7 Stendhal almost certainly took this name from Mathilde Dembowska, the beautiful Italian wife of a Polish officer with whom he had fallen passionately in love in Milan.
Chapter Two: Entering Society138F
him about Horace. He still found these mirrors rather commanding. But he did not frame his replies, for a provincial, in sentences of excessive length. He had beautiful eyes, which shone even more brilliantly, either with shyness or, when he had answered particularly well, with joy. He was found acceptable. This kind of testing added a little interest to their somber dinner. The marquis gave his questioner a sign to push him even harder. "Might it be possible," he was thinking, "that he actually knows something?" Julien answered, improvising ideas as he went along, and losing enough of his shyness so that he demonstrated—not exactly wit, an impossibility for anyone not in command of Paris's way of speaking—but an originality, not to be sure set out gracefully, or properly ordered, but proving that he had a perfect grasp of Latin. His adversary, a member of the Paleographic Academy, who by chance knew Latin, seeing that Julien was a first-rate humanist, no longer worried about embarrassing him; he began a really serious interrogation. In the heat of combat, Julien was finally able to forget about the dining room's decorations, and to bring forth ideas about the Roman poets that his questioner had never seen so much as mentioned in print. As an honest man, he was obliged to respect the young secretary. Luckily, they got into a discussion of whether Horace had been poor or rich. Had he been a friendly fellow, voluptuous and carefree, throwing off poems to amuse himself, like Chapelle, friend of Molière and La Fontaine,8 or was he a poor devil of a poet laureate, connected to court and turning out odes for the ruler's birthday, like Southey,9 Byron's attacker? They spoke of the state of society under Augustus and George IV, in both of which epochs the aristocracy had been all-powerful, though Maecenas,10 in Rome—not the simple knight he'd seemed—had stripped away that power, while in England the aristocracy had reduced George IV almost to the level of the Doge of Venice.11 This discussion appeared to draw the marquis out of the torpid state into which, when dinner had started, boredom had plunged him. Julien knew nothing whatever about these moderns—Southey, Lord Byron, George IV— whose very names he was hearing for the first time. But no one could doubt that, whenever events in Rome were at issue, knowledge of which could be gathered from the works of Horace, Martial, Tacitus, etc., he was unquestionably the superior. Julien unceremoniously drew on ideas he'd acquired from the Bishop of Besançon, in the jolly discussion he'd had with that prelate. Nor were these the least appreciated. When they were weary of talking about poets, the marquise, who made it a rule to admire whatever amused her husband, condescended to give Julien a passing glance. "The truly gauche manners of this young priest," remarked the academician to her, he being seated beside her, "may well conceal a genuinely learned man." Julien overheard part of this. The mistress of the house was fond of ready-made phrases, and she adopted this one, about Julien, very pleased at having invited an academician to dine with them. "He amuses Monsieur de La Mole," she thought.