Extremely glad at being rebuffed, he hastened to look round him. The moon was so brilliant that the shadows which it made in mademoiselle de la Mole’s room were black. “It’s quite possible for men to be concealed without my seeing them,” he thought.
“What have you got in your pocket at the side of your coat?” Mathilde said to him, delighted at finding something to talk about. She was suffering strangely; all those sentiments of reserve and timidity which were so natural to a girl of good birth, had reasserted their dominion and were torturing her.
“I have all kinds of arms and pistols,” answered Julien equally glad at having something to say.
“You must take the ladder away,” said Mathilde.
“It is very big, and may break the windows of the salon down below or the room on the ground floor.”
“You must not break the windows,” replied Mathilde making a vain effort to assume an ordinary conversational tone; “it seems to me you can lower the ladder by tying a cord to the first rung. I have always a supply of cords at hand.”
“So this is a woman in love,” thought Julien. “She actually dares to say that she is in love. So much self-possession and such shrewdness in taking precautions are sufficient indications that I am not triumphing over M. de Croisenois as I foolishly believed, but that I am simply succeeding him. As a matter of fact, what does it matter to me? Do I love her? I am triumphing over the marquis in so far as he would be very angry at having a successor, and angrier still at that successor being myself. How haughtily he looked at me this evening in the Café Tortoni when he pretended not to recognise me! And how maliciously he bowed to me afterwards, when he could not get out of it.”
Julien had tied the cord to the last rung of the ladder. He lowered it softly and leant far out of the balcony in order to avoid its touching the window pane. “A fine opportunity to kill me,” he thought, “if anyone is hidden in Mathilde’s room;” but a profound silence continued to reign everywhere.
The ladder touched the ground. Julien succeeded in laying it on the border of the exotic flowers along side the wall.
“What will my mother say,” said Mathilde, “when she sees her beautiful plants all crushed? You must throw down the cord,” she added with great self-possession. “If it were noticed going up to the balcony, it would be a difficult circumstance to explain.”