answered Julien. "I was improvising for the first time in my life! It is true that it is to be feared that it will also be the last."
At this moment, Julien was playing on Mathilde's character with all the self-possession of a clever pianist, whose fingers are on the instrument.… "It is true," he added, "that I lack the advantage of a distinguished birth, but Mathilde's great soul has lifted her lover up to her own level. Do you think that Boniface de la Mole would have cut a better figure before his judges?"
On this particular day, Mathilde was as unaffectedly tender as a poor girl living in a fifth storey. But she failed to extract from him any simpler remark. He was paying her back without knowing it for all the torture she had frequently inflicted on him.
"The sources of the Nile are unknown," said Julien to himself: "it has not been vouchsafed to the human eye to see the king of rivers as a simple brook: similarly, no human eye shall see Julien weak. In the first place because he is not so. But I have a heart which it is easy to touch. The most commonplace words, if said in a genuine tone, can make my voice broken and even cause me to shed tears. How often have frigid characters not despised me for this weakness. They thought that I was asking a favour: that is what I cannot put up with.
"It is said that when at the foot of the scaffold, Danton was affected by the thought of his wife: but Danton had given strength to a nation of coxcombs and prevented the enemy from reaching Paris.… I alone know what I should have been able to do.… I represent to the others at the very outside, simply A PERHAPS.
"If madame de Rênal had been here in my cell instead of Mathilde, should I have been able to have answered for myself? The extremity of my despair and my repentance would have been taken for a craven fear of death by the Valenods and all the patricians of the locality. They are so proud, are those feeble spirits, whom their pecuniary position puts above temptation! 'You see what it is to be born a carpenter's son,' M. de Moirod and de Cholin doubtless said after having condemned me to death! 'A man can learn to be learned and clever, but the qualities of the heart—the
