10
PARTISAN REVIEW
Renal is many years older than himself-and a mother. The
encounters between them are unlike those of adult lovers: Madame
de Renal is too shocked by the impact on her innocent nature of
her first experience of real love to maintain any strong sense of
reality; and Julien is too dominated by his will to recognize the
extent and quality of his attraction toward her. It is very nearly
as "pure" a relationship as that between Fabrizio and the San–
severina; descriptions of the physical side are suspiciously vague
and uncirqumstantial. For the most part Julien behaves like a
spoiled child engaged in an intrigue with his mother. Only at
rare moments of collapse, such as the one in which he is rebuked
for breaking into Madame de Renal's bedroom at night, is the real
basis of his trouble, the
natural
Julien revealed:
"Wretch!" she cried. There was some confusion. Julien for–
got his futile plans and returned to his own natural character.
Not to please :so charming a woman seemed to him the greatest
disaster possible. His only answer to her reproaches was to fling
himself at her feet, clasping her round the knees. As she spoke
to him with extreme harshness, he burst into tears.
Different in kind and development, however, is the relation–
ship with Mathilde de la Mole. Like the heroine of the frag–
mentary
Lamiel,
this character is a feminine counterpart for the
desperate and amoral heroes. To Julien the obstacle that she
presents is of course that of social rank; she is at the very top of
that ladder that he must ascend to guarantee his victory. From her
standpoint she is fascinated by the idea that there is something
"daring and audacious" in loving one so far beneath her.
If
Julien
had been merely another suitor of her own class, the affair would
lack that element which characterizes great passion: "the immen–
sity of the difficulties to be overcome and the dark uncertainty of
the issue." At times she is the transparent littJe sadist: "She had
infinite cleverness, and this cleverness triumphed in the art of tor–
turing the self-esteem of others and inflicting cruel wounds upon
them." The meeting of the-se two can only be sterile and mutually
destructive; it has the character of moral or spiritual incest-a
merging of identities in the flux. As incapable of love as her hus–
band, she seeks to
e~cape
the ennui of her class and her position
by a kind of perpetual titillation of the soul. At the top of one of
the chapters Stendhal quotes from some forgotten book of memoirs:
"The need of anxiety,
such was the character of the beautiful
