Leo Tolstoy - 3 books to know Napoleonic Wars

‘What connection can there be between leading a whole household by the nose, wearing black and the 30th of April?’ he asked himself. ‘I must be even stupider than I thought.

‘I must confess to you,’ he said to the Academician, and his eye continued the question.

‘Let us take a turn in the garden,’ said the Academician, delighted to see this chance of delivering a long and formal speech. ‘What! Is it really possible that you do not know what happened on the 30th of April, 1574?’

‘Where?’ asked Julien, in surprise.

‘On the Place de Greve.’

Julien was so surprised that this name did not enlighten him. His curiosity, the prospect of a tragic interest, so attuned to his nature, gave him those sparkling eyes which a story-teller so loves to see in his audience. The Academician, delighted to find a virgin ear, related at full length to Julien how, on the 30th of April, 1574, the handsomest young man of his age, Boniface de La Mole, and Annibal de Coconasso, a Piedmontese gentleman, his friend, had been beheaded on the Place de Greve. ‘La Mole was the adored lover of Queen Marguerite of Navarre; and observe,’ the Academician added, ‘that Mademoiselle de La Mole is named Mathilde–Marguerite. La Mole was at the same time the favourite of the Duc d’Alencon and an intimate friend of the King of Navarre, afterwards Henri IV, the husband of his mistress. On Shrove Tuesday in this year, 1574, the Court happened to be at Saint–Germain, with the unfortunate King Charles IX, who was on his deathbed. La Mole wished to carry off the Princes, his friends, whom Queen Catherine de’ Medici was keeping as prisoners with the Court. He brought up two hundred horsemen under the walls of Saint–Germain, the Due d’Alencon took fright, and La Mole was sent to the scaffold.

‘But what appeals to Mademoiselle Mathilde, as she told me herself, seven or eight years ago, when she was only twelve, for she has a head, such a head! .. .’ and the Academician raised his eyes to heaven. ‘What impresses her in this political catastrophe is that Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who had waited concealed in a house on the Place de Greve, made bold to ask the executioner for her lover’s head. And the following night, at midnight, she took the head in her carriage, and went to bury it with her own hands in a chapel which stood at the foot of the hill of Montmartre.’

‘Is it possible?’ exclaimed Julien, deeply touched.

‘Mademoiselle Mathilde despises her brother because, as you see, he thinks nothing of all this ancient history, and never goes into mourning on the 30th of April. It is since this famous execution, and to recall the intimate friendship between La Mole and Coconasso, which Coconasso, being as he was an Italian, was named Annibal, that all the men of this family have borne that name. And,’ the Academician went on, lowering his voice, ‘this Coconasso was, on the authority of Charles IX, himself, one of the bloodiest assassins on the 24th of August, 1572.. But how is it possible, my dear Sorel, that you are ignorant of these matters, you, who are an inmate of the house?’

‘Then that is why twice, during the dinner, Mademoiselle de La Mole addressed her brother as Annibal. I thought I had not heard aright.’

‘It was a reproach. It is strange that the Marquise permits such folly . . . That great girl’s husband will see some fine doings!’

This expression was followed by five or six satirical phrases. The joy at thus revealing an intimate secret that shone in the Academician’s eyes shocked Julien. ‘What are we but a pair of servants engaged in slandering our employers?’ he thought. ‘But nothing ought to surprise me that is done by this academic gentleman.’

One day Julien had caught him on his knees before the Marquise de La Mole; he was begging her for a tobacco licence for a nephew in the country. That night, he gathered from a little maid of Mademoiselle de La Mole, who was making love to him, as Elisa had done in the past, that her mistress’s mourning was by no means put on to attract attention. This eccentricity was an intimate part of her nature. She really loved this La Mole, the favoured lover of the most brilliant Queen of her age, who had died for having sought to set his friends at liberty. And what friends! The First Prince of the Blood and Henri IV.

Accustomed to the perfect naturalness that shone through the whole of Madame de Renal’s conduct, Julien saw nothing but affectation in all the women of Paris, and even without feeling disposed to melancholy, could think of nothing to say to them. Mademoiselle de La Mole was the exception.

He began no longer to mistake for hardness of heart the kind of beauty that goes with nobility of bearing. He had long conversations with Mademoiselle de La Mole, who would stroll with him in the garden sometimes after dinner, past the open windows of the drawing-room. She told him one day that she was reading d’Aubigne’s History, and Brantome. ‘A strange choice,’ thought Julien, ‘and the Marquise does not allow her to read the novels of Walter Scott!’

One day she related to him, with that glow of pleasure in her eyes which proves the sincerity of the speaker’s admiration, the feat of a young woman in the reign of Henri in, which she had just discovered in the Memoires by l’Etoile: finding that her husband was unfaithful, she had stabbed him.

Julien’s self-esteem was flattered. A person surrounded by such deference, one who, according to the Academician, was the leader of the household, deigned to address him in a tone which might almost be regarded as friendly. ‘I was mistaken,’ was his next thought; ‘this is not familiarity, I am only the listener to a tragic story, it is the need to speak. I am regarded as learned by this family. I shall go and read Brantome, d’Aubigne, l’Etoile. I shall be able to challenge some of the anecdotes which Mademoiselle de La Mole cites to me. I must emerge from this part of a passive listener.’

In course of time his conversations with this girl, whose manner was at once so imposing and so easy, became more interesting. He forgot his melancholy role as a plebeian in revolt. He found her learned and indeed rational. Her opinions in the garden differed widely from those which she maintained in the drawing-room. At times she displayed with him an enthusiasm and a frankness which formed a perfect contrast with her normal manner, so haughty and cold.

‘The Wars of the League are the heroic age of France,’ she said to him one day, her eyes aflame with intellect and enthusiasm. ‘Then everyone fought to secure a definite object which he desired in order to make his party triumph, and not merely to win a stupid Cross as in the days of your Emperor. You must agree that there was less egoism and pettiness. I love that period.’

‘And Boniface de La Mole was its hero,’ he said to her.

‘At any rate he was loved as it is perhaps pleasant to be loved. What woman alive today would not be horrified to touch the head of her decapitated lover?’

Madame de La Mole called her daughter indoors. Hypocrisy, to be effective, must be concealed; and Julien, as we see, had taken Mademoiselle de La Mole partly into his confidence as to his admiration for Napoleon.

‘That is the immense advantage which they have over us,’ he said to himself, when left alone in the garden. ‘The history of their ancestors raises them above vulgar sentiments, and they have not always to be thinking of their daily bread! What a wretched state of things!’ he added bitterly. ‘I am not worthy to discuss these serious matters. My life is nothing more than a sequence of hypocrisies, because I have not an income of a thousand francs with which to buy my bread.’

‘What are you dreaming of, Sir?’ Mathilde asked him, running back outdoors.