3 Madame de Staël's (see note for p. 278, l. 1) list of reputed lovers included Talleyrand, the Count de Narbonne, Joseph Bonaparte, and especially Benjamin Constant. The story of their stormy affair is told from his perspective in the novel Adolphe, and from hers in Corinne.
The Red and the Black
I felt for those young aristocrats: he's so jealous of them. Ah, if he knew how little danger they represent for me! how, when I compare them to Julien, they seem bloodless, all of them copies of one another." As her mind shaped these notions, Mathilde was drawing random lines, in pencil, on a page in her sketchbook. One of the profiles she'd produced both amazed and delighted her: it was strikingly like Julien. "It's the voice of heaven! This is one of love's miracles," she exclaimed to herself, ecstatically. "Now I'll surely draw his portrait." She ran up to her room, shut herself in, and set to work, trying hard to really draw a portrait of Julien. But she could not: the profile she'd drawn by accident always resembled him most closely. She was utterly enchanted: it seemed to her proof positive of a great passion. She didn't close her sketchbook until much later, when her mother called her to go to the Italian opera. There was only one idea in her head: catch Julien's attention, so she could get her mother to have him accompany them to the performance. He did not appear; the only people with whom the ladies shared their box were some dull commoners. During the opera's first act, Mathilde dreamed most passionately of the man she loved. But in the second act—sung, it must be admitted, to a melody worthy of Cimarosa4— she heard a maxim about love, and it pierced her to the heart. The heroine was proclaiming: "I must be punished for loving him so wildly; I love him far too much!" From the moment Mathilde heard this sublime aria, the whole world seemed to disappear for her. She was spoken to; she did not reply. Her mother was scolding her, but Mathilde could barely see the marquise. Her ecstasy reached an exalted, passionate state comparable to the most violent sensations that, for some time, Julien had been feeling for her. The divinely graceful aria, in which she heard the strikingly apposite maxim, filled every moment when she was not thinking directly of Julien. Her love of music, that night, left her feeling as Madame de Rênal always had, when thinking of Julien. Mind-made love is of course subtler than true love, but its moments of enthusiasm are limited: it understands itself too well; it is always evaluating, passing judgment. Rather than deranging the mind, it throbs only to the beating of thought. Returning to the house, no matter what Madame de La Mole might say, Mathilde claimed she was feeling feverish, and spent much of the night playing the melody, over and over, on her piano. She sang the words of the famous aria5 that had so charmed her: Devo punirmi, devo punirmi, Se troppo amai, etc. I must be punished, I must be punished, I love him too much. After that wild night, she believed she'd managed to triumph over her love. (Writing these things, I know, will still further injure this unfortunate author. Prigs and prudes will accuse me of indecency. But it does no harm to young women, shining so brilliantly in Parisian drawing rooms, to suggest that one, just one, among them might be susceptible to the insane acts disfiguring Mathilde's character. She's a completely imaginary person, and indeed conceived well outside the manners and mores which, in the pages of history, will secure such a distinguished place for our nineteenth-century civilization. (It is, after all, not prudence that might be thought deficient, among the young girls who have ornamented this winter season's dances and balls. (Nor do I think anyone can accuse them of excessive scorn for glittering fortunes, horses, handsome estates, and everything that guarantees a fine position in the world. Far from feeling