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Rh had been able to have informed her that all these letters were left unsealed and thrown haphazard into Julien's drawer.

One morning the porter was bringing into the library a letter to him from the maréchale. Mathilde met the man, saw the letter together with the address in Julien's handwriting. She entered the library as the porter was leaving it, the letter was still on the edge of the table. Julien was very busy with his work and had not yet put it in his drawer.

"I cannot endure this," exclaimed Mathilde, as she took possession of the letter, "you are completely forgetting me, me your wife, your conduct is awful, monsieur."

At these words her pride, shocked by the awful unseemliness of her proceeding, prevented her from speaking. She burst into tears, and soon seemed to Julien scarcely able to breathe. Julien was so surprised and embarrassed that he did not fully appreciate how ideally fortunate this scene was for himself. He helped Mathilde to sit down; she almost abandoned herself in his arms.

The first minute in which he noticed this movement, he felt an extreme joy. Immediately afterwards, he thought of Korasoff: "I may lose everything by a single word."

The strain of carrying out his tactics was so great that his arms stiffened. "I dare not even allow myself to press this supple, charming frame to my heart, or she will despise me or treat me badly. What an awful character!" And while he cursed Mathilde's character, he loved her a hundred times more. He thought he had a queen in his arms.

Julien's impassive coldness intensified the anguished pride which was lacerating the soul of mademoiselle de la Mole. She was far from having the necessary self-possession to try and read in his eyes what he felt for her at that particular moment. She could not make up her mind to look at him. She trembled lest she might encounter a contemptuous expression.

Seated motionless on the library divan, with her head turned in the opposite direction to Julien, she was a prey to the most poignant anguish that pride and love can inflict upon a human soul. What an awful step had she just slipped into taking! "It has been reserved for me, unhappy woman that I am, to see my most unbecoming advances rebuffed! and