“I have an irksome duty to perform,” thought Julien. “I must write to mademoiselle de la Mole:—”
“I have avenged myself,” he said to her. “Unfortunately, my name will appear in the papers, and I shall not be able to escape from the world incognito. I shall die in two months’ time. My revenge was ghastly, like the pain of being separated from you. From this moment I forbid myself to write or pronounce your name. Never speak of me even to my son; silence is the only way of honouring me. To the ordinary commonplace man, I shall represent a common assassin. Allow me the luxury of the truth at this supreme moment; you will forget me. This great catastrophe of which I advise you not to say a single word to a single living person, will exhaust, for several years to come, all that romantic and unduly adventurous element which I have detected in your character. You were intended by nature to live among the heroes of the middle ages; exhibit their firm character. Let what has to happen take place in secret and without your being compromised. You will assume a false name, and you will confide in no one. If you absolutely need a friend’s help, I bequeath the abbé Pirard to you.
“Do not talk to anyone else, particularly to the people of your own class—the de Luz’s, the Caylus’s.
“A year after my death, marry M. de Croisenois; I command you as your husband. Do not write to me at all, I shall not answer. Though in my view, much less wicked than Iago, I am going to say, like him: ‘From this time forth, I never will speack word.’[1]
“I shall never be seen to speak or write again. You will have received my final words and my final expressions of adoration.
“J. S.”
It was only after he had despatched this letter and had recovered himself a little, that Julien felt for the first time extremely unhappy. Those momentous words, I shall die, meant the successive tearing out of his heart of each individual hope and ambition. Death, in itself, was not horrible in his eyes. His whole life had been nothing but a long preparation for unhappiness, and he had made a point of not losing sight of what is considered the greatest unhappiness of all.
“Come then,” he said to himself; “if I had to fight a duel in a couple of months, with an expert duellist, should I be weak enough to think about it incessantly with panic in my soul?”
He passed more than an hour in trying to analyze himself thoroughly on this score.
When he saw clear in his own soul, and the truth appeared before his eyes with as much definiteness as one of the pillars of his prison, he thought about remorse.
“Why should I have any? I have been atrociously injured; I have killed—I deserve death, but that is all. I die after having squared my account with humanity. I do not leave any obligation unfulfilled. I owe nothing to anybody; there is nothing shameful about my death, except the instrument of it; that alone, it is true, is simply sufficient to disgrace me in the eyes of the bourgeois of Verrières; but from the intellectual standpoint, what could be more contemptible than they? I have one means of winning their consideration; by flinging pieces of gold to the people as I go to the scaffold. If my memory is linked with the idea of gold, they will always look upon it as resplendent.”
After this chain of reasoning, which after a minute’s reflection seemed to him self-evident, Julien said to himself, “I have nothing left to do in the world,” and fell into a deep sleep.
About 9 o’clock in the evening the gaoler woke him up as he brought in his supper.
“What are they saying in Verrières?”