Part 2 Chapter 24
StrasbourgFascination! Thou sharest with love all its energy, all its capacityfor suffering. Its enchanting pleasures, its sweet delights are alonebeyond thy sphere. I could not say, as I saw her asleep: She is allmine with her angelic beauty and her sweet frailties! Behold herdelivered into my power, as heaven made her in its compassionto enchant a man's heart.
Ode by SCHILLERObliged to spend a week in Strasbourg, Julien sought to distract himself with thoughts of martial glory and of devotion to his country. Washe in love, then? He could not say, only he found in his bruised heartMathilde the absolute mistress of his happiness as of his imagination. Herequired all his natural energy to keep himself from sinking into despair.
To think of anything that bore no relation to Mademoiselle de La Molewas beyond his power. Ambition, the mere triumphs of vanity, had I distracted him in the past from the sentiments that Madame de Renal inspired in him. Mathilde had absorbed all; he found her everywhere inhis future.
On every hand, in this future, Julien foresaw failure. This creaturewhom we saw at Verrieres so filled with presumption, so arrogant, hadfallen into an absurd extreme of modesty.
Three days earlier he would have killed the abbe Castanede withpleasure, and at Strasbourg, had a boy picked a quarrel with him, hewould have offered the boy an apology. In thinking over the adversaries,the enemies whom he had encountered in the course of his life, he foundthat invariably he, Julien, had been in the wrong.
The fact was that he had now an implacable enemy in that powerfulimagination, which before had been constantly employed in paintingsuch brilliant successes for him in the future.
The absolute solitude of a traveller's existence strengthened the powerof this dark imagination. What a treasure would a friend have been!
'But,' Julien asked himself, 'is there a heart in the world that beats for me?
And if I had a friend, does not honour impose on me an eternal silence?'
He took a horse and rode sadly about the neighbourhood of Kehl; it isa village on the bank of the Rhine, immortalised by Desaix and GouvionSaint-Cyr. A German peasant pointed out to him the little streams, theroads, the islands in the Rhine which the valour of those great Generalshas made famous. Julien, holding the reins in his left hand, was carryingspread out in his right the superb map which illustrates the Memoirs ofMarshal Saint-Cyr. A joyful exclamation made him raise his head.
It was Prince Korasoff, his London friend, who had expounded to himsome months earlier the first principles of high fatuity. Faithful to thisgreat art, Korasoff, who had arrived in Strasbourg the day before, hadbeen an hour at Kehl, and had never in his life read a line about the siegeof 1796, began to explain it all to Julien. The German peasant gazed athim in astonishment; for he knew enough French to make out the enormous blunders into which the Prince fell. Julien's thoughts were a thousand leagues away from the peasant's, he was looking with amazementat this handsome young man, and admiring his grace in the saddle.
'A happy nature!' he said to himself. 'How well his breeches fit him,how elegantly his hair is cut! Alas, if I had been like that, perhaps afterloving me for three days she would not have taken a dislike to me.'
When the Prince had come to an end of his version of the siege ofKehl: 'You look like a Trappist,' he said to Julien, 'you are infringing theprinciple of gravity I taught you in London. A melancholy air can neverbe the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, itmust be because you want something, there is something in which youhave not succeeded.
'It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it isthe person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior. Realise,my dear fellow, what a grave mistake you are making.'
Julien flung a crown to the peasant who stood listening to them, open-mouthed.
'Good,' said the Prince, 'that is graceful, a noble disdain! Very good!'
And he put his horse into a gallop. Julien followed him, filled with a stupefied admiration.
'Ah! If I had been like that, she would not have preferred Croisenois tome!' The more his reason was shocked by the absurdities of the Prince,the more he despised himself for not admiring them, and deemed himself unfortunate in not sharing them. Self-contempt can be carried nofarther.
The Prince found him decidedly melancholy: 'Ah, my dear fellow,' hesaid to him, as they rode into Strasbourg, 'have you lost all your money,or can you be in love with some little actress?'
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fiftyyears. They have now reached the days of Louis XV.
These jests, at the expense of love, filled Julien's eyes with tears: 'Whyshould not I consult so friendly a man?' he asked himself suddenly.
'Well, yes, my friend,' he said to the Prince, 'you find me in Strasbourg,madly in love, indeed crossed in love. A charming woman, who lives ina neighbouring town, has abandoned me after three days of passion, andthe change is killing me.'
He described to the Prince, under an assumed name, the actions andcharacter of Mathilde.
'Do not go on,' said Korasoff: 'to give you confidence in your physician, I am going to cut short your confidences. This young woman's husband possesses an enormous fortune, or, what is more likely, she herselfbelongs to the highest nobility of the place. She must be proud ofsomething.'
Julien nodded his head, he had no longer the heart to speak.
'Very good,' said the Prince, 'here are three medicines, all rather bitter,which you are going to take without delay:
'First: You must every day see Madame —— what do you call her?'
'Madame de Dubois.'
'What a name!' said the Prince, with a shout of laughter; 'but forgiveme, to you it is sublime. It is essential that you see Madame de Duboisevery day; above all do not appear to her cold and cross; remember thegreat principle of your age: be the opposite to what people expect of you.
Show yourself precisely as you were a week before you were honouredwith her favours.'
