to reflect, she did not recover from her astonishment that so great a happiness could exist; and that she had never had anything of.
"Oh," she said to herself, "if I had only known Julien ten years ago when I was still considered pretty."
Julien was far from having thoughts like these. His love was still akin to ambition. It was the joy of possessing, poor, unfortunate and despised as he was, so beautiful a woman. His acts of devotion, and his ecstacies at the sight of his mistress's charms finished by reassuring her a little with regard to the difference of age. If she had possessed a little of that knowledge of life which the woman of thirty has enjoyed in the more civilised of countries for quite a long time, she would have trembled for the duration of a love, which only seemed to thrive on novelty and the intoxication of a young man's vanity. In those moments when he forgot his ambition, Julien admired ecstatically even the hats and even the dresses of Madame de Rênal. He could not sate himself with the pleasure of smelling their perfume. He would open her mirrored cupboard, and remain hours on end admiring the beauty and the order of everything that he found there. His love leaned on him and looked at him. He was looking at those jewels and those dresses which had had been her wedding presents.
"I might have married a man like that," thought Madame de Rênal sometimes. "What a fiery soul! What a delightful life one would have with him?"
As for Julien, he had never been so near to those terrible instruments of feminine artillery. "It is impossible," he said to himself "for there to be anything more beautiful in Paris." He could find no flaw in his happiness. The sincere admiration and ecstacies of his mistress would frequently make him forget that silly pose which had rendered him so stiff and almost ridiculous during the first moments of the intrigue. There were moments where, in spite of his habitual hypocrisy, he found an extreme delight in confessing to this great lady who admired him, his ignorance of a crowd of little usages. His mistress's rank seemed to lift him above himself. Madame de Rênal, on her side, would find the sweetest thrill of intellectual voluptuousness in thus instructing in a number of little things this young man who was so full of genius,
