The same evening he had six pounds of candles which had been saved, he said, by Julien's carefulness, and by the promptness with which he had extinguished them, carried to the seminary chapel. Nothing could have been nearer the truth. The poor boy was extinguished himself. He had not had a single thought after meeting Madame de Rênal.
He knew his age, he knew his department, and he is rich.
The Forerunner
Julien had not emerged from the deep reverie in which the episode in the cathedral had plunged him, when the severe Abbé Pirard summoned him.
“M. the Abbé Chas-Bernard has just written in your favour. I am on the whole sufficiently satisfied with your conduct. You are extremely imprudent and irresponsible without outward sign of it. However, up to the present, you have proved yourself possessed of a good and even generous heart. Your intellect is superior. Taking it all round, I see in you a spark which one must not neglect.
“I am on the point of leaving this house after fifteen years of work. My crime is that I have left the seminarists to their free will, and that I have neither protected nor served that secret society of which you spoke to me at the Confessional. I wish to do something for you before I leave. I would have done so two months earlier, for you deserve it, had it not been for the information laid against you as the result of the finding in your trunk of Amanda Binet's address. I will make you New and Old Testament tutor.” Julien was transported with gratitude and evolved the idea of throwing himself on his knees and thanking God. He yielded to a truer impulse, and approaching the Abbé Pirard, took his hand and pressed it to his lips.
“What is the meaning of this?” exclaimed the director angrily, but Julien's eyes said even more than his act.
The Abbé Pirard looked at him in astonishment, after the manner of a man who has long lost the habit of encountering refined emotions. The attention deceived the director. His voice altered.
“Well yes, my child, I am attached to you. Heaven knows that I have been so in spite of myself. I ought to show neither hate nor love to anyone. I see in you something which offends the vulgar. Jealousy and calumny will pursue you in whatever place Providence may place you. Your comrades will never behold you without hate, and if they pretend to like you, it will only be to betray you with greater certainty. For this there is only one remedy. Seek help only from God, who, to punish you for your presumption, has cursed you with the inevitable hatred of your comrades. Let your conduct be pure. That is the only resource which I can see for you. If you love truth with an irresistible embrace, your enemies will sooner or later be confounded.”
It had been so long since Julien had heard a friendly voice that he must be forgiven a weakness. He burst out into tears.
The Abbé Pirard held out his arms to him. This moment was very sweet to both of them. Julien was mad with joy. This promotion was the first which he had obtained. The advantages were immense. To realise them one must have been condemned to pass months on end without an instant's solitude, and in immediate contact with comrades who were at the best importunate, and for the most part insupportable. Their cries alone would have sufficed to disorganise a delicate constitution. The noise and joy of these peasants, well-fed and well-clothed as they were, could only find a vent for itself, or believe in its own completeness when they were shouting with all the strength of their lungs.
Now Julien dined alone, or nearly an hour later than the other seminarists. He had a key of the garden and could walk in it when no one else was there.
Julien was astonished to perceive that he was now hated less. He, on the contrary, had been expecting that their hate would become twice as intense. That secret desire of his that he should not be spoken to, which had been only too manifest before, and had earned him so many enemies, was no longer looked upon as a sign of ridiculous haughtiness. It became, in the eyes of the coarse beings who surrounded him, a just appreciation of his own dignity. The hatred of him sensibly diminished, above all among the youngest of his comrades, who were now his pupils, and whom he treated with much politeness. Gradually he obtained his own following. It became looked upon as bad form to call him Martin Luther.
But what is the good of enumerating his friends and his enemies? The whole business is squalid, and all the more squalid in proportion to the truth of the picture. And yet the clergy supply the only teachers of morals which the people have. What would happen to the people without them? Will the paper ever replace the curé?
Since Julien's new dignity, the director of the seminary made a point of never speaking to him without witnesses. These tactics were prudent, both for the master and for the pupil, but above all it was meant for a test. The invariable principle of that severe Jansenist Pirard was thisâ“if a man has merit in your eyes, put obstacles in the way of all he desires, and of everything which he undertakes. If the merit is real, he will manage to overthrow or get round those obstacles.”
