The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
steps of our hero were, in spite of the prudence on which he plumed
himself, as much mistakes as his choice of a confessor. Misled as he
was by all the self-confidence of a man of imagination, he took his
projects for facts, and believed that he was a consummate hypocrite.
His folly went so far as to reproach himself for his success in this
kind of weakness.
"Alas, it is my only weapon," he said to himself. "At another period I
should have earned my livelihood by eloquent deeds in the face of the
enemy."
Satisfied as he was with his own conduct, Julien looked around him. He
found everywhere the appearance of the purest virtue.
Eight or ten seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity, and had
visions like Saint Theresa, and Saint Francis, when he received his
stigmata on Mount _Vernia_ in the Appenines. But it was a great secret
and their friends concealed it. These poor young people who had
visions were always in the infirmary. A hundred others combined an
indefatigable application to a robust faith. They worked till they fell
ill, but without learning much. Two or three were distinguished by a
real talent, amongst others a student of the name of Chazel, but both
they and Julien felt mutually unsympathetic.
The rest of these three hundred and twenty-one seminarists consisted
exclusively of coarse persons, who were by no means sure of
understanding the Latin words which they kept on repeating the livelong
day. Nearly all were the sons of peasants, and they preferred to gain
their livelihood by reciting some Latin words than by ploughing the
earth. It was after this examination of his colleagues that Julien,
during the first few days, promised himself a speedy success.
"Intelligent people are needed in every service," he said to himself,
"for, after all, there is work to be done. I should have been a
sergeant under Napoleon. I shall be a grand vicar among these future
curés."
"All these poor devils," he added, "manual labourers as they have been
since their childhood, have lived on curded milk and black bread up
till they arrived here. They would only eat meat five or six times a
year in their hovels. Like the Roman soldiers who used to find war the
time of rest, these poor peasants are enchanted with the delights of
the seminary."
Julien could never read anything in their gloomy eyes but the
satisfaction of physical craving after dinner, and the expectation
of sensual pleasure before the meal. Such were the people among whom
Julien had to distinguish himself; but the fact which he did not know,
and which they refrained from telling him, was that coming out first
in the different courses of dogma, ecclesiastical history, etc., etc.,
which are taken at the seminary, constituted in their eyes, neither
more nor less than a splendid sin.
Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at
bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the
popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France
seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. It is the
submissive heart which counts for everything in its eyes. It suspects,
and rightly so, any success in studies, even sacred ones. What is to
prevent a superior man from crossing over to the opposite side like
Sièyes or Gregory. The trembling Church clings on to the Pope as its
one chance of safety. The Pope alone is in a position to attempt to
paralyse all personal self-examination, and to make an impression by
means of the pompous piety of his court ceremonial on the bored and
morbid spirit of fashionable society.
Julien, as he began to get some glimpse of these various truths,
which are none the less in total contradiction to all the official
pronouncements of any seminary, fell into a profound melancholy. He
worked a great deal and rapidly succeeded in learning things which were
extremely useful to a priest, extremely false in his own eyes, and
devoid of the slightest interest for him. He felt there was nothing
else to do.
"Am I then forgotten by the whole world," he thought. He did not know
that M. Pirard had received and thrown into the fire several letters
with the Dijon stamp in which the most lively passion would pierce
through the most formal conventionalism of style. "This love seems to
be fought by great attacks of remorse. All the better," thought the
abbé Pirard. "At any rate this lad has not loved an infidel woman."
One day the abbé Pirard opened a letter which seemed half-blotted out
by tears. It was an adieu for ever. "At last," said the writer to
Julien, "Heaven has granted me the grace of hating, not the author of
my fall, but my fall itself. The sacrifice has been made, dear one, not
without tears as you see. The safety of those to whom I must devote
my life, and whom you love so much, is the decisive factor. A just
but terrible God will no longer see His way to avenge on them their
mother's crimes. Adieu, Julien. Be just towards all men." The end of
the letter was nearly entirely illegible. The writer gave an address at
Dijon, but at the same time expressed the hope that Julien would not
answer, or at any rate would employ language which a reformed woman
could read without blushing. Julien's melancholy, aggravated by the
mediocre nourishment which the contractor who gave dinners at thirteen
centimes per head supplied to the seminary, began to affect his health,
when Fouqué suddenly appeared in his room one morning.
"I have been able to get in at last. I have duly been five times to
Besançon in order to see you. Could never get in. I put someone by the
door to watch. Why the devil don't you ever go out?"
"It is a test which I have imposed on myself."
"I find you greatly changed, but here you are again. I have just
learned from a couple of good five franc pieces that I was only a fool
not to have offered them on my first journey."
