Leo Tolstoy - 3 books to know Napoleonic Wars

‘You went to secure the Cross which is lying there’ the Marquis told him. ‘I do not wish to make you lay aside your black coat, and I have grown accustomed to the more amusing tone which I have adopted with the man in blue. Until further orders, understand this: when I see this Cross, you are the younger son of my friend the Duc de Chaulnes, who, without knowing it, has been for the last six months employed in diplomacy. Observe,’ added the Marquis, with a highly serious air, cutting short Julien’s expressions of gratitude, ‘that I do not on any account wish you to rise above your station. That is always a mistake, and a misfortune both for patron and for protege. When my lawsuits bore you, or when you no longer suit me I shall ask for a good living for you, like that of our friend the abbe Pirard, and nothing more,’ the Marquis added, in the driest of tones.

This Cross set Julien’s pride at rest; he began to talk far more freely. He felt himself less frequently insulted and made a butt by those remarks, susceptible of some scarcely polite interpretation, which, in the course of an animated conversation, may fall from the lips of anyone.

His Cross was the cause of an unexpected visit; this was from M. le Baron de Valenod, who came to Paris to thank the Minister for his Barony and to come to an understanding with him. He was going to be appointed Mayor of Verrieres in the place of M. de Renal.

Julien was consumed with silent laughter when M. de Valenod gave him to understand that it had just been discovered that M de Renal was a Jacobin. The fact was that, in a new election which was in preparation, the new Baron was the ministerial candidate, and in the combined constituency of the Department, which in reality was strongly Ultra, it was M. de Renal who was being put forward by the Liberals.

It was in vain that Julien tried to learn something of Madame de Renal; the Baron appeared to remember their former rivalry, and was impenetrable. He ended by asking Julien for his father’s vote at the coming election. Julien promised to write.

‘You ought, Monsieur le Chevalier, to introduce me to M. le Marquis de La Mole.’

‘Indeed, so I ought,’ thought Julien; ‘but a rascal like this!’

‘To be frank,’ he replied, ‘I am too humble a person in the Hotel de La Mole to take it upon me to introduce anyone.’

Julien told the Marquis everything: that evening he informed him of Valenod’s pretension, and gave an account of his life and actions since 1814.

‘Not only,’ M. de La Mole replied, with a serious air, ‘will you introduce the new Baron to me tomorrow, but I shall invite him to dine the day after. He will be one of our new Prefects.’

‘In that case,’ retorted Julien coldly, ‘I request the post of Governor of the Poorhouse for my father.’

‘Excellent,’ said the Marquis, recovering his gaiety; ‘granted; I was expecting a sermon. You are growing up.’

M. de Valenod informed Julien that the keeper of the lottery office at Verrieres had just died; Julien thought it amusing to bestow this place upon M. de Cholin, the old imbecile whose petition he had picked up in the room occupied there by M. de La Mole. The Marquis laughed heartily at the petition which Julien recited as he made him sign the letter applying for this post to the Minister of Finance.

No sooner had M. de Cholin been appointed than Julien learned that this post had been requested by the Deputies of the Department for M. Gros, the celebrated geometrician: this noble-hearted man had an income of only fourteen hundred francs, and every year had been lending six hundred francs to the late holder of the post, to help him to bring up his family.

Julien was astonished at the effect of what he had done. ‘It is nothing,’ he told himself; ‘I must be prepared for many other acts of injustice, if I am to succeed, and, what is more, must know how to conceal them, under a cloak of fine sentimental words: poor M, Gros! It is he that deserved the Cross, it is I that have it, and I must act according to the wishes of the Government that has given it to me.’

WHAT IS THE DECORATION that Confers Distinction?

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Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir.

PELLICO

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ONE DAY JULIEN RETURNED from the charming property of Villequier, on the bank of the Seine, in which M. de La Mole took a special interest because, of all his estates, it was the only one that had belonged to the celebrated Boniface de La Mole. He found at the Hotel the Marquise and her daughter, who had returned from Hyeres.

Julien was now a dandy and understood the art of life in Paris. He greeted Mademoiselle de La Mole with perfect coolness. He appeared to remember nothing of the time when she asked him so gaily to tell her all about his way of falling from his horse.

Mademoiselle de La Mole found him taller and paler. There was no longer anything provincial about his figure or his attire; not so with his conversation: this was still perceptibly too serious, too positive. In spite of these sober qualities, and thanks to his pride, it conveyed no sense of inferiority; one felt merely that he still regarded too many things as important. But one saw that he was a man who would stand by his word.

‘He is wanting in lightness of touch, but not in intelligence,’ Mademoiselle de La Mole said to her father, as she teased him over the Cross he had given Julien. ‘My brother has been asking you for it for the last eighteen months, and he is a La Mole!’

‘Yes; but Julien has novelty. That has never been the case with the La Mole you mention.’

M. le Duc de Retz was announced.

Mathilde felt herself seized by an irresistible desire to yawn; she recognised the antique decorations and the old frequenters of the paternal drawing-room. She formed an entirely boring picture of the life she was going to resume in Paris. And yet at Hyeres she had longed for Paris.

‘To think that I am nineteen!’ she reflected: ‘it is the age of happiness, according to all those gilt-edged idiots.’ She looked at nine or ten volumes of recent poetry that had accumulated, during her absence in Provence, on the drawing-room table. It was her misfortune to have more intelligence than MM. de Croisenois, de Caylus, de Luz, and the rest of her friends. She could imagine everything that they would say to her about the beautiful sky in Provence, poetry, the south, etc., etc.

Those lovely eyes, in which was revealed the most profound boredom, and, what was worse still, a despair of finding any pleasure, came to rest upon Julien. At any rate, he was not exactly like all the rest.

‘Monsieur Sorel,’ she said in that short, sharp voice, with nothing feminine about it, which is used by young women of the highest rank, ‘Monsieur Sorel, are you coming to M. de Retz’s ball tonight?’

‘Mademoiselle, I have not had the honour to be presented to M. le Duc.’ (One would have said that these words and the title burned the lips of the proud provincial.)

‘He has asked my brother to bring you; and, if you came, you could tell me all about Villequier; there is some talk of our going there in the spring. I should like to know whether the house is habitable, and if the country round it is as pretty as people say. There are so many undeserved reputations!’

Julien made no reply.

‘Come to the ball with my brother,’ she added, in the driest of tones.

Julien made a respectful bow. ‘So, even in the middle of a ball, I must render accounts to all the members of the family. Am I not paid to be their man of business?’ In his ill humour, he added: ‘Heaven only knows whether what I tell the daughter may not upset the plans of her father, and brother, and mother! It is just like the court of a Sovereign Prince. One is expected to be a complete nonentity, and at the same time give no one any grounds for complaint.