It was the hunting season. It had occurred to Fouqué to send a stag and a boar to the seminary as though they came from Julien's parents. The dead animals were put down on the floor between the kitchen and the refectory. It was there that they were seen by all the seminarists on their way to dinner. They constituted a great attraction for their curiosity. The boar, dead though it was, made the youngest ones feel frightened. They touched its tusks. They talked of nothing else for a whole week.
This gift, which raised Julien's family to the level of that class of society which deserves respect, struck a deadly blow at all jealousy. He enjoyed a superiority, consecrated by fortune. Chazel, the most distinguished of the seminarists, made advances to him, and always reproached him for not having previously apprised them of his parents' position and had thus involved them in treating money without sufficient respect. A conscription took place, from which Julien, in his capacity as seminarist, was exempt. This circumstance affected him profoundly. “So there is just passed forever that moment which, twenty years earlier, would have seen my heroic life begin. He was walking alone in the seminary garden. He heard the masons who were walling up the cloister walls talking between themselves.
“Yes, we must go. There's the new conscription. When the other was alive it was good business. A mason could become an officer then, could become a general then. One has seen such things.”
“You go and see now. It's only the ragamuffins who leave for the army. Any one who has anything stays in the country here.”
“The man who is born wretched stays wretched, and there you are.”
“I say, is it true what they say, that the other is dead?” put in the third mason.
“Oh well, it's the âbig men' who say that, you see. The other one made them afraid.”
“What a difference. How the fortification went ahead in his time. And to think of his being betrayed by his own marshals.”
This conversation consoled Julien a little. As he went away, he repeated with a sigh:
“Le seul roi dont le peuple a garde la memoire.”
The time for the examination arrived. Julien answered brilliantly. He saw that Chazel endeavoured to exhibit all his knowledge. On the first day the examiners, nominated by the famous Grand Vicar de Frilair, were very irritated at always having to put first, or at any rate second, on their list, that Julien Sorel, who had been designated to them as the Benjamin of the Abbé Pirard. There were bets in the seminary that Julien would come out first in the final list of the examination, a privilege which carried with it the honour of dining with my Lord Bishop. But at the end of a sitting, dealing with the fathers of the Church, an adroit examiner, having first interrogated Julien on Saint Jerome and his passion for Cicero, went on to speak about Horace, Virgil and other profane authors. Julien had learnt by heart a great number of passages from these authors without his comrades' knowledge. Swept away by his successes, he forgot the place where he was, and recited in paraphrase with spirit several odes of Horace at the repeated request of the examiner. Having for twenty minutes given him enough rope to hang himself, the examiner changed his expression, and bitterly reproached him for the time he had wasted on these profane studies, and the useless or criminal ideas which he had got into his head.
“I am a fool, sir. You are right,” said Julien modestly, realising the adroit stratagem of which he was the victim.
This examiner's dodge was considered dirty, even at the seminary, but this did not prevent the Abbé de Frilair, that adroit individual who had so cleverly organised the machinery of the Besançon congregation, and whose despatches to Paris put fear into the hearts of judges, prefects, and even the generals of the garrison, from placing with his powerful hand the number 198 against Julien's name. He enjoyed subjecting his enemy, Pirard the Jansenist, to this mortification.
His chief object for the last ten years had been to deprive him of the headship of the seminary. The Abbé, who had himself followed the plan which he had indicated to Julien, was sincere, pious, devoted to his duties and devoid of intrigue, but heaven in its anger had given him that bilious temperament which is by nature so deeply sensitive to insults and to hate. None of the insults which were addressed to him was wasted on his burning soul. He would have handed in his resignation a hundred times over, but he believed that he was useful in the place where Providence had set him. “I prevent the progress of Jesuitism and Idolatry,” he said to himself.
