Mathilde de La Mole

The daughter of the Marquis de La Mole, young, extremely wealthy, bored and a reader. She is Julien's second love, and the exact opposite of the first: where Madame de Rênal loves without knowing it, she decides to love.

What moves her

Boredom, and the suspicion that the age itself offers nothing worthy of admiration. She worships an ancestor executed in the sixteenth century because she prefers the bloody grandeur of the past to the comfortable mediocrity of the salon. It is, however, Abbé Pirard who introduces Julien to this ancestor, speaking of her brother, the young Count Norbert, who is bound to scorn him as a petty bourgeois.

Her yardstick for judging a man is explicit, and it is what makes Julien interesting in her eyes long before any affection.

The leaky barrel and the pendulum

Her boredom has two readings that complement each other without merging. According to Gorgias, Mathilde is the uninitiated of the myth: she has everything and retains nothing, because she lacks temperance, and the life she refuses is precisely the one that is satisfied with what the present day offers. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, she oscillates between the boredom of possession and the pain of lack: she tires of what she has, desires Julien while he is dangerous, despises him after the conquest and suffers again when he withdraws by Korasoff's method. With Plato the lack is hers and has a remedy; with Schopenhauer she is only the extreme case of a human condition.

Love as a project

Mathilde does not fall in love with Julien; she falls in love with her own courage to love beneath her class. It is love read before it is lived, with a historical model, a role to play and an imaginary audience, and Stendhal names it plainly.

The narrator separates this love from the other by kind, not by intensity, and the sentence is the key to any discussion of the two.

That is why she surrenders only when she is treated with calculated indifference, and the surrender comes in the form of a chosen humiliation, which is what she has always wanted to stage.

What is political in her pride

Her cult of the beheaded ancestor is not an isolated morbid taste: it is the form that the nostalgia of the nobility takes in a house that has lost real power and kept only the name. Her father's salon lives in fear, and Julien reads this fear in the very marble of the door.

This is the material that produces someone like Mathilde. In a class that shields itself from the century instead of contending with it, the only greatness available is that of the past, and she goes to look for it in 1574 because 1830 offers her nothing to admire.

And the ending confirms the reading from the practical side. When she resolves to save Julien, she appeals to no argument at all: she goes to Abbé de Frilair, the Congregation's man in Besançon, has the word "bishopric" reach him through correspondence with the Marechale de Fervaques, and he replies by counting the jurors he says he holds in his hand.

The same machine she despises in the salon is the one she sets in motion without hesitation when she needs it. This is what separates her pride from Julien's: he wants to enter through the window because the door is closed, and she has the key and pretends not to like the house.

The ending, and what it reveals

After the execution, she performs the gesture she had been rehearsing since the beginning: she buries her lover's head with her own hands, repeating the cult of the ancestor of the sixteenth century.

The contrast with Madame de Rênal's silent death, three days later and in the same chapter, is the last thing the book does, and it is no accident: one love produces ceremony, the other produces consequence. Stendhal does not say which is worth more; he sets the two side by side and leaves the stage.

Trajectory

In chapter 3 of Book II, she enters the library through a small secret door, disguised among the spines, in search of a volume of Voltaire, and is annoyed to find Julien there. At night, she laughs at the horse fall he recounts simply, and asks him for the details.

In chapter 8 of Book II, at the ball of the Duke de Retz, bored among her suitors, she sees Count Altamira, condemned to death, and formulates the maxim that only a death sentence honors a man. From it, she begins to measure her suitors and concludes that noble birth takes away strength of character.

In chapter 10 of Book II, she appears in full mourning, the only one in black in the family, on the day her ancestor Boniface de La Mole was beheaded. She walks with Julien in the garden, reads the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, and confesses that she loves the time of the wars of the Holy League, when a beheaded lover was still loved as he should be.

In chapter 11 of Book II, tired of the identical letters of her suitors, she decides in a burst of joy that she is in love, and concludes that only a heroic love will free her from the boredom of her own class.

