me.
It may be a deliberate piece of affectation; but I see her eyes become animated when I appear unexpectedly.
Can the women of Paris manage to act to such an extent.
What does it matter to me!
I have appearances in my favour, let us enjoy appearances.
Heavens, how beautiful she is!
How I like her great blue eyes when I see them at close quarters, and they look at me in the way they often do?
What a difference between this spring and that of last year, when I lived an unhappy life among three hundred dirty malicious hypocrites, and only kept myself afloat through sheer force of character, I was almost as malicious as they were."
"That young girl is making fun of me," Julien would think in his suspicious days.
"She is acting in concert with her brother to make a fool of me.
But she seems to have an absolute contempt for her brother's lack of energy.
He is brave and that is all.
He has not a thought which dares to deviate from the conventional.
It is always I who have to take up the cudgels in his defence.
A young girl of nineteen!
Can one at that age act up faithfully every second of the day to the part which one has determined to play.
On the other hand whenever mademoiselle de la Mole fixes her eyes on me with a singular expression comte Norbert always goes away.
I think that suspicious. Ought he not to be indignant at his sister singling out a servant of her household? For that is how I heard the Duke de Chaulnes speak about me.
This recollection caused anger to supersede every other emotion.
It is simply a fashion for old fashioned phraseology on the part of the eccentric duke?"
"Well, she is pretty!" continued Julien with a tigerish expression, "I will have her, I will then go away, and woe to him who disturbs me in my flight."
This idea became Julien's sole preoccupation. He could not think of anything else.
His days passed like hours.
Every moment when he tried to concentrate on some important matter his mind became a blank, and he would wake up a quarter of an hour afterwards with a beating heart and an anxious mind, brooding over this idea "does she love me?" _____
CHAPTER XLI
A YOUNG GIRL'S DOMINION
_____ I admire her beauty but I fear her intellect.—Merimee. _____
If Julien had employed the time which he spent in exaggerating Matilde's beauty or in working himself up into a rage against that family haughtiness which she was forgetting for his sake in examining what was going on in the salon, he would have understood the secret of her dominion over all that surrounded her.
When anyone displeased mademoiselle de La Mole she managed to punish the offender by a jest which was so guarded, so well chosen, so polite and so neatly timed, that the more the victim thought about it, the sorer grew the wound.
She gradually became positively terrible to wounded vanity.
As she attached no value to many things which the rest of her family very seriously wanted, she always struck them as self-possessed.
The salons of the aristocracy are nice enough to brag about when you leave them, but that is all; mere politeness alone only counts for something in its own right during the first few days.
Julien experienced this after the first fascination and the first astonishment had passed off.
"Politeness," he said to himself "is nothing but the absence of that bad temper which would be occasioned by bad manners."
Mathilde was frequently bored; perhaps she would have been bored anywhere.
She then found a real distraction and real pleasure in sharpening an epigram.