11 Germaine Necker, Baroness de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817), author of Corinne and Delphine. Immensely rich, a successful and influential author, and probably the most famous nonroyal woman in Europe; it is true that Madame de Staël was not beautiful. Whether she would have traded all her advantages for Mathilde's beauty is highly debatable.
Chapter Nine: The Ball
Chapter Nine: The Ball Splendid, costly clothes, bright candles, perfume: so many pretty bare arms, lovely shoulders; flowers, rousing Rossini melodies, Ciceri's paintings! I'm beside myself! Uzeri, Travels1 "You're in a terrible mood," the Marquise de La Mole told her. "I warn you: at a ball, that's most ungracious." "I just have a headache," answered Mathilde indifferently. "It's horribly warm in here." Just then, as if to justify Mademoiselle de La Mole, old Baron de Tully got sick and collapsed; they had to carry him out. People mentioned apoplexy; it was distinctly disagreeable. Mathilde did not care. It was her fixed prejudice never to so much as look at old men, or anyone else well known for saying sad things. She danced in order to get away from talk about apoplexy, which this surely wasn't, because two days later the baron reappeared. "But Monsieur Sorel has not," she said to herself, after her dancing was done. She was virtually hunting him, with her glance, when she saw him in another drawing room. Quite extraordinarily, he had apparently shed the impassive coldness that, to him, was so natural. He no longer looked like an Englishman. "He's chatting with Count Altamira, my death-sentence man!" Mathilde saw. "There's a dark fire in his eyes; he looks like a prince in disguise; he seems twice as proud." Julien drifted back toward her, constantly in conversation with Altamira. She looked at him, fixedly, studying his face for signs of those high qualities that, in a man of honor, might make him worthy of a death sentence. As he passed close by her: "Yes," he was saying to Count Altamira, "Danton was a man!" "Oh heavens! Might he be a Danton," she wondered. "But his face is so noble, and that Danton was so terribly ugly—a butcher, I think."2 Julien was still quite nearby; she had no hesitation about calling him over. Her conscience and her pride impelled her to ask, for a young girl, a truly extraordinary question. "Wasn't Danton a butcher?" she said to him. "Yes, as far as certain people are concerned," Julien told her, with a poorly masked expression of contempt, his eyes still burning from his conversation with Altamira. "But unfortunately for the aristocracy, he was in fact a lawyer at Méry on the Seine. In other words, mademoiselle," he added spitefully, "he began just like several of the peers I see here. It is true that Danton labored, in the eyes of beauty, under an enormous disadvantage: he was very ugly." He spoke these last words rapidly, with an air both extraordinary and, without question, not very polite. Julien waited a moment, bent slightly forward, in humble pride. He seemed to be telling her: "I am paid to answer you, and I live on what I am paid." He did not trouble to raise his eyes toward her. And she, her lovely eyes open very wide, and fixed on him, seemed to be his slave. Finally, as the silence remained unbroken, he glanced at her, just as a valet glances at his