At that moment some one was saying near her: “Comte Altamira is the second son of the Prince of San Nazaro-Pimentel; it was a Pimentel who tried to save Conradin, was beheaded in 1268. It is one of the noblest families in Naples.”
“So,” said Mathilde to herself, “what a pretty proof this is of my maxim, that good birth deprives a man of that force of character in default of which a man does not get condemned to death. I seem doomed to reason falsely to-night. Since I am only a woman like any other, well I must dance.” She yielded to the solicitations of M. de Croisenois who had been asking for a gallop for the last hour. To distract herself from her failure in philosophy, Mathilde made a point of being perfectly fascinating. M. de Croisenois was enchanted. But neither the dance nor her wish to please one of the handsomest men at court, nor anything at all, succeeded in distracting Mathilde. She could not possibly have been more of a success. She was the queen of the ball. She coldly appreciated the fact.
“What a blank life I shall pass with a person like Croisenois,” she said to herself as he took her back to her place an hour afterwards. “What pleasure do I get,” she added sadly, “if after an absence of six months I find myself at a ball which all the women of Paris were mad with jealousy to go to? And what is more I am surrounded by the homage of an ideally constituted circle of society. The only bourgeois are some peers and perhaps one or two Juliens. And yet,” she added with increasing sadness, “what advantages has not fate bestowed upon me! Distinction, fortune, youth, everything except happiness. My most dubious advantages are the very ones they have been speaking to me about all the evening. Wit, I believe I have it, because I obviously frighten everyone. If they venture to tackle a serious subject, they will arrive after five minutes of conversation and as though they had made a great discovery at a conclusion which we have been repeating to them for the last hour. I am beautiful, I have that advantage for which madame de Stael would have sacrificed everything, and yet I’m dying of boredom. Shall I have reason to be less bored when I have changed my name for that of the marquis de Croisenois?
“My God though,” she added, while she almost felt as if she would like to cry, “isn’t he really quite perfect? He’s a paragon of the education of the age; you can’t look at him without his finding something charming and even witty to say to you; he is brave. But that Sorel is strange,” she said to herself, and the expression of her eyes changed from melancholy to anger. “I told him that I had something to say to him and he hasn’t deigned to reappear.”
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
THE BALL
The luxurious dresses, the glitter of the candles; all those pretty arms and fine shoulders; the bouquets, the intoxicating strains of Rossini, the paintings of Ciceri. I am beside myself.—Journeys of Useri.