266
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
ce sentiment par Julien, un leger bruit leur fit tourner
la
,tete. Julien
vit mademoiselle de La Mole qui ecoutait. Il rougit. Elle etait venue
chercher un livre et avait tout entendu; elle prit quelque consid6ration
pour Julien. Celui-la n'est pas nea genoux, pensa-t-elle, ccmme ce
vieil abbe. Dieu! qu'il est laid.
A diner, Julien n'osait pas regarder mademoiselle de La Male,
mais eUe eut
la
bonte de lui addresser la parole. Ce jour-la, on attendait
beaucoup de monde, dIe l'engagea
Ii
rester.
...
The scene, as I said, is designed to prepare for a passionate
and extremely tragic love intrigue. Its function and its psychological
value we shall not here discuss; they lie outside of our subject. What
interests us in the scene
is
this: it would be almost incomprehensible
without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political
situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of
a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which
France found itself just before the July Revolution. Even the
boredom which reigns in the dining-room and salon of this noble
house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous
personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among
them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important
people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable.
Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon
politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period.
In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the
corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately
implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore
conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its ad–
herents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere of pure
convention, of limitation, of constraint, against which the intelligence
and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons
the things which interest everyone-the political and religious prob–
lems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its
literature or of that of the very recent past--could not be discussed, or
at best could be discussed only
in
official phrases so mendacious that
a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. How different
from the intellectual daring of the famous eighteenth-century salons,
which, to be sure, did not dream of the dangers to their own existence
which they were unleashing! Now the danger is known, and life is
