The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
which his wife paid to Julien's prison; for at the end of three days
he sent her his carriage with the express order to return to Verrières
immediately.
This cruel separation had been a bad beginning for Julien's day. He
was informed two or three hours later that a certain intriguing priest
(who had, however, never managed to make any headway among the Jesuits
of Besançon) had, since the morning, established himself in the street
outside the prison gates. It was raining a great deal, and the man out
there was pretending to play the martyr. Julien was in a weak mood, and
this piece of stupidity annoyed him deeply.
In the morning, he had already refused this priest's visit, but the man
had taken it into his head to confess Julien, and to win a name for
himself among the young women of Besançon by all the confidences which
he would pretend to have received from him.
He declared in a loud voice that he would pass the day and the night by
the prison gates. "God has sent me to touch the heart of this apostate
..." and the lower classes, who are always curious to see a scene,
began to make a crowd.
"Yes, my brothers," he said to them, "I will pass the day here and the
night, as well as all the days and all the nights which will follow.
The Holy Ghost has spoken to me. I am commissioned from above; I am the
man who must save the soul of young Sorel. Do you join in my prayers,
etc."
Julien had a horror of scandal, and of anything which could attract
attention to him. He thought of seizing the opportunity of escaping
from the world incognito; but he had some hope of seeing madame de
Rênal again, and he was desperately in love.
The prison gates were situated in one of the most populous streets. His
soul was tortured by the idea of this filthy priest attracting a crowd
and creating a scandal--"and doubtless he is repeating my name at every
single minute!" This moment was more painful than death.
He called the turnkey who was devoted to him, and sent sent him two or
three times at intervals of one hour to see if the priest was still by
the prison gates.
"Monsieur," said the turnkey to him on each occasion, "he is on both
his knees in the mud; he is praying at the top of his voice, and saying
litanies for your soul.
"The impudent fellow," thought Julien. At this moment he actually heard
a dull buzz. It was the responses of the people to the litanies. His
patience was strained to the utmost when he saw the turnkey himself
move his lips while he repeated the Latin words.
"They are beginning to say," added the turnkey, "that you must have a
very hardened heart to refuse the help of this holy man."
"Oh my country, how barbarous you still are!" exclaimed Julien, beside
himself with anger. And he continued his train of thought aloud,
without giving a thought to the turn-key's presence.
"The man wants an article in the paper about him, and that's a way in
which he will certainly get it.
"Oh you cursed provincials! At Paris I should not be subjected to all
these annoyances. There they are more skilled in their charlatanism.
"Show in the holy priest," he said at last to the turnkey, and great
streams of sweat flowed down his forehead. The turnkey made the sign of
the cross and went out rejoicing.
The holy priest turned out to be very ugly, he was even dirtier than he
was ugly. The cold rain intensified the obscurity and dampness of the
cell. The priest wanted to embrace Julien, and began to wax pathetic as
he spoke to him. The basest hypocrisy was only too palpable; Julien had
never been so angry in his whole life.
A quarter of an hour after the priest had come in Julien felt an
absolute coward. Death appeared horrible to him for the first time. He
began to think about the state of decomposition which his body would be
in two days after the execution, etc., etc.
He was on the point of betraying himself by some sign of weakness or
throwing himself on the priest and strangling him with his chain, when
it occurred to him to beg the holy man to go and say a good forty franc
mass for him on that very day.
It was twelve o'clock, so the priest took himself off.
CHAPTER LXXIV
As soon as he had gone out Julien wept desperately and for a long time.
He gradually admitted to himself that if madame de Rênal had been at
Besançon he would have confessed his weakness to her. The moment when
he was regretting the absence of this beloved woman he heard Mathilde's
step.
"The worst evil of being in prison," he thought "is one's inability to
close one's door." All Mathilde said only irritated him.
She told him that M. de Valenod had had his nomination to the
prefectship in his pocket on the day of his trial, and had consequently
dared to defy M. de Frilair and give himself the pleasure of condemning
him to death.
"Why did your friend take it into his head," M. de Frilair just said
to me, "to awaken and attack the petty vanity of that bourgeois
aristocracy. Why talk about caste? He pointed out to them what they
ought to do in their own political interest; the fools had not been
giving it a thought and were quite ready to weep. That caste interest
intervened and blinded their eyes to the horror of condemning a man to
death. One must admit that M. Sorel is very inexperienced. If we do not
succeed in saving him by a petition for a reprieve, his death will be a
kind of suicide."
Mathilde was careful not to tell Julien a matter concerning which she
had now no longer any doubts; it was that the abbé de Frilair seeing
that Julien was ruined, had thought that it would further his ambitious
projects to try and become his successor.
"Go and listen to a mass for me," he said to Mathilde, almost beside
himself with vexation and impotent rage, and leave me a moment in
peace. Mathilde who was already very jealous of madame de Rênal's
visits and who had just learned of her departure realised the cause of
Julien's bad temper and burst into tears.