At the time of the examinations, it was perhaps nearly two months since he had spoken to Julien, and nevertheless, he was ill for eight days when, on receipt of the official letter announcing the result of the competition, he saw the number 198 placed beside the name of that pupil whom he regarded as the glory of his town. This stern character found his only consolation in concentrating all his surveillance on Julien. He was delighted that he discovered in him neither anger, nor vindictiveness, nor discouragement.
Julien felt a thrill some months afterwards when he received a letter. It bore the Paris post-mark. Madame de Rênal is remembering her promises at last, he thought. A gentleman who signed himself Paul Sorel, and who said that he was his relative, sent him a letter of credit for five hundred francs. The writer went on to add that if Julien went on to study successfully the good Latin authors, a similar sum would be sent to him every year.
“It is she. It is her kindness,” said Julien to himself, feeling quite overcome. “She wishes to console me. But why not a single word of affection?”
He was making a mistake in regard to this letter, for Madame de Rênal, under the influence of her friend, Madame Derville, was abandoning herself to profound remorse. She would often think, in spite of herself, of that singular being, the meeting with whom had revolutionized her life. But she carefully refrained from writing to him.
If we were to talk the terminology of the seminary, we would be able to recognise a miracle in the sending of these five hundred francs and to say that heaven was making use of Monsieur de Frilair himself in order to give this gift to Julien. Twelve years previously the Abbé de Frilair had arrived in Besançon with an extremely exiguous portmanteau, which, according to the story, contained all his fortune. He was now one of the richest proprietors of the department. In the course of his prosperity, he had bought the one half of an estate, while the other half had been inherited by Monsieur de la Mole. Consequently there was a great lawsuit between these two personages.
M. le Marquis de la Mole felt that, in spite of his brilliant life at Paris and the offices which he held at Court, it would be dangerous to fight at Besançon against the Grand Vicar, who was reputed to make and unmake prefects.
Instead of soliciting a present of fifty thousand francs which could have been smuggled into the budget under some name or other, and of throwing up this miserable lawsuit with the Abbé Frilair over a matter of fifty thousand francs, the marquis lost his temper. He thought he was in the right, absolutely in the right. Moreover, if one is permitted to say so, who is the judge who has not got a son, or at any rate a cousin to push in the world?
In order to enlighten the blindest minds the Abbé de Frilair took the carriage of my Lord the Bishop eight days after the first decree which he obtained, and went himself to convey the cross of the Legion of Honour to his advocate. M. de la Mole, a little dumbfounded at the demeanour of the other side, and appreciating also that his own advocates were slackening their efforts, asked advice of the Abbé Chélan, who put him in communication with M. Pirard.
At the period of our story the relations between these two men had lasted for several years. The Abbé Pirard imported into this affair his characteristic passion. Being in constant touch with the Marquis's advocates, he studied his case, and finding it just, he became quite openly the solicitor of M. de la Mole against the all-powerful Grand Vicar. The latter felt outraged by such insolence, and on the part of a little Jansenist into the bargain.
“See what this Court nobility who pretend to be so powerful really are,” would say the Abbé de Frilair to his intimates. M. de la Mole has not even sent a miserable cross to his agent at Besançon, and will let him be tamely turned out. None the less, so they write me, this noble peer never lets a week go by without going to show off his blue ribbon in the drawing-room of the Keeper of the Seals, whoever it may be.
In spite of all the energy of the Abbé Pirard, and although M. de la Mole was always on the best of terms with the minister of justice, and above all with his officials, the best that he could achieve after six careful years was not to lose his lawsuit right out. Being as he was in ceaseless correspondence with the Abbé Pirard in connection with an affair in which they were both passionately interested, the Marquis came to appreciate the Abbé's particular kind of intellect. Little by little, and in spite of the immense distance in their social positions, their correspondence assumed the tone of friendship. The Abbé Pirard told the Marquis that they wanted to heap insults upon him till he should be forced to hand in his resignation. In his anger against what, in his opinion, was the infamous stratagem employed against Julien, he narrated his history to the Marquis.