Leo Tolstoy - 3 books to know Napoleonic Wars

This speech restored all its activity to Julien’s spirit. ‘People have been trying to damage me with the Marechale; they have told her of my enthusiasm for Napoleon. This intelligence has stung her sufficiently for her to yield to the temptation to let me feel her resentment.’ This discovery kept him amused for the rest of the evening and made him amusing. As he was bidding the Marechale good night in the vestibule of the Opera: ‘Bear in mind, Sir,’ she said to him, ‘that people must not love Napoleon when they love me; they may, at the most, accept him as a necessity imposed by Providence. Anyhow, the man had not a soul pliant enough to feel great works of art.’

‘When they love me!’ Julien repeated to himself; ‘either that means nothing at all, or it means everything. There is one of the secrets of language that are hidden from us poor provincials.’ And he thought incessantly of Madame de Renal as he copied an immensely long letter intended for the Marechale.

‘How is it,’ she asked him the following evening, with an air of indifference which seemed to him unconvincing, ‘that you speak to me of London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, it appears, after leaving the Opera?’

Julien was greatly embarrassed; he had copied the letter line for line, without thinking of what he was writing, and apparently had forgotten to substitute for the words London and Richmond, which occurred in the original, Paris and Saint–Cloud. He began two or three excuses, but found it impossible to finish any of them; he felt himself on the point of giving way to an outburst of helpless laughter. At length, in his search for the right words, he arrived at the following idea: ‘Exalted by the discussion of the most sublime, the highest interests of the human soul, my own, in writing to you, must have become distracted.

‘I am creating an impression,’ he said to himself, ‘therefore I can spare myself the tedium of the rest of the evening.’ He left the Hotel de Fervaques in hot haste. That evening, as he looked over the original text of the letter which he had copied the night before, he very soon came to the fatal passage where the young Russian spoke of London and Richmond. Julien was quite surprised to find this letter almost tender.

It was the contrast between the apparent frivolity of his talk and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of his letters that had marked him out. The length of his sentences was especially pleasing to the Marechale; this was not the cursory style brought into fashion by Voltaire, that most immoral of men! Although our hero did everything in the world to banish any suggestion of common sense from his conversation, it had still an anti-monarchical and impious colour which did not escape the notice of Madame de Fervaques. Surrounded by persons who were eminently moral, but who often had not one idea in an evening, this lady was profoundly impressed by everything that bore a semblance of novelty; but, at the same time, she felt that she owed it to herself to be shocked by it. She called this defect, ‘retaining the imprint of the frivolity of the age’.

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