feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_40_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 11
feat_summary_id: part 2, chapter 11
feat_summary: {"name": "Part 2, Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-11", "summary": "The narrator tells us that if Julien were more observant, he'd realize just how crushing Mathilde can be to anyone who annoys her. She receives a lot of love letters from young men and is basically a heartbreaker. One day, Mathilde realizes that she's totally in love with Julien. She's never known the feeling before, and it feels great.", "analysis": ""}
text: CHAPTER XLI
  
  A YOUNG GIRL'S DOMINION
  
  
          I admire her beauty but I fear her intellect.--_Merimee_.
  
  
  If Julien had employed the time which he spent in exaggerating
  Matilde's beauty or in working himself up into a rage against that
  family haughtiness which she was forgetting for his sake in examining
  what was going on in the salon, he would have understood the secret of
  her dominion over all that surrounded her.
  
  When anyone displeased mademoiselle de La Mole she managed to punish
  the offender by a jest which was so guarded, so well chosen, so polite
  and so neatly timed, that the more the victim thought about it, the
  sorer grew the wound. She gradually became positively terrible to
  wounded vanity. As she attached no value to many things which the
  rest of her family very seriously wanted, she always struck them as
  self-possessed. The salons of the aristocracy are nice enough to brag
  about when you leave them, but that is all; mere politeness alone only
  counts for something in its own right during the first few days. Julien
  experienced this after the first fascination and the first astonishment
  had passed off. "Politeness," he said to himself "is nothing but the
  absence of that bad temper which would be occasioned by bad manners."
  Mathilde was frequently bored; perhaps she would have been bored
  anywhere. She then found a real distraction and real pleasure in
  sharpening an epigram.
  
  It was perhaps in order to have more amusing victims than her great
  relations, the academician and the five or six other men of inferior
  class who paid her court, that she had given encouragement to the
  marquis de Croisenois, the comte Caylus and two or three other young
  men of the highest rank. They simply represented new subjects for
  epigrams.
  
  We will admit with reluctance, for we are fond of Mathilde, that she
  had received many letters from several of them and had sometimes
  answered them. We hasten to add that this person constitutes an
  exception to the manners of the century. Lack of prudence is not
  generally the fault with which the pupils of the noble convent of the
  Sacred Heart can be reproached.
  
  One day the marquis de Croisenois returned to Mathilde a fairly
  compromising letter which she had written the previous night. He
  thought that he was thereby advancing his cause a great deal by taking
  this highly prudent step. But the very imprudence of her correspondence
  was the very element in it Mathilde liked. Her pleasure was to stake
  her fate. She did not speak to him again for six weeks.
  
  She amused herself with the letters of these young men, but in her view
  they were all like each other. It was invariably a case of the most
  profound, the most melancholy, passion.
  
  "They all represent the same perfect man, ready to leave for
  Palestine," she exclaimed to her cousin. "Can you conceive of anything
  more insipid? So these are the letters I am going to receive all my
  life! There can only be a change every twenty years according to the
  kind of vogue which happens to be fashionable. They must have had more
  colour in them in the days of the Empire. In those days all these young
  society men had seen or accomplished feats which really had an element
  of greatness. The Duke of N---- my uncle was at Wagram."
  
  "What brains do you need to deal a sabre blow? And when they have had
  the luck to do that they talk of it so often!" said mademoiselle de
  Sainte-Heredite, Mathilde's cousin.
  
  "Well, those tales give me pleasure. Being in a real battle, a battle
  of Napoleon, where six thousand soldiers were killed, why, that's proof
  of courage. Exposing one's self to danger elevates the soul and saves
  it from the boredom in which my poor admirers seem to be sunk; and that
  boredom is contagious. Which of them ever thought of doing anything
  extraordinary? They are trying to win my hand, a pretty business to
  be sure! I am rich and my father will procure advancement for his
  son-in-law. Well! I hope he'll manage to find someone who is a little
  bit amusing."
  
  Mathilde's keen, sharp and picturesque view of life spoilt her language
  as one sees. An expression of hers would often constitute a blemish
  in the eyes of her polished friends. If she had been less fashionable
  they would almost have owned that her manner of speaking was, from the
  standpoint of feminine delicacy, to some extent unduly coloured.
  
