The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
"If we continue to find pleasure in each other's society and if the
marquis's house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my
curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the
living. I owe you that and even more, he added interrupting Julien's
thanks, for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besançon. If
instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you
would have saved me."
The abbé's voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to
feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself
into his friend's arms. He could not help saying to him in the most
manly manner he could assume:
"I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great
misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found
another father in you, monsieur."
"That is good, that is good," said the embarrassed abbé, then suddenly
remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude "you must never
say luck, my child, always say providence."
The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an
immense door. It was the Hôtel de la Mole, and to prevent the passers
by having any doubt on the subject these words could be read in black
marble over the door.
This affectation displeased Julien. "They are so frightened of the
Jacobins. They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head.
Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and they advertise their
house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can
recognise it and loot it." He communicated his thought to the abbé
Pirard.
"Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate. What a dreadful idea you
have got into your head."
"Nothing could be simpler," said Julien.
The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the the
court, struck him with admiration. It was fine sunshine. "What
magnificent architecture," he said to his friend. The hotel in question
was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat
façade built about the time of Voltaire's death. At no other period had
fashion and beauty been so far from one another.
CHAPTER XXXII
ENTRY INTO SOCIETY
Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room
where one appeared alone and without support at the
age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to
intimidate me. The more I wished to please the more
clumsy I became. I evolved the most unfounded ideas
about everything. I would either abandon myself without
any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply
because he had looked at me with a serious air; but
all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of
my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful
day--_Kant_.
Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. "Pull
yourself together," said the abbé Pirard. "You get horrible ideas into
your head, besides you are only a child. What has happened to the
nil mirari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you
established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you. They will
see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under
a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to
make you fall into some gross blunder."
"Let them do their worst," said Julien biting his lip, and he became as
distrustful as ever.
The salons on the first storey which our gentlemen went through before
reaching the marquis' study, would have seemed to you, my reader, as
gloomy as they were magnificent. If they had been given to you just as
they were, you would have refused to live in them. This was the domain
of yawning and melancholy reasoning. They redoubled Julien's rapture.
"How can any one be unhappy?" he thought, "who lives in so splendid an
abode."
Finally our gentlemen arrived at the ugliest rooms in this superb
suite. There was scarcely any light. They found there a little keen
man with a lively eye and a blonde wig. The abbé turned round
to Julien and presented him. It was the marquis. Julien had much
difficulty in recognising him, he found his manner was so polite.
It was no longer the grand seigneur with that haughty manner of the
abbey of Bray-le-Haut. Julien thought that his wig had much too many
hairs. As the result of this opinion he was not at all intimidated.
The descendant of the friend of Henry III. seemed to him at first of
a rather insignificant appearance. He was extremely thin and very
restless, but he soon noticed that the marquis had a politeness which
was even more pleasant to his listener than that of the Bishop of
Besançon himself. The audience only lasted three minutes. As they went
out the abbé said to Julien,
"You looked at the marquis just as you would have looked at a picture.
I am not a great expert in what these people here call politeness. You
will soon know more about it than I do, but really the boldness of your
looks seemed scarcely polite."
They had got back into the fiacre. The driver stopped near the
boulevard; the abbé ushered Julien into a suite of large rooms. Julien
noticed that there was no furniture. He was looking at the magnificent
gilded clock representing a subject which he thought very indecent,
when a very elegant gentleman approached him with a smiling air. Julien
bowed slightly.
The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. Julien shuddered
and leapt back, he reddened with rage. The abbé Pirard, in spite of his
gravity, laughed till the tears came into his eyes. The gentleman was a
tailor.
"I give you your liberty for two days," said the abbé as they went
out. "You cannot be introduced before then to Madame de la Mole. Any
one else would watch over you as if you were a young girl during these
first few moments of your life in this new Babylon. Get ruined at once
if you have got to be ruined, and I will be rid of my own weakness of
being fond of you. The day after to-morrow this tailor will bring you
two suits, you will give the man who tries them on five francs. Apart
from that don't let these Parisians hear the sound of your voice. If
you say a word they will manage somehow to make fun of you. They have a
talent for it. Come and see me the day after to-morrow at noon.... Go
and ruin yourself.... I was forgetting, go and order boots and a hat at
these addresses."
Julien scrutinised the handwriting of the addresses.
