Stendal Fullscreen Red and black (1827)

Pause

How can you love me?" she repeated vaguely, because the idea oppressed her.

Julien could not realise her happiness, but he saw that it was genuine and he forgot almost entirely his own fear of being ridiculous.

The foolish thought that he was regarded as an inferior, by reason of his obscure birth, disappeared also.

As Julien's transports reassured his timid mistress, she regained a little of her happiness, and of her power to judge her lover.

Happily, he had not, on this occasion, that artificial air which had made the assignation of the previous night a triumph rather than a pleasure.

If she had realised his concentration on playing a part that melancholy discovery would have taken away all her happiness for ever.

She could only have seen in it the result of the difference in their ages.

Although Madame de Renal had never thought of the theories of love, difference in age is next to difference in fortune, one of the great commonplaces of provincial witticisms, whenever love is the topic of conversation.

In a few days Julien surrendered himself with all the ardour of his age, and was desperately in love.

"One must own," he said to himself, "that she has an angelic kindness of soul, and no one in the world is prettier."

He had almost completely given up playing a part.

In a moment of abandon, he even confessed to her all his nervousness.

This confidence raised the passion which he was inspiring to its zenith.

"And I have no lucky rival after all," said Madame de Renal to herself with delight.

She ventured to question him on the portrait in which he used to be so interested.

Julien swore to her that it was that of a man.

When Madame de Renal had enough presence of mind left to reflect, she did not recover from her astonishment that so great a happiness could exist; and that she had never had anything of.

"Oh," she said to herself, "if I had only known Julien ten years ago when I was still considered pretty."

Julien was far from having thoughts like these.

His love was still akin to ambition. It was the joy of possessing, poor, unfortunate and despised as he was, so beautiful a woman.

His acts of devotion, and his ecstacies at the sight of his mistress's charms finished by reassuring her a little with regard to the difference of age.

If she had possessed a little of that knowledge of life which the woman of thirty has enjoyed in the more civilised of countries for quite a long time, she would have trembled for the duration of a love, which only seemed to thrive on novelty and the intoxication of a young man's vanity.

In those moments when he forgot his ambition, Julien admired ecstatically even the hats and even the dresses of Madame de Renal.

He could not sate himself with the pleasure of smelling their perfume.

He would open her mirrored cupboard, and remain hours on end admiring the beauty and the order of everything that he found there.

His love leaned on him and looked at him. He was looking at those jewels and those dresses which had had been her wedding presents.

"I might have married a man like that," thought Madame de Renal sometimes.

"What a fiery soul!

What a delightful life one would have with him?"

As for Julien, he had never been so near to those terrible instruments of feminine artillery.

"It is impossible," he said to himself "for there to be anything more beautiful in Paris."

He could find no flaw in his happiness.

The sincere admiration and ecstacies of his mistress would frequently make him forget that silly pose which had rendered him so stiff and almost ridiculous during the first moments of the intrigue.

There were moments where, in spite of his habitual hypocrisy, he found an extreme delight in confessing to this great lady who admired him, his ignorance of a crowd of little usages.

His mistress's rank seemed to lift him above himself.

Madame de Renal, on her side, would find the sweetest thrill of intellectual voluptuousness in thus instructing in a number of little things this young man who was so full of genius, and who was looked upon by everyone as destined one day to go so far.

Even the sub-prefect and M. Valenod could not help admiring him. She thought it made them less foolish.

As for Madame Derville, she was very far from being in a position to express the same sentiments.

Rendered desperate by what she thought she divined, and seeing that her good advice was becoming offensive to a woman who had literally lost her head, she left Vergy without giving the explanation, which her friend carefully refrained from asking.

Madame de Renal shed a few tears for her, and soon found her happiness greater than ever.

As a result of her departure, she found herself alone with her lover nearly the whole day.

Julien abandoned himself all the more to the delightful society of his sweetheart, since, whenever he was alone, Fouque's fatal proposition still continued to agitate him.

During the first days of his novel life there were moments when the man who had never loved, who had never been loved by anyone, would find so delicious a pleasure in being sincere, that he was on the point of confessing to Madame de Renal that ambition which up to then had been the very essence of his existence.

He would have liked to have been able to consult her on the strange temptation which Fouque's offer held out to him, but a little episode rendered any frankness impossible. _____

CHAPTER XVII

THE FIRST DEPUTY _____

Oh, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day,

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away.