Some months previously Mathilde had given up all hope of meeting any being who was a little different from the common pattern.
She had found some happiness in allowing herself to write to some young society men.
This rash procedure, which was so unbecoming and so imprudent in a young girl, might have disgraced her in the eyes of M. de Croisenois, the Duke de Chaulnes, his father, and the whole Hotel de Chaulnes, who on seeing the projected marriage broken off would have wanted to know the reason.
At that time Mathilde had been unable to sleep on those days when she had written one of her letters.
But those letters were only answers.
But now she ventured to declare her own love.
She wrote first (what a terrible word!) to a man of the lowest social grade.
This circumstance rendered her eternal disgrace quite inevitable in the event of detection.
Who of the women who visited her mother would have dared to take her part?
What official excuse could be evolved which could successfully cope with the awful contempt of society.
Besides speaking was awful enough, but writing!
"There are some things which are not written!" Napoleon had exclaimed on learning of the capitulation of Baylen.
And it was Julien who had told her that epigram, as though giving her a lesson that was to come in useful subsequently.
But all this was comparatively unimportant, Mathilde's anguish had other causes.
Forgetting the terrible effect it would produce on society, and the ineffable blot on her scutcheon that would follow such an outrage on her own caste, Mathilde was going to write to a person of a very different character to the Croisenois', the de Luz's, the Caylus's.
She would have been frightened at the depth and mystery in Julien's character, even if she had merely entered into a conventional acquaintance with him.
And she was going to make him her lover, perhaps her master.
"What will his pretensions not be, if he is ever in a position to do everything with me?
Well! I shall say, like Medea: Au milieu de tant de perils il me reste Moi."
She believed that Julien had no respect for nobility of blood.
What was more, he probably did not love her.
In these last moments of awful doubt her feminine pride suggested to her certain ideas.
"Everything is bound to be extraordinary in the life of a girl like me," exclaimed Mathilde impatiently.
The pride, which had been drilled into her since her cradle, began to struggle with her virtue.
It was at this moment that Julien's departure precipitated everything. (Such characters are luckily very rare.)
Very late in the evening, Julien was malicious enough to have a very heavy trunk taken down to the porter's lodge. He called the valet, who was courting mademoiselle de la Mole's chambermaid, to move it.
"This man?uvre cannot result in anything," he said to himself, "but if it does succeed, she will think that I have gone."
Very tickled by this humorous thought, he fell asleep.
Mathilde did not sleep a wink.
Julien left the hotel very early the next morning without being seen, but he came back before eight o'clock.
He had scarcely entered the library before M. de la Mole appeared on the threshold.
He handed her his answer.
He thought that it was his duty to speak to her, it was certainly perfectly feasible, but mademoiselle de la Mole would not listen to him and disappeared.
Julien was delighted. He did not know what to say.
"If all this is not a put up job with comte Norbert, it is clear that it is my cold looks which have kindled the strange love which this aristocratic girl chooses to entertain for me.
I should be really too much of a fool if I ever allowed myself to take a fancy to that big blonde doll."
This train of reasoning left him colder and more calculating than he had ever been.
"In the battle for which we are preparing," he added, "pride of birth will be like a high hill which constitutes a military position between her and me.
That must be the field of the man?uvres.
I made a great mistake in staying in Paris; this postponing of my departure cheapens and exposes me, if all this is simply a trick.
What danger was there in leaving?
If they were making fun of me, I was making fun of them.
If her interest for me was in any way real, I was making that interest a hundred times more intense."
Mademoiselle de la Mole's letter had given Julien's vanity so keen a pleasure, that wreathed as he was in smiles at his good fortune he had forgotten to think seriously about the propriety of leaving.
It was one of the fatal elements of his character to be extremely sensitive to his own weaknesses.
He was extremely upset by this one, and had almost forgotten the incredible victory which had preceded this slight check, when about nine o'clock mademoiselle de la Mole appeared on the threshold of the library, flung him a letter and ran away.
"So this is going to be the romance by letters," he said as he picked it up.
"The enemy makes a false move; I will reply by coldness and virtue."
He was asked with a poignancy which merely increased his inner gaiety to give a definite answer.
He indulged in the pleasure of mystifying those persons who he thought wanted to make fun of him for two pages, and it was out of humour again that he announced towards the end of his answer his definite departure on the following morning.