Although extremely rich, this great lord was by no means miserly. He had never been able to prevail on the Abbé Pirard to accept even the reimbursement of the postal expenses occasioned by the lawsuit. He seized the opportunity of sending five hundred francs to his favourite pupil. M. de la Mole himself took the trouble of writing the covering letter. This gave the Abbé food for thought. One day the latter received a little note which requested him to go immediately on an urgent matter to an inn on the outskirts of Besançon. He found there the steward of M. de la Mole.
“M. le Marquis has instructed me to bring you his carriage,” said the man to him. “He hopes that after you have read this letter you will find it convenient to leave for Paris in four or five days. I will employ the time in the meanwhile in asking you to be good enough to show me the estates of M. le Marquis in the Franche-Comté, so that I can go over them.”
The letter was short:â
“Rid yourself, my good sir, of all the chicanery of the provinces and come and breathe the peaceful atmosphere of Paris. I send you my carriage which has orders to await your decision for four days. I will await you myself at Paris until Tuesday. You only require to say so, monsieur, to accept in your own name one of the best livings in the environs of Paris. The richest of your future parishioners has never seen you, but is more devoted than you can possibly think: he is the Marquis de la Mole.”
Without having suspected it, the stern Abbé Pirard loved this seminary, peopled as it was by his enemies, but to which for the past fifteen years he had devoted all his thoughts. M. de la Mole's letter had the effect on him of the visit of the surgeon come to perform a difficult but necessary operation. His dismissal was certain. He made an appointment with the steward for three days later. For forty-eight hours he was in a fever of uncertainty. Finally he wrote to the M. de la Mole, and composed for my Lord the Bishop a letter, a masterpiece of ecclesiastical style, although it was a little long; it would have been difficult to have found more unimpeachable phrases, and ones breathing a more sincere respect. And nevertheless, this letter, intended as it was to get M. de Frilair into trouble with his patron, gave utterance to all the serious matters of complaint, and even descended to the little squalid intrigues which, having been endured with resignation for six years, were forcing the Abbé Pirard to leave the diocese.
They stole his firewood, they poisoned his dog, etc., etc.
Having finished this letter he had Julien called. Like all the other seminarists, he was sleeping at eight o'clock in the evening.
“You know where the Bishop's Palace is,” he said to him in good classical Latin. “Take this letter to my Lord. I will not hide from you that I am sending you into the midst of the wolves. Be all ears and eyes. Let there be no lies in your answers, but realise that the man questioning you will possibly experience a real joy in being able to hurt you. I am very pleased, my child, at being able to give you this experience before I leave you, for I do not hide from you that the letter which you are bearing is my resignation.”
Julien stood motionless. He loved the Abbé Pirard. It was in vain that prudence said to him,
“After this honest man's departure the Sacré-Coeur party will disgrace me and perhaps expel me.”
He could not think of himself. He was embarrassed by a phrase which he was trying to turn in a polite way, but as a matter of fact he found himself without the brains to do so.
“Well, my friend, are you not going?”
“Is it because they say, Monsieur,” answered Julian timidly, “that you have put nothing on one side during your long administration? I have six hundred francs.”
His tears prevented him from continuing.
“That also will be noticed,” said the ex-director of the seminary coldly. “Go to the Palace. It is getting late.”
Chance would so have it that on that evening, the Abbé de Frilair was on duty in the salon of the Palace. My lord was dining with the prefect, so it was to M. de Frilair himself that Julien, though he did not know it, handed the letter.
Julien was astonished to see this Abbé boldly open the letter which was addressed to the Bishop. The face of the Grand Vicar soon expressed surprise, tinged with a lively pleasure, and became twice as grave as before. Julien, struck with his good appearance, found time to scrutinise him while he was reading. This face would have possessed more dignity had it not been for the extreme subtlety which appeared in some features, and would have gone to the fact of actually denoting falseness if the possessor of this fine countenance had ceased to school it for a single minute. The very prominent nose formed a perfectly straight line and unfortunately gave to an otherwise distinguished profile, a curious resemblance to the physiognomy of a fox. Otherwise this Abbé, who appeared so engrossed with Monsieur Pirard's resignation, was dressed with an elegance which Julien had never seen before in any priest and which pleased him exceedingly.
