Chapter summary
For the second day in a row, Julien Sorel surprises Norbert and Mathilde de La Mole talking about him, and sees silence fall when he arrives. He suspects they are mocking him, since a hoax seems more likely to him than a passion of the marquis's daughter for the secretary. Even so, from the strands of horsehair he places on the volumes of Voltaire, which vanish for weeks, he discovers that someone in the house reads them in secret, and, adding this to the books hostile to throne and altar that disappear from the marquis's library, he begins to see in Mathilde a Catherine de' Medici, the mold of calculation and perversity he admired in his youth in the priests Maslon, Frilair and Castanède, of the seminary and of the Congregation. Mathilde, offended by his coldness, becomes more infatuated, shuns the parties and outrages their friends, in particular the Marquis de Croisenois.
About to leave for Languedoc, where the Marquis de La Mole has entrusted him with the administration of lands and houses, Julien hears from Mathilde, the evening before, that she will send him a letter that night and that he should postpone the journey. The letter is a declaration of love. The joy of having defeated Croisenois, who is handsome and noble, sends him into raptures, and a scruple of gratitude to the marquis lasts only briefly: in a world of selfishness, he concludes, one should not refuse a pleasure that is offered. He had already told the marquis that lawsuits in Normandy required postponing the trip when the fear of a trap leads him to take precautions: he has a clerk copy the letter, hides the original in a Bible bought on the spot, and sends it by coach to an employee of Fouqué, whose name no one knows in Paris. He replies to Mathilde with the caution of a diplomat, quoting the clearest phrases of her letter in a tone of doubt about her sincerity, and goes to the Italian opera, where he hears his friend Geronimo sing.
Analysis
Julien fears a trap because the habit of distrust, learned in the seminary and in Verrières, keeps him from accepting being loved. He copies the letter, hides the original and sends it to an employee of Fouqué, so as to have proof if he is accused, and replies with a diplomat's caution. He postpones the trip to Languedoc because his victory over Croisenois is too sweet to abandon.
Julien completes Mathilde's charm by seeing her, in his imagination, as a Catherine de' Medici, that is, dressing her in the same mold of calculation and perversity he admired in his youth in Maslon, in Verrières, and in Abbé de Frilair and Castanède, in Besançon (see the seminary at Besançon). He cannot love without first distrusting.
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