Part 2 Chapter 20

The Japanese VaseHis heart does not at first realise the whole extent of his misery:

he is more disturbed than moved. But in proportion as his reasonreturns, he feels the depth of his misfortune. All the pleasures inlife are as nothing to him, he can feel only the sharp points of thedespair that is rending him. But what is the good of speaking ofphysical pain? What pain felt by the body alone is comparable tothis?

JEAN-PAULThe dinner bell rang, Julien had barely time to dress; he found Mathilde in the drawing-room urging her brother and M. de Croisenois not togo and spend the evening with Madame la Marechale de Fervaques.

She could hardly have been more seductive and charming with them.

After dinner they were joined by M. de Luz, M. de Caylus and several oftheir friends. One would have said that Mademoiselle de La Mole hadresumed, together with the observance of sisterly affection, that of thestrictest conventions. Although the weather that evening was charming,she insisted that they should not go out to the garden; she was determined not to be lured away from the armchair in which Madame de LaMole was enthroned. The blue sofa was the centre of the group, as inwinter.

Mathilde was out of humour with the garden, or at least it seemed toher to be utterly boring: it was associated with the memory of Julien.

Misery destroys judgment. Our hero made the blunder of clinging tothat little cane chair which in the past had witnessed such brilliant triumphs. This evening, nobody spoke to him; his presence passed asthough unperceived or worse. Those of Mademoiselle de La Mole'sfriends who were seated near him at the end of the sofa made an affectation of turning their backs on him, or so he thought.

'It is a courtier's disgrace,' he concluded. He decided to study for a moment the people who were trying to crush him with their disdain.

M. de Luz's uncle held an important post in the King's Household, theconsequence of which was that this gallant officer opened his conversation with each fresh arrival with the following interesting detail: Hisuncle had set off at seven o'clock for Saint-Cloud, and expected to spendthe night there. This piece of news was introduced in the most casualmanner, but it never failed to come out.

Upon observing M. de Croisenois with the severe eye of misery, Julienremarked the enormous influence which this worthy and amiable youngman attributed to occult causes. So much so that he became moody andcross if he heard an event of any importance set down to a simple andquite natural cause. 'There is a trace of madness there,' Julien told himself. 'This character bears a striking resemblance to that of the EmperorAlexander, as Prince Korasoff described him to me.' During the first yearof his stay in Paris, poor Julien, coming fresh from the Seminary, dazzledby the graces, so novel to him, of all these agreeable young men, coulddo nothing but admire them. Their true character was only now beginning to outline itself before his eyes.

'I am playing an undignified part here,' he suddenly decided. The nextthing was how to leave his little cane chair in a fashion that should notbe too awkward. He tried to think of one, he called for something original upon an imagination that was fully occupied elsewhere. He was obliged to draw upon his memory, which, it must be confessed, was by nomeans rich in resources of this order; the boy was still a thorough novice,so that his awkwardness was complete and attracted everyone's attention when he rose to leave the drawing-room. Misery was all too evidentin his whole deportment. He had been playing the part for three quartersof an hour of a troublesome inferior from whom people do not take thetrouble to conceal what they think of him.

The critical observations which he had been making at the expense ofhis rivals prevented him, however, from taking his misfortune too seriously; he retained, to give support to his pride, the memory of what hadoccurred the night before last. 'Whatever the advantages they may haveover me,' he thought as he went into the garden by himself, 'Mathildehas not been to any of them what, on two occasions in my life, she hasdeigned to be to me.'

His sagacity went no farther. He failed entirely to understand the character of the singular person whom chance had now made absolute mistress of his whole happiness.

He devoted the next day to killing himself and his horse with exhaustion. He made no further attempt, that evening, to approach the blue sofato which Mathilde was faithful. He remarked that Comte Norbert didnot so much as deign to look at him when they met in the house. 'Hemust be making an extraordinary effort,' he thought, 'he who is naturallyso polite.'

For Julien, sleep would have meant happiness. Despite his bodily exhaustion, memories of a too seductive kind began to invade his wholeimagination. He had not the intelligence to see that by his long ridesthrough the forests round Paris, acting only upon himself and in no wayupon the heart or mind of Mathilde, he was leaving the arrangement ofhis destiny to chance.

It seemed to him that one thing would supply boundless comfort tohis grief: namely to speak to Mathilde. And yet what could he venture tosay to her?

This was the question upon which one morning at seven o'clock hewas pondering deeply, when suddenly he saw her enter the library.

'I know, Sir, that you desire to speak to me.'

'Great God! Who told you that?'

'I know it, what more do you want? If you are lacking in honour, youmay ruin me, or at least attempt to do so; but this danger, which I do notregard as real, will certainly not prevent me from being sincere. I nolonger love you, Sir; my wild imagination misled me … '

On receiving this terrible blow, desperate with love and misery, Julientried to excuse himself. Nothing could be more absurd. Does one excuseoneself for failing to please? But reason no longer held any sway over hisactions. A blind instinct urged him to postpone the decision of his fate. Itseemed to him that so long as he was still speaking, nothing was definitely settled. Mathilde did not listen to his words, the sound of them irritated her, she could not conceive how he had the audacity to interrupther.

