"I am behind hand," exclaimed Julien.
"It is quite a long time since I met madame de Fervaques."
He immediately began to copy out this first love letter. It was a homily packed with moral platitudes and deadly dull.
Julien was fortunate enough to fall asleep at the second page.
Some hours afterwards he was surprised to see the broad daylight as he lent on his desk.
The most painful moments in his life were those when he woke up every morning to realise his unhappiness.
On this particular day he finished copying out his letter in a state verging on laughter.
"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that there ever lived a young man who actually wrote like that."
He counted several sentences of nine lines each.
At the bottom of the original he noticed a pencilled note.
"These letters are delivered personally, on horseback, black cravat, blue tail-coat.
You give the letter to the porter with a contrite air; expression of profound melancholy.
If you notice any chambermaid, dry your eyes furtively and speak to her."
All this was duly carried out.
"I am taking a very bold course!" thought Julien as he came out of the Hotel de Fervaques, "but all the worse for Korasoff.
To think of daring to write to so virtuous a celebrity.
I shall be treated with the utmost contempt, and nothing will amuse me more.
It is really the only comedy that I can in any way appreciate.
Yes, it will amuse me to load with ridicule that odious creature whom I call myself.
If I believed in myself, I would commit some crime to distract myself."
The moment when Julien brought his horse back to the stable was the happiest he had experienced for a whole month.
Korasoff had expressly forbidden him to look at the mistress who had left him, on any pretext whatsoever.
But the step of that horse, which she knew so well, and Julien's way of knocking on the stable door with his riding-whip to call a man, sometimes attracted Mathilde to behind the window-curtain.
The muslin was so light that Julien could see through it.
By looking under the brim of his hat in a certain way, he could get a view of Mathilde's figure without seeing her eyes.
"Consequently," he said to himself, "she cannot see mine, and that is not really looking at her."
In the evening madame de Fervaques behaved towards him, exactly as though she had never received the philosophic mystical and religious dissertation which he had given to her porter in the morning with so melancholy an air.
Chance had shown Julien on the preceding day how to be eloquent; he placed himself in such a position that he could see Mathilde's eyes.
She, on her side, left the blue sofa a minute after the marechale's arrival; this involved abandoning her usual associates.
M. de Croisenois seemed overwhelmed by this new caprice: his palpable grief alleviated the awfulness of Julien's agony.
This unexpected turn in his life made him talk like an angel, and inasmuch as a certain element of self-appreciation will insinuate itself even into those hearts which serve as a temple for the most august virtue, the marechale said to herself as she got into her carriage,
"Madame de la Mole is right, this young priest has distinction.
My presence must have overawed him at first.
As a matter of fact, the whole tone of this house is very frivolous; I can see nothing but instances of virtue helped by oldness, and standing in great need of the chills of age.
This young man must have managed to appreciate the difference; he writes well, but I fear very much that this request of his in his letter for me to enlighten him with my advice, is really nothing less than an, as yet, unconscious sentiment.
"Nevertheless how many conversions have begun like that!
What makes me consider this a good omen is the difference between his style and that of the young people whose letters I have had an opportunity of seeing.
One cannot avoid recognising unction, profound seriousness, and much conviction in the prose of this young acolyte; he has no doubt the sweet virtue of a Massillon." _____
CHAPTER LVII
THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH _____
Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a coterie.
Telemaque. _____
The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her disposal the finest places in the Church of France.
This idea had not struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable.
When he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
"I have a hard task before me today," he said to himself as he came in with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."
It was more so.
What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.
"It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made me copy out at London."
It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos.