Part 16

When the first rays of the sun woke him the next morning, he found himself lying on the floor.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE WORLD, OR WHAT THE RICH MAN LACKS

I am alone upon the earth, no one deigns to think of me. All those whom I see making their fortune possess a shamelessness and a hardness of heart that I do not feel within me. They hate me because of my easy goodness. Ah! soon I shall die, either of hunger, or of the misfortune of seeing men so hard.

YOUNG.

He hurried to brush his coat and go downstairs; he was late. A usher scolded him severely; instead of seeking to justify himself, Julien crossed his arms upon his chest:

--_Peccavi, pater optime_ (I have sinned, I confess my fault, O my father), he said with a contrite air.

This opening had great success. The clever ones among the seminarians saw that they had to do with a man who was no stranger to the elements of the trade. Recreation hour arrived; Julien found himself the object of general curiosity. But all that was found in him was reserve and silence. Following the maxims he had laid down for himself, he regarded his three hundred and twenty-one comrades as enemies; the most dangerous of all, in his eyes, was Abbé Pirard.

A few days later Julien had to choose a confessor; a list was presented to him.

Eh! good Lord! whom do they take me for, he said to himself, do they think I do not understand what speaking means? and he chose Abbé Pirard.

Without his suspecting it, this step was decisive. A very young seminarian, a native of Verrières, who from the first day had declared himself his friend, told him that had he chosen M. Castanède, the under-director of the seminary, he might have acted with more prudence.

--Abbé Castanède is the enemy of M. Pirard, who is suspected of Jansenism, added the little seminarian, leaning toward his ear.

All the first moves of our hero, who thought himself so prudent, were, like the choice of a confessor, acts of thoughtlessness. Misled by all the presumption of a man of imagination, he took his intentions for facts, and believed himself a consummate hypocrite. His madness went so far as to reproach himself for his successes in this art of weakness.

Alas! it is my only weapon! in another age, he would say to himself, it is by speaking actions, face to face with the enemy, that I should have won my bread.

Julien, satisfied with his conduct, looked around him; he found everywhere the appearance of the purest virtue.

Eight or ten seminarians lived in the odor of sanctity, and had visions like Saint Teresa and Saint Francis, when he received the stigmata on mount _Vernia_ in the Apennines. But it was a great secret; their friends hid it. These poor young men of visions were almost always in the infirmary. A hundred others united a robust faith to an indefatigable application. They worked to the point of making themselves ill, but without learning much. Two or three distinguished themselves by real talent, and among others, one named Chazel; but Julien felt aversion for them, and they for him.

The rest of the three hundred and twenty-one seminarians was composed only of coarse beings who were not at all sure of understanding the Latin words they repeated all day long. Almost all were sons of peasants, and they preferred to earn their bread by reciting a few Latin words rather than by digging the earth. It was on the basis of this observation that, from the first days, Julien promised himself rapid success. In any service, there is need of intelligent men, for after all, there is work to be done, he told himself. Under Napoleon, I should have been a sergeant; among these future priests, I shall be a grand vicar.

All these poor devils, he added, laborers from childhood, lived until their arrival here on curdled milk and black bread. In their cottages, they ate meat only five or six times a year. Like the Roman soldiers who found war a time of rest, these coarse peasants are enchanted with the delights of the seminary.

Julien never read in their dull eyes anything but the physical need satisfied after dinner, and the physical pleasure expected before the meal. Such were the men amid whom he had to distinguish himself; but what Julien did not know, what they took care not to tell him, was that to be first in the various courses of dogma, ecclesiastical history, etc., etc., which one follows at the seminary, was in their eyes but a _splendid_ sin. Since Voltaire, since the government of the two chambers, which is at bottom but _mistrust and personal examination_, and gives to the spirit of the people that bad habit of mistrusting, the Church of France seems to have understood that books are her true enemies. It is submission of heart that is all in her eyes. To succeed in studies even sacred is suspect to her, and with good reason. Who will prevent the superior man from crossing to the other side, like Sieyès or Grégoire! The trembling Church clings to the pope as to the only chance of salvation. The pope alone can try to paralyze personal examination, and, by the pious pomp of the ceremonies of his court, make an impression on the bored and sickly mind of worldly people.

Julien, half penetrating these various truths, which nevertheless all words spoken in a seminary tend to contradict, fell into a profound melancholy. He worked hard, and rapidly succeeded in learning things very useful to a priest, very false in his eyes, and in which he took no interest. He believed he had nothing else to do.