The twofold remorse of her virtue and her pride made her, that morning, equally unhappy. She was more or less crushed by the frightful ideaof having given certain rights over herself to a little cleric, the son of apeasant. 'It is almost,' she told herself in moments when she exaggerated her distress, 'as though I had to reproach myself with a weakness for oneof the footmen.'

In bold and proud natures, it is only a step from anger with oneself tofury with other people; one's transports of rage are in such circumstancesa source of keen pleasure.

In a moment, Mademoiselle de La Mole reached the stage of heapingon Julien the marks of the most intense scorn. She had infinite cleverness,and this cleverness triumphed in the art of torturing the self-esteem ofothers and inflicting cruel wounds upon them.

For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the actionof a superior intelligence animated by the most violent hatred of himself.

So far from entertaining the slightest idea of defending himself at thatmoment, he began to despise himself. Hearing her heap upon him suchcruel marks of scorn, so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinionthat he might have of himself, he felt that Mathilde was right, and thatshe was not saying enough.

As for her, her pride found an exquisite pleasure in thus punishingherself and him for the adoration which she had felt a few days earlier.

She had no need to invent or to think for the first time of the cruelwords which she now uttered with such complacence. She was only repeating what for the last week had been said in her heart by the counselof the opposite party to love.

Every word increased Julien's fearful misery an hundredfold. He triedto escape, Mademoiselle de La Mole held him by the arm with a gestureof authority.

'Please to observe,' he said to her, 'that you are speaking extremelyloud; they will hear you in the next room.'

'What of that!' Mademoiselle de La Mole retorted proudly, 'who willdare to say to me that he has heard me? I wish to rid your petty self-esteem for ever of the ideas which it may have formed of me.'

When Julien was able to leave the library, he was so astounded that healready felt his misery less keenly. 'Well! She no longer loves me,' he repeated to himself, speaking aloud as though to inform himself of his position. 'It appears that she loved me for a week or ten days, and I shalllove her all my life.

'Is it really possible, she meant nothing, nothing at all to my heart, onlya few days ago.'

The delights of satisfied pride flooded Mathilde's bosom; so she hadmanaged to break with him for ever! The thought of so complete a triumph over so strong an inclination made her perfectly happy. 'And sothis little gentleman will understand, and once for all, that he has notand never will have any power over me.' She was so happy that reallyshe had ceased to feel any love at that moment.

After so atrocious, so humiliating a scene, in anyone less passionatethan Julien, love would have become impossible. Without departing fora single instant from what she owed to herself, Mademoiselle de La Molehad addressed to him certain of those disagreeable statements, so wellcalculated that they can appear to be true, even when one remembersthem in cold blood.

The conclusion that Julien drew at the first moment from so astonishing a scene was that Mathilde had an unbounded pride. He believedfirmly that everything was at an end for ever between them, and yet, thefollowing day, at luncheon, he was awkward and timid in her presence.

This was a fault that could not have been found with him until then. Insmall matters as in great, he knew clearly what he ought and wished todo, and carried it out.

That day, after luncheon, when Madame de La Mole asked him for aseditious and at the same time quite rare pamphlet, which her parishpriest had brought to her secretly that morning, Julien, in taking it from aside table, knocked over an old vase of blue porcelain, the ugliest thingimaginable.

Madame de La Mole rose to her feet with a cry of distress and cameacross the room to examine the fragments of her beloved vase. 'It was oldJapan,' she said, 'it came to me from my great-aunt the Abbess of Chelles;it was a present from the Dutch to the Duke of Orleans when he was Regent and he gave it to his daughter … '

Mathilde had followed her mother, delighted to see the destruction ofthis blue vase which seemed to her horribly ugly. Julien stood silent andnot unduly distressed; he saw Mademoiselle de La Mole standing closebeside him.

'This vase,' he said to her, 'is destroyed for ever; so is it with a sentiment which was once the master of my heart; I beg you to accept myapologies for all the foolish things it has made me do'; and he left theroom.

'Really, one would think,' said Madame de La Mole as he went, 'thatthis M. Sorel is proud and delighted with what he has done.'

This speech fell like a weight upon Mathilde's heart. 'It is true,' she toldherself, 'my mother has guessed aright, such is the sentiment that is animating him.' Then and then only ended her joy in the scene that she hadmade with him the day before. 'Ah, well, all is at an end,' she said to herself with apparent calm; 'I am left with a great example; my mistake hasbeen fearful, degrading! It will make me wise for all the rest of my life.'

'Was I not speaking the truth?' thought Julien; 'why does the love that Ifelt for that madwoman torment me still?'

This love, so far from dying, as he hoped, was making rapid strides.

'She is mad, it is true,' he said to himself, 'but is she any less adorable? Isit possible for a girl to be more lovely? Everything that the most elegantcivilisation can offer in the way of keen pleasures, was it not all combined to one's heart's content in Mademoiselle de La Mole?' Thesememories of past happiness took possession of Julien, and rapidly undidall the work of reason.

Reason struggles in vain against memories of this sort; its stern endeavours serve only to enhance their charm.

Twenty-four hours after the breaking of the old Japanese vase, Julienwas decidedly one of the unhappiest of men.