The Red and the Black (48 page)

The lavish clothes, the dazzling candles, the
perfumes: so many pretty arms and lovely
shoulders; bouquets of flowers, lilting tunes by
Rossini, paintings by Ciceri! I am beside myself!

Uzeri's Travels

'YOU'RE in a bad mood,' the Marquise de La Mole said to her; 'I warn you, it's not becoming at a ball.'

'I've only got a headache,' replied Mathilde disdainfully, 'it's too hot in here.'

At that moment, as if to vindicate M
^lle
de La Mole, the old Baron de Tolly was taken ill and collapsed; he
had to be carried away. Apoplexy was mentioned; it was an unpleasant
incident.

Mathilde took no notice.
It was a matter of principle, with her, never to pay any attention to
the old, or indeed anyone known to say dreary things.

She danced to escape the conversation about apoplexy, which was not
the trouble after all, since two days later the baron turned up again.

But M. Sorel still hasn't come, she
said to herself again after she had finished dancing. She was almost
looking round for him when she caught sight of him in another room.
Amazingly enough, he seemed to have lost the air of imperturbable
coldness that came so naturally to him; he didn't look English any
more.

He's talking to Count Altamira,
my man under sentence of death! Mathilde said to herself. There's a
look of smouldering fire in his eye; he's like a prince in disguise;
his expression is prouder than ever.

Julien, still talking to Altamira, was coming over to where she was;
she gazed steadily at him, studying his features for a sign of those
high qualities that can earn a man the honour of being sentenced to
death.

As he was passing by her:

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'Yes,' he said to Count Altamira, ' Danton
^*
was a man!'

Oh heavens! Could he be a Danton? Mathilde wondered; but he has such a
noble face, and Danton was such a horribly ugly individual, he was a
butcher, I believe. Julien was still quite near her, and she did not
hesitate to call him over; she was aware and proud of asking an
extraordinary question for a young lady:

'Wasn't Danton a butcher?' she said to him.

'Yes, in some people's view,' Julien replied with an expression of
the most undisguised disdain, his eyes still glinting from his
conversation with Altamira; 'but unfortunately for people of high birth,
he was a barrister at Méry-surSeine; in other words, Mademoiselle,' he
added with a hostile expression, 'he began like a number of peers I
see here. It's true that Danton had a tremendous disadvantage in the
eyes of beauty: he was extremely ugly.'

These last words were spoken quickly, with an extraordinary and certainly most impolite expression.

Julien paused for a moment, bending forward a little from the waist,
and with a proudly humble expression. He seemed to be saying: 'I'm
paid to answer you, and I live off my pay.' He did not deign to look
up at Mathilde. She, with her big eyes extraordinarily wide open and
fixed upon him looked like his slave. At length, as the silence
continued, he looked at her like a valet looking at his master--to
take orders. Although his eyes stared straight into Mathilde's, which
were still fixed on him with a strange look, he walked away with
marked alacrity.

How could he, who is
genuinely so handsome, Mathilde said to herself at length as she
emerged from her musing, how could he praise ugliness like that! Never
dwells on his own conduct! He's not like Caylus or Croisenois. This
Sorel has something of the look my father adopts when he does such a
good imitation of Napoleon at a ball. She had quite forgotten Danton.
There's no getting away from it, this evening I'm bored. She seized
her brother's arm and, to his great dismay, forced him to do a turn on
the dance floor. It occurred to her she could follow the conversation
between the condemned man and Julien.

There was a huge throng. She managed none the less to get

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within two paces of them just as Altamira was making for a tray in
order to take an ice-cream. He was talking to Julien, half turning
towards him. He saw an arm in a brocade sleeve taking one of the ices
next to his. The braid seemed to catch his attention: he turned round
completely in order to see who the arm belonged to. At that instant,
those noble and innocent eyes took on a mild expression of disdain.

'You see that man,' he said rather quietly to Julien; 'he's the
Prince of Araceli, the ----- Ambassador. This morning he requested my
extradition
^*
from M. de Nerval, your Foreign Minister. Look, there he is over
there playing whist. M. de Nerval is rather inclined to hand me over,
for we gave you two or three conspirators in 1816. If I'm returned to
my king, I'll be hanged within twenty-four hours. And it'll be one or
other of those fine gentlemen with moustaches who'll
grab me.
'
^*

'Base wretches!' exclaimed Julien under his breath.

