3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

ever have been a young man who could write such stuff?’ He counted several sentences of nine lines. At the foot of the original he caught sight of a pencilled note.

      ‘One delivers these letters oneself: on horseback, a black cravat, a blue greatcoat. One hands the letter to the porter with a contrite air; profound melancholy in the gaze. If one should see a lady’s maid, wipe the eyes furtively. Address a few words to the maid.’

      All these instructions were faithfully carried out.

      ‘What I am doing is very bold,’ thought Julien, as he rode away from the Hotel de Fervaques, ‘but so much the worse for Korasoff. To dare write to so notorious a prude! I am going to be treated with the utmost contempt, and nothing will amuse me more. This is, really, the only form of comedy to which I can respond. Yes, to cover with ridicule that odious being whom I call myself will amuse me. If I obeyed my instincts I should commit some crime for the sake of distraction.’

      For a month past, the happiest moment in Julien’s day had been that in which he brought his horse back to the stables. Korasoff had expressly forbidden him to look, upon any pretext whatsoever, at the mistress who had abandoned him. But the paces of that horse which she knew so well, the way in which Julien rapped with his whip at the stable door to summon a groom, sometimes drew Mathilde to stand behind her window curtain. The muslin was so fine that Julien could see through it. By looking up in a certain way from under the brim of his hat, he caught a glimpse of Mathilde’s form without seeing her eyes. ‘Consequently,’ he told himself, ‘she cannot see mine, and this is not the same as looking at her.’

      That evening, Madame de Fervaques behaved to him exactly as though she had not received the philosophical, mystical and religious dissertation which, in the morning, he had handed to her porter with such an air of melancholy. The evening before, chance had revealed to Julien the secret springs of eloquence; he arranged himself so as to be able to see Mathilde’s eyes. She, meanwhile, immediately after the arrival of the Marechale, rose from the blue sofa: this was a desertion of her regular company. M. de Croisenois showed consternation at this new caprice; his evident distress relieved Julien of the keenest pangs of his own sufferings.

      This unexpected turn in his affairs made him talk like an angel; and as self-esteem finds its way even into hearts that serve as temples to the most august virtue: ‘Madame de La Mole is right,’ the Marechale said to herself, as she stepped into her carriage, ‘that young priest has distinction. My presence must, at first, have frightened him. Indeed, everything that one finds in that house is very frivolous; all the virtue I see there is the result of age, and stood in great need of the congealing hand of time. That young man must have seen the difference; he writes well; but I am much afraid that the request that I should enlighten him with my advice, which he makes in his letter, is in reality only a sentiment unaware of itself.

      ‘And yet, how many conversions have begun in this way! What leads me to augur well of this one is the difference in his style from that of the young men whose letters I have had occasion to see. It is impossible not to recognise unction, a profound earnestness and great conviction in the prose of this young Levite; he must have the soothing virtue of Massillon.’

      Chapter 27

      THE BEST POSITIONS in the Church

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      Service! talent! merit! bah! belong to a coterie.

      TELEMACHUS

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      THUS THE IDEA OF A Bishopric was for the first time blended with that of Julien in the head of a woman who sooner or later would be distributing the best positions in the Church of France. This prospect would have made little difference to him; for the moment, his thoughts rose to nothing that was alien to his present misery: everything intensified it; for instance the sight of his bedroom had become intolerable to him. At night, when he came upstairs with his candle, each piece of furniture, every little ornament seemed to acquire the power of speech to inform him harshly of some fresh detail of his misery.

      This evening, ‘I am a galley slave,’ he said to himself, as he entered it, with a vivacity long unfamiliar to him: ‘let us hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first.’

      It was even more so. What he was copying seemed to him so absurd that he began to transcribe it line for line, without a thought of the meaning.

      ‘It is even more emphatic,’ he said to himself, ‘than the official documents of the Treaty of Muenster, which my tutor in diplomacy made me copy out in London.’

      It was only then that he remembered the letters from Madame de Fervaques, the originals of which he had forgotten to restore to the grave Spaniard, Don Diego Bustos. He searched for them; they were really almost as fantastic a rigmarole as those of the young Russian gentleman. They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. ‘It is the Aeolian harp of style,’ thought Julien. ‘Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.’

      The monologue which we have here abridged was repeated nightly for a fortnight. Falling asleep while transcribing a sort of commentary on the Apocalypse, going next day to deliver a letter with a melancholy air, leaving his horse in the stable yard with the hope of catching a glimpse of Mathilde’s gown, working, putting in an appearance in the evening at the Opera when Madame de Fervaques did not come to the Hotel de La Mole; such were the monotonous events of Julien’s existence. They became more interesting when Madame de Fervaques paid a visit to the Marquise; then he could steal a glance at Mathilde’s eyes beneath the side of the Marechale’s hat, and would wax eloquent. His picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a turn at once more striking and more elegant.

      He was fully aware that what he was saying seemed absurd to Mathilde, but he sought to impress her by the elegance of his diction. ‘The falser the things I say, the more I ought to appeal to her,’ thought Julien; and then, with a shocking boldness, he began to exaggerate certain aspects of nature. He very soon perceived that, if he were not to appear vulgar in the eyes of the Marechale, he must above all avoid any simple or reasonable idea. He continued on these lines, or abridged his amplifications according as he read success or indifference in the eyes of the two great ladies to whom he must appeal.

      On the whole, his life was less horrible than at the time when his days passed in inaction.

      ‘But,’ he said to himself one evening, ‘here I am transcribing the fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have been faithfully delivered to the Marechale’s Swiss. I shall soon have the honour of filling all the pigeonholes in her desk. And yet she treats me exactly as though I were not writing! What can be the end of all this? Can my constancy bore her as much as it bores me? I am bound to say that this Russian, Korasoff’s friend, who was in love with the fair Quakeress of Richmond, must have been a terrible fellow in his day; no one could be more deadly.’

      Like everyone of inferior intelligence whom chance brings into touch with the operations of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack launched by the young Russian upon the heart of the fair English maid. The first forty letters were intended only to make her pardon his boldness in writing. It was necessary to make this gentle person, who perhaps was vastly bored, form the habit of receiving letters that were perhaps a trifle less insipid than her everyday life.

      One morning, a letter was handed to Julien; he recognised the armorial bearings of Madame de Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which would have seemed quite impossible to him a few days earlier: it was only an invitation to dine.

      He hastened to consult Prince Korasoff’s instructions. Unfortunately, the young Russian had chosen to be as frivolous as Dorat, just where he ought to have been simple and intelligible; Julien