In chapter 14 of Book II, the narrator shows the cost of the letter Mathilde wrote to Julien: the struggle against pride and the fear of dishonor, and above all the fear of displeasing him. She throws him a new letter asking for a definitive answer; he replies with mockery and announces his departure, and she tosses him a note so that he will climb the gardener's staircase to her window.

In chapter 16 of Book II, she receives Julien in her room and carries out the resolution she had made: to belong entirely to him if he dared to come that far. The narrator says that her enthusiasm was somewhat deliberate and that passionate love, more than a reality, was still a model one imitated.

In chapter 17 of Book II, she tells Julien that she is horrified at having given herself to the first man who came along. When he throws himself at an old sword in the library and then draws back, she gazes at him without hatred, delighted to have come close to being killed by her lover.

In chapter 19 of Book II, after despising him once she was certain of being loved, she reconstructs by herself, with arguments, why it was worth giving in. Doodling absently, she unintentionally draws Julien's profile and takes it as a miracle of love, and the narrator calls what she feels cerebral love.

In chapter 20 of Book II, one morning in the library, she declares to Julien that she no longer loves him and humiliates him with calculated contempt, while he tries in vain to justify himself.

In chapter 29 of Book II, she finds on Julien's table the letter the porter had just brought, demands explanations and weeps. When she opens his drawer, she discovers eight or ten unopened letters from the Marechale de Fervaques, falls at his feet and says she can no longer live without his love.

In chapter 30 of Book II, she offers Julien the excess of her love and suffering, and he resists to the limit of what he can bear. Julien, in thought, compares the two lovers: Madame de Rênal found reasons to do what her heart dictated, and Mathilde lets her heart be moved only after finding good reasons. That evening, she persuades her mother to go to the Opera only to find out whether he will spend the night with the Marechale.

In chapter 32 of Book II, for the first time she truly loves: she is submissive with Julien and ever more haughty with everyone else. On discovering that she is pregnant, she writes to her father an eight-page letter in which she takes the blame for having seduced the young man and proposes to live with him in Switzerland as Madame Sorel.

In chapter 33 of Book II, faced with the marquis's fury, who sees her as Madame Sorel and not as a duchess, Mathilde, who has seen Julien's suicide note, swears to her father that she will publicly be the widow Sorel, sends Julien to Villequier for prudence, and rejects all plans for a clandestine delivery.

In chapter 35 of Book II, a note from her ("Everything is lost") makes Julien race from Strasbourg to Paris, where she shows him the marquis's letter, which refuses marriage to a man who seduces a girl for her wealth, and Madame de Rênal's letter.

In chapter 38 of Book II, she enters the tower at Besançon dressed as a peasant woman and proposes to Julien that they die together. After eight days of requests, she manages to speak with Abbé de Frilair, confesses that she is the marquis's daughter, and asks whether it is possible to help Julien escape.

In chapter 39 of Book II, she asks her own rival, the Marechale de Fervaques, for a letter from the bishop to the vicar general. Her devotion, made of extravagant projects, squandered gold and bribed jailers, wearies Julien, who feels remorse at not returning it.

In chapter 41 of Book II, on the eve of the trial, she brings Frilair the bishop's letter, and he guarantees her the acquittal, because he counts on her to reach the bishopric. Julien is sentenced to death all the same.

In chapter 42 of Book II, she wakes Julien in his cell, furious because Frilair has betrayed her, and heaps curses on him when he refuses to appeal; she calls in the lawyer Félix Vaneau to fight the refusal.

In chapter 44 of Book II, she tells Julien that on the day of the trial, Baron de Valenod, with his appointment as governor in his pocket, dared to mock Frilair and took the pleasure of condemning Julien to death.

In chapter 45 of Book II, she torments Julien in prison with almost daily scenes of jealousy. After the execution, she places his head before her, kisses it on the forehead, attends the burial, and has the grotto on the mountain above Verrières, where Julien wished to be buried, adorned with marbles sculpted in Italy.