25 One of the most popular and enduring plays of Jean Rotrou (1609–50). Venceslas, aging King of Poland, abdicates in order to avoid having to carry out the execution of his son, Ladislas, who has been convicted of murder.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was Mathilde. "Good: she didn't understand me." That realization restored his calm coolness. Mathilde looked as if she'd been sick for six months: indeed, she was not recognizable. "That vile de Frilair betrayed me," she told him, wringing her hands. Anger kept her from crying. "Wasn't I wonderful, yesterday, when I made my speech?" Julien replied. "For the first time in my life, I was improvising! Of course, it may well be the last time, too." Julien was playing on Mathilde's character with all the calm skill of a trained pianist seated at a keyboard..."I don't have the advantage of illustrious birth: true. But," he went on, "Mathilde's lofty soul has raised her lover to her level. Do you think Boniface de La Mole would have done better, facing these judges?" That day, Mathilde was unaffectedly tender, like some poor girl who lived high on the fifth story, but she could not get him to speak more straightforwardly. He did not realize it, but he was paying her back for the torments she had often inflicted. "We have no idea where the Nile begins," he said to himself. "No human eye has ever been allowed to see the king of rivers as a simple little brook; so, too, no human eye will see Julien weak, first of all because he isn't. But my heart is easily moved: perfectly ordinary words, if said truly, can affect my voice and even make my tears fall. How many times have dried-out hearts scorned me for this defect! They think I'm begging for mercy—and I can't endure that. "It's said Danton was moved by thoughts of his wife, even at the foot of the scaffold, but Danton had given strength to a nation of conceited puppies, and kept the enemy out of Paris. I'm the only one who knows what I might have been able to do...For everyone else, I'm pretty much a perhaps. "If Madame de Rênal were here in my cell, instead of Mathilde, could I have answered for what I've done? The intensity of both my despair and my repentance would be seen by the Valenods, and all the Franche-Comté patricians, as vulgar fear of death. They're so proud, these feeble-hearted men, because their wealth sets them above temptation! 'See what it's like,' Messieurs de Moirod and de Cholin would say—the men who have just condemned me to death—'to be born a carpenter's son! You can make yourself learned, and skillful—but ah, the spirit! ... That cannot be learned.' Not even by this wretched Mathilde, who's crying, right now," he said to himself, looking at her reddened eyes. .. and then he put his arms around her. Seeing real sorrow made him forget his philosophizing..."Perhaps she's been crying all night," he said to himself. "But, some day, how ashamed she'll be, remembering this! She'll see herself, in her early youth, having been led astray by the base ideas of a plebeian...De Croisenois is weak enough to marry her and, damn it, he'll do very well. She'll give him a role to play: "By the rights a steady spirit enjoys, all filled with high Ideals, against the coarser spirit of vulgar humans.26 "Now that's amusing: since I knew I had to die, all the poetry I've ever known has been coming back to me. This indicates a failing mind..." Mathilde was repeating, her voice faint: "He's there, in the next room." He finally paid attention to what she was saying. "Her voice may be weak," he thought, "but her imperious manner is still there. She's keeping her voice down, so she can hold in her anger." "And who's there?" he said to her, gently. "The lawyer, so you can sign the appeal." "I won't appeal."