Her grief was real; Julien saw this and was only the more irritated. He
had a crying need of solitude, and how was he to get it?
Eventually Mathilde, after having tried to melt him by every possible
argument, left him alone. But almost at the same moment, Fouqué
presented himself.
"I need to be alone," he said, to this faithful friend, and as he saw
him hesitate: "I am composing a memorial for my petition for pardon ...
one thing more ... do me a favour, and never speak to me about death.
If I have need of any especial services on that day, let me be the
first to speak to you about it."
When Julien had eventually procured solitude, he found himself more
prostrate and more cowardly than he had been before. The little force
which this enfeebled soul still possessed had all been spent in
concealing his condition from mademoiselle de la Mole.
Towards the evening he found consolation in this idea.
"If at the very moment this morning, when death seemed so ugly to
me, I had been given notice of my execution, the public eye would
have acted as a spur to glory, my demeanour would perhaps have had a
certain stiffness about it, like a nervous fop entering a salon. A few
penetrating people, if there are any amongst these provincial might
have managed to divine my weakness.... But no one would have seen it."
And he felt relieved of part of his unhappiness. "I am a coward at this
very moment," he sang to himself, "but no one will know it."
An even more unpleasant episode awaited him on the following day. His
father had been announcing that he would come and see him for some time
past: the old white-haired carpenter appeared in Julien's cell before
he woke up.
Julien felt weak, he was anticipating the most unpleasant reproaches.
His painful emotion was intensified by the fact that on this particular
morning he felt a keen remorse for not loving his father.
"Chance placed us next to each other in the world," he said to himself,
while the turnkey was putting the cell a little in order, "and we have
practically done each other all the harm we possibly could. He has come
to administer the final blow at the moment of my death."
As soon as they were without witnesses, the old man commenced his stern
reproaches.
Julien could not restrain his tears. "What an unworthy weakness," he
said to himself querulously. "He will go about everywhere exaggerating
my lack of courage: what a triumph for the Valenod, and for all the
fatuous hypocrites who rule in Verrières! They are very great in
France, they combine all the social advantages. But hitherto, I could
at any rate say to myself, it is true they are in receipt of money, and
that all the honours lavished on them, but I have a noble heart.
"But here is a witness whom everyone will believe, and who will testify
to the whole of Verrières that I shewed weakness when confronted with
death, and who will exaggerate it into the bargain! I shall be taken
for a coward in an ordeal which comes home to all!"
Julien was nearly desperate. He did not know how to get rid of his
father. He felt it absolutely beyond his strength to invent a ruse
capable of deceiving so shrewd an old man.
His mind rapidly reviewed all the alternatives. "I have saved some
money," he suddenly exclaimed.
This inspiration produced a change in the expression of the old man and
in Julien's own condition.
"How ought I to dispose of it?" continued Julien more quietly. The
result had freed him from any feeling of inferiority.
The old carpenter was burning not to let the money slip by him, but
it seemed that Julien wanted to leave part of it to his brothers. He
talked at length and with animation. Julien felt cynical.
"Well, the Lord has given me a message with regard to my will. I will
give a thousand francs to each of my brothers and the rest to you."
"Very good," said the old man. "The rest is due to me: but since God
has been gracious enough to touch your heart, your debts ought to be
paid if you wish to die like a good Christian. There are, moreover, the
expenses of your board and your education, which I advanced to you,
but which you are not thinking of."
"Such is paternal love," repeated Julien to himself, dejectedly, when
he was at last alone. Soon the gaoler appeared.
"Monsieur, I always bring my visitors a good bottle of champagne after
near relations have come to see them. It is a little dear, six francs a
bottle, but it rejoices the heart."
"Bring three glasses," said Julien to him, with a childish eagerness,
"and bring in two of the prisoners whom I have heard walking about
in the corridor." The gaoler brought two men into him who had once
been condemned to the gallows, and had now been convicted of the same
offence again, and were preparing to return to penal servitude. They
were very cheerful scoundrels, and really very remarkable by reason of
their subtlety, their courage, and their coolness.
"If you give me twenty francs," said one of them to Julien, "I will
tell you the story of my life in detail. It's rich."
"But you will lie," said Julien.
"Not me," he answered, "my friend there, who is jealous of my twenty
francs will give me away if I say anything untrue."
His history was atrocious. It was evidence of a courageous heart which
had only one passion--that of money.
After their departure Julien was no longer the same man. All his anger
with himself had disappeared. The awful grief which had been poisoned
and rendered more acute by the weakness of which he had been a victim
since madame de Rênal's departure had turned to melancholy.
"If I had been less taken in by appearances," he said to himself, "I
would have had a better chance of seeing that the Paris salons are full
of honest men like my father, or clever scoundrels like those felons.