Am I then forgotten by all the earth? he thought. He did not know that M. Pirard had received and thrown into the fire some letters postmarked Dijon, and in which, despite the forms of the most proper style, the most lively passion showed through. Great remorse seemed to combat this love. So much the better, thought Abbé Pirard, it is at least not an impious woman that this young man has loved.

One day Abbé Pirard opened a letter that seemed half effaced by tears; it was an eternal farewell. At last, it was said to Julien, heaven has done me the grace of hating, not the author of my fault, he shall always be what I hold dearest in the world, but my fault itself. The sacrifice is made, my friend. It is not without tears, as you see. The salvation of the beings to whom I owe myself and whom you have so loved, prevails. A just but terrible God can no longer take vengeance on them for the crimes of their mother. Farewell, Julien; be just toward men.

This end of the letter was almost absolutely illegible. An address at Dijon was given, and yet it was hoped that Julien would never answer, or that at least he would use words that a woman returned to virtue could hear without blushing.

The melancholy of Julien, aided by the mediocre nourishment provided at the seminary by the contractor of dinners at 83 centimes, began to affect his health when one morning Fouqué suddenly appeared in his room.

--At last I could get in. I have come to Besançon five times, without reproach, to see you. Always a wooden face. I posted someone at the seminary gate; why the devil do you never go out?

--It is a trial I imposed upon myself.

--I find you much changed. At last I see you again. Two fine five-franc crowns have just taught me that I was but a fool not to have offered them on the first trip.

The conversation was endless between the two friends. Julien changed color, when Fouqué said to him:

--By the way, do you know? the mother of your pupils has fallen into the highest devotion.

And he spoke with that detached air which makes so singular an impression on the passionate soul whose dearest interests one overturns without suspecting it.

--Yes, my friend, into the most exalted devotion. They say she makes pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of Abbé Maslon, who spied so long on poor M. Chélan, Mme de Rênal would have none of him. She goes to confess at Dijon or at Besançon.

--She comes to Besançon! said Julien, his forehead covered with redness.

--Fairly often, answered Fouqué, with an interrogative air.

--Do you have any _Constitutionnels_ on you?

--What do you say? replied Fouqué.

--I ask you if you have any _Constitutionnels_, repeated Julien, in the calmest tone of voice. They sell them for thirty sous a copy here.

--What! even at the seminary, liberals! cried Fouqué. Poor France! he added, taking the hypocritical voice and gentle tone of Abbé Maslon.

This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero, had not, the very next day, a word addressed to him by that little seminarian from Verrières, who seemed to him so childish, made him make an important discovery. Since he had been at the seminary, Julien's conduct had been but a series of false moves. He laughed at himself with bitterness.

To be sure, the important actions of his life had been conducted with skill, but he did not attend to details, and the clever ones at the seminary look only to details. Thus, he already passed among his comrades for a free-thinker. He had been betrayed by a host of little actions.

In their eyes, he was convicted of that enormous vice, _he thought, he judged for himself_, instead of blindly following _authority_ and example. Abbé Pirard had been of no help to him; he had not addressed a single word to him outside the tribunal of penitence, where moreover he listened more than he spoke. It would have been quite otherwise had he chosen Abbé Castanède.

From the moment Julien perceived his folly, he was no longer bored. He wished to know the full extent of the evil, and, to that end, departed a little from that haughty and obstinate silence with which he repelled his comrades. It was then that they took revenge on him. His advances were met with a contempt that went as far as derision. He recognized that, since his entry into the seminary, there had not been an hour, especially during recreation, that had not had consequences for or against him, that had not increased the number of his enemies, or won him the goodwill of some seminarian sincerely virtuous or a little less coarse than the others. The evil to repair was immense, the task very difficult. Henceforth Julien's attention was constantly on guard; it was a matter of sketching for himself a wholly new character.

The movements of his eyes, for example, gave him much trouble. It is not without reason that in those places one keeps them lowered. What presumption was mine at Verrières! he told himself; I thought I was living; I was only preparing for life; here I am at last in the world, such as I shall find it to the end of my role, surrounded by true enemies. What immense difficulty, he added, this hypocrisy of every minute! it would make the labors of Hercules pale. The Hercules of modern times is Sixtus Quint, deceiving for fifteen years running, by his modesty, forty cardinals who had seen him lively and haughty throughout his youth.

Science is then nothing here! he said to himself with spite; progress in dogma, in sacred history, etc., count only in appearance. All that is said on this subject is meant to trap fools such as I. Alas! my only merit consisted in my rapid progress, in my way of seizing these absurdities. Do they, at bottom, esteem them at their true value? do they judge them as I do? And I had the stupidity to be proud of them! These first places that I always obtain have served only to give me bad marks for the true places that one obtains on leaving the seminary and where one earns money. Chazel, who has more learning than I, always throws into his compositions some clumsiness that gets him relegated to the fiftieth place; if he obtains the first, it is by oversight. Ah! how a word, a single word from M. Pirard would have helped me!

