This done, he returned to the Hotel de la Mole, joyous and buoyant.
Now it's our turn he exclaimed as he locked himself into the room and threw off his coat.
"What! mademoiselle," he wrote to Mathilde, "is it mademoiselle de la Mole who gets Arsene her father's lackey to hand an only too flattering letter to a poor carpenter from the Jura, in order no doubt to make fun of his simplicity?" And he copied out the most explicit phrases in the letter which he had just received.
His own letter would have done honour to the diplomatic prudence of M. the Chevalier de Beauvoisis.
It was still only ten o'clock when Julien entered the Italian opera, intoxicated with happiness and that feeling of his own power which was so novel for a poor devil like him.
He heard his friend Geronimo sing.
Music had never exalted him to such a pitch. _____
CHAPTER XLIV
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS _____
What perplexity!
What sleepless nights!
Great God.
Am I going to make myself contemptible?
He will despise me himself.
But he is leaving, he is going away.
Alfred de Musset. _____
Mathilde had not written without a struggle.
Whatever might have been the beginning of her interest in Julien, it soon dominated that pride which had reigned unchallenged in her heart since she had begun to know herself.
This cold and haughty soul was swept away for the first time by a sentiment of passion, but if this passion dominated her pride, it still kept faithfully to the habits of that pride.
Two months of struggles and new sensations had transformed, so to speak her whole moral life.
Mathilde thought she was in sight of happiness.
This vista, irresistible as it is for those who combine a superior intellect with a courageous soul, had to struggle for a long time against her self respect and all her vulgar duties.
One day she went into her mother's room at seven o'clock in the morning and asked permission to take refuge in Villequier.
The marquise did not even deign to answer her, and advised her to go back to bed.
This was the last effort of vulgar prudence and respect for tradition.
The fear of doing wrong and of offending those ideas which the Caylus's, the de Luz's, the Croisenois' held for sacred had little power over her soul. She considered such creatures incapable of understanding her. She would have consulted them, if it had been a matter of buying a carriage or an estate.
Her real fear was that Julien was displeased with her.
"Perhaps he, too, has only the appearance of a superior man?"
She abhorred lack of character; that was her one objection to the handsome young men who surrounded her.
The more they made elegant fun of everything which deviated from the prevailing mode, or which conformed to it but indifferently, the lower they fell in her eyes.
They were brave and that was all.
"And after all in what way were they brave?" she said to herself.
"In duels, but the duel is nothing more than a formality.
The whole thing is mapped out beforehand, even the correct thing to say when you fall.
Stretched on the turf, and with your hand on your heart, you must vouchsafe a generous forgiveness to the adversary, and a few words for a fair lady, who is often imaginary, or if she does exist, will go to a ball on the day of your death for fear of arousing suspicion."
"One braves danger at the head of a squadron brilliant with steel, but how about that danger which is solitary, strange, unforeseen and really ugly."
"Alas," said Mathilde to herself, "it was at the court of Henri III. that men who were great both by character and by birth were to be found!
Yes! If Julien had served at Jarnac or Moncontour, I should no longer doubt.
In those days of strength and vigour Frenchmen were not dolls.
The day of the battle was almost the one which presented the fewest problems."
Their life was not imprisoned, like an Egyptian mummy in a covering which was common to all, and always the same.
"Yes," she added, "there was more real courage in going home alone at eleven o'clock in the evening when one came out of the Hotel de Soissons where Catherine de' Medici lived than there is nowadays in running over to Algiers.
A man's life was then a series of hazards.
Nowadays civilisation has banished hazard. There are no more surprises.
If anything new appears in any idea there are not sufficient epigrams to immortalise it, but if anything new appears in actual life, our panic reaches the lowest depth of cowardice.
Whatever folly panic makes us commit is excused.
What a degenerate and boring age!
What would Boniface de la Mole have said if, lifting his cut-off head out of the tomb, he had seen seventeen of his descendants allow themselves to be caught like sheep in 1793 in order to be guillotined two days afterwards!
Death was certain, but it would have been bad form to have defended themselves and to have killed at least one or two Jacobins.
Yes! in the heroic days of France, in the age of Boniface de la Mole, Julien would have been the chief of a squadron, while my brother would have been the young priest with decorous manners, with wisdom in his eyes and reason on his lips."