LITMIR.BIZ

      THE RUSSIAN INSTRUCTIONS laid down categorically that one must never contradict in speech the person with whom one corresponded. One must never depart, upon any account, from an attitude of the most ecstatic admiration; the letters were all based upon this supposition.

      One evening, at the Opera, in Madame de Fervaques’s box, Julien praised to the skies the ballet in Manon Lescaut.^[13] His sole reason for doing so was that he found it insipid.

      The Marechale said that this ballet was greatly inferior to abbe Prevost’s novel.

      ‘What!’ thought Julien, with surprise and amusement, ‘a person of such extreme virtue praise a novel!’ Madame de Fervaques used to profess, two or three times weekly, the most utter scorn for the writers, who, by means of those vulgar works, sought to corrupt a younger generation only too prone to the errors of the senses.

      ‘In that immoral and pernicious class, Manon Lescaut,’ the Marechale went on, ‘occupies, they say, one of the first places. The frailties and well-merited sufferings of a thoroughly criminal heart are, they say, described in it with a truth that is almost profound; which did not prevent your Bonaparte from declaring on Saint Helena that it was a novel written for servants.’

      This speech restored all its activity to Julien’s spirit. ‘People have been trying to damage me with the Marechale; they have told her of my enthusiasm for Napoleon. This intelligence has stung her sufficiently for her to yield to the temptation to let me feel her resentment.’ This discovery kept him amused for the rest of the evening and made him amusing. As he was bidding the Marechale good night in the vestibule of the Opera: ‘Bear in mind, Sir,’ she said to him, ‘that people must not love Napoleon when they love me; they may, at the most, accept him as a necessity imposed by Providence. Anyhow, the man had not a soul pliant enough to feel great works of art.’

      ‘When they love me!’ Julien repeated to himself; ‘either that means nothing at all, or it means everything. There is one of the secrets of language that are hidden from us poor provincials.’ And he thought incessantly of Madame de Renal as he copied an immensely long letter intended for the Marechale.

      ‘How is it,’ she asked him the following evening, with an air of indifference which seemed to him unconvincing, ‘that you speak to me of London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, it appears, after leaving the Opera?’

      Julien was greatly embarrassed; he had copied the letter line for line, without thinking of what he was writing, and apparently had forgotten to substitute for the words London and Richmond, which occurred in the original, Paris and Saint–Cloud. He began two or three excuses, but found it impossible to finish any of them; he felt himself on the point of giving way to an outburst of helpless laughter. At length, in his search for the right words, he arrived at the following idea: ‘Exalted by the discussion of the most sublime, the highest interests of the human soul, my own, in writing to you, must have become distracted.

      ‘I am creating an impression,’ he said to himself, ‘therefore I can spare myself the tedium of the rest of the evening.’ He left the Hotel de Fervaques in hot haste. That evening, as he looked over the original text of the letter which he had copied the night before, he very soon came to the fatal passage where the young Russian spoke of London and Richmond. Julien was quite surprised to find this letter almost tender.

      It was the contrast between the apparent frivolity of his talk and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of his letters that had marked him out. The length of his sentences was especially pleasing to the Marechale; this was not the cursory style brought into fashion by Voltaire, that most immoral of men! Although our hero did everything in the world to banish any suggestion of common sense from his conversation, it had still an anti-monarchical and impious colour which did not escape the notice of Madame de Fervaques. Surrounded by persons who were eminently moral, but who often had not one idea in an evening, this lady was profoundly impressed by everything that bore a semblance of novelty; but, at the same time, she felt that she owed it to herself to be shocked by it. She called this defect, ‘retaining the imprint of the frivolity of the age’.