Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/475

Rh would go off on another tack, and he would think that Julien would read between the lines of this financial generosity, change his name, exile himself to America, and write to Mathilde that he was dead for her. M. de la Mole imagined this letter written, and went so far as to follow its effect on his daughter's character.

The day when he was awakened from these highly youthful dreams by Mathilde's actual letter after he had been thinking for along time of killing Julien or securing his disappearance he was dreaming of building up a brilliant position for him. He would make him take the name of one of his estates, and why should he not make him inherit a peerage? His father-in-law, M. the duke de Chaulnes, had, since the death of his own son in Spain, frequently spoken to him about his desire to transmit his title to Norbert.…

"One cannot help owning that Julien has a singular aptitude for affairs, had boldness, and is possibly even brilliant," said the marquis to himself … "but I detect at the root of his character a certain element which alarms me. He produces the same impression upon everyone, consequently there must be something real in it," and the more difficult this reality was to seize hold of, the more it alarmed the imaginative mind of the old marquis.

"My daughter expressed the same point very neatly the other day (in a suppressed letter).

"Julien has not joined any salon or any côterie. He has nothing to support himself against me, and has absolutely no resource if I abandon him. Now is that ignorance of the actual state of society? I have said to him two or three times, the only real and profitable candidature is the candidature of the salons.

"No, he has not the adroit, cunning genius of an attorney who never loses a minute or an opportunity. He is very far from being a character like Louis XI. On the other hand, I seen him quote the most ungenerous maxims … it is beyond me. Can it be that he simply repeats these maxims in order to use them as a dam against his passions?

"However, one thing comes to the surface; he cannot bear contempt, that's my hold on him.

"He has not, it is true, the religious reverence for high birth. He does not instinctively respect us.… That is wrong;