Part 21

But what delights, too, those first two hours, when his friend sincerely wished to send him away and he pleaded his cause, seated beside her in the darkness! A soul like Julien's is followed by such memories throughout an entire lifetime. The rest of the interview was already mingling with the early days of their love, fourteen months before.

Julien was roused from his deep reverie because the carriage had stopped. They had just entered the courtyard of the posting station, on rue J.-J.-Rousseau.

—I want to go to Malmaison, he said to a cab that drew near.

—At this hour, sir, and for what purpose?

—What is it to you! Drive on.

Every true passion thinks only of itself. That is why, it seems to me, all passions are so ridiculous in Paris, where the neighbor always presumes that one thinks a great deal of him. I shall refrain from recounting Julien's transports at Malmaison. He wept. What! despite the ugly white walls built that year, which cut the park into pieces? —Yes, sir; for Julien as for posterity, there was nothing between Arcole, Saint Helena, and Malmaison.

That evening, Julien hesitated long before entering the theater; he had strange ideas about that place of perdition.

A deep mistrust kept him from admiring the living Paris; he was touched only by the monuments left by his hero.

Here I am, then, in the center of intrigue and hypocrisy! Here reign the protectors of the Abbé de Frilair.

On the evening of the third day, curiosity prevailed over the plan of seeing everything before presenting himself to Abbé Pirard. This abbé explained to him, in a cold tone, the kind of life that awaited him at M. de La Mole's.

—If, after a few months, you are of no use, you shall return to the seminary, but by the proper door. You are to lodge with the marquis, one of the greatest noblemen in France. You shall wear black, but as a man in mourning, and not as a churchman. I require that, three times a week, you follow your theological studies in a seminary, where I shall have you presented. Every day, at noon, you shall install yourself in the marquis's library, who intends to employ you in writing letters for lawsuits and other affairs. The marquis writes, in two words, in the margin of each letter he receives, the summary of the reply to be made. I have undertaken that at the end of three months you shall be able to make these replies, so that, of twelve you present for the marquis's signature, he may sign eight or nine. In the evening, at eight o'clock, you shall put his desk in order, and at ten you shall be free.

It may happen, continued Abbé Pirard, that some old lady or some soft-spoken man will hint at immense advantages for you, or quite crudely offer you gold to show him the letters received by the marquis...

—Ah, sir! cried Julien, blushing.

—It is singular, said the abbé with a bitter smile, that poor as you are, and after a year in the seminary, you still have these virtuous indignations left. You must have been very blind!

Would it be the force of blood? said the abbé half aloud, as if speaking to himself.

—What is singular, he added, looking at Julien, is that the marquis knows you... I know not how. He gives you, to begin with, a hundred louis in salary. He is a man who acts only on whims; that is his failing; he will vie in childishness with you. If he is satisfied, your salary may later rise to eight thousand francs.

But you well understand, resumed the abbé in a sharp tone, that he does not give you all that money for your pretty eyes. The point is to be useful. In your place, I would speak very little, and above all I would never speak of what I am ignorant of.

—Ah! said the abbé, I have made inquiries for you; I was forgetting the family of M. de La Mole. He has two children, a daughter and a son of nineteen, elegant to a supreme degree, a kind of madman, who never knows at noon what he will do at two. He has wit, and bravery; he served in the Spanish war. The marquis hopes—I know not why—that you will become the friend of the young Count Norbert. I said you were a great Latinist; perhaps he counts on your teaching his son some ready-made phrases on Cicero and Virgil.

In your place, I would never allow myself to be teased by this handsome young man; and, before yielding to his advances, perfectly polite but a little spoiled by irony, I would have them repeated more than once.

I shall not hide from you that the young Count de La Mole must despise you at first, because you are but a petty bourgeois. His forefather was of the Court, and had the honor of having his head cut off in the Place de Grève on 26 April 1574, for a political intrigue. You are the son of a carpenter of Verrières, and moreover, in the pay of his father. Weigh well these differences and study the history of this family in Moreri; all the flatterers who dine with them make from time to time what they call delicate allusions to it.

Beware how you answer the jests of M. le Comte Norbert de La Mole, squadron leader of hussars and future peer of France, and do not come later to make complaints to me.

—It seems to me, said Julien, blushing deeply, that I should not even answer a man who despises me.

—You have no idea of that kind of contempt; it will show itself only through exaggerated compliments. If you were a fool, you might be taken in by it; if you wished to make your fortune, you should let yourself be taken in.

—The day all this no longer suits me, said Julien, shall I pass for an ingrate if I return to my little cell No. 103?

—Certainly, replied the abbé, all the complaisant people of the house will slander you, but I shall appear, I who did it. _Adsum qui feci_. I shall say that this resolution comes from me.

Julien was grieved by the bitter and almost malicious tone he noticed in M. Pirard; that tone quite spoiled his last reply.

The fact is that the abbé made a matter of conscience of loving Julien, and it was with a kind of religious terror that he thus mingled so directly in the fate of another.

