"I cannot endure this," exclaimed Mathilde, as she took possession of the letter, "you are completely forgetting me, me your wife, your conduct is awful, monsieur."
At these words her pride, shocked by the awful unseemliness of her proceeding, prevented her from speaking.
She burst into tears, and soon seemed to Julien scarcely able to breathe.
Julien was so surprised and embarrassed that he did not fully appreciate how ideally fortunate this scene was for himself.
He helped Mathilde to sit down; she almost abandoned herself in his arms.
The first minute in which he noticed this movement, he felt an extreme joy.
Immediately afterwards, he thought of Korasoff:
"I may lose everything by a single word."
The strain of carrying out his tactics was so great that his arms stiffened.
"I dare not even allow myself to press this supple, charming frame to my heart, or she will despise me or treat me badly.
What an awful character!"
And while he cursed Mathilde's character, he loved her a hundred times more. He thought he had a queen in his arms.
Julien's impassive coldness intensified the anguished pride which was lacerating the soul of mademoiselle de la Mole.
She was far from having the necessary self-possession to try and read in his eyes what he felt for her at that particular moment.
She could not make up her mind to look at him. She trembled lest she might encounter a contemptuous expression.
Seated motionless on the library divan, with her head turned in the opposite direction to Julien, she was a prey to the most poignant anguish that pride and love can inflict upon a human soul.
What an awful step had she just slipped into taking!
"It has been reserved for me, unhappy woman that I am, to see my most unbecoming advances rebuffed! and rebuffed by whom?" added her maddened and wounded pride; "rebuffed by a servant of my father's!
That's more than I will put up with," she said aloud, and rising in a fury, she opened the drawer of Julien's table, which was two yards in front of her.
She stood petrified with horror when she saw eight or ten unopened letters, completely like the one the porter had just brought up.
She recognised Julien's handwriting, though more or less disguised, on all the addresses.
"So," she cried, quite beside herself, "you are not only on good terms with her, but you actually despise her. You, a nobody, despise madame la marechale de Fervaques!"
"Oh, forgive me, my dear," she added, throwing herself on her knees; "despise me if you wish, but love me.
I cannot live without your love."
And she fell down in a dead faint.
"So our proud lady is lying at my feet," said Julien to himself. _____
CHAPTER LX
A BOX AT THE BOUFFES _____
As the blackest sky
Foretells the heaviest tempest
Don Juan, c. 1. st.76. _____
In the midst of these great transports Julien felt more surprised than happy.
Mathilde's abuse proved to him the shrewdness of the Russian tactics. "'Few words, few deeds,' that is my one method of salvation."
He picked up Mathilde, and without saying a word, put her back on the divan.
She was gradually being overcome by tears.
In order to keep herself in countenance, she took madame de Fervaques' letters in her hands, and slowly broke the seals.
She gave a noticeable nervous movement when she recognised the marechale's handwriting.
She turned over the pages of these letters without reading them. Most of them were six pages.
"At least answer me," Mathilde said at last, in the most supplicatory tone, but without daring to look at Julien:
"You know how proud I am. It is the misfortune of my position, and of my temperament, too, I confess.
Has madame de Fervaques robbed me of your heart?
Has she made the sacrifices to which my fatal love swept me?"
A dismal silence was all Julien's answer.
"By what right," he thought, "does she ask me to commit an indiscretion unworthy of an honest man?"
Mathilde tried to read the letters; her eyes were so wet with tears that it was impossible for her to do so.
She had been unhappy for a month past, but this haughty soul had been very far from owning its own feelings even to itself.
Chance alone had brought about this explosion.
For one instant jealousy and love had won a victory over pride.
She was sitting on the divan, and very near him.
He saw her hair and her alabaster neck. For a moment he forgot all he owed to himself. He passed his arm around her waist, and clasped her almost to his breast.