“My father may change his mind; do me the favour of leaving for Villequier this very minute. Mount your horse again, and leave the hôtel before they get up from table.”
When Julien’s coldness and astonishment showed no sign of abatement, she burst into tears.
“Let me manage our affairs,” she exclaimed ecstatically, as she clasped him in her arms. “You know, dear, it is not of my own free will that I separate from you. Write under cover to my maid. Address it in a strange hand-writing, I will write volumes to you. Adieu, flee.”
This last word wounded Julien, but he none the less obeyed. “It will be fatal,” he thought “if, in their most gracious moments these aristocrats manage to shock me.”
Mathilde firmly opposed all her father’s prudent plans. She would not open negotiations on any other basis except this. She was to be Madame Sorel, and was either to live with her husband in poverty in Switzerland, or with her father in Paris. She rejected absolutely the suggestion of a secret accouchement. “In that case I should begin to be confronted with a prospect of calumny and dishonour. I shall go travelling with my husband two months after the marriage, and it will be easy to pretend that my son was born at a proper time.”
This firmness though at first received with violent fits of anger, eventually made the marquis hesitate.
“Here,” he said to his daughter in a moment of emotion, “is a gift of ten thousand francs a year. Send it to your Julien, and let him quickly make it impossible for me to retract it.”
In order to obey Mathilde, whose imperious temper he well knew, Julien had travelled forty useless leagues; he was superintending the accounts of the farmers at Villequier. This act of benevolence on the part of the marquis occasioned his return. He went and asked asylum of the abbé Pirard, who had become Mathilde’s most useful ally during his absence. Every time that he was questioned by the marquis, he would prove to him that any other course except public marriage would be a crime in the eyes of God.
“And happily,” added the abbé, “worldly wisdom is in this instance in agreement with religion. Could one, in view of Mdlle. de la Mole’s passionate character, rely for a minute on her keeping any secret which she did not herself wish to preserve? If one does not reconcile oneself to the frankness of a public marriage, society will concern itself much longer with this strange mésalliance. Everything must be said all at once without either the appearance or the reality of the slightest mystery.”
“It is true,” said the marquis pensively.