8 Pierre de l'Etoile (1546–1611), a Parisian bourgeois, left a detailed diary of his time.
The Red and the Black
truly startled, in the drawing room, if they could see that look on her face. That sweetness, that goodness, isn't something she ever shows, not to anybody." Julien tried not to exaggerate this odd friendship. He described it to himself as a relationship at gunpoint. Every day, when they found themselves together again, and before they could resume the previous night's almost intimate tone, they virtually had to ask themselves: "Will we be friends today, or enemies?" Julien was very well aware that, if he ever let himself be insulted, with impunity, by this haughty girl, everything was all over. "If I have to quarrel with her, wouldn't it be better, in a proper defense of my pride, if I started it, instead of just repelling the signs of contempt that, surely, will follow right behind the very smallest surrender of my personal dignity?" Several times, when they were not in good moods, Mathilde tried to play the great lady with him. She made these attempts with rare skill, but Julien roughly pushed them aside. One day he interrupted her sharply: "Has Mademoiselle de La Mole some order to transmit to her father's secretary?" he said. "He is obliged to obey the marquis's orders, and to respectfully carry them out. But, otherwise, the marquis's secretary has nothing to say to mademoiselle. He is not paid to communicate his thoughts to her." This kind of behavior, and his strange doubts, drove away the boredom once so regularly afflicting him, in that resplendent drawing room where he'd been afraid of everything, and where it had never felt proper to joke about anything. "It would be a good joke, if she loved me! But whether she does or she doesn't," Julien went on, "I have for my friend a girl who's intelligent, in front of whom the whole house trembles, and most of all the Marquis de Croisenois—that infinitely polished young man, so gentle, so courageous, who has all the advantages of birth and fortune, either one of which would put my heart so completely at ease! He's wildly in love; he'll surely marry her. Just consider all the letters Monsieur de La Mole has had me write to the lawyers on both sides, to settle the terms of the marriage contract! And I, who see myself so much the underling, with my pen in my hand, here I am, two hours later, in the garden again, victorious over this fine, good young man—for her preference is striking, utterly plain to see. And perhaps she dislikes him as a possible husband. She's arrogant enough for that. And all the kindnesses she shows me, they come to me in my role as an employee-confidant! "But no: Either I'm crazy, or she's paying court to me. The colder and more respectful I am to her, the more she comes looking for me. It might be a pretense, an affectation—but I can see her eyes light up when I appear without warning. Do Parisian women know how to go that far, with their game-playing? But what difference does it make to me! Here I've got all the appearances: let's savor them. And Lord, how pretty she is! How I relish those big blue eyes, seen so close, and looking at me as they often do! What a difference between this spring and last year's, in Besançon, when I was miserable and sustained myself only by force of character, in the middle of three hundred nasty, dirty hypocrites! I was almost as nasty as they were." When he fell victim to mistrust: "She's making fun of me, that girl," Julien would think. "She and her brother have made a pact to bamboozle me. But she really seems to despise her brother's listlessness! 'He's courageous, and that's all he is,' she told me. 'He hasn't got a single thought bold enough to defy fashion! I am always required to defend him. I'm a girl, I'm only nineteen! How can I be forever faithful, day after day, to the hypocrisy they demand of us?' "On the other hand, when Mademoiselle de La Mole looks so fixedly at me, with that strange expression in her big blue eyes, Count Norbert always looks away. That strikes me as suspicious. Shouldn't he be indignant if his sister so honors a household servant? And I've heard the Duke de Chaulnes talk of me that way." Remembering this, anger replaced every other feeling. "Is that peculiar old duke just crazy about old-fashioned ways of speech?
Chapter Ten: Queen Marguerite
"Lord, Lord, but she's pretty!" Julien resumed, a tigerish look on his face. "I'll have her, I'll leave afterward, and anyone who chases after me had better watch out!" He became preoccupied with the idea; he was unable to think of anything else. Days went by, for him, as if they'd been hours. Over and over, as he tried to focus on some serious business, his mind would let everything else fall away, and for a quarter of an hour he'd be lost in dreams, his heart beating hard, his head hurting, and always wondering about the exact same thing: "Does she really love me?"
The Red and the Black
Chapter Eleven: A Young Girl's Imperial Dominion I admire her beauty, but I'm afraid of her mind. —Mérimée1 Had Julien tried to analyze what went on in the drawing room, with the same intensity with which he set himself to dramatizing her beauty, or getting himself excited about the family's natural arrogance—which she put aside for him—he would have understood how she ruled over everyone around her. The moment anyone displeased Mademoiselle de La Mole, she knew exactly how to strike back with a jest so carefully calculated, so well chosen, so apparently decent and decorous, hurled with such perfect timing, that the wound kept growing worse and worse, the more the victim thought about it. Bit by bit, she would become increasingly destructive of the offending party's self-esteem. Since she had absolutely no interest in most of the things so very seriously sought by the rest of the family, to them she seemed forever cool and calm. Aristocratic drawing rooms are pleasant to discuss, when you've escaped from them, but that's about all: sheer politeness, never progressing beyond politeness, is worth very little after first meetings. Julien had experienced this, too, after an initial enchantment, an initial surprise. "Politeness," he told himself, "is merely the absence of that anger which creates bad manners." Mathilde was frequently bored; it may well have been that she would have been bored wherever she was. Accordingly, honing an epigram was for her both a distraction and a genuine pleasure. It may have been in order to have victims a bit more amusing than her grandparents, the academician, and the five or six underlings who composed their court, that she had encouraged the Marquis de Croisenois, Count de Caylus, and two or three other young men of the highest rank. All they were to her was new targets for epigrams. It pains us to admit, since we love Mathilde, that she had received letters from several of these young men, and had sometimes replied to them. We hasten to add that, in so doing, she was an exception to the rules of her time. Lack of prudence is not usually ascribable to young women who have been students at the noble Convent of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.2 One day, the Marquis de Croisenois sent her back a significantly compromising letter that, the previous night, she had written him. This demonstration of great prudence seemed to him quite helpful, as a way of furthering his cause. But recklessness was what Mathilde liked in her correspondence. She took real pleasure in games of that sort. She did not speak to him again for a full six weeks. These young men's letters amused her, but according to her they were all alike, always heavy with "the most profound passion," with "infinite melancholy."3 "They're each and all the same perfect man, ready to leave on another Crusade," she said to her cousin, Mademoiselle de Sainte-Hérédité. "Have you ever seen anything more insipid? And these are the letters I'm going to receive, all the rest of my life! Letters like this can only change every twenty years, when the world changes to a new way of keeping itself busy. Letters had to be less colorless, in the days of Napoleon. All young aristocrats, back then, had