These were the only words which Julien heard. They sufficed to inspire him with the highest admiration. “That is the way,” he thought, “that real business is done; what would this great statesman say if he were to listen to the impassioned ranters heard three days ago?”
Julien took two days to reach Strasbourg. He thought he would have nothing to do there. He made a great detour. “If that devil of an abbé Castanède has recognised me he is not the kind of man to loose track of me easily.... And how he would revel in making a fool of me, and causing my mission to fail.”
Fortunately the abbé Castanède, who was chief of the congregational police on all the northern frontier had not recognised him. And the Strasbourg Jesuits, although very zealous, never gave a thought to observing Julien, who with his cross and his blue tail-coat looked like a young military man, very much engrossed in his own personal appearance.
[CHAPTER LIV]
STRASBOURG
Fascination! Love gives thee all his love, energy and all his power of suffering unhappiness. It is only his enchanting pleasures, his sweet delights, which are outside thy sphere. When I saw her sleep I was made to say “With all her angelic beauty and her sweet weaknesses she is absolutely mine! There she is, quite in my power, such as Heaven made her in its pity in order to ravish a man’s heart.”—Ode of Schiller.
Julien was compelled to spend eight days in Strasbourg and tried to distract himself by thoughts of military glory and patriotic devotion. Was he in love then? he could not tell, he only felt in his tortured soul that Mathilde was the absolute mistress both of his happiness and of his imagination. He needed all the energy of his character to keep himself from sinking into despair. It was out of his power to think of anything unconnected with mademoiselle de la Mole. His ambition and his simple personal successes had formerly distracted him from the sentiments which madame de Rênal had inspired. Mathilde was all-absorbing; she loomed large over his whole future.