It was only later that Julien knew in what the special talent of the Abbé de Frilair really consisted. He knew how to amuse his bishop, an amiable old man made for Paris life, and who looked upon Besançon as exile. This Bishop had very bad sight, and was passionately fond of fish. The Abbé de Frilair used to take the bones out of the fish which was served to my Lord. Julien looked silently at the Abbé who was re-reading the resignation when the door suddenly opened with a noise. A richly dressed lackey passed in rapidly. Julien had only time to turn round towards the door. He perceived a little old man wearing a pectoral cross. He prostrated himself. The Bishop addressed a benevolent smile to him and passed on. The handsome Abbé followed him and Julien was left alone in the salon, and was able to admire at his leisure its pious magnificence.
The Bishop of Besançon, a man whose spirit had been tried but not broken by the long miseries of the emigration, was more than seventy-five years old and concerned himself infinitely little with what might happen in ten years' time.
“Who is that clever-looking seminarist I think I saw as I passed?” said the Bishop. “Oughtn't they to be in bed according to my regulations?”
“That one is very wide-awake I assure you, my Lord, and he brings great news. It is the resignation of the only Jansenist residing in your diocese; that terrible Abbé Pirard realises at last that we mean business.”
“Well,” said the Bishop with a laugh. “I challenge you to replace him with any man of equal worth, and to show you how much I prize that man, I will invite him to dinner for to-morrow.”
The Grand Vicar tried to slide in a few words concerning the choice of a successor. The prelate, who was little disposed to talk business, said to him,
“Before we install the other, let us get to know a little of the circumstances under which the present one is going. Fetch me this seminarist. The truth is in the mouth of children.”
Julien was summoned. “I shall find myself between two inquisitors,” he thought. He had never felt more courageous. At the moment when he entered, two valets, better dressed than M. Valenod himself, were undressing my lord. That prelate thought he ought to question Julien on his studies before questioning him about M. Pirard. He talked a little theology, and was astonished. He soon came to the humanities, to Virgil, to Horace, to Cicero. “It was those names,” thought Julien, “that earned me my number 198. I have nothing to lose. Let us try and shine.” He succeeded. The prelate, who was an excellent humanist himself, was delighted.
At the prefect's dinner, a young girl who was justly celebrated, had recited the poem of the Madeleine. He was in the mood to talk literature, and very quickly forgot the Abbé Pirard and his affairs to discuss with the seminarist whether Horace was rich or poor. The prelate quoted several odes, but sometimes his memory was sluggish, and then Julien would recite with modesty the whole ode: the fact which struck the bishop was that Julien never deviated from the conversational tone. He spoke his twenty or thirty Latin verses as though he had been speaking of what was taking place in his own seminary. They talked for a long time of Virgil, or Cicero, and the prelate could not help complimenting the young seminarist. “You could not have studied better.”
“My Lord,” said Julien, “your seminary can offer you 197 much less unworthy of your high esteem.”
“How is that?” said the Prelate astonished by the number.
“I can support by official proof just what I have had the honour of saying before my lord. I obtained the number 198 at the seminary's annual examination by giving accurate answers to the very questions which are earning me at the present moment my lord's approbation.”
“Ah, it is the Benjamin of the Abbé Pirard,” said the Bishop with a laugh, as he looked at M. de Frilair. “We should have been prepared for this. But it is fair fighting. Did you not have to be woken up, my friend,” he said, addressing himself to Julien. “To be sent here?”
“Yes, my Lord. I have only been out of the seminary alone once in my life to go and help M. the Abbé Chas-Bernard decorate the cathedral on Corpus Christi day.”
“Optime,” said the Bishop. “So, it is you who showed proof of so much courage by placing the bouquets of feathers on the baldachin. They make me shudder. They make me fear that they will cost some man his life. You will go far, my friend, but I do not wish to cut short your brilliant career by making you die of hunger.”
