Joy Never Manifests Only As A Glimmer
Gain your authority from a moral point of view - through the power to give meaning and value to your actions, without externalizing too much of your sense of self-importance.
Leaving Frederique’s room, Samuel did not immediately enter Julius’, but stopped in the room preceding it and leaning his forehead against the window, moving his fingers on the window, automatically looking at the yard, breathing and reflecting. He needed, as strong as he was, to rest for a moment from the hard work he had just begun to do and which he had to continue.
In the soul of this deeply clouded man, joy never manifests only as a glimmer. Turning back to Julius, the pleasure he had felt in wresting Frederique’s consent with the promise that she would be his after, as before he was rich, was quickly eclipsed and replaced by a cloud of bitter gloom.
Here, then, is where I have arrived thanks to skill, combinations and fatigue, he said to himself: let me no longer rely on human virtue. I rely on the word of Frederique and the honor of Julius !
My whole plan rests on the fact that Frédérique, once rich, countess, free from everything that kept her under my dominion, will remember the oath she made to me when she was poor and submissive; that the rich countess will remember the flower child, that the millionaire will remember the poor man ! All my future, all my calculations, all my greatness, all my solidity rest on this quicksand: the fidelity of a woman.
Does the fact that you deny your own experience and the “lessons” assimilated in the past, denote that you still have some forgiveness to yourself for a decision that may later turn out to be a premature one?
My thinking is a revenge of the past, a crossing of my past with the present of others. As for Julius’ promise to treat Frederique as his own daughter and no other, I will proceed so that he has no time to yield. He wanted her, even worse so, for himself ! I couldn’t do anything else. Parents die before their children. It is the law of nature. Julius will die before Frederique, he will die on the very day of the marriage. I decided.
Things will change for the better. After the death of Julius I will bring Frederique to Menilmontant. I am her guardian. It is enough for Julius to appoint me as his executor. I will keep Frédérique away from Lothario.
Meanwhile, political events will continue their course. The Polignac ministry is a defiance to which France will respond with a revolution. Obviously, this revolution, which belongs to the entire people, will escape from the hands of those who claim to lead it. It will evolve beyond their will and drown them in its waves. I will be strong, I will be rich, I will be what I want, I will dominate the chaos that will result from a world that disappears and another that is established. I will hold Frédérique in admiration. How will the naive Lothario look next to a Napoleon of democracy !
The future is mine. Everyone will love me, everyone will bless me. Starting right with Julius. Hey, hey, it’s true ! He will owe me death in full happiness, he who lay in apathy and disgust. But let us hasten to finish everything before Lothario comes. I’m afraid of them showing up too soon and thwarting our efforts…”
Leadership means using the experience of the present, accumulated including learning the lessons of the past, to strategically project your future, by renouncing the external constraints that facilitate the acquisition of negative attitudes.
Joy Never Manifests Only As A Glimmer, but as a moral force to overcome any affective or material shortcomings, to not let yourself be defeated by them, and thus through reason to win the freedom that gives dignity and independence to the soul by dominating the opposite effects that can appear if your Ego is too confident.
* Note: Dumas, Alexandre - The Hand of Providence, Editura Vestala, 1993, Bucureşti.
