3 Coblenz, Germany, was the center of the émigré community in the early years of the Revolution. The so- called Army of the Princes, led by Louis XVI's brother and cousins, was headquartered at Coblenz.
The Red and the Black
gave him, and the curiosity inspired in him by this entire circle of young aristocrats, he would have refrained from following the shining young fellows with mustaches into the garden, after dinner, as they went walking with Mademoiselle de la Mole. "Yes, I can't possibly ignore it," Julien told himself. "Mademoiselle de La Mole looks at me so very strangely. Yet even when those beautiful blue eyes are fixed on me, wide with utmost abandon, I always see a basically analytical stance, a cool calmness, and a maliciousness. Can these really be expressions of love? How differently Madame de Rênal looked at me!" After dinner, once, having first followed Monsieur de La Mole into his office room, Julien hurried back down to the garden. As he came close to the group around Mathilde, without warning he was struck by loudly pronounced words. Mathilde was giving her brother a very difficult time. Julien heard his own name, twice, each time very distinctly. He came over to them; suddenly there was total silence, though assorted unsuccessful attempts were made to break it. Both Mademoiselle de La Mole and her brother were too worked up to find another topic of conversation. Messieurs de Caylus, de Croisenois, de Luz, and one of their other friends, were as cold as glass to Julien. He left them.
Chapter Thirteen: A Conspiracy
Chapter Thirteen: A Conspiracy Random words, heard by chance, turn to hard facts in the eyes of a man of imagination, if there's any fire burning in his heart. —Schiller1 Again the next day, he surprised Norbert and his sister, who had been speaking of him. As he joined them, a deathly silence fell, exactly like the previous evening. He was hugely suspicious. Are these pleasant young people planning a way to make fun of me? He had to admit this was far more likely, and much more natural, than Mademoiselle de La Mole's pretended passion for a poor devil of a secretary. "In any case, do these people ever experience passion? Mystification is their specialty. They're jealous of my tongue's miserable little superiority. Jealousy remains one of their weaknesses. They're transparently clear. Mademoiselle de La Mole wants me to think she's interested in me, quite simply so she can turn me into a spectacle for her intended husband." This bitter suspicion shifted Julien's entire moral framework. The destructive idea confronted a budding love in his heart; it had no difficulty killing it off. His love had been based only on Mathilde's rare beauty, or more likely on her queenly manner and the wonderful way she dressed. In such things, Julien was still a self-made social climber. It's always said that a pretty aristocratic woman is the most astonishing thing of all, for a spirited peasant, when he reaches the higher rungs of society. It was hardly Mathilde's character, all this time, that had set Julien to dreaming. He was sensible enough to understand that, in fact, he knew nothing about her character. Everything he'd been seeing of it might be no more than a pretense. For example: Nothing could make Mathilde miss Sunday mass; she went to church with her mother virtually every day. If some careless fellow, in the de La Mole drawing room, happened to forget where he was and allowed himself even a distantly barbed remark about the true or pretended interests of either church or state, Mathilde immediately turned seriously icy. Her glance went from liveliness to all the impenetrable haughtiness of an old family portrait. But Julien knew for sure that she always had, in her room, one or two of Voltaire's most philosophical books. He himself had often secretly borrowed volumes of that magnificently bound edition. He would separate somewhat the remaining books, concealing what he had borrowed, but soon realized that someone else was reading Voltaire. He fell back on a seminary trick, putting a few strands of hair in volumes he imagined might well interest Mademoiselle de La Mole. As the weeks went by, all the hair disappeared. Monsieur de La Mole grew impatient with his bookseller, who was sending him all the so- called Memoirs,2 and ordered Julien to buy whatever new volumes were moderately racy. But to keep the poison from spreading through the house, the secretary had been directed to place these in a small bookcase right in the marquis's room. Julien was soon positive that if any of these new volumes were, to any degree, hostile to the interests of church or throne, it did not take long for them to disappear. He was equally certain that it was not Norbert who was reading them. Considerably dramatizing this experience, Julien believed Mademoiselle de La Mole possessed of the conniving nature of Machiavelli. A pose of such wickedness was, in her eyes,