It was Mathilde.
"Luckily, she has not understood me."
This reflection restored all his self possession.
He found Mathilde as changed as though she had gone through a six months' illness: she was really not recognisable.
"That infamous Frilair has betrayed me," she said to him, wringing her hands.
Her fury prevented her from crying.
"Was I not fine when I made my speech yesterday?" answered Julien.
"I was improvising for the first time in my life!
It is true that it is to be feared that it will also be the last."
At this moment, Julien was playing on Mathilde's character with all the self-possession of a clever pianist, whose fingers are on the instrument....
"It is true," he added, "that I lack the advantage of a distinguished birth, but Mathilde's great soul has lifted her lover up to her own level.
Do you think that Boniface de la Mole would have cut a better figure before his judges?"
On this particular day, Mathilde was as unaffectedly tender as a poor girl living in a fifth storey. But she failed to extract from him any simpler remark.
He was paying her back without knowing it for all the torture she had frequently inflicted on him.
"The sources of the Nile are unknown," said Julien to himself: "it has not been vouchsafed to the human eye to see the king of rivers as a simple brook: similarly, no human eye shall see Julien weak. In the first place because he is not so.
But I have a heart which it is easy to touch. The most commonplace words, if said in a genuine tone, can make my voice broken and even cause me to shed tears.
How often have frigid characters not despised me for this weakness.
They thought that I was asking a favour: that is what I cannot put up with.
"It is said that when at the foot of the scaffold, Danton was affected by the thought of his wife: but Danton had given strength to a nation of coxcombs and prevented the enemy from reaching Paris.... I alone know what I should have been able to do.... I represent to the others at the very outside, simply A PERHAPS.
"If madame de Renal had been here in my cell instead of Mathilde, should I have been able to have answered for myself?
The extremity of my despair and my repentance would have been taken for a craven fear of death by the Valenods and all the patricians of the locality. They are so proud, are those feeble spirits, whom their pecuniary position puts above temptation!
'You see what it is to be born a carpenter's son,' M. de Moirod and de Cholin doubtless said after having condemned me to death!
'A man can learn to be learned and clever, but the qualities of the heart—the qualities of the heart cannot be learnt.'
Even in the case of this poor Mathilde, who is crying now, or rather, who cannot cry," he said to himself, as he looked at her red eyes....
And he clasped her in his arms: the sight of a genuine grief made him forget the sequence of his logic....
"She has perhaps cried all the night," he said to himself, "but how ashamed she will be of this memory on some future day!
She will regard herself as having been led astray in her first youth by a plebeian's low view of life....
Le Croisenois is weak enough to marry her, and upon my word, he will do well to do so.
She will make him play a part."
"Du droit qu'un esprit ferme et vaste en ses desseins
A sur l'esprit grossier des vulgaires humaines."
"Ah! that's really humorous; since I have been doomed to die, all the verses I ever knew in my life are coming back into my memory.
It must be a sign of demoralisation."
Mathilde kept on repeating in a choked voice:
"He is there in the next room."
At last he paid attention to what she was saying.
"Her voice is weak," he thought, "but all the imperiousness of her character comes out in her intonation.
She lowers her voice in order to avoid getting angry."
"And who is there?" he said, gently.
"The advocate, to get you to sign your appeal."
"I shall not appeal."
"What! you will not appeal," she said, getting up, with her eyes sparkling with rage.
"And why, if you please?"
"Because I feel at the present time that I have the courage to die without giving people occasion to laugh too much at my expense.
And who will guarantee that I shall be in so sound a frame of mind in two months' time, after living for a long time in this damp cell?
I foresee interviews with the priests, with my father.
I can imagine nothing more unpleasant.
Let's die."
This unexpected opposition awakened all the haughtiness of Mathilde's character.
She had not managed to see the abbe de Frilair before the time when visitors were admitted to the cells in the Besancon prison. Her fury vented itself on Julien.