QUOTES

1 " Punish me for my awful pride," she said to him, clasping him in her arms so tightly as almost to choke him. "You are my master, dear, I am your slave. I must ask your pardon on my knees for having tried to rebel." She left his arms to fall at his feet. "Yes," she said to him, still intoxicated with happiness and with love, "you are my master, reign over me for ever. When your slave tries to revolt, punish her severely."

In another moment she tore herself from his arms, and lit a candle, and it was only by a supreme effort that Julien could prevent her from cutting off a whole tress of her hair.

"I want to remind myself," she said to him, "that I am your handmaid. If I am ever led astray again by my abominable pride, show me this hair and say, 'It is not a question of the emotion which your soul may be feeling at present, you have sworn to obey, obey on your honour.'

As he was moving his hand over the soft ground in the darkness and satisfying himself that the mark had entirely disappeared, he felt something fall down on his hands. It was a whole tress of Mathilde's hair which she had cut off and thrown down to him.

She was at the window.

"That's what your servant sends you," she said to him in a fairly loud voice, "It is the sign of eternal gratitude. I renounce the exercise of my reason, be my master."

Julien was quite overcome and was on the point of going to fetch the ladder again and climbing back into her room. Finally reason prevailed.

(A few days later...)

In a single minute mademoiselle de la Mole reached the point of loading Julien with the signs of the most extreme contempt. She had infinite wit, and this wit was always triumphant in the art of torturing vanity and wounding it cruelly.

Hearing himself overwhelmed with such marks of contempt which were so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinion that he might have of himself, he thought that Mathilde was right, and that she did not say enough.

As for her, she found it deliciously gratifying to her pride to punish in this way both herself and him for the adoration that she had felt some days previously.

She did not have to invent and improvise the cruel remarks which she addressed to him with so much gusto.

Each word intensified a hundredfold Julien's awful unhappiness. He wanted to run away, but mademoiselle de la Mole took hold of his arm authoritatively.

"Be good enough to remark," he said to her, "that you are talking very loud. You will be heard in the next room."

"What does it matter?" mademoiselle de la Mole answered haughtily. "Who will dare to say they have heard me? I want to cure your miserable vanity once and for all of any ideas you may have indulged in on my account."

When Julien was allowed to leave the library he was so astonished that he was less sensitive to his unhappiness. "She does not love me any more," he repeated to himself...

"Is it really possible she was nothing to me, nothing to my heart so few days back?"

Mathilde's heart was inundated by the joy of satisfied pride. So she had been able to break with him for ever! So complete a triumph over so strong an inclination rendered her completely happy. "So this little gentleman will understand, once and for all, that he has not, and will never have, any dominion over me." She was so happy that in reality she ceased to love at this particular moment. "

― Stendhal ,

3 " Sa figure sévère et mécontente fit un étrange contraste avec la douce joie que sa présence chassait "

― Stendhal ,