Chapter summary
Julien Sorel returns from the Villequier estate, on the banks of the Seine, which had belonged to Boniface de La Mole, and finds at the mansion the marquise and Mathilde de La Mole, back from Hyères. Julien, who is already a dandy, treats Mathilde with absolute coldness; she, bored at having to return to Paris and her suitors, asks whether he will attend the Duke de Retz's ball. Her brother Norbert comes to fetch him at midnight, and Julien accepts with irritation, seeing a slight in the courtesy, but the magnificence of the Retz mansion dazzles him. At the ball, the young men remark that Mathilde is the queen of the party and wonder who would be worthy of her. She strikes up a conversation with Julien and calls him a philosopher, like Rousseau, and he replies that Rousseau was a fool before high society, which he frequented with the mind of an upstart lackey, and which he grew drunk with happiness to be received by whenever a duke turned from his walk to accompany one of his friends. She is taken aback by his coldness.
The Marquis de Croisenois, who intends to marry her, comes to seek her out, and Mathilde is already bored by the life she would have with him. Seeing Count Altamira, condemned to death for a failed conspiracy, in a corner, she formulates the maxim that only a death sentence honors a man, because it is the one thing that cannot be bought, and asks Croisenois to introduce her to the count. Altamira, however, is interested only in what a two-chamber government could give his country, and leaves her to speak with a Peruvian general. Mathilde then begins to look at the young men around her, wondering which of them would have himself condemned to death, and concludes, on hearing of Altamira's ancestry, that noble birth robs one of the strength of character without which that would be impossible. She dances, she is the queen of the ball and remains bored, and she ends irritated because Julien, whom she wanted to speak with, did not come back.
Analysis
Mathilde begins to measure suitors by their willingness to be condemned to death, because what displeases her in her world is that everything can be bought or inherited. Seeing Altamira, condemned and devout, she discovers a prestige that money and name cannot provide. She concludes that noble birth robs one of strength of character: whoever is born with everything risks nothing, and the love she wants demands risk.
Mathilde formulates there the sentence that will guide all her conduct in the following chapters:
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