Mathilde struck him as adorable. All words are weak to express his excessive admiration. As he walked beside her he looked surreptitiously at her hands, her arms, her queenly bearing. He was so completely overcome by love and unhappiness as to be on the point of falling at her feet and crying "pity."
"Yes, and that person who is so beautiful, who is so superior to everything and who loved me once, will doubtless soon love M. de Caylus."
Julien could have no doubts of mademoiselle de la Mole's sincerity, the accent of truth was only too palpable in everything she said. In order that nothing might be wanting to complete his unhappiness there were moments when, as a result of thinking about the sentiments which she had once experienced for M. de Caylus, Mathilde came to talk of him, as though she loved him at the present time. She certainly put an inflection of love into her voice. Julien distinguished it clearly.
He would have suffered less if his bosom had been filled inside with molten lead. Plunged as he was in this abyss of unhappiness how could the poor boy have guessed that it was simply because she was talking to him, that mademoiselle de la Mole found so much pleasure in recalling those weaknesses of love which she had formerly experienced for M. de Caylus or M. de Luz.
Words fail to express Julien's anguish. He listened to these detailed confidences of the love she had experienced for others in that very avenue of pines where he had waited so few days ago for one o'clock to strike that he might invade her room. No human being can undergo a greater degree of unhappiness.
This kind of familiar cruelty lasted for eight long days. Mathilde sometimes seemed to seek opportunities of speaking to him and sometimes not to avoid them; and the one topic of conversation to which they both seemed to revert with a kind of cruel pleasure, was the description of the sentiments she had felt for others. She told him about the letters which she had written, she remembered their very words, she recited whole sentences by heart.
She seemed during these last days to be envisaging Julien with a kind of malicious joy. She found a keen enjoyment in his pangs.
