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‘You always keep us waiting,’ said the Marquise, as he kissed her hand.
Julien gathered that this was the Comte de La Mole. He found him charming from the first.
‘Is it possible,’ he said to himself, ‘that this is the man whose offensive pleasantries are going to drive me from this house?’
By dint of a survey of Comte Norbert’s person, Julien discovered that he was wearing boots and spurs; ‘and I ought to be wearing shoes, evidently as his inferior.’ They sat down to table. Julien heard the Marquise utter a word of rebuke, slightly raising her voice. Almost at the same moment he noticed a young person extremely fair and very comely, who was taking her place opposite to him. She did not attract him at all; on studying her attentively, however, he thought that he had never seen such fine eyes; but they hinted at great coldness of heart. Later, Julien decided that they expressed a boredom which studies other people but keeps on reminding itself that it is one’s duty to be imposing. ‘Madame de Renal, too, had the most beautiful eyes,’ he said to himself; ‘people used to compliment her on them; but they had nothing in common with these.’ Julien had not enough experience to discern that it was the fire of wit that shone from time to time in the eyes of Mademoiselle Mathilde, for so he heard her named. When Madame de Renal’s eyes became animated, it was with the fire of her passions, or was due to a righteous indignation upon hearing of some wicked action. Towards the end of dinner, Julien found the right word to describe the type of beauty exemplified by the eyes of Mademoiselle de La Mole: ‘They are scintillating,’ he said to himself. Otherwise, she bore a painful resemblance to her mother, whom he disliked more and more, and he ceased to look at her. Comte Norbert, on the other hand, struck him as admirable in every respect. Julien was so captivated, that it never entered his head to be jealous of him and to hate him, because he was richer and nobler than himself.
Julien thought that the Marquis appeared bored.
During the second course, he said to his son:
‘Norbert, I must ask you to look after M. Julien Sorel, whom I have just taken upon my staff, and intend to make a man of, if that (cela) can be done.
‘He is my secretary,’ the Marquis added to his neighbour, ‘and he spells cela with a double l.’
Everyone looked at Julien, who gave Norbert a slightly exaggerated bow; but on the whole, they were satisfied with his appearance.
The Marquis must have spoken of the kind of education that Julien had received, for one of the guests tackled him upon Horace: ‘It was precisely in discussing Horace that I was successful with the Bishop of Besancon,’ Julien said to himself, ‘evidently he is the only author they know.’ From that moment he was master of himself. This change was made easy by his having just decided that Mademoiselle de La Mole would never be a woman in his eyes. Since his Seminary days he defied men to do their worst, and refused to be intimidated by them. He would have enjoyed perfect self-possession, had the dining-room been furnished with less magnificence. It was, as a matter of fact, a pair of mirrors, each of them eight feet high, in which he caught sight now and then of his challenger as he spoke of Horace, that still continued to overawe him. His sentences were not unduly long for a provincial. He had fine eyes, the sparkle in which was enhanced by his tremulous, or, when he had made a good answer, his happy shyness. This sort of examination made a serious dinner-party quite interesting. The Marquis made a sign to the other speaker to press Julien hard. ‘Can it be possible that he does know something?’ he thought.
Julien found fresh ideas as he answered, and lost enough of his shyness not, indeed, to display wit, a thing impossible to a person ignorant of the language that is spoken in Paris, but he had original ideas, albeit expressed without gracefulness or appropriateness, and it could be seen that he had a thorough knowledge of Latin.
His adversary was a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, who happened to know Latin; he found in Julien an excellent humanist, lost all fear of making him blush, and really did seek to embarrass him. In the heat of the duel, Julien at length forgot the magnificent decoration of the dining-room, and began to express ideas with regard to the Latin poets, which the other had never read in any book. Being an honest man, he gave the credit for them to the young secretary. Fortunately, the discussion turned to the question whether Horace had been poor or rich: an amiable person, sensual and easy-going, making poetry for his own amusement, like Chapelle, the friend of Moliere and La Fontaine; or a poor devil of a Poet Laureate attached to the court and composing odes for the King’s Birthday, like Southey, the traducer of Lord Byron. They spoke of the state of society under Augustus and under George IV; in both epochs the aristocracy was all-powerful! but in Rome it saw its power wrested from it by Maecenas, who was a mere knight; and in England it had reduced George IV more or less to the position of a Doge of Venice. This discussion seemed to draw the Marquis out of the state of torpor in which his boredom had kept him plunged at the beginning of dinner.
Julien could make nothing of all these modern names, such as Southey, Lord Byron, George IV, which he now heard for the first time. But no one could fail to observe that whenever there was any question of historical events at Rome, a knowledge of which might be derived from the works of Horace, Martial, Tacitus, etc., he had an unchallengeable superiority. Julien appropriated without a scruple a number of ideas which he had acquired from the Bishop of Besancon, during the famous discussion he had had with that prelate; these proved to be not the least acceptable.
When the party tired of discussing poets, the Marquise, who made it a rule to admire anything that amused her husband, condescended to glance at Julien. ‘The awkward manners of this young cleric may perhaps be concealing a learned man,’ the Academician, who was sitting near her, said to the Marquise; and Julien overheard something of what he was saying. Ready-made phrases were quite to the taste of his hostess; she adopted this description of Julien, and was glad that she had invited the Academician to dine. ‘He amuses M. de La Mole,’ she thought.
Chapter 3
FIRST STEPS
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That immense valley filled with brilliant lights and with all those thousands of people dazzles my sight. Not one of them knows me, all are superior to me. My head reels.
Poemi dell’ avvocato, REINA
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EARLY IN THE MORNING of the following day, Julien was copying letters in the library, when Mademoiselle Mathilde entered by a little private door, cleverly concealed with shelves of dummy books. While Julien was admiring this device, Mademoiselle Mathilde appeared greatly surprised and distinctly annoyed to see him there. Julien decided that her curlpapers gave her a hard, haughty, almost masculine air. Mademoiselle de La Mole had a secret habit of stealing books from her father’s library, undetected. Julien’s presence frustrated her expedition that morning, which annoyed her all the more as she had come to secure the second volume of Voltaire’s Princesse de Babylone, a fitting complement to an eminently monarchical and religious education, a triumph on the part of the Sacre–Coeur! This poor girl, at nineteen, already required the spice of wit to make her interested in a novel.
Comte Norbert appeared in the library about three o’clock; he had come to study a newspaper, in order to be able to talk politics that evening, and was quite pleased to find Julien, whose existence he had forgotten. He was charming to him, and offered to lend him a horse.
‘My father is letting us off until dinner.’
Julien appreciated this us, and thought it charming.
‘Heavens, Monsieur le Comte,’ said Julien, ‘if it were a question of felling an eighty-foot tree, trimming it and sawing it into planks, I venture to say that I should manage it well enough; but riding