"The influence of my contemporaries wins the day," he said aloud, with a bitter laugh.
"Though I am talking to myself and within an ace of death, I still play the hypocrite. Oh you nineteenth century!
A hunter fires a gun shot in the forest, his quarry falls, he hastens forward to seize it. His foot knocks against a two-foot anthill, knocks down the dwelling place of the ants, and scatters the ants and their eggs far and wide. The most philosophic among the ants will never be able to understand that black, gigantic and terrifying body, the hunter's boot, which suddenly invaded their home with incredible rapidity, preceded by a frightful noise, and accompanied by flashes of reddish fire."
"In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o'clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o'clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word 'night'?"
"Give it five more hours of existence, and it will see night, and understand its meaning."
"So, in my case, I shall die at the age of twenty-three.
Give me five more years of life in order to live with madame de Renal."
He began to laugh like Mephistopheles.
How foolish to debate these great problems.
"(1).
I am as hypocritical as though there were someone there to listen to me.
"(2).
I am forgetting to live and to love when I have so few days left to live.
Alas, madame de Renal is absent; perhaps her husband will not let her come back to Besancon any more, to go on compromising her honour."
"That is what makes me lonely, and not the absence of a God who is just, good and omnipotent, devoid of malice, and in no wise greedy of vengeance."
"Oh, if He did exist.
Alas I should fall at His feet. I have deserved death, I should say to Him, but oh Thou great God, good God, indulgent God, give me back her whom I love!"
By this time the night was far advanced.
After an hour or two of peaceful sleep, Fouque arrived.
Julien felt strongly resolute, like a man who sees to the bottom of his soul. _____
CHAPTER LXXV _____
"I cannot play such a trick on that poor abbe Chas-Bernard, as to summon him," he said to Fouque: "it would prevent him from dining for three whole days.—But try and find some Jansenist who is a friend of M. Pirard."
Fouque was impatiently waiting for this suggestion.
Julien acquitted himself becomingly of all the duty a man owes to provincial opinion.
Thanks to M. the abbe de Frilair, and in spite of his bad choice of a confessor, Julien enjoyed in his cell the protection of the priestly congregation; with a little more diplomacy he might have managed to escape.
But the bad air of the cell produced its effect, and his strength of mind diminished.
But this only intensified his happiness at madame de Renal's return.
"My first duty is towards you, my dear," she said as she embraced him;
"I have run away from Verrieres."
Julien felt no petty vanity in his relations with her, and told her all his weaknesses.
She was good and charming to him.
In the evening she had scarcely left the prison before she made the priest, who had clung on to Julien like a veritable prey, go to her aunt's: as his only object was to win prestige among the young women who belonged to good Besancon society, madame de Renal easily prevailed upon him to go and perform a novena at the abbey of Bray-le-Haut.
No words can do justice to the madness and extravagance of Julien's love.
By means of gold, and by using and abusing the influence of her aunt, who was devout, rich and well-known, madame de Renal managed to see him twice a day.
At this news, Mathilde's jealousy reached a pitch of positive madness.
M. de Frilair had confessed to her that all his influence did not go so far as to admit of flouting the conventions by allowing her to see her sweetheart more than once every day.
Mathilde had madame de Renal followed so as to know the smallest thing she did.
M. de Frilair exhausted all the resources of an extremely clever intellect in order to prove to her that Julien was unworthy of her.
Plunged though she was in all these torments, she only loved him the more, and made a horrible scene nearly every day.
Julien wished, with all his might, to behave to the very end like an honourable man towards this poor young girl whom he had so strangely compromised, but the reckless love which he felt for madame de Renal swept him away at every single minute.
When he could not manage to persuade Mathilde of the innocence of her rival's visits by all his thin excuses, he would say to himself: "at any rate the end of the drama ought to be quite near.
The very fact of not being able to lie better will be an excuse for me."
Mademoiselle de La Mole learnt of the death of the marquis de Croisenois.
The rich M. de Thaler had indulged in some unpleasant remarks concerning Mathilde's disappearance: M. de Croisenois went and asked him to recant them: M. de Thaler showed him some anonymous letters which had been sent to him, and which were full of details so artfully put together that the poor marquis could not help catching a glimpse of the truth.
M. de Thaler indulged in some jests which were devoid of all taste.
Maddened by anger and unhappiness, M. de Croisenois demanded such unqualified satisfaction, that the millionaire preferred to fight a duel.
Stupidity triumphed, and one of the most lovable of men met with his death before he was twenty-four.
This death produced a strange and morbid impression on Julien's demoralised soul.
"Poor Croisenois," he said to Mathilde, "really behaved very reasonably and very honourably towards us; he had ample ground for hating me and picking a quarrel with me, by reason of your indiscretion in your mother's salon; for the hatred which follows on contempt is usually frenzied."
M. de Croisenois' death changed all Julien's ideas concerning Mathilde's future. He spent several days in proving to her that she ought to accept the hand of M. de Luz.