The conversation of the two friends went on for ever. Julien changed
colour when Fouqué said to him,
"Do you know, by the by, that your pupils' mother has become positively
devout."
And he began to talk in that off-hand manner which makes so singular an
impression on the passionate soul, whose dearest interests are being
destroyed without the speaker having the faintest suspicion of it.
"Yes, my friend, the most exalted devoutness. She is said to make
pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of the abbé Maslon, who has
played the spy so long on that poor M. Chélan, Madame de Rênal would
have nothing to do with him. She goes to confession to Dijon or
Besançon."
"She goes to Besançon," said Julien, flushing all over his forehead.
"Pretty often," said Fouqué in a questioning manner.
"Have you got any _Constitutionnels_ on you?"
"What do you say?" replied Fouqué.
"I'm asking if you've got any _Constitutionnels_?" went on Julien
in the quietest tone imaginable. "They cost thirty sous a number here."
"What!" exclaimed Fouqué. "Liberals even in the seminary! Poor France,"
he added, assuming the abbé Maslon's hypocritical voice and sugary tone.
This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero, if he had not
been put on the track of an important discovery by some words addressed
to him the following day by the little seminarist from Verrières.
Julien's conduct since he had been at the seminary had been nothing but
a series of false steps. He began to make bitter fun of himself.
In point of fact the important actions in his life had been cleverly
managed, but he was careless about details, and cleverness in a
seminary consists in attention to details. Consequently, he had already
the reputation among his comrades of being a _strong-minded person._ He
had been betrayed by a number of little actions.
He had been convicted in their eyes of this enormity, _he thought and
judged for himself_ instead of blindly following authority and example.
The abbé Pirard had been no help to him. He had not spoken to him
on a single occasion apart from the confessional, and even there he
listened more than he spoke. Matters would have been very different if
he had chosen the abbé Castanède. The moment that Julien realised his
folly, he ceased to be bored. He wished to know the whole extent of the
evil, and to effect this emerged a little from that haughty obstinate
silence with which he had scrupulously rebuffed his comrades. It was
now that they took their revenge on him. His advances were welcomed by
a contempt verging on derision. He realised that there had not been one
single hour from the time of his entry into the seminary, particularly
during recreation time, which had not resulted in affecting him one
way or another, which had not increased the number of his enemies, or
won for him the goodwill of some seminarist who was either sincerely
virtuous or of a fibre slightly less coarse than that of the others.
The evil to repair was infinite, and the task very difficult.
Henceforth, Julien's attention was always on guard. The problem before
him was to map out a new character for himself.
The moving of his eyes for example, occasioned him a great deal of
trouble. It is with good reason that they are carried lowered in these
places.
"How presumptuous I was at Verrières," said Julien to himself. "I
thought I lived; I was only preparing for life, and here I am at last
in the world such as I shall find it, until my part comes to an end,
surrounded by real enemies. What immense difficulties," he added,
"are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute. It is
enough to put the labours of Hercules into the shade. The Hercules of
modern times is the Pope Sixtus Quintus, who deceived by his modesty
fifteen years on end forty Cardinals who had seen the liveliness and
haughtiness of his whole youth.
"So knowledge is nothing here," he said to himself with disgust.
"Progress in doctrine, in sacred history, etc., only seem to count.
Everything said on those subjects is only intended to entrap fools like
me. Alas my only merit consists in my rapid progress, and in the way in
which I grasp all their nonsense. Do they really value those things at
their true worth? Do they judge them like I do. And I had the stupidity
to be proud of my quickness. The only result of my coming out top has
been to give me inveterate enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than
I do, always throws some blunder in his compositions which gets him put
back to the fiftieth place. If he comes out first, it is only because
he is absent-minded. O how useful would one word, just one word, of M.
Pirard, have been to me."
As soon as Julien was disillusioned, the long exercises in ascetic
piety, such as the attendances in the chapel five times a week, the
intonation of hymns at the chapel of the Sacré Cœur, etc., etc.,
which had previously seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most
interesting opportunities for action. Thanks to a severe introspection,
and above all, by trying not to overdo his methods, Julien did not
attempt at the outset to perform significant actions (that is to say,
actions which are proof of a certain Christian perfection) like those
seminarists who served as a model to the rest.
Seminarists have a special way, even of eating a poached egg, which
betokens progress in the devout life.
The reader who smiles at this will perhaps be good enough to remember
all the mistakes which the abbé Delille made over the eating of an egg
when he was invited to breakfast with a lady of the Court of Louis XVI.
Julien first tried to arrive at the state of _non culpa_, that is
to say the state of the young seminarist whose demeanour and manner
of moving his arms, eyes, etc. while in fact without any trace of
worldliness, do not yet indicate that the person is entirely absorbed
by the conception of the other world, and the idea of the pure