The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
great need of the chills of age. This young man must have managed to
appreciate the difference; he writes well, but I fear very much that
this request of his in his letter for me to enlighten him with my
advice, is really nothing less than an, as yet, unconscious sentiment.
"Nevertheless how many conversions have begun like that! What makes me
consider this a good omen is the difference between his style and that
of the young people whose letters I have had an opportunity of seeing.
One cannot avoid recognising unction, profound seriousness, and much
conviction in the prose of this young acolyte; he has no doubt the
sweet virtue of a Massillon."
CHAPTER LVII
THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH
Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a côterie.
_Télémaque_.
The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of
Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her
disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not
struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly
limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify
it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When
he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture
and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce
harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
"I have a hard task before me today," he said to himself as he came in
with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us
hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."
It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished
up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.
"It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official
documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made
me copy out at London."
It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which
he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos.
He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of
the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant
everything and nothing. "It's the Æolian harp of style," thought
Julien. "The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty
thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable
fear of ridicule."
The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen
days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary
on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it
the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope
of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, going in the evening
to the opera on those evenings when madame de Fervaques did not come
to the Hôtel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien's
life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the
marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde's eyes underneath
a feather of the maréchale's hat, and he would wax eloquent. His
picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was
both more striking and more elegant.
He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde's eyes, but
he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. "The falser my
speeches are the more I ought to please," thought Julien, and he then
had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own
character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the
eyes of the maréchale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational
ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand
eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes
of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.
Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were
passed in inaction.
"But," he said to himself one evening, "here I am copying out the
fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have
been duly delivered to the maréchale's porter. I shall have the honour
of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me
as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my
constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that
Russian friend of Korasoff's who was in love with the pretty Quakeress
of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more
overwhelming."
Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the
manœuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack
executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl.
The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness
for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived
a life of inordinate boredom, had to be induced to contract the habit
of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid than her
everyday life.
One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms
of madame la Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which
would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an
invitation to dinner.
He rushed to prince Korasoffs instructions. Unfortunately the young
Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just
when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able
to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the
maréchale's dinner.
The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de
Diane in the Tuileries with panelled oil-paintings.
There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that
the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in
decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. "What a moral
century!" he thought.
He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present
at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of
---- the maréchale's uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical
patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. "What
immense progress I have made," said Julien to himself with a melancholy
smile, "and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the
famous bishop of ----."
The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.
"It's like the small talk in a bad book," thought Julien. "All the
greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening
for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater--the speaker's
bombast, or his abominable ignorance?"
The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named
Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be
professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of
the Hôtel de la Mole with his base calumnies.
It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though,
madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an
indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau's
sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien's success; "but
since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the
same time any more than a fool," said the future professor to himself,
"if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime maréchale, she will obtain
some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of
him in the Hôtel de la Mole."
M. the abbé Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his
success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy
between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous maréchale
which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.
CHAPTER LVIII
MANON LESCAUT
Accordingly once he was thoroughly convinced of the
asinine stupidity of the prior, he would usually succeed
well enough by calling white black, and black white.
_Lichtenberg_.
The Russian instructions peremptorily forbade the writer from ever
contradicting in conversation the recipient of the letters. No pretext
could excuse any deviation from the rôle of that most ecstatic
admiration. The letters were always based on that hypothesis.
One evening at the opera, when in madame de Fervaques' box, Julien
spoke of the ballet of _Manon Lescaut_ in the most enthusiastic terms.
His only reason for talking in that strain was the fact that he thought
it insignificant.
The maréchale said that the ballet was very inferior to the abbé
Prévost's novel.
"The idea," thought Julien, both surprised and amused, "of so highly
virtuous a person praising a novel! Madame de Fervaques used to profess
two or three times a week the most absolute contempt for those writers,
who, by means of their insipid works, try to corrupt a youth which is,
alas! only too inclined to the errors of the senses."
"_Manon Lescaut_" continued the maréchale, "is said to be one of the
best of this immoral and dangerous type of book. The weaknesses and the
deserved anguish of a criminal heart are, they say, portrayed with a
truth which is not lacking in depth; a fact which does not prevent your
Bonaparte from stating at St. Helena that it is simply a novel written
for lackeys."
The word Bonaparte restored to Julien all the activity of his mind.
"They have tried to ruin me with the maréchale; they have told her of
my enthusiasm for Napoleon. This fact has sufficiently piqued her to
make her yield to the temptation to make me feel it." This discovery
amused him all the evening, and rendered him amusing. As he took leave
of the maréchale in the vestibule of the opera, she said to him,
"Remember, monsieur, one must not like Bonaparte if you like me; at
the best he can only be accepted as a necessity imposed by Providence.
Besides, the man did not have a sufficiently supple soul to appreciate
masterpieces of art."
"When you like me," Julien kept on repeating to himself, "that means
nothing or means everything. Here we have mysteries of language which
are beyond us poor provincials." And he thought a great deal about
madame de Rênal, as he copied out an immense letter destined for the
maréchale.
"How is it," she said to him the following day, with an assumed
indifference which he thought was clumsily assumed, "that you talk to
me about London and Richmond in a letter which you wrote last night, I
think, when you came back from the opera?"
Julien was very embarrassed. He had copied line by line without
thinking about what he was writing, and had apparently forgotten to
substitute Paris and Saint Cloud for the words London and Richmond
which occurred in the original. He commenced two or three sentences,
but found it impossible to finish them. He felt on the point of
succumbing to a fit of idiotic laughter. Finally by picking his words
he succeeded in formulating this inspiration: "Exalted as I was by the
discussion of the most sublime and greatest interests of the human
soul, my own soul may have been somewhat absent in my letter to you."
"I am making an impression," he said to himself, "so I can spare myself
the boredom of the rest of the evening." He left the Hôtel de Fervaques
at a run. In the evening he had another look at the original of the
letter which he had copied out on the previous night, and soon came to
the fatal place where the young Russian made mention of London and of
Richmond. Julien was very astonished to find this letter almost tender.
It had been the contrast between the apparent lightness of his
conversation, and the sublime and almost apocalyptic profundity of
his letters which had marked him out for favour. The maréchale was
particularly pleased by the longness of the sentences; this was very