Chapter summary
In the Opéra Bouffe box, Mathilde de La Mole weeps and asks for "guarantees" from Julien Sorel, who binds himself to silence so as not to betray his own emotion. At home, after two hours forcing himself through the Memorial of Saint Helena, he decides to frighten her. The next day he appears at the library only at nine, when she has been waiting since eight. Mathilde offers to leave with him for London and lose themselves, and Julien replies in a glacial tone that there is no guarantee she will love him for eight days. The coldness gives way among the honeysuckles of the garden, where the memory of past despair makes him weep. He covers the slip by saying those tender phrases were prepared earlier, for a woman who loved him and bored him. Mathilde laughs at his taste for the Marechale de Fervaques, and her only annoyance is that he keeps copying the Russian letters for the marechale.
Analysis
Julien decides to frighten her because he fears losing, the next day, the advantage he has just won. The enemy obeys only out of fear, and so will not dare to despise him. He reaches the library at nine, an hour after the time he knew she would be there, and answers the offer to leave for London with coldness. The coldness gives way among the honeysuckles, and he prefers to claim that the tender phrases came from before rather than reveal the emotion. Revealing it would take from him the power the method gives.
Before the phrase, Julien tries to calm himself with Napoleon's book, and the book cannot hold his head. It is this book he throws away in the next line.
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