The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
nothingness of this one.
Julien incessantly found such phrases as these charcoaled on the walls
of the corridors. "What are sixty years of ordeals balanced against
an eternity of delights or any eternity of boiling oil in hell?" He
despised them no longer. He realised that it was necessary to have them
incessantly before his eyes. "What am I going to do all my life," he
said to himself. "I shall sell to the faithful a place in heaven. How
am I going to make that place visible to their eyes? By the difference
between my appearance and that of a layman."
After several months of absolutely unremitting application, Julien
still had the appearance of thinking. The way in which he would move
his eyes and hold his mouth did not betoken that implicit faith which
is ready to believe everything and undergo everything, even at the cost
of martyrdom. Julien saw with anger that he was surpassed in this by
the coarsest peasants. There was good reason for their not appearing
full of thought.
What pains did he not take to acquire that facial expression of blindly
fervent faith which is found so frequently in the Italian convents,
and of which Le Guerchin has left such perfect models in his Church
pictures for the benefit of us laymen.
On feast-days, the seminarists were regaled with sausages and cabbage.
Julien's table neighbours observed that he did not appreciate this
happiness. That was looked upon as one of his paramount crimes.
His comrades saw in this a most odious trait, and the most foolish
hypocrisy. Nothing made him more enemies.
"Look at this bourgeois, look at this stuck-up person," they would
say, "who pretends to despise the best rations there are, sausages and
cabbage, shame on the villain! The haughty wretch, he is damned for
ever."
"Alas, these young peasants, who are my comrades, find their ignorance
an immense advantage," Julien would exclaim in his moments of
discouragement. "The professor has not got to deliver them on their
arrival at the seminary from that awful number of worldly ideas which I
brought into it, and which they read on my face whatever I do."
Julien watched with an attention bordering on envy the coarsest of the
little peasants who arrived at the seminary. From the moment when they
were made to doff their shabby jackets to don the black robe, their
education consisted of an immense and limitless respect for _hard
liquid cash_ as they say in Franche-Comté.
That is the consecrated and heroic way of expressing the sublime idea
of current money.
These seminarists, like the heroes in Voltaire's novels, found their
happiness in dining well. Julien discovered in nearly all of them
an innate respect for the man who wears a suit of good cloth. This
sentiment appreciates the distributive justice, which is given us at
our courts, at its value or even above its true value. "What can one
gain," they would often repeat among themselves, "by having a law suit
with 'a big man?'"
That is the expression current in the valleys of the Jura to express
a rich man. One can judge of their respect for the richest entity
of all--the government. Failure to smile deferentially at the mere
name of M. the Prefect is regarded as an imprudence in the eyes of
the Franche-Comté peasant, and imprudence in poor people is quickly
punished by lack of bread.
After having been almost suffocated at first by his feeling of
contempt, Julien eventually experienced a feeling of pity; it often
happened that the fathers of most of his comrades would enter their
hovel in winter evenings and fail to find there either bread, chestnuts
or potatoes.
"What is there astonishing then?" Julien would say to himself, "if in
their eyes the happy man is in the first place the one who has just had
a good dinner, and in the second place the one who possesses a good
suit? My comrades have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see
in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of the happiness of
dining well and having a warm suit."
Julien happened to hear a young imaginative seminarist say to his
companion.
"Why shouldn't I become Pope like Sixtus Quintus who kept pigs?"
"They only make Italians Popes," answered his friend. "But they will
certainly draw lots amongst us for the great vicarships, canonries and
perhaps bishoprics. M. P---- Bishop of Châlons, is the son of a cooper.
That's what my father is."
One day, in the middle of a theology lesson, the Abbé Pirard summoned
Julien to him. The young fellow was delighted to leave the dark, moral
atmosphere in which he had been plunged. Julien received from the
director the same welcome which had frightened him so much on the first
day of his entry.
"Explain to me what is written on this playing card?" he said, looking
at him in a way calculated to make him sink into the earth.
Julien read:
"Amanda Binet of the Giraffe Café before eight o'clock. Say you're from
Genlis, and my mother's cousin."
Julien realised the immense danger. The spies of the abbé Castanède had
stolen the address.
"I was trembling with fear the day I came here," he answered, looking
at the abbé Pirard's forehead, for he could not endure that terrible
gaze. "M. Chélan told me that this is a place of informers and
mischief-makers of all kinds, and that spying and tale-bearing by one
comrade on another was encouraged by the authorities. Heaven wishes it
to be so, so as to show life such as it is to the young priests, and
fill them with disgust for the world and all its pomps."
"And it's to me that you make these fine speeches," said the abbé
Pirard furiously. "You young villain."
"My brothers used to beat me at Verrières," answered Julien coldly,
"When they had occasion to be jealous of me."
"Indeed, indeed," exclaimed M. Pirard, almost beside himself.