And by the order of the Bishop, biscuits and wine were brought in, to which Julien did honour, and the Abbé de Frilair, who knew that his Bishop liked to see people eat gaily and with a good appetite, even greater honour.
The prelate, more and more satisfied with the end of his evening, talked for a moment of ecclesiastical history. He saw that Julien did not understand. The prelate passed on to the moral condition of the Roman Empire under the system of the Emperor Constantine. The end of paganism had been accompanied by that state of anxiety and of doubt which afflicts sad and jaded spirits in the nineteenth century. My Lord noticed Julien's ignorance of almost the very name of Tacitus. To the astonishment of the prelate, Julien answered frankly that that author was not to be found in the seminary library.
“I am truly very glad,” said the Bishop gaily, “You relieve me of an embarrassment. I have been trying for the last five minutes to find a way of thanking you for the charming evening which you have given me in a way that I could certainly never have expected. I did not anticipate finding a teacher in a pupil in my seminary. Although the gift is not unduly canonical, I want to give you a Tacitus. The prelate had eight volumes in a superior binding fetched for him, and insisted on writing himself on the title page of the first volume a Latin compliment to Julien Sorel. The Bishop plumed himself on his fine Latinity. He finished by saying to him in a serious tone, which completely clashed with the rest of the conversation,
“Young man, if you are good, you will have one day the best living in my diocese, and one not a hundred leagues from my episcopal palace, but you must be good.”
Laden with his volumes, Julien left the palace in a state of great astonishment as midnight was striking.
My Lord had not said a word to him about the Abbé Pirard. Julien was particularly astonished by the Bishop's extreme politeness. He had had no conception of such an urbanity in form combined with so natural an air of dignity. Julien was especially struck by the contrast on seeing again the gloomy Abbé Pirard, who was impatiently awaiting him.
“Quid tibi dixerunt (What have they said to you)?” he cried out to him in a loud voice as soon as he saw him in the distance. “Speak French, and repeat my Lord's own words without either adding or subtracting anything,” said the ex-Director of the seminary in his harsh tone, and with his particularly inelegant manners, as Julien got slightly confused in translating into Latin the speeches of the Bishop.
“What a strange present on the part of the Bishop to a young seminarist,” he ventured to say as he turned over the leaves of the superb Tacitus, whose gilt edges seemed to horrify him.
Two o'clock was already striking when he allowed his favourite pupil to retire to his room after an extremely detailed account.
“Leave me the first volume of your Tacitus,” he said to him. “Where is my Lord Bishop's compliment? This Latin line will serve as your lightning-conductor in this house after my departure.”
“Erit tibi, fili mi, successor meus tanquam leo querens quem devoret.” (For my successor will be to you, my son, like a ravening lion seeking someone to devour).
The following morning Julien noticed a certain strangeness in the manner in which his comrades spoke to him. It only made him more reserved. “This,” he thought, “is the result of M. Pirard's resignation. It is known over the whole house, and I pass for his favourite. There ought logically to be an insult in their demeanour.” But he could not detect it. On the contrary, there was an absence of hate in the eyes of all those he met along the corridors. “What is the meaning of this? It is doubtless a trap. Let us play a wary game.”
Finally the little seminarist said to him with a laugh,
“Cornelii Taciti opera omnia (complete works of Taciti).”
On hearing these words, they all congratulated Julien enviously, not only on the magnificent present which he had received from my lord, but also on the two hours' conversation with which he had been honoured. They knew even its minutest details. From that moment envy ceased completely. They courted him basely. The Abbé Castanède, who had manifested towards him the most extreme insolence the very day before, came and took his arm and invited him to breakfast.
By some fatality in Julien's character, while the insolence of these coarse creatures had occasioned him great pain, their baseness afforded him disgust, but no pleasure.
Towards mid-day the Abbé Pirard took leave of his pupils, but not before addressing to them a severe admonition.