Silence!"
These were the only words which Julien heard.
They sufficed to inspire him with the highest admiration.
"That is the way," he thought, "that real business is done; what would this great statesman say if he were to listen to the impassioned ranters heard three days ago?"
Julien took two days to reach Strasbourg. He thought he would have nothing to do there.
He made a great detour.
"If that devil of an abbe Castanede has recognised me he is not the kind of man to loose track of me easily.... And how he would revel in making a fool of me, and causing my mission to fail."
Fortunately the abbe Castanede, who was chief of the congregational police on all the northern frontier had not recognised him.
And the Strasbourg Jesuits, although very zealous, never gave a thought to observing Julien, who with his cross and his blue tail-coat looked like a young military man, very much engrossed in his own personal appearance. _____
CHAPTER LIV
STRASBOURG _____
Fascination!
Love gives thee all his love, energy and all his power of suffering unhappiness.
It is only his enchanting pleasures, his sweet delights, which are outside thy sphere.
When I saw her sleep I was made to say "With all her angelic beauty and her sweet weaknesses she is absolutely mine!
There she is, quite in my power, such as Heaven made her in its pity in order to ravish a man's heart."—Ode of Schiller. _____
Julien was compelled to spend eight days in Strasbourg and tried to distract himself by thoughts of military glory and patriotic devotion.
Was he in love then? he could not tell, he only felt in his tortured soul that Mathilde was the absolute mistress both of his happiness and of his imagination.
He needed all the energy of his character to keep himself from sinking into despair.
It was out of his power to think of anything unconnected with mademoiselle de la Mole.
His ambition and his simple personal successes had formerly distracted him from the sentiments which madame de Renal had inspired.
Mathilde was all-absorbing; she loomed large over his whole future.
Julien saw failure in every phase of that future.
This same individual whom we remember to have been so presumptuous and haughty at Verrieres, had fallen into an excess of grotesque modesty.
Three days ago he would only have been too pleased to have killed the abbe Castanede, and now, at Strasbourg, if a child had picked a quarrel with him he would have thought the child was in the right.
In thinking again about the adversaries and enemies whom he had met in his life he always thought that he, Julien, had been in the wrong.
The fact was that the same powerful imagination which had formerly been continuously employed in painting a successful future in the most brilliant colours had now been transformed into his implacable enemy.
The absolute solicitude of a traveller's life increased the ascendancy of this sinister imagination.
What a boon a friend would have been!
But Julien said to himself,
"Is there a single heart which beats with affection for me?
And even if I did have a friend, would not honour enjoin me to eternal silence?"
He was riding gloomily in the outskirts of Kehl; it is a market town on the banks of the Rhine and immortalised by Desaix and Gouvion Saint-Cyr.
A German peasant showed him the little brooks, roads and islands of the Rhine, which have acquired a name through the courage of these great generals.
Julien was guiding his horse with his left hand, while he held unfolded in his right the superb map which adorns the Memoirs of the Marshal Saint Cyr.
A merry exclamation made him lift his head.
It was the Prince Korasoff, that London friend of his, who had initiated him some months before into the elementary rules of high fatuity.
Faithful to his great art, Korasoff, who had just arrived at Strasbourg, had been one hour in Kehl and had never read a single line in his whole life about the siege of 1796, began to explain it all to Julien.
The German peasant looked at him in astonishment; for he knew enough French to appreciate the enormous blunders which the prince was making.
Julien was a thousand leagues away from the peasant's thoughts. He was looking in astonishment at the handsome young man and admiring his grace in sitting a horse.
"What a lucky temperament," he said to himself, "and how his trousers suit him and how elegantly his hair is cut!
Alas, if I had been like him, it might have been that she would not have come to dislike me after loving me for three days."
When the prince had finished his siege of Kehl, he said to Julien,
"You look like a Trappist, you are carrying to excess that principle of gravity which I enjoined upon you in London.
A melancholy manner cannot be good form. What is wanted is an air of boredom.
If you are melancholy, it is because you lack something, because you have failed in something."
"That means showing one's own inferiority; if, on the other hand you are bored, it is only what has made an unsuccessful attempt to please you, which is inferior.
So realise, my dear friend, the enormity of your mistake."
Julien tossed a crown to the gaping peasant who was listening to them.
"Good," said the prince, "that shows grace and a noble disdain, very good!"