Mathilde did not miss a syllable of their conversation. Boredom had vanished.

'Not as base as all that,' rejoined Count Altamira. 'I talked to you
about myself to fire your imagination. Look at the Prince of Araceli;
every five minutes he casts an eye on his Golden Fleece; he can't get
over the pleasure of seeing that trinket on his chest. The poor man is
basically an anachronism. A hundred years ago the Fleece was a signal
honour, but at that time it would have been way out of his reach.
Today, among the men of high birth, it takes an Araceli to be
delighted with it. He would have had a whole town hanged to get it.'

'Was that the price he paid for it?' asked Julien anxiously.

'Not exactly,' replied Altamira coldly; 'he may have had thirty or so
rich landowners from his part of the world flung into the river for
their reputation as liberals.'

'What a monster!' said Julien again.

M
^lle
de La Mole, leaning forward with the keenest interest, was so close
to him that her lovely hair almost touched his shoulder.

'How young you are!' replied Altamira. 'I was telling you that I have
a married sister in Provence; she's still pretty, she's kind and
gentle; and an excellent mother, faithful to all her duties, pious but
not a zealot.'

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What's he driving at? wondered M
^lle
de La Mole.

'She's happy,' went on Count Altamira; 'she was happy in 1815. At
that time I was hiding in her house, on her estate near Antibes. Well,
when she heard of Marshal Ney's
^*
execution, she started dancing!'

'Is that possible?' said Julien, dumbfounded.

'It's the partisan spirit,' replied Altamira. 'There are no genuine
passions left in the nineteenth century: that's why people are so
bored in France. They commit acts of the utmost cruelty, but without
any cruelty at all.'

'Too bad!' said
Julien; 'when you commit crimes, you should at least do it with
enjoyment: that's the only good thing about them, and the only slight
justification there is for them.'

Utterly forgetting everything she owed herself, M
^lle
de La Mole had stationed herself almost completely between Altamira
and Julien. Her brother, who was giving her his arm in a habitual act
of obedience, was gazing around the room, and to hide his awkwardness
tried to look as if he was hemmed in by the crowd.

'You're right,' Altamira was saying; 'people do everything without
enjoyment, and without remembering what they've done, even when it's a
crime. I can point out to you as many as ten men at this ball who
will be eternally damned as murderers. They've forgotten all about it,
and so has society.
¹

'Several of them are moved to tears if their dog breaks a leg. At the
Père-Lachaise Cemetery when flowers are flung on their graves, as you
put it so nicely in Paris, we are told that they combined all the
virtues of valiant knights, and we learn of the mighty deeds of their
ancestors who lived under Henri IV.
^*
If, in spite of the good offices of the Prince of Araceli, I am not
hanged and I ever come to enjoy my fortune in Paris, I intend to
invite you to dine with nine or ten revered and remorseless assassins.

'You and I shall be the only ones
with untainted blood at this dinner, but I shall be despised and
almost hated as a bloodthirsty monster and a Jacobin, and you will be
despised

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quite simply as a man from the common people who has intruded into good society.'

'Nothing could be more true,' said M
^lle
de La Mole.

Altamira looked at her in astonishment; Julien did not deign to give her as much as a look.

'Mark you, the revolution I found myself leading', Altamira went on,
'was a failure because I was unwilling to let three heads roll, and to
distribute among our followers seven or eight millions which happened
to be in a coffer I had the key to. My king, who today is consumed
with the desire to have me hanged, and before the uprising was on
intimate terms with me, would have given me the Grand Sash of his
Order if I had let those three heads roll and distributed the money
from the coffers, for I should at least have had a half success, and
my country would have had a Charter as it stood... That's the way of
the world, it's a game of chess.'

'At that time', Julien volunteered, his eyes ablaze, 'you didn't know the game; now...'

'I'd let heads roll, you mean, and I wouldn't be a Girondin
^*
as you insinuated to me the other day...? I'll answer that one',
said Altamira with a look of sadness, 'when you've killed a man in a
duel, which I may say is far less nasty than having him put to death
by an executioner.'

'I'm telling
you!' said Julien, 'the ends justify the means; if instead of being an
atom I had some sort of power, I'd have three men hanged to save the
lives of four.'

