The advocate, who was a red-tape pedant, thought him mad, and believed, with the public, that it was jealousy which had lead him to take up the pistol. He ventured one day to give Julien to understand that this contention, whether true or false, would be an excellent way of pleading. But the accused man became in a single minute a passionate and drastic individual.
“As you value your life, monsieur,” exclaimed Julien, quite beside himself, “mind you never put forward such an abominable lie.” The cautious advocate was for a moment afraid of being assassinated.
He was preparing his case because the decisive moment was drawing near. The only topic of conversation in Besançon, and all the department, was the cause célèbre. Julien did not know of this circumstance. He had requested his friends never to talk to him about that kind of thing.
On this particular day, Fouqué and Mathilde had tried to inform him of certain rumours which in their view were calculated to give hope. Julien had stopped them at the very first word.
“Leave me my ideal life. Your pettifogging troubles and details of practical life all more or less jar on me and bring me down from my heaven. One dies as best one can: but I wish to chose my own way of thinking about death. What do I care for other people? My relations with other people will be sharply cut short. Be kind enough not to talk to me any more about those people. Seeing the judge and the advocate is more than enough.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said to himself, “it seems that I am fated to die dreaming. An obscure creature like myself, who is certain to be forgotten within a fortnight, would be very silly, one must admit, to go and play a part. It is nevertheless singular that I never knew so much about the art of enjoying life, as since I have seen its end so near me.”
He passed his last day in promenading upon the narrow terrace at the top of the turret, smoking some excellent cigars which Mathilde had had fetched from Holland by a courier. He had no suspicion that his appearance was waited for each day by all the telescopes in the town. His thoughts were at Vergy. He never spoke to Fouqué about madame de Rênal, but his friend told him two or three times that she was rapidly recovering, and these words reverberated in his heart.
While Julien’s soul was nearly all the time wholly in the realm of ideas, Mathilde, who, as befits an aristocratic spirit, had occupied herself with concrete things, had managed to make the direct and intimate correspondence between madame de Fervaques and M. de Frilair progress so far that the great word bishopric had been already pronounced. The venerable prelate, who was entrusted with the distribution of the benefices, added in a postscript to one of his niece’s letters, “This poor Sorel is only a lunatic. I hope he will be restored to us.”
At the sight of these lines, M. de Frilair felt transported. He had no doubts about saving Julien.
“But for this Jacobin law which has ordered the formation of an unending panel of jurymen, and which has no other real object, except to deprive well-born people of all their influence,” he said to Mathilde on the eve of the balloting for the thirty-six jurymen of the session, “I would have answered for the verdict. I certainly managed to get the curé N—— acquitted.”