As soon as he had gone out Julien wept desperately and for a long time. He gradually admitted to himself that if madame de Rênal had been at Besançon he would have confessed his weakness to her. The moment when he was regretting the absence of this beloved woman he heard Mathilde’s step.
“The worst evil of being in prison,” he thought “is one’s inability to close one’s door.” All Mathilde said only irritated him.
She told him that M. de Valenod had had his nomination to the prefectship in his pocket on the day of his trial, and had consequently dared to defy M. de Frilair and give himself the pleasure of condemning him to death.
“Why did your friend take it into his head,” M. de Frilair just said to me, “to awaken and attack the petty vanity of that bourgeois aristocracy. Why talk about caste? He pointed out to them what they ought to do in their own political interest; the fools had not been giving it a thought and were quite ready to weep. That caste interest intervened and blinded their eyes to the horror of condemning a man to death. One must admit that M. Sorel is very inexperienced. If we do not succeed in saving him by a petition for a reprieve, his death will be a kind of suicide.”
Mathilde was careful not to tell Julien a matter concerning which she had now no longer any doubts; it was that the abbé de Frilair seeing that Julien was ruined, had thought that it would further his ambitious projects to try and become his successor.
“Go and listen to a mass for me,” he said to Mathilde, almost beside himself with vexation and impotent rage, and leave me a moment in peace. Mathilde who was already very jealous of madame de Rênal’s visits and who had just learned of her departure realised the cause of Julien’s bad temper and burst into tears.
Her grief was real; Julien saw this and was only the more irritated. He had a crying need of solitude, and how was he to get it?
Eventually Mathilde, after having tried to melt him by every possible argument, left him alone. But almost at the same moment, Fouqué presented himself.
“I need to be alone,” he said, to this faithful friend, and as he saw him hesitate: “I am composing a memorial for my petition for pardon ... one thing more ... do me a favour, and never speak to me about death. If I have need of any especial services on that day, let me be the first to speak to you about it.”