His eyes shone with the fire of conscience and scorn for the idle judgements of men; they met M
^lle
de La Mole's right next to him, and instead of changing into a gracious and civil look, his scorn seemed to intensify.

She was deeply shocked at it; but it was no longer in her power to
forget Julien. She moved away in mortification, dragging her brother
with her.

I must drink some punch and
dance a lot, she told herself; I'll pick the best of the crowd, and
make an impression at all costs. Good, here comes that impertinent
celebrity the Comte de Fervaques. She accepted his invitation; they
danced. It's a matter of seeing, she thought, which of the two of us
will be the more impertinent; but so that I can make proper fun of

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him, I must get him talking. Soon all the rest of the quadrille only
danced for appearances' sake. No one wished to miss any of Mathilde's
stinging repartee. M. de Fervaques was getting flustered, and as he
could only produce elegant phrases instead of ideas, he was making
faces; Mathilde, who was in a bad mood, was merciless to him and made
an enemy out of him. She danced until daybreak and at length withdrew
in a state of terrible fatigue. But in the carriage she went and used
up the small amount of strength she had left on making herself sad
and miserable. She'd been despised by Julien and couldn't despise him.

Julien was on top of the world.
Swept off his feet unawares by the music, the flowers, the beautiful
women, the elegance of it all, and more than anything, by his
imagination, which dreamed of distinctions for himself and liberty for
everyone.

'What a fine ball!' he remarked to the count; 'there's nothing missing.'

'Yes there is: thought,' replied Altamira.

And his face betrayed the kind of scorn that is all the more scathing
because obvious efforts of politeness are being made to conceal it.

'You're right there, my lord. It's true, isn't it, that thought still turns to conspiracy?'

'I am here for the sake of my name. But everyone hates thought in
your salons. It must never rise above the wit of a vaudeville couplet:
then it is rewarded. But the man who thinks, and puts any energy and
novelty into his sallies, gets termed a cynic by you people. Wasn't
that what one of your judges called Courier?
^*
You put him in prison, just like Béranger.
^*
Anyone with any claim to distinction for his intellect, in your
country, is booted into the police courts by the Congregation; and
right-minded folk applaud.

'You see,
your antiquated society puts appearances before everything else... You
will never rise above military bravery; you will have men like Murat,
^*
but never a single Washington. All I detect in France is vanity. A
man who comes up with new ideas while speaking is bound to let slip
the odd rash remark, and his host considers himself dishonoured.'

As he spoke, the count's carriage, which was taking Julien

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home, drew up in front of the Hôtel de La Mole. Julien was
starry-eyed about his conspirator. Altamira had paid him a fine
compliment, obviously out of deep conviction: 'You haven't got the
flippancy of the French, you understand the principle of utility.' It
so happened that only two days before, Julien had seen Marino Faliero,
a tragedy by Casimir Delavigne.
^*

Doesn't Israel Bertuccio have more character than all those noble
Venetians? reflected our rebellious plebeian; and yet they are people
whose lineage can be traced back unequivocally to the year 700, a
century before Charlemagne, whereas the cream of the nobility at M. de
Retz's ball this evening only goes back, and haltingly at that, as
far as the thirteenth century. Well! in the midst of these nobles from
Venice, with all the distinction of their birth, Israel Bertuccio is
the man you remember!

A conspiracy
wipes out all the titles conferred by the whims of society. A member
of it immediately steps into the rank assigned him by his attitude
towards death. Intelligence itself loses its power...

What would Danton be today, in this age of Valenods and Rênals? not even the crown prosecutor's deputy...

What am I saying! he'd have sold himself to the Congregation; he'd be a
minister, for the great Danton did after all steal. Mirabeau was
another one who sold himself. Napoleon had stolen millions in Italy,
otherwise he'd have been stopped in his tracks by poverty, like
Pichegru.
^*
La Fayette was the only one who never stole. Do you have to steal, do
you have to sell yourself? Julien wondered. This question stopped him
in his tracks. He spent the rest of the night reading the history of
the Revolution.

The next day as he wrote his letters in the library his thoughts were still on the conversation with Count Altamira.

In point of fact, he said to himself after daydreaming for a long while, if those liberal Spaniards
^*
had compromised the people by committing crimes, they wouldn't have
been so easy to sweep aside. They were proud and talkative children...
just like me! exclaimed Julien suddenly as if waking up with a
start.

What difficult thing have I ever done to give me the right to

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