—You will see yet, he added with the same ill grace, and as performing a painful duty—you will see Mme la Marquise de La Mole. She is a tall blonde woman, devout, haughty, perfectly polite, and even more insignificant. She is daughter of the old Duke de Chaulnes, so known for his noble prejudices. This great lady is a sort of high-relief abridgment of what essentially forms the character of women of her rank. She does not hide—she—that having had ancestors who went on the Crusades is the only advantage she esteems. Money comes only long after: does that surprise you? we are no longer in the provinces, my friend.

You will see in her salon several great lords speak of our princes with a singular lightness of tone. As for Mme de La Mole, she lowers her voice out of respect every time she names a prince and especially a princess. I would not advise you to say before her that Philip II or Henry VIII were monsters. They were kings, which gives them imprescriptible rights to the respect of all, and above all to the respect of beings without birth, such as you and me. However, added M. Pirard, we are priests; for she will take you for one, and in that capacity she regards us as necessary valets de chambre to her salvation.

—Sir, said Julien, it seems to me I shall not be long in Paris.

—So much the better; but note that there is no fortune, for a man of our cloth, except through the great lords. With that indefinable something—at least for me—which there is in your character, if you do not make your fortune you will be persecuted; there is no middle ground for you. Do not deceive yourself. Men see that they do not please you by addressing you; in a social country like this one, you are doomed to unhappiness if you do not attain to respect.

What would have become of you at Besançon, without this whim of the Marquis de La Mole? One day you will understand all the strangeness of what he does for you, and, if you are not a monster, you will have an eternal gratitude toward him and his family. How many poor abbés, more learned than you, have lived for years in Paris, on the fifteen sous of their mass and the ten sous of their arguments in the Sorbonne!... Recall what I told you, last winter in the early years of that bad subject Cardinal Dubois. Would your pride by chance think itself more talented than he?

I, for example, a tranquil and mediocre man, counted on dying in my seminary; I had the childishness to grow attached to it. Well! I was about to be dismissed when I gave my resignation. Do you know what my fortune was? I had five hundred twenty francs in capital, neither more nor less; not a friend, scarcely two or three acquaintances. M. de La Mole, whom I had never seen, got me out of that bad pass; he had but a word to say, and I was given a cure whose parishioners are all well-to-do people, above gross vices, and the income shames me, so little is it proportioned to my work. I have spoken to you at such length only to put a little lead in that head.

One more word: I have the misfortune to be irascible; it is possible that you and I may cease speaking to each other.

If the haughtiness of the marquise, or the bad jests of her son, render this house decidedly unbearable to you, I advise you to finish your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris, and rather to the north than the south. There is in the north more civilization and less injustice, and, he added lowering his voice, I must confess it, the neighborhood of the Paris newspapers frightens the little tyrants.

If we continue to find pleasure in seeing each other, and the marquis's house does not suit you, I offer you the place of my vicar, and I shall share by half with you what this cure yields. I owe you that and more, he added, interrupting Julien's thanks, for the singular offer you made me at Besançon. If instead of five hundred twenty francs I had had nothing, you would have saved me.

The abbé had lost his cruel tone of voice. To his great shame Julien felt tears in his eyes; he was dying to throw himself into his friend's arms: he could not help saying to him, with the most manly air he could assume:

—I have been hated by my father since the cradle; that was one of my great misfortunes; but I shall complain no more of chance, I have found a father in you, sir.

—That is well, that is well, said the abbé, embarrassed; then meeting opportunely a word of the seminary director: one must never say chance, my child, always say Providence.

The cab stopped; the coachman lifted the bronze knocker of an immense door: it was the HÔTEL DE LA MOLE; and, so that passersby might not doubt it, these words were read on a black marble above the door.

This affectation displeased Julien.

They are so afraid of the Jacobins! They see a Robespierre and his cart behind every hedge; they are often at the point of dying of laughter and they thus display their house so the rabble may recognize it in case of riot, and pillage it. He communicated his thought to Abbé Pirard.

—Ah! poor child, you will soon be my vicar. What frightful idea came to you there!

—I find nothing so simple, said Julien.

The gravity of the porter and above all the cleanliness of the courtyard had struck him with admiration. The sun was shining beautifully.

—What magnificent architecture! he said to his friend.

It was a matter of one of those hotels with so flat a facade in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, built around the time of Voltaire's death. Never have fashion and beauty been so far apart.

CHAPTER II

ENTRY INTO THE WORLD

Ridiculous and touching memory: The first salon where at eighteen I appeared alone and without support! the glance of a woman sufficed to intimidate me. The more I wished to please, the more awkward I became. I formed the most false notions of everything; or I gave myself up without reason, or I saw in a man an enemy because he had looked at me gravely. But then, amid the dreadful misfortunes of my timidity, how beautiful a fine day was!

KANT.

Julien stopped, amazed, in the middle of the courtyard.

—Do look reasonable, said Abbé Pirard; horrible ideas come to you, and then you are but a child! Where is Horace's _nil mirari_? (Never enthusiasm.) Reflect that this crowd of lackeys, seeing you established here, will seek to mock you; they will see in you an equal, unjustly placed above them. Under the appearances of good-nature, of good advice, of the desire to guide you, they will try to make you fall into some gross blunder.

