3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

which may entitle a man to the honour of being sentenced to death.

      As he passed by her:

      ‘Yes,’ he was saying to Conte Altamira, ‘Danton was a man!’

      ‘Oh, heavens! Is he to be another Danton,’ thought Mathilde; ‘but he has such a noble face, and that Danton was so horribly ugly, a butcher, I fancy.’ Julien was still quite near her, she had no hesitation in calling to him; she was conscious and proud of asking a question that was extraordinary, coming from a girl.

      ‘Was not Danton a butcher?’ she asked him.

      ‘Yes, in the eyes of certain people,’ Julien answered her with an expression of the most ill-concealed scorn, his eye still ablaze from his conversation with Altamira, ‘but unfortunately for people of birth, he was a lawyer at Mery-sur-Seine; that is to say, Mademoiselle,’ he went on with an air of sarcasm, ‘that he began life like several of the Peers whom I see here this evening. It is true that Danton had an enormous disadvantage in the eyes of beauty: he was extremely ugly.’

      The last words were uttered rapidly, with an extraordinary and certainly far from courteous air.

      Julien waited for a moment, bowing slightly from the waist and with an arrogantly humble air. He seemed to be saying: ‘I am paid to answer you, and I live upon my pay.’ He did not deign to raise his eyes to her face. She, with her fine eyes opened extraordinarily wide and fastened upon him, seemed like his slave. At length, as the silence continued, he looked at her as a servant looks at his master, when receiving orders. Although his eyes looked full into those of Mathilde, still fastened upon him with a strange gaze, he withdrew with marked alacrity.

      ‘That he, who really is so handsome,’ Mathilde said to herself at length, awakening from her dreams, ‘should pay such a tribute to ugliness! Never a thought of himself! He is not like Caylus or Croisenois. This Sorel has something of the air my father adopts when he is playing the Napoleon, at a ball.’ She had entirely forgotten Danton. ‘No doubt about it, I am bored this evening.’ She seized her brother by the arm, and, greatly to his disgust, forced him to take her for a tour of the rooms. The idea occurred to her of following the condemned man’s conversation with Julien.

      The crowd was immense. She succeeded, however, in overtaking them at the moment when, just in front of her, Altamira had stopped by a tray of ices to help himself. He was talking to Julien, half turning towards him. He saw an arm in a braided sleeve stretched out to take an ice from the same tray. The gold lace seemed to attract his attention; he turned round bodily to see whose this arm was. Immediately his eyes, so noble and unaffected, assumed a slight expression of scorn.

      ‘You see that man,’ he murmured to Julien; ‘he is the Principe d’Araceli, the —— Ambassador. This morning he applied for my extradition to your French Foreign Minister, M. de Nerval. Look, there he is over there, playing whist. M. de Nerval is quite ready to give me up, for we gave you back two or three conspirators in 1816. If they surrender me to my King I shall be hanged within twenty-four hours. And it will be one of those pretty gentlemen with moustaches who will seize me.’

      ‘The wretches!’ exclaimed Julien, half aloud.

      Mathilde did not lose a syllable of their conversation. Her boredom had vanished.

      ‘Not such wretches as all that,’ replied Conte Altamira. ‘I have spoken to you of myself to impress you with a real instance. Look at Principe d’Araceli; every five minutes he casts a glance at his Golden Fleece; he cannot get over the pleasure of seeing that trinket on his breast. The poor man is really nothing worse than an anachronism. A hundred years ago, the Golden Fleece was a signal honour, but then it would have been far above his head. Today, among people of breeding, one must be an Araceli to be thrilled by it. He would have hanged a whole town to obtain it.’

      ‘Was that the price he paid for it?’ said Julien, with anxiety.

      ‘Not exactly,’ replied Altamira coldly; ‘he perhaps had some thirty wealthy landowners of his country, who were supposed to be Liberals, flung into the river.’

      ‘What a monster!’ said Julien again.

      Mademoiselle de La Mole, leaning forward with the keenest interest, was so close to him that her beautiful hair almost brushed his shoulder.

      ‘You are very young!’ replied Altamira. ‘I told you that I have a married sister in Provence; she is still pretty, good, gentle; she is an excellent mother, faithful to all her duties, pious without bigotry.’

      ‘What is he leading up to?’ thought Mademoiselle de La Mole.

      ‘She is happy,’ Conte Altamira continued; ‘she was happy in 1815. At that time I was in hiding there, on her property near Antibes; well, as soon as she heard of the execution of Marshal Ney, she began to dance!’

      ‘Is it possible?’ said the horrified Julien.

      ‘It is the partisan spirit,’ replied Altamira. There are no longer any genuine passions in the nineteenth century; that is why people are so bored in France. We commit the greatest cruelties, but without cruelty.’

      ‘All the worse!’ said Julien; ‘at least, when we commit crimes, we should commit them with pleasure: that is the only good thing about them, and the only excuse that can in any way justify them.’

      Mademoiselle de La Mole, entirely forgetting what she owed to herself, had placed herself almost bodily between Altamira and Julien. Her brother, upon whose arm she leaned, being accustomed to obey her, was looking about the room, and, to hide his lack of composure, pretending to be held up by the crowd.

      ‘You are right,’ said Altamira; ‘we do everything without pleasure and without remembering it afterwards, even our crimes. I can point out to you at this ball ten men, perhaps, who will be damned as murderers. They have forgotten it, and the world also.^[9]

      ‘Many of them are moved to tears if their dog breaks its paw. At Pere–Lachaise, when people strew flowers on their graves, as you so charmingly say in Paris, we are told that they combined all the virtues of the knights of old, and we hear of the great deeds of their ancestor who lived in the days of Henri IV: If, despite the good offices of Principe d’Araceli, I am not hanged, and if I ever come to enjoy my fortune in Paris, I hope to invite you to dine with nine or ten murderers who are honoured and feel no remorse.

      ‘You and I, at that dinner, will be the only two whose hands are free from blood, but I shall be despised and almost hated, as a bloody and Jacobinical monster, and you will simply be despised as a plebeian who has thrust his way into good society.’

      ‘Nothing could be more true,’ said Mademoiselle de La Mole.

      Altamira looked at her in astonishment; Julien did not deign to look at her.

      ‘Note that the revolution at the head of which I found myself,’ Conte Altamira went on, ‘was unsuccessful, solely because I would not cut off three heads, and distribute among our supporters seven or eight millions which happened to be in a safe of which I held the key. My King, who is now burning to have me hanged, and who, before the revolt, used to address me as tu, would have given me the Grand Cordon of his Order if I had cut off those three heads and distributed the money in those safes: for then I should have scored at least a partial success, and my country would have had a Charter of sorts . . . Such is the way of the world, it is a game of chess.’

      ‘Then,’ replied Julien, his eyes ablaze, ‘you did not know the game; now . . . ’

      ‘I should cut off the heads, you mean, and I should not be a Girondin as you gave me to understand the other day? I will answer you,’ said Altamira sadly, ‘when you have killed a man in a duel, and that is a great deal less unpleasant than having him put to death by a headsman.’

      ‘Faith!’ said Julien, ‘the end justifies the means; if, instead of being a mere atom, I had any power, I would hang three men to save the lives of four.’

      His eyes expressed the fire of conscience and a contempt