"It's the marquis's hand," said the abbé; "he is an energetic man who
foresees everything, and prefers doing to ordering. He is taking you
into his house, so that you may spare him that kind of trouble. Will
you have enough brains to execute efficiently all the instructions
which he will give you with scarcely a word of explanation? The future
will show, look after yourself."
Julien entered the shops indicated by the addresses without saying a
single word. He observed that he was received with respect, and that
the bootmaker as he wrote his name down in the ledger put M. de Sorel.
When he was in the Cemetery of Père La Chaise a very obliging
gentleman, and what is more, one who was Liberal in his views,
suggested that he should show Julien the tomb of Marshal Ney which a
sagacious statecraft had deprived of the honour of an epitaph, but when
he left this Liberal, who with tears in his eyes almost clasped him in
his arms, Julien was without his watch. Enriched by this experience two
days afterwards he presented himself to the abbé Pirard, who looked at
him for a long time.
"Perhaps you are going to become a fop," said the abbé to him severely.
Julien looked like a very young man in full mourning; as a matter of
fact, he looked very well, but the good abbé was too provincial himself
to see that Julien still carried his shoulders in that particular way
which signifies in the provinces both elegance and importance. When the
marquis saw Julien his opinion of his graces differed so radically from
that of the good abbé as he said,
"Would you have any objection to M. le Sorel taking some dancing
lessons?"
The abbé was thunderstruck.
"No," he answered at last. "Julien is not a priest."
The marquis went up the steps of a little secret staircase two at a
time, and installed our hero in a pretty attic which looked out on the
big garden of the hotel. He asked him how many shirts he had got at the
linen drapers.
"Two," answered Julien, intimidated at seeing so great a lord
condescend to such details.
"Very good," replied the marquis quite seriously, and with a certain
curt imperiousness which gave Julien food for thought. "Very good, get
twenty-two more shirts. Here are your first quarter's wages."
As he went down from the attic the marquis called an old man. "Arsène,"
he said to him, "you will serve M. Sorel." A few minutes afterwards
Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library. It was a delicious
moment. To prevent his emotion being discovered he went and hid in
a little dark corner. From there he contemplated with rapture the
brilliant backs of the books. "I shall be able to read all these," he
said to himself. "How can I fail to like it here? M. de Rênal would
have thought himself dishonoured for ever by doing one-hundredth part
of what the Marquis de la Mole has just done for me.
"But let me have a look at the copies I have to make." Having finished
this work Julien ventured to approach the books. He almost went mad
with joy as he opened an edition of Voltaire. He ran and opened the
door of the library to avoid being surprised. He then indulged in the
luxury of opening each of the eighty volumes. They were magnificently
bound and were the masterpiece of the best binder in London. It was
even more than was required to raise Julien's admiration to the maximum.
An hour afterwards the marquis came in and was surprised to notice that
Julien spelt cela with two "ll" cella. "Is all that the abbé told me of
his knowledge simply a fairy tale?" The marquis was greatly discouraged
and gently said to him,
"You are not sure of your spelling?"
"That is true," said Julien without thinking in the least of the
injustice that he was doing to himself. He was overcome by the kindness
of the marquis which recalled to him through sheer force of contrast
the superciliousness of M. de Rênal.
"This trial of the little Franc-comtois abbé is waste of time," thought
the marquis, "but I had such great need of a reliable man."
"You spell cela with one 'l,'" said the marquis to him, "and when you
have finished your copies look the words whose spelling you are not
sure of up in the dictionary."
The marquis sent for him at six o'clock. He looked at Julien's boots
with manifest pain. "I am sorry for a mistake I made. I did not tell
you that you must dress every day at half-past five."
Julien looked at him but did not understand.
"I mean to say put on stockings. Arsène will remind you. To-day I will
make your apologies."
As he finished the sentence M. de la Mole escorted Julien into a salon
resplendent with gilding. On similar occasions M. de Rênal always made
a point of doubling his pace so as to have the privilege of being the
first to pass the threshold. His former employer's petty vanity caused
Julien to tread on the marquis's feet and hurt him a great deal because
of his gout. "So he is clumsy to the bargain," he said to himself. He
presented him to a woman of high stature and of imposing appearance.
It was the marquise. Julien thought that her manner was impertinent,
and that she was a little like Madame de Maugiron, the wife of the
sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Verrières when she was present
at the Saint-Charles dinner. Rendered somewhat nervous by the extreme
magnificence of the salon Julien did not hear what M. de la Mole was