Chapter summary
Forced to wait eight days in Strasbourg, Julien Sorel finds in his soul only Mathilde de La Mole, mistress of his happiness and of his imagination. Riding on horseback near Kehl, he meets again Prince Korasoff, the friend from London who had initiated him into the rules of fatuousness, and, when he confesses that he is in love and rejected, he receives from him the recipe: see the beloved every day without seeming cold or angry, court a woman from her circle without showing any sign of passion, and reserve ardent passion for letters, which Korasoff supplies ready-made.
Analysis
Julien refuses Korasoff's rich cousin but accepts the method, because what he wants is not fortune, it is Mathilde: money would close the way back to her. He obeys the advice to feign detachment because sincerity, which won him over Madame de Rênal, has failed here, and he settles on the Marechale de Fervaques as a false target.
Korasoff's method is the exact opposite of what worked with Madame de Rênal: there Julien won through the involuntary sincerity of a poor, proud young man; here he can only hold Mathilde by pretending, with the technique of a third party, a detachment he no longer feels.
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