Julien went on with his story without being in the least intimidated:--
"The day of my arrival at Besançon I was hungry, and I entered a
café. My spirit was full of revulsion for so profane a place, but I
thought that my breakfast would cost me less than at an inn. A lady,
who seemed to be the mistress of the establishment, took pity on my
inexperience. 'Besançon is full of bad characters,' she said to me. 'I
fear something will happen to you, sir. If some mishap should occur to
you, have recourse to me and send to my house before eight o'clock. If
the porters of the seminary refuse to execute your errand, say you are
my cousin and a native of Genlis.'"
"I will have all this chatter verified," exclaimed the abbé Pirard,
unable to stand still, and walking about the room.
"Back to the cell."
The abbé followed Julien and locked him in. The latter immediately
began to examine his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal cards had
been so carefully hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but several
things had been disarranged. Nevertheless, he had never been without
the key. What luck that, during the whole time of my blindness, said
Julien to himself, I never availed myself of the permission to go out
that Monsieur Castanède would offer me so frequently, with a kindness
which I now understand. Perhaps I should have had the weakness to have
changed my clothes and gone to see the fair Amanda, and then I should
have been ruined. When they gave up hope of exploiting that piece of
information for the accomplishment of his ruin, they had used it to
inform against him. Two hours afterwards the director summoned him.
"You did not lie," he said to him, with a less severe look, "but
keeping an address like that is an indiscretion of a gravity which you
are unable to realise. Unhappy child! It may perhaps do you harm in ten
years' time."
CHAPTER XXVII
FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE
The present time, Great God! is the ark of the Lord;
cursed be he who touches it.--_Diderot_.
The reader will kindly excuse us if we give very few clear and definite
facts concerning this period of Julien's life. It is not that we
lack facts; quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw in
the seminary is too black for the medium colour which the author
has endeavoured to preserve throughout these pages. Those of our
contemporaries who have suffered from certain things cannot remember
them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that
of reading a tale.
Julien achieved scant success in his essays at hypocritical gestures.
He experienced moments of disgust, and even of complete discouragement.
He was not a success, even in a a vile career. The slightest help
from outside would have sufficed to have given him heart again, for
the difficulty to overcome was not very great, but he was alone, like
a derelict ship in the middle of the ocean. "And when I do succeed,"
he would say to himself, "think of having to pass a whole lifetime in
such awful company, gluttons who have no thought but for the large
omelette which they will guzzle at dinner-time, or persons like the
abbé Castanède, who finds no crime too black! They will attain power,
but, great heavens! at what cost.
"The will of man is powerful, I read it everywhere, but is it enough to
overcome so great a disgust? The task of all the great men was easy by
comparison. However terrible was the danger, they found it fine, and
who can realise, except myself, the ugliness of my surroundings?"
This moment was the most trying in his whole life. It would have been
so easy for him to have enlisted in one of the fine regiments at the
garrison of Besançon. He could have become a Latin master. He needed so
little for his subsistence, but in that case no more career, no more
future for his imagination. It was equivalent to death. Here is one of
his sad days in detail:
"I have so often presumed to congratulate myself on being different
from the other young peasants! Well, I have lived enough to realise
that _difference engenders hate_," he said to himself one morning.
This great truth had just been borne in upon him by one of his most
irritating failures. He had been working for eight days at teaching a
pupil who lived in an odour of sanctity. He used to go out with him
into the courtyard and listen submissively to pieces of fatuity enough
to send one to sleep standing. Suddenly the weather turned stormy. The
thunder growled, and the holy pupil exclaimed as he roughly pushed him
away.
"Listen! Everyone for himself in this world. I don't want to be burned
by the thunder. God may strike you with lightning like a blasphemer,
like a Voltaire."
"I deserve to be drowned if I go to sleep during the storm," exclaimed
Julien, with his teeth clenched with rage, and with his eyes opened
towards the sky now furrowed by the lightning. "Let us try the conquest
of some other rogue."
The bell rang for the abbé Castanède's course of sacred history. That
day the abbé Castanède was teaching those young peasants already
so frightened by their father's hardships and poverty, that the
Government, that entity so terrible in their eyes, possessed no real
and legitimate power except by virtue of the delegation of God's vicar
on earth.
"Render yourselves worthy, by the holiness of your life and by your
obedience, of the benevolence of the Pope. Be _like a stick in his
hands_," he added, "and you will obtain a superb position, where you
will be far from all control, and enjoy the King's commands, a position
from which you cannot be removed, and where one-third of the salary
is paid by the Government, while the faithful who are moulded by your
preaching pay the other two-thirds."
Castanède stopped in the courtyard after he left the lesson-room. "It
is particularly appropriate to say of a curé," he said to the pupils
who formed a ring round him, "that the place is worth as much as the
man is worth. I myself have known parishes in the mountains where the