  She, on her side, was very unjust towards the handsome cavaliers who
  fill the Bois de Boulogne. She envisaged the future not with terror,
  that would have been a vivid emotion, but with a disgust which was very
  rare at her age.
  
  What could she desire? Fortune, good birth, wit, beauty, according to
  what the world said, and according to what she believed, all these
  things had been lavished upon her by the hands of chance.
  
  So this was the state of mind of the most envied heiress of the
  faubourg Saint-Germain when she began to find pleasure in walking with
  Julien. She was astonished at his pride; she admired the ability of the
  little bourgeois. "He will manage to get made a bishop like the abbe
  Mouray," she said to herself.
  
  Soon the sincere and unaffected opposition with which our hero received
  several of her ideas filled her mind; she continued to think about
  it, she told her friend the slightest details of the conversation,
  but thought that she would never succeed in fully rendering all their
  meaning.
  
  An idea suddenly flashed across her; "I have the happiness of loving,"
  she said to herself one day with an incredible ecstasy of joy. "I am in
  love, I am in love, it is clear! Where can a young, witty and beautiful
  girl of my own age find sensations if not in love? It is no good. I
  shall never feel any love for Croisenois, Caylus, and _tutti quanti_.
  They are unimpeachable, perhaps too unimpeachable; any way they bore
  me."
  
  She rehearsed in her mind all the descriptions of passion which she
  had read in _Manon Lescaut_, the _Nouvelle Heloise_, the _Letters of
  a Portuguese Nun_, etc., etc. It was only a question of course of the
  grand passion; light love was unworthy of a girl of her age and birth.
  She vouchsafed the name of love to that heroic sentiment which was met
  with in France in the time of Henri III. and Bassompierre. That love
  did not basely yield to obstacles, but, far from it, inspired great
  deeds. "How unfortunate for me that there is not a real court like that
  of Catherine de' Medici or of Louis XIII. I feel equal to the boldest
  and greatest actions. What would I not make of a king who was a man of
  spirit like Louis XIII. if he were sighing at my feet! I would take
  him to the Vendee, as the Baron de Tolly is so fond of saying, and
  from that base he would re-conquer his kingdom; then no more about a
  charter--and Julien would help me. What does he lack? name and fortune.
  He will make a name, he will win a fortune.
  
  "Croisenois lacks nothing, and he will never be anything else all his
  life but a duke who is half 'ultra' and half Liberal, an undecided
  being who never goes to extremes and consequently always plays second
  fiddle.
  
  "What great action is not an extreme at the moment when it is
  undertaken? It is only after accomplishment that it seems possible to
  commonplace individuals. Yes, it is love with all its miracles which
  is going to reign over my heart; I feel as much from the fire which is
  thrilling me. Heaven owed me this boon. It will not then have lavished
  in vain all its bounties on one single person. My happiness will be
  worthy of me. Each day will no longer be the cold replica of the day
  before. There is grandeur and audacity in the very fact of daring to
  love a man, placed so far beneath me by his social position. Let us see
  what happens, will he continue to deserve me? I will abandon him at the
  first sign of weakness which I detect. A girl of my birth and of that
  mediaeval temperament which they are good enough to ascribe to me (she
  was quoting from her father) must not behave like a fool.
  
  "But should I not be behaving like a fool if I were to love the marquis
  de Croisenois? I should simply have a new edition over again of that
  happiness enjoyed by my girl cousins which I so utterly despise. I
  already know everything the poor marquis would say to me and every
  answer I should make. What's the good of a love which makes one
  yawn? One might as well be in a nunnery. I shall have a celebration
  of the signing of a contract just like my younger cousin when the
  grandparents all break down, provided of course that they are not
  annoyed by some condition introduced into the contract at the eleventh
  hour by the notary on the other side."
  
  
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Part 2, Chapter 11
target: The narrator tells us that if Julien were more observant, he'd realize just how crushing Mathilde can be to anyone who annoys her. She receives a lot of love letters from young men and is basically a heartbreaker. One day, Mathilde realizes that she's totally in love with Julien. She's never known the feeling before, and it feels great.