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376 want to cure your miserable vanity once and for all of any ideas you may have indulged in on my account."

When Julien was allowed to leave the library he was so astonished that he was less sensitive to his unhappiness. "She does not love me any more," he repeated to himself, speaking aloud as though to teach himself how he stood. "It seems that she has loved me eight or ten days, but I shall love her all my life."

"Is it really possible she was nothing to me, nothing to my heart so few days back?"

Mathilde's heart was inundated by the joy of satisfied pride. So she had been able to break with him for ever! So complete a triumph over so strong an inclination rendered her completely happy. "So this little gentleman will understand, once and for all, that he has not, and will never have, any dominion over me." She was so happy that in reality she ceased to love at this particular moment.

In a less passionate being than Julien love would have become impossible after a scene of such awful humiliation. Without deviating for a single minute from the requirements of her own self-respect, mademoiselle de la Mole had addressed to him some of those unpleasant remarks which are so well thought out that they may seem true, even when remembered in cold blood.

The conclusion which Julien drew in the first moment of so surprising a scene, was that Mathilde was infinitely proud. He firmly believed that all was over between them for ever, and none the less, he was awkward and nervous towards her at breakfast on the following day. This was a fault from which up to now he had been exempt.

Both in small things as in big it was his habit to know what he ought and wanted to do, and he used to act accordingly.

The same day after breakfast madame de la Mole asked him for a fairly rare, seditious pamphlet which her curé had surreptitiously brought her in the morning, and Julien, as he took it from a bracket, knocked over a blue porcelain vase which was as ugly as it could possibly be.

Madame de la Mole got up, uttering a cry of distress, and proceeded to contemplate at close quarters the ruins of her beloved vase. "It was old Japanese," she said. "It came to me from my great aunt, the abbess of Chelles. It was a