—I defy them to, said Julien, biting his lip, and he resumed all his mistrust.

The salons these gentlemen crossed on the first floor, before arriving at the marquis's study, would have seemed to you, O my reader, as sad as they were magnificent. Were they given to you as they are, you would refuse to inhabit them; it is the homeland of yawning and of gloomy reasoning. They redoubled Julien's enchantment. How can one be unhappy, he thought, when one lives in so splendid a dwelling!

At last, these gentlemen arrived at the ugliest of the rooms in that superb apartment: scarcely was there daylight; there was found a little thin man, with a lively eye and a blonde wig. The abbé turned toward Julien and presented him. It was the marquis. Julien had much trouble recognizing him, so polite did he find his air. This was no longer the great nobleman with so haughty a mien of the Abbey of Bray-le-Haut. It seemed to Julien that his wig had far too much hair. Aided by this impression he was not at all intimidated. The descendant of the friend of Henri III seemed to him at first to have rather a mean bearing. He was very thin and moved about a great deal; but Julien soon remarked that the marquis had a politeness even more agreeable to the interlocutor than that of the Bishop of Besançon himself. The audience lasted not three minutes. On leaving, the abbé said to Julien:

—You looked at the marquis as you would at a picture. I am no great Greek in what these people call politeness, soon you will know more of it than I; but still the boldness of your gaze seemed to me hardly polite.

They had got back into the cab; the coachman stopped near the boulevard; the abbé introduced Julien into a suite of great salons. Julien noticed there were no furnishings. He was looking at a magnificent gilded clock, representing a subject very indecent in his eyes, when a very elegant gentleman approached with a laughing air. Julien made a half-bow.

The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. Julien started and jumped backward. He reddened with anger. Abbé Pirard, despite his gravity, laughed till he cried. The gentleman was a tailor.

—I give you your liberty for two days, said the abbé as he left; it is only then that you may be presented to Mme de La Mole. Another would keep you like a young girl in these first moments of your stay in this new Babylon. Lose yourself right away if you are to lose yourself, and I shall be delivered from the weakness I have of thinking of you. The day after tomorrow morning, this tailor will bring you two suits; you will give five francs to the boy who tries them on you. Besides, do not make known the sound of your voice to those Parisians. If you say a word, they will find the secret of mocking you. It is their talent. The day after tomorrow be at my house at noon... Go, lose yourself... I forgot, go order boots, shirts, a hat, at the addresses here.

Julien looked at the writing of these addresses.

—It is the marquis's hand, said the abbé; he is an active man who foresees all, and who prefers to do than to command. He takes you near him so that you may spare him this kind of trouble. Will you have enough wit to execute well all the things this lively man will indicate to you in half-words? That is what the future will show: beware!

Julien entered, without saying a single word, the workshops indicated by the addresses; he noticed he was received with respect, and the bootmaker, writing his name in his register, put M. Julien de Sorel.

At the Père-Lachaise cemetery, a very obliging gentleman, and even more liberal in his talk, offered to show Julien the tomb of Marshal Ney, which a clever politics deprives of the honor of an epitaph. But on parting from this liberal, who, tears in his eyes, almost embraced him, Julien no longer had his watch. It was rich in this experience that the day after next, at noon, he presented himself to Abbé Pirard, who looked at him much.

—You are perhaps becoming a fop, said the abbé with a severe air. Julien looked like a very young man in deep mourning; he was in truth very well dressed, but the good abbé was too provincial himself to see that Julien still had that shoulder carriage which in the provinces is at once elegance and importance. On seeing Julien, the marquis judged his graces in a way so different from the good abbé's, that he said to him:

—Would you have any objection to M. Sorel taking dancing lessons?

The abbé remained petrified.

—No, he answered at last; Julien is not a priest.

The marquis, mounting two steps at a time a little hidden staircase, went himself to install our hero in a pretty garret overlooking the immense garden of the hotel. He asked him how many shirts he had taken at the linen-draper's.

—Two, answered Julien, intimidated to see so great a lord descend to such details.

—Very well, resumed the marquis with a serious air and a certain imperative and brief tone, which gave Julien pause; very well! take twenty-two more shirts. Here is the first quarter of your salary.

On descending from the garret, the marquis called an old man:

—Arsène, he said to him, you will wait on M. Sorel.

A few minutes later, Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library; that moment was delicious. Not to be surprised in his emotion, he went to hide in a dark little corner; from there he contemplated with rapture the shining backs of the books: I shall be able to read all that, he told himself. And how should I dislike it here? M. de Rênal would have thought himself dishonored forever by the hundredth part of what the Marquis de La Mole has just done for me.

But, let us see the copies to be made. That work finished, Julien dared approach the books; he nearly went mad with joy on finding an edition of Voltaire. He ran to open the library door so as not to be surprised. He then gave himself the pleasure of opening each of the eighty volumes. They were magnificently bound; it was the masterpiece of the best workman in London. That was not needed to carