The Red and the Black (20 page)

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 lawsuit 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 Chlons, 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.”

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 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 surplice fees were worth more than that of many town livings. There was quite as much money, without counting the fat capons, the eggs, fresh butter, and a thousand and one pleasant details, and there the curé is indisputably the first man. There is not a good meal to which he is not invited, fêted, etc.”

Castanède had scarcely gone back to his room before the pupils split up into knots. Julien did not form part of any of them; he was left out like a black sheep. He saw in every knot a pupil tossing a coin in the air, and if he managed to guess right in this game of heads or tails, his comrades would decide that he would soon have one of those fat livings.

Anecdotes ensued. A certain young priest, who had scarcely been ordained a year, had given a tame rabbit to the maidservant of an old curé, and had succeeded in being asked to be his curate. In a few months afterwards, for the curé had quickly died, he had replaced him in that excellent living. Another had succeeded in getting himself designated as a successor to a very rich town living, by being present at all the meals of an old, paralytic curé, and by dexterously carving his poultry. The seminarists, like all young people, exaggerated the effect of those little devices, which have an element of originality, and which strike the imagination.

“I must take part in these conversations,” said Julien to himself. When they did not talk about sausages and good livings, the conversation ran on the worldly aspect of ecclesiastical doctrine, on the differences of bishops and prefects, of mayors and curés. Julien caught sight of the conception of a second god, but of a god who was much more formidable and much more powerful than the other one. That second god was the Pope. They said among themselves, in a low voice, however, and when they were quite sure that they would not be heard by Pirard, that the reason for the Pope not taking the trouble of nominating all the prefects and mayors of France, was that he had entrusted that duty to the King of France by entitling him a senior son of the Church.

It was about this time that Julien thought he could exploit, for the benefit of his own reputation, his knowledge of De Maistre's book on the Pope. In point of fact, he did astonish his comrades, but it was only another misfortune. He displeased them by expounding their own opinions better than they could themselves. Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.

Julien's command of language added consequently a new crime to his score. By dint of thinking about him, his colleagues succeeded in expressing the horror with which he would inspire them by a single expression; they nicknamed him Martin Luther, “particularly,” they said, “because of that infernal logic which makes him so proud.”

Several young seminarists had a fresher complexion than Julien, and could pass as better-looking, but he had white hands, and was unable to conceal certain refined habits of personal cleanliness. This advantage proved a disadvantage in the gloomy house in which chance had cast him. The dirty peasants among whom he lived asserted that he had very abandoned morals. We fear that we may weary our reader by a narration of the thousand and one misfortunes of our hero. The most vigorous of his comrades, for example, wanted to start the custom of beating him. He was obliged to arm himself with an iron compass, and to indicate, though by signs, that he would make use of it. Signs cannot figure in a spy's report to such good advantage as words.