he began to find himself in love. Then in order to complete the charm he thought her a Catherine de Médicis. Nothing was too deep or too criminal for the character which he ascribed to her. She was the ideal of the Maslons, the Frilairs, and the Castanèdes whom he had admired so much in his youth. To put it shortly, she represented in his eyes the Paris ideal.
Could anything possibly be more humorous than believing in the depth or in the depravity of the Parisian character?
It is impossible that this trio is making fun of me thought Julien. The reader knows little of his character if he has not begun already to imagine his cold and gloomy expression when he answered Mathilde's looks. A bitter irony rebuffed those assurances of friendship which the astonished mademoiselle de La Mole ventured to hazard on two or three occasions.
Piqued by this sudden eccentricity, the heart of this young girl, though naturally cold, bored and intellectual, became as impassioned as it was naturally capable of being. But there was also a large element of pride in Mathilde's character, and the birth of a sentiment which made all her happiness dependent on another, was accompanied by a gloomy melancholy.
Julien had derived sufficient advantage from his stay in Paris to appreciate that this was not the frigid melancholy of ennui. Instead of being keen as she had been on at-homes, theatres, and all kinds of distractions, she now shunned them.
Music sung by Frenchmen bored Mathilde to death, yet Julien, who always made a point of being present when the audience came out of the Opera, noticed that she made a point of getting taken there as often as she could. He thought he noticed that she had lost a little of that brilliant neatness of touch which used to be manifest in everything she did. She would sometimes answer her friends with jests rendered positively outrageous through the sheer force of their stinging energy. He thought that she made a special butt of the marquis de Croisenois. That young man must be desperately in love with money not to give the go-by to that girl, however rich she maybe, thought Julien. And as for himself, indignant at these outrages on masculine self-respect, he redoubled his frigidity towards her. Sometimes he went so far as to answer her with scant courtesy.
In spite of his resolution not to become the dupe of
