3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

(marvel of marvels!) in hardly giving a thought to Mademoiselle de La Mole.

      Mathilde had almost forgotten him during his absence. ‘After all, he is only a common person,’ she thought, ‘his name will always remind me of the greatest mistake of my life. I must return in all sincerity to the recognised standards of prudence and honour; a woman has everything to lose in forgetting them.’ She showed herself ready to permit at length the conclusion of the arrangement with the Marquis de Croisenois, begun so long since. He was wild with joy; he would have been greatly astonished had anyone told him that it was resignation that lay at the root of this attitude on Mathilde’s part, which was making him so proud.

      All Mademoiselle de La Mole’s ideas changed at the sight of Julien. ‘In reality, that is my husband,’ she said to herself; ‘if I return in sincerity to the standards of prudence, it is obviously he that I ought to marry.’

      She was prepared for importunities, for an air of misery on Julien’s part; she prepared her answers: for doubtless, on rising from table, he would endeavour to say a few words to her. Far from it, he remained fixed in the drawing-room, his eyes never even turned towards the garden, heaven knows with how great an effort! ‘It would be better to get our explanation over at once,’ Mademoiselle de La Mole told herself; she went out by herself to the garden, Julien did not appear there. Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms.

      Prince Korasoff would indeed have been proud, had he been in Paris: the evening was passing exactly as he had foretold.

      He would have approved of the mode of behaviour to which Julien adhered throughout the days that followed.

      An intrigue among those constituting the Power behind the Throne was about to dispose of several Blue Ribands; Madame la Marechale de Fervaques insisted that her great-uncle should be made a Knight of the Order. The Marquis de La Mole was making a similar claim for his father-inlaw; they combined their efforts, and the Marechale came almost every day to the Hotel de La Mole. It was from her that Julien learned that the Marquis was to become a Minister: he offered the Camarilla a highly ingenious plan for destroying the Charter, without any fuss, in three years’ time.

      Julien might expect a Bishopric, if M. de La Mole entered the Ministry; but to his eyes all these important interests were as though hidden by a veil. His imagination perceived them now only vaguely, and so to speak in the distance. The fearful misery which was driving him mad made him see every interest in life in the state of his relations with Mademoiselle de La Mole. He calculated that after five or six years of patient effort, he might succeed in making her love him once again.

      This coolest of heads had, as we see, sunk to a state of absolute unreason. Of all the qualities that had distinguished him in the past, there remained to him only a trace of firmness. Faithful to the letter to the plan of conduct dictated to him by Prince Korasoff, every evening he took his place as near as possible to the armchair occupied by Madame de Fervaques, but found it impossible to think of a word to say to her.

      The effort that he was imposing on himself to appear cured in the eyes of Mathilde absorbed all his spiritual strength, he remained rooted beside the Marechale like a barely animate being; his eyes even, as in the extremity of physical suffering, had lost all their fire.

      Since Madame de La Mole’s attitude towards the world was never anything more than a feeble copy of the opinions of that husband who might make her a Duchess, for some days she had been lauding Julien’s merits to the skies.

      Chapter 26

      MORAL LOVE

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      There also was of course in Adeline

      That calm patrician polish in the address,

      Which ne’er can pass the equinoctial line

      Of anything which nature would express;

      Just as a mandarin finds nothing fine,

      At least his manner suffers not to guess

      That anything he views can greatly please.

      Don Juan, XIII. 34

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      ‘THERE IS A TRACE OF madness in the way the whole of this family have of looking at things,’ thought the Marechale; ‘they are infatuated with their little abbe, who can do nothing but sit and stare at one; it is true, his eyes are not bad-looking.’

      Julien, for his part, found in the Marechale’s manner an almost perfect example of that patrician calm which betokens a scrupulous politeness and still more the impossibility of any keen emotion. Any sudden outburst, a want of self-control, would have shocked Madame de Fervaques almost as much as a want of dignity towards one’s inferiors. The least sign of sensibility would have been in her eyes like a sort of moral intoxication for which one ought to blush, and which was highly damaging to what a person of exalted rank owed to herself. Her great happiness was to speak of the King’s latest hunt, her favourite book the Memoires du duc de Saint–Simon, especially the genealogical part.

      Julien knew the place in the drawing-room which, as the lights were arranged, suited the style of beauty of Madame de Fervaques. He would be there waiting for her, but took great care to turn his chair so that he should not be able to see Mathilde. Astonished by this persistence in hiding from her, one evening she left the blue sofa and came to work at a little table that stood by the Marquise’s armchair. Julien could see her at quite a close range from beneath the brim of Madame de Fervaques’s hat. Those eyes, which governed his destiny, frightened him at first, seen at such close range, then jerked him violently out of his habitual apathy; he talked, and talked very well.

      He addressed himself to the Marechale, but his sole object was to influence the heart of Mathilde. He grew so animated that finally Madame de Fervaques could not understand what he said.

      This was so much to the good. Had it occurred to Julien to follow it up with a few expressions of German mysticism, religious fervour and Jesuitry, the Marechale would have numbered him straightway among the superior persons called to regenerate the age.

      ‘Since he shows such bad taste,’ Mademoiselle de La Mole said to herself, ‘as to talk for so long and with such fervour to Madame de Fervaques, I shall not listen to him any more.’ For the rest of the evening she kept her word, albeit with difficulty.

      At midnight, when she took up her mother’s candlestick, to escort her to her room, Madame de La Mole stopped on the stairs to utter a perfect panegyric of Julien. This completed Mathilde’s ill humour; she could not send herself to sleep. A thought came to her which soothed her: ‘The things that I despise may even be great distinctions in the Marechale’s eyes.’

      As for Julien, he had now taken action, he was less wretched; his eyes happened to fall on the Russia-leather portfolio in which Prince Korasoff had placed the fifty-three love letters of which he had made him a present. Julien saw a note at the foot of the first letter: ‘Send No. 1 a week after the first meeting.’

      ‘I am late!’ exclaimed Julien, ‘for it is ever so long now since I first met Madame de Fervaques.’ He set to work at once to copy out this first love letter; it was a homily stuffed with phrases about virtue, and of a deadly dullness; Julien was fortunate in falling asleep over the second page.

      Some hours later the risen sun surprised him crouching with his head on the table. One of the most painful moments of his life was that in which, every morning, as he awoke, he discovered his distress.