From the moment Julien was undeceived, the long exercises of ascetic piety, such as the rosary five times a week, the hymns to the Sacred Heart, etc., etc., which had seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most interesting moments of action. Reflecting severely upon himself, and seeking above all not to exaggerate his means, Julien did not aspire at once, like the seminarians who served as models to the others, to perform at every instant _significant_ actions, that is to say, proving a kind of Christian perfection. In the seminary, there is a way of eating a soft-boiled egg that announces the progress made in the devout life.

The reader, who perhaps smiles, would deign to remember all the faults made, in eating an egg, by Abbé Delille invited to breakfast at the house of a great lady of the court of Louis XVI.

Julien first sought to attain the _non culpa_; it is the state of the young seminarian whose gait, whose way of moving his arms, eyes, etc., indicate in truth nothing worldly, but do not yet show the being absorbed by the idea of the other life and the _pure nothingness_ of this one.

Constantly Julien found written in charcoal, on the walls of the corridors, phrases such as this: What are sixty years of trial, weighed against an eternity of delights or an eternity of boiling oil in hell! He no longer despised them; he understood that they must be ever before his eyes. What shall I do all my life? he told himself; I shall sell the faithful a place in heaven. How shall this place be made visible to them? by the difference between my exterior and that of a layman.

After several months of application every instant, Julien still had the air of thinking. His way of moving his eyes and carrying his mouth did not announce the implicit faith ready to believe and uphold all, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this kind by the coarsest peasants. There were good reasons why they should not look thoughtful.

How much trouble did he not give himself to attain that beatific and narrow brow, that physiognomy of fervent and blind faith, ready to believe all and suffer all, which one finds so frequently in the convents of Italy, and of which, to us laymen, the Guercino has left such perfect models in his church paintings.[*]

[*] See, at the Louvre museum. Francis, Duke of Aquitaine, laying down the crown and taking the monk's habit, no. 1130.

On feast days, the seminarians were given sausages with sauerkraut. The table neighbors of Julien had observed that he was insensible to this happiness; this was one of his first crimes. His comrades saw in it a hateful trait of the silliest hypocrisy; nothing made him more enemies. See this bourgeois, see this disdainful one, they said, who pretends to despise the best _fare_, sausages with sauerkraut! fie, the ugly one! the proud one! the damned! He should have abstained by penitence from eating a part and made the sacrifice of saying to some friend, showing the sauerkraut:

--What can man offer to an all-powerful being, if not voluntary pain?

Julien lacked the experience that makes things of this sort so easily seen.

Alas! the ignorance of these young peasants, my comrades, is for them an immense advantage, he cried, in his moments of discouragement. On their arrival at the seminary, the professor has no need to rid them of that frightful number of worldly ideas that I bring there, and that they read on my face whatever I do.

Julien studied, with an attention bordering on envy, the coarsest of the little peasants who arrived at the seminary. At the moment they were stripped of their ratteen jacket, to make them don the black robe, their education was limited to an immense and boundless respect for hard and liquid cash, as one says in Franche-Comté.

It is the sacramental and heroic manner of expressing the sublime idea _of ready money_.

Happiness, for these seminarians, as for the heroes of Voltaire's novels, consists especially in dining well. Julien discovered in almost all an innate respect for the man who wears a coat of _fine cloth_. This feeling appreciates _distributive justice_, such as our courts give it to us, at its value and even below its value. What can one gain, they often repeated among themselves, in pleading against a fat man?

It is the word of the valleys of the Jura, to express a rich man. Let one judge of their respect for the richest of all beings: the government!

Not to smile with respect at the mere name of M. the prefect passes, in the eyes of the peasants of Franche-Comté, for an imprudence; now imprudence in the poor is rapidly punished by lack of bread.

After having been as if suffocated in the first times by the sentiment of contempt, Julien ended by feeling pity: it had often happened to the fathers of most of his comrades to return in the evening in winter to their cottage, and to find there neither bread, nor chestnuts, nor potatoes. What is so surprising, Julien told himself, if the happy man, in their eyes, is first he who has just dined well, and next he who possesses a good coat! My comrades have a firm vocation, that is to say, they see in the ecclesiastical state a long continuation of this happiness: dining well and having a warm coat in winter.

It happened to Julien to hear a young seminarian, gifted with imagination, say to his companion:

--Why should I not become pope like Sixtus Quint, who kept the swine?

