The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
The master of the house was an enormous man whose name was not
pronounced. Julien thought he had the appearance and eloquence of a
man who ruminated. At a sign from the marquis, Julien had remained at
the lower end of the table. In order to keep himself in countenance,
he began to cut quills. He counted out of the corner of his eye seven
visitors, but Julien could only see their backs. Two seemed to him
to be speaking to M. de la Mole on a footing of equality, the others
seemed more or less respectful.
A new person entered without being announced. "This is strange,"
thought Julien. "People are not announced in this salon. Is this
precaution taken in my honour?" Everybody got up to welcome the new
arrival. He wore the same extremely distinguished decoration as three
of the other persons who were in the salon. They talked fairly low. In
endeavouring to form an opinion of the new comer, Julien was reduced to
seeing what he could learn from his features and his appearance. He was
short and thick-set. He had a high colour and a brilliant eye and an
expression that looked like a malignant boar, and nothing else.
Julien's attention was partly distracted by the almost immediate
arrival of a very different kind of person. It was a tall very thin
man who wore three or four waistcoats. His eye was caressing, his
demeanour polite.
"He looks exactly like the old bishop of Besançon," thought Julien.
This man evidently belonged to the church, was apparently not more than
fifty to fifty-five years of age, and no one could have looked more
paternal than he did.
The young bishop of Agde appeared. He looked very astonished when,
in making a scrutiny of those present, his gaze fell upon Julien. He
had not spoken to him since the ceremony of Bray-le-Haut. His look of
surprise embarrassed and irritated Julien. "What!" he said to himself,
"will knowing a man always turn out unfortunate for me? I don't feel
the least bit intimidated by all those great lords whom I have never
seen, but the look of that young bishop freezes me. I must admit that I
am a very strange and very unhappy person."
An extremely swarthy little man entered noisily soon afterwards and
started talking as soon as he reached the door. He had a yellow
complexion and looked a little mad. As soon as this ruthless talker
arrived, the others formed themselves into knots with the apparent
object of avoiding the bother of listening to him.
As they went away from the mantelpiece they came near the lower end
of the table where Julien was placed. His countenance became more and
more embarrassed, for whatever efforts he made, he could not avoid
hearing, and in spite of all his lack of experience he appreciated
all the moment of the things which they were discussing with such
complete frankness, and the importance which the high personages whom
he apparently had under his observation must attach to their being kept
secret.
Julien had already cut twenty quills as slowly as possible; this
distraction would shortly be no longer available. He looked in vain at
M. de la Mole's eyes for an order; the marquis had forgotten him.
"What I am doing is ridiculous," he said to himself as he cut his
quills, "but persons with so mediocre an appearance and who are
handling such great interests either for themselves or for others must
be extremely liable to take offence. My unfortunate look has a certain
questioning and scarcely respectful expression, which will doubtless
irritate them. But if I palpably lower my eyes I shall look as if I
were picking up every word they said."
His embarrassment was extreme, he was listening to strange things.
CHAPTER LII
THE DISCUSSION
The republic:--For one man to day who will sacrifice
everything for the public welfare, there are thousands
and millions who think of nothing except their
enjoyments and their vanity. One is requested in Paris
by reason of the qualities not of one's self but of
one's carriage.
--NAPOLEON, Memorial.
The footman rushed in saying "Monsieur the duke de ----"
"Hold your tongue, you are just a fool," said the duke as he entered.
He spoke these words so well, and with so much majesty, that Julien
could not help thinking this great person's accomplishments were
limited to the science of snubbing a lackey. Julien raised his
eyes and immediately lowered them. He had so fully appreciated the
significance of the new arrival that he feared that his look might be
an indiscretion.
The duke was a man of fifty dressed like a dandy and with a jerky
walk. He had a narrow head with a large nose and a face that jutted
forward; it would have been difficult to have looked at the same time
more insignificant. His arrival was the signal for the opening of the
meeting.
Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical observations by
de la Mole's voice. "I present to you M. the abbé Sorel," said the
Marquis. "He is gifted with an astonishing memory; it is scarcely an
hour ago since I spoke to him of the mission by which he might be
honoured, and he has learned the first page of the _Quotidienne_ by
heart in order to give proof of his memory."
"Ah! foreign news of that poor N--" said the master of the house. He
took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered
humorous by its own self-importance. "Speak, monsieur," he said to him.
The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited
so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines, "That is
enough." The little man who looked like a boar sat down. He was the
president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien
a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him. Julien established
himself at it with writing materials. He counted twelve persons seated
round the green table cloth.
"M. Sorel," said the Duke, "retire into next room, you will be called."
The master of the house began to look very anxious. "The shutters
are not shut," he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper. "It is no
good looking out of the window," he stupidly cried to Julien--"so
here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy," thought the latter.
"Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Grève.
Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis,
and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the
sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him."
While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded
the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory
for ever. He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard
the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken
a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way. Julien was left to
his own reflections for a long time. He was in a salon upholstered in
red velvet with large pieces of gold lace. A large ivory crucifix was
on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M.
de Maistre's book _The Pope_ was on the mantelpiece. Julien opened it
so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. From time to time they talked
loudly in the next room. At last the door was opened and he was called
in.
"Remember, gentlemen," the president was saying "that from this moment
we are talking in the presence of the duke of ----. This gentleman,"
he said, pointing to Julien, "is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred
cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily
our very slightest words."
"It is your turn to speak, Monsieur," he said pointing to the paternal
looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it
would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the
waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.
(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of
dots. "That," said his publisher, "would be clumsy and in the case of
so light a work clumsiness is death."
"Politics," replies the author, "is a stone tied round the neck of
literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the
midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a
concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not
harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give
mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half,
who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the
morning paper in its own drastic manner."
"If your characters don't talk politics," replied the publisher, "they
cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as
you claim?")
Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted
extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of
suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed
either offensive or intolerable (see the _Gazette des Tribunaux_).
The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps
a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with
a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an
unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first
before the duke ("but what duke is it?" thought Julien to himself) with
the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling
the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into
the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials
are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went
so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of
morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,
"Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal
Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution.
If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with
some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing
with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to
oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions there is nothing
decisive except personal methods."
"Ah! praising assassination again!" said the master of the house
anxiously.
"Spare us your sentimental sermons," cried the president angrily. His
boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. "Go on," he said to the
man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president
became purple.
"Noble England," replied the advocate-general, "is crushed to-day:
for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay
the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the
Jacobins. She has no more Pitt."
"She has the Duke of Wellington," said a military personage looking
very important.
"Please, gentlemen, silence," exclaimed the president. "If we are still
going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in."
"We know that monsieur has many ideas," said the duke irritably,
looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien
saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive
allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside
himself with rage.
"There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen," went on the speaker with all
the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his
listeners to reason. "If there were a new Pitt in England, you would
not dupe a nation twice over by the same means."
"That's why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward
impossible in France," exclaimed the military interrupter.
On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get
angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would