'Ah! I was calm then,' cried Julien, in desperation, 'I thought that I pitied her … '
'The moth singes its wings in the flame of the candle,' the Prince continued, 'a metaphor as old as the world.
'First of all: you will see her every day.
'Secondly: you will pay court to a woman of her acquaintance, butwithout any appearance of passion, you understand? I do not concealfrom you, yours is a difficult part to play: you have to act, and if she discovers that you are acting, you are doomed.'
'She is so clever, and I am not! I am doomed,' said Julien sadly.
'No, you are only more in love than I thought. Madame de Dubois isprofoundly taken up with herself, like all women who have receivedfrom heaven either too high a rank or too much money. She looks at herself instead of looking at you, and so does not know you. During the twoor three amorous impulses to which she has yielded in your favour, by agreat effort of imagination, she beheld in you the hero of her dreams andnot yourself as you really are …'But what the devil, these are the elements, my dear Sorel, are you stilla schoolboy? …'Egad! Come into this shop; look at that charming black cravat; youwould say it was made by John Anderson, of Burlington Street; do methe pleasure of buying it, and of throwing right away that dreadful blackrope which you have round your neck.
'And now,' the Prince went on as they left the shop of the first hosier inStrasbourg, 'who are the friends of Madame de Dubois? Good God, whata name! Do not be angry, my dear Sorel, I cannot help it… To whom willyou pay court?'
'To a prude of prudes, the daughter of an enormously rich stocking-merchant. She has the loveliest eyes in the world, which please mevastly; she certainly occupies the first place in the district; but amid allher grandeur she blushes and loses her head entirely if anyone refers totrade and a shop. And unfortunately for her, her father was one of thebest-known tradesmen in Strasbourg.'
'So that if one mentions industry,' said the Prince, with a laugh, 'youmay be sure that your fair one is thinking of herself and not of you. Theweakness is divine and most useful, it will prevent you from ever doinganything foolish in her fair eyes. Your success is assured.'
Julien was thinking of Madame la Marechale de Fervaques, who oftencame to the Hotel de La Mole. She was a beautiful foreigner who hadmarried the Marshal a year before his death. Her whole life seemed to have no other object than to make people forget that she was the daughter of an industrial, and in order to count for something in Paris she hadset herself at the head of the forces of virtue.
Julien admired the Prince sincerely; what would he not have given tohave his absurd affectations! The conversation between the friends wasendless; Korasoff was in raptures: never had a Frenchman given him solong a hearing. 'And so I have succeeded at last,' the Prince said to himself with delight, 'in making my voice heard when I give lessons to mymasters!
'It is quite understood,' he repeated to Julien for the tenth time, 'not avestige of passion when you are talking to the young beauty, theStrasbourg stocking-merchant's daughter, in the presence of Madame deDubois. On the contrary, burning passion when you write. Reading awell-written love letter is a prude's supreme pleasure; it is a momentaryrelaxation. She is not acting a part, she dares to listen to her heart; and so,two letters daily.'
'Never, never!' said Julien, losing courage; 'I would let myself bebrayed in a mortar sooner than compose three sentences; I am a corpse,my dear fellow, expect nothing more of me. Leave me to die by theroadside.'
'And who said anything about composing phrases? I have in my hold-all six volumes of love letters in manuscript. There are specimens forevery kind of woman, I have a set for the most rigid virtue. Didn'tKalisky make love on Richmond Terrace, you know, a few miles out ofLondon, to the prettiest Quakeress in the whole of England?'
Julien was less wretched when he parted from his friend at two o'clockin the morning.
Next day the Prince sent for a copyist, and two days later Julien hadfifty-three love letters carefully numbered, intended to cope with themost sublime and melancholy virtue.
'There would be fifty-four,' said the Prince, 'only Kalisky was shownthe door; but what does it matter to you, being ill-treated by thestocking-merchant's daughter, since you are seeking to influence onlythe heart of Madame de Dubois?'
Every day they went out riding: the Prince was madly taken with Julien. Not knowing what token to give him of his sudden affection, heended by offering him the hand of one of his cousins, a wealthy heiress in Moscow; 'and once you are married,' he explained, 'my influence andthe Cross you are wearing will make you a Colonel in two years.'
'But this Cross was not given me by Napoleon, quite the reverse.'
'What does that matter,' said the Prince, 'didn't he invent it? It is stillthe first decoration by far in Europe.'
Julien was on the point of accepting; but duty recalled him to the eminent personage; on parting from Korasoff, he promised to write. He received the reply to the secret note that he had brought, and hastened toParis; but he had barely been by himself for two days on end, before thethought of leaving France and Mathilde seemed to him a punishmentworse than death itself. 'I shall not wed the millions that Korasoff offersme,' he told himself, 'but I shall follow his advice.
'After all, the art of seduction is his business; he has thought of nothingelse for more than fifteen years, for he is now thirty. One cannot say thathe is lacking in intelligence; he is shrewd and cautious; enthusiasm, poetry are impossible in such a nature: he is calculating; all the more reasonwhy he should not be mistaken.
'There is no help for it, I am going to pay court to Madame deFervaques.
'She will bore me a little, perhaps, but I shall gaze into those lovelyeyes which are so like the eyes that loved me best in the world.
'She is foreign; that is a fresh character to be studied.
'I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, andpay no heed to myself.'
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