"The first man who came along," cried Julien, and he made for an old mediaeval sword which was kept in the library as a curiosity.
His grief—which he thought was at its maximum at the moment when he had spoken mademoiselle de la Mole—had been rendered a hundred times more intense by the tears of shame which he saw her shedding.
He would have been the happiest of men if he had been able to kill her.
When he was on the point of drawing the sword with some difficulty from its ancient scabbard, Mathilde, rendered happy by so novel a sensation, advanced proudly towards him, her tears were dry.
The thought of his benefactor—the marquis de la Mole—presented itself vividly to Julien. "Shall I kill his daughter?" he said to himself, "how horrible." He made a movement to throw down the sword. "She will certainly," he thought, "burst out laughing at the sight of such a melodramatic pose:" that idea was responsible for his regaining all his self-possession. He looked curiously at the blade of the old sword as though he had been looking for some spot of rust, then put it back in the scabbard and replaced it with the utmost tranquillity on the gilt bronze nail from which it hung.
The whole manœuvre, which towards the end was very slow, lasted quite a minute; mademoiselle de la Mole looked at him in astonishment. "So I have been on the verge of being killed by my lover," she said to herself.
This idea transported her into the palmiest days of the age of Charles IX. and of Henri III.
She stood motionless before Julien, who had just replaced the sword; she looked at him with eyes whose hatred had disappeared. It must be owned that she was very fascinating at this moment, certainly no woman looked less like a Parisian doll (this expression symbolised Julien's great objection to the women of this city).
"I shall relapse into some weakness for him," thought Mathilde; "it is quite likely that he will think himself my lord and master after a relapse like that at the very moment that I have been talking to him so firmly." She ran away.
"By heaven, she is pretty said Julien as he watched her run and that's the creature who threw herself into my arms with so
