No human being can undergo a greater degree of unhappiness.
This kind of familiar cruelty lasted for eight long days.
Mathilde sometimes seemed to seek opportunities of speaking to him and sometimes not to avoid them; and the one topic of conversation to which they both seemed to revert with a kind of cruel pleasure, was the description of the sentiments she had felt for others.
She told him about the letters which she had written, she remembered their very words, she recited whole sentences by heart.
She seemed during these last days to be envisaging Julien with a kind of malicious joy.
She found a keen enjoyment in his pangs.
One sees that Julien had no experience of life; he had not even read any novels.
If he had been a little less awkward and he had coolly said to the young girl, whom he adored so much and who had been giving him such strange confidences: "admit that though I am not worth as much as all these gentlemen, I am none the less the man whom you loved," she would perhaps have been happy at being at thus guessed; at any rate success would have entirely depended on the grace with which Julien had expressed the idea, and on the moment which he had chosen to do so.
In any case he would have extricated himself well and advantageously from a situation which Mathilde was beginning to find monotonous.
"And you love me no longer, me, who adores you!" said Julien to her one day, overcome by love and unhappiness.
This piece of folly was perhaps the greatest which he could have committed.
These words immediately destroyed all the pleasure which mademoiselle de la Mole found in talking to him about the state of her heart.
She was beginning to be surprised that he did not, after what had happened, take offence at what she told him. She had even gone so far as to imagine at the very moment when he made that foolish remark that perhaps he did not love her any more.
"His pride has doubtless extinguished his love," she was saying to herself.
"He is not the man to sit still and see people like Caylus, de Luz, Croisenois whom he admits are so superior, preferred to him.
No, I shall never see him at my feet again."
Julien had often in the naivety of his unhappiness, during the previous days praised sincerely the brilliant qualities of these gentlemen; he would even go so far as to exaggerate them.
This nuance had not escaped mademoiselle de la Mole, she was astonished by it, but did not guess its reason.
Julien's frenzied soul, in praising a rival whom he thought was loved, was sympathising with his happiness.
These frank but stupid words changed everything in a single moment; confident that she was loved, Mathilde despised him utterly.
She was walking with him when he made his ill-timed remark; she left him, and her parting look expressed the most awful contempt.
She returned to the salon and did not look at him again during the whole evening.
This contempt monopolised her mind the following day. The impulse which during the last week had made her find so much pleasure in treating Julien as her most intimate friend was out of the question; the very sight of him was disagreeable.
The sensation Mathilde felt reached the point of disgust; nothing can express the extreme contempt which she experienced when her eyes fell upon him.
Julien had understood nothing of the history of Mathilde's heart during the last week, but he distinguished the contempt.
He had the good sense only to appear before her on the rarest possible occasions, and never looked at her.
But it was not without a mortal anguish that he, as it were, deprived himself of her presence.
He thought he felt his unhappiness increasing still further.
"The courage of a man's heart cannot be carried further," he said to himself.
He passed his life seated at a little window at the top of the hotel; the blind was carefully closed, and from here at any rate he could see mademoiselle de la Mole when she appeared in the garden.
What were his emotions when he saw her walking after dinner with M. de Caylus, M. de Luz, or some other for whom she had confessed to him some former amorous weakness!
Julien had no idea that unhappiness could be so intense; he was on the point of shouting out. This firm soul was at last completely overwhelmed.
Thinking about anything else except mademoiselle de la Mole had become odious to him; he became incapable of writing the simplest letters.
"You are mad," the marquis said to him.
Julien was frightened that his secret might be guessed, talked about illness and succeeded in being believed.
Fortunately for him the marquis rallied him at dinner about his next journey; Mathilde understood that it might be a very long one.
It was now several days that Julien had avoided her, and the brilliant young men who had all that this pale sombre being she had once loved was lacking, had no longer the power of drawing her out of her reverie.
"An ordinary girl," she said to herself, "would have sought out the man she preferred among those young people who are the cynosure of a salon; but one of the characteristics of genius is not to drive its thoughts over the rut traced by the vulgar.
"Why, if I were the companion of a man like Julien, who only lacks the fortune that I possess, I should be continually exciting attention, I should not pass through life unnoticed.
Far from incessantly fearing a revolution like my cousins who are so frightened of the people that they have not the pluck to scold a postillion who drives them badly, I should be certain of playing a role and a great role, for the man whom I have chosen has a character and a boundless ambition.
What does he lack?
Friends, money?
I will give them him."
But she treated Julien in her thought as an inferior being whose love one could win whenever one wanted. _____
CHAPTER XLIX
THE OPERA BOUFFE _____
How the spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.—Shakespeare. _____