2 Czar Alexander I (born 1777, reigned 1801–25), grew increasingly mystic and erratic in his later years. His death was never officially certified, and there were rumors that he had actually abdicated and withdrawn to a monastery.
The Red and the Black
which was, it has to be admitted, not very rich in resources of this kind. The poor fellow was still uneasy with social custom, so he seemed perfectly clumsy, as well as perfectly obvious, when he rose to leave the drawing room. Misery was all too obvious in everything he did. He had played, for three-quarters of an hour, the role of a supplicant underling, from whom no one bothers to hide exactly what they think of him. The critical observations he had just made about his rivals, however, kept him from treating his misery too tragically, and to solace his pride he had the memory of what had taken place two nights earlier. "Whatever advantages they may have over me," he thought, walking alone in the garden, "Mathilde has never been to any of them what, twice in her life, she's been willing to be for me." It was as far as his wisdom went. He had absolutely no comprehension of this bizarre woman's character, she whom Fate had made complete mistress of his happiness. He spent the day trying to kill, by way of weariness, both himself and his horse. In the evening, he carefully stayed away from the blue sofa, to which Mathilde remained faithful. He noticed that Count Norbert would not so much as look at him, when they crossed paths in the house. "It must be violently difficult," he thought, "for such a naturally polite man." For Julien, sleep would have been happiness. Despite his fatigued body, wonderfully alluring memories began to take over his imagination. He was not clever enough to see that long days of riding through the woods near Paris affected him, and him only; they had no effect on Mathilde's heart, or on her mind. He was leaving his destiny entirely up to chance. He fancied that there was one thing which would be infinitely soothing to his sorrows: it would be to speak to Mathilde. And yet, what could he dare say to her? And this is what, at seven in the morning, he was dreamily considering when, suddenly, he saw her come into the library. "I'm aware, sir, that you wish to speak to me." "Good Lord! Who said that to you?" "I know it: why does it matter how? If you're not a man of honor, you can destroy me, or at least attempt to. But such a danger, which I do not consider real, will certainly not prevent me from being honest. I no longer love you, sir. My insane imagination deluded me..." After this terrible blow, frantic with love and misery, Julien attempted to argue himself back into favor. Nothing could have been more absurd. Argue yourself out of being disliked? But reason no longer had any control over his actions. Blind instinct compelled him to delay this final determination of his fate. He felt that, while he was still talking, it would not be all over. Mathilde did not listen to him; the sound of his words irritated her. She could not have believed he'd have the audacity to interrupt her. Remorse, caused by virtue and by pride, had made her, that morning, equally wretched. To some extent, she was overwhelmed by a frightful idea: she had given claims on herself to a petty priest, a peasant's son. "This is almost the same," she told herself, in moments of exaggerating her misery, "as if I had to reproach myself, having had a weakness for one of the servants." For proud, bold spirits, it's a short step from anger at themselves to anger at others. Wild fury is, in such cases, a lively pleasure. In a flash, Mathilde soared into action, covering Julien with furiously exaggerated contempt. She had immense resources, especially in the arts of torturing people's vanity and inflicting the most savage wounds. For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the workings of a superior mind, motivated by extraordinary hatred, and entirely directed at him. He was unable even to think of defending himself; indeed, he began to share her burning contempt. As he heard
Chapter Twenty: The Japanese Vase
Mathilde heaping up her disdain, her cruelties, all cleverly calculated to destroy whatever good opinion he might have had of himself, he felt she was right, and she could not have said enough of such things. She herself felt a delicious, thrilling pride in thus punishing herself, and him, for the worship of him that, several days earlier, had so overcome her. There was no need for her to create out of nothing, or to plan for the first time, the cruel things she spoke with such satisfaction. All she had to do was repeat what the anti-love forces, deep in her heart, had already been saying for a week. The things she said kept multiplying Julien's terrible misery. He tried to run off; Mademoiselle de La Mole held him where he was, with an authoritative grip on his arm. "Take notice, please," he said, "that you're speaking very loudly. You'll be heard in the next room." "I don't care!" she responded haughtily. "Who's going to dare tell me they've overheard me? I want to cure—forever!—any ideas your petty vanity may have had about me." When Julien was able to leave the library, he was so stunned that he actually could not feel his misery so deeply as before. "Well! She doesn't love me anymore," he kept repeating aloud, as if to help himself determine his position. "She has apparently loved me for a week or so—and I, I'll love her forever. "How can it be possible that, just a few days ago, she had absolutely no place in my heart, none whatever!" Mathilde's heart was flooded with delighted pride. She had managed to break with him forever! To triumph so completely, over so powerful a passion, made her perfectly happy. "Now this little gentleman will understand, once and for all, that he neither has nor will have the slightest dominion over me." She was so intensely happy that, truthfully, at that moment there was no love left in her. After such an awful scene, as humiliating as it was dreadful, love would have become impossible for anyone less impassioned than Julien. Without forgetting for an instant what she owed herself, Mademoiselle de La Mole had directed distasteful remarks at him, deftly calculated to seem truths even when remembered more calmly. The conclusion Julien had drawn, in the first moments that followed such an astonishing scene, was that Mathilde's pride was boundless. He believed firmly that, between them, everything was finished forever, and yet the next day, at lunch, he was awkward and shy in her presence. It was not a failing that, until then, he could have been reproached with. In little as in large matters, he knew precisely what he was owed, and what he wanted to do, and he did it. That day, after lunch, when Madame de La Mole was asking him for a seditious and distinctly rare pamphlet, brought to the library that morning by her parish priest, Julien knocked over an old vase, in blue porcelain, and almost inconceivably ugly. Madame de La Mole stood up, uttering a cry of distress, and came nearer, to look at the shattered pieces of her precious vase. "This was from old Japan," she said. "It came to me from my great aunt, the Abbess at Chelles.3 It had been a present from the Dutch to the Duke d'Orléans, when he was Regent of France, and he had given it to his daughter..." Mathilde had been watching her mother, delighted to see the blue vase broken; it had always seemed to her horribly ugly. Julien said nothing, not particularly upset. He saw Mademoiselle de La Mole quite near him.