--They make popes only of Italians, answered the friend; but surely they will draw lots among us, for places of grand vicars, of canons, and perhaps of bishops. M. P..., bishop of Châlons, is son of a cooper: it is my father's trade.

One day, in the middle of a dogma lesson, Abbé Pirard had Julien called. The poor young man was delighted to leave the physical and moral atmosphere in the midst of which he was plunged.

Julien found in M. the director the reception that had so frightened him the day of his entry into the seminary.

--Explain to me what is written on this playing card, he said to him, looking at him in a way that made him sink into the ground.

Julien read:

"Amanda Binet, at the Girafe café, before eight o'clock. Say that one is from Genlis, and the cousin of my mother."

Julien saw the immensity of the danger; the police of Abbé Castanède had stolen this address from him.

--The day I entered here, he answered, looking at the brow of Abbé Pirard, for he could not bear his terrible eye, I was trembling: M. Chélan had told me that it was a place full of denunciations and wickedness of all kinds; spying and denunciation among comrades are encouraged there. Heaven wills it so, to show life as it is to young priests, and inspire in them disgust for the world and its pomps.

--And it is to me that you make phrases, said Abbé Pirard furiously. Little rogue!

--At Verrières, Julien resumed coldly, my brothers beat me when they had reason to be jealous of me...

--To the point! to the point! cried M. Pirard, almost beside himself.

Not in the least intimidated, Julien resumed his narration.

--The day of my arrival at Besançon, toward noon, I was hungry, I went into a café. My heart was filled with repugnance for so profane a place; but I thought my breakfast would cost me less there than at the inn. A lady, who seemed to be the mistress of the shop, took pity on my novice air. Besançon is full of bad characters, she said to me, I fear for you, sir. If some misfortune should befall you, have recourse to me, send to my house before eight o'clock. If the seminary porters refuse to do your errand, say you are my cousin, and a native of Genlis...

--All this gossip shall be verified, cried Abbé Pirard, who, unable to stay still, walked about the room. Go to your cell.

The abbé followed Julien and locked him in. He at once began to search his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal card was preciously hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but there were several disturbances; yet the key never left him. What luck, Julien told himself, that, during the time of my blindness, I never accepted the permission to go out, which M. Castanède offered me so often with a kindness I now understand. Perhaps I might have had the weakness to change clothes and go see the beautiful Amanda; I should have been lost. When they despaired of making use of the information in this way, not to lose it they made a denunciation of it.

Two hours later, the director had him called.

--You have not lied, he said to him with a less severe look; but keeping such an address is an imprudence whose gravity you cannot conceive. Unhappy child! in ten years, perhaps, it will do you harm.

CHAPTER XXVII

FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

The present time, great God! is the ark of the Lord. Woe to him who touches it.

DIDEROT.

The reader will kindly allow us to give very few clear and precise facts about this period of Julien's life. It is not that they are lacking to us, quite the contrary; but, perhaps what he saw at the seminary is too black for the moderate coloring that one has sought to preserve in these pages. The contemporaries who suffer from certain things can recall them only with a horror that paralyzes all other pleasure, even that of reading a tale.

Julien succeeded poorly in his attempts at hypocrisy of gesture; he fell into moments of disgust and even of complete discouragement. He had no success, and that in an ugly career. The least external help would have sufficed to sustain his constancy; the difficulty to overcome was not very great; but he was alone like a boat abandoned in the midst of the Ocean. And if I succeeded, he told himself, to spend a whole life in such bad company! Gluttons who think only of the bacon omelet they will devour at dinner, or Abbé Castanèdes, for whom no crime is too black! they will attain power; but at what price, great God!

The will of man is powerful, I read it everywhere; but does it suffice to overcome such disgust? The task of great men was easy; however terrible the danger, they found it beautiful; and who can understand, except me, the ugliness of what surrounds me?

This moment was the most trying of his life. It was so easy for him to enlist in one of the fine regiments garrisoned at Besançon! He could make himself a master of Latin; so little was needed for his subsistence! But then no more career, no more future for his imagination: it was to die. Here is the detail of one of his sad days.

My presumption has so often applauded itself that I was different from the other young peasants! Well, I have lived long enough to see that _difference engenders hatred_, he told himself one morning. This great truth had just been shown him by one of his most stinging failures. He had worked eight days to please a pupil who lived in the odor of sanctity. He walked with him in the courtyard, listening with submission to nonsense that would put one to sleep standing. Suddenly the weather turned to storm, thunder rumbled, and the holy pupil cried out, pushing him away in a coarse manner:

--Listen; every man for himself in this world, I do not want to be burned by the thunder: God can strike you with lightning like an impious man, like a Voltaire.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”