To sum up she did not give love a single thought; on this particular day she was tired of loving.
As for Julien, his emotions were those of a child of sixteen.
He was a successive prey to awful doubt, astonishment and despair during this breakfast which he thought would never end.
As soon as he could decently get up from the table, he flew rather than ran to the stable, saddled his horse himself, and galloped off.
"I must kill my heart through sheer force of physical fatigue," he said to himself as he galloped through the Meudon woods.
"What have I done, what have I said to deserve a disgrace like this?"
"I must do nothing and say nothing to-day," he thought as he re-entered the hotel. "I must be as dead physically as I am morally."
Julien saw nothing any more, it was only his corpse which kept moving. _____
CHAPTER L
THE JAPANESE VASE _____
His heart does not first realise the full extremity of his unhappiness: he is more troubled than moved.
But as reason returns he feels the depth of his misfortune.
All the pleasures of life seem to have been destroyed, he can only feel the sharp barbs of a lacerating despair.
But what is the use of talking of physical pain?
What pain which is only felt by the body can be compared to this pain?—Jean Paul. _____
The dinner bell rang, Julien had barely time to dress: he found Mathilde in the salon.
She was pressing her brother and M. de Croisenois to promise her that they would not go and spend the evening at Suresnes with madame the marechale de Fervaques.
It would have been difficult to have shown herself more amiable or fascinating to them.
M. de Luz, de Caylus and several of their friends came in after dinner.
One would have said that mademoiselle de la Mole had commenced again to cultivate the most scrupulous conventionality at the same time as her sisterly affection.
Although the weather was delightful this evening, she refused to go out into the garden, and insisted on their all staying near the arm-chair where madame de la Mole was sitting. The blue sofa was the centre of the group as it had been in the winter.
Mathilde was out of temper with the garden, or at any rate she found it absolutely boring: it was bound up with the memory of Julien.
Unhappiness blunts the edge of the intellect.
Our hero had the bad taste to stop by that little straw chair which had formerly witnessed his most brilliant triumphs.
To-day none spoke to him, his presence seemed to be unnoticed, and worse than that.
Those of mademoiselle de la Mole's friends who were sitting near him at the end of the sofa, made a point of somehow or other turning their back on him, at any rate he thought so.
"It is a court disgrace," he thought.
He tried to study for a moment the people who were endeavouring to overwhelm him with their contempt.
M. de Luz had an important post in the King's suite, the result of which was that the handsome officer began every conversation with every listener who came along by telling him this special piece of information. His uncle had started at seven o'clock for St. Cloud and reckoned on spending the night there. This detail was introduced with all the appearance of good nature but it never failed to be worked in.
As Julien scrutinized M. de Croisenois with a stern gaze of unhappiness, he observed that this good amiable young man attributed a great influence to occult causes.
He even went so far as to become melancholy and out of temper if he saw an event of the slightest importance ascribed to a simple and perfectly natural cause.
"There is an element of madness in this," Julien said to himself.
This man's character has a striking analogy with that of the Emperor Alexander, such as the Prince Korasoff described it to me.
During the first year of his stay in Paris poor Julien, fresh from the seminary and dazzled by the graces of all these amiable young people, whom he found so novel, had felt bound to admire them.
Their true character was only beginning to become outlined in his eyes.
"I am playing an undignified role here," he suddenly thought.
The question was, how he could leave the little straw chair without undue awkwardness.
He wanted to invent something, and tried to extract some novel excuse from an imagination which was otherwise engrossed.
He was compelled to fall back on his memory, which was, it must be owned, somewhat poor in resources of this kind. The poor boy was still very much out of his element, and could not have exhibited a more complete and noticeable awkwardness when he got up to leave the salon.
His misery was only too palpable in his whole manner.
He had been playing, for the last three quarters of an hour, the role of an officious inferior from whom one does not take the trouble to hide what one really thinks.
The critical observations he had just made on his rivals prevented him, however, from taking his own unhappiness too tragically. His pride could take support in what had taken place the previous day.
"Whatever may be their advantages over me," he thought, as he went into the garden alone, "Mathilde has never been to a single one of them what, twice in my life, she has deigned to be to me!"
His penetration did not go further.
He absolutely failed to appreciate the character of the extraordinary person whom chance had just made the supreme mistress of all his happiness.
He tried, on the following day, to make himself and his horse dead tired with fatigue.
He made no attempt in the evening to go near the blue sofa to which Mathilde remained constant.
He noticed that comte Norbert did not even deign to look at him when he met him about the house.
"He must be doing something very much against the grain," he thought; "he is naturally so polite."
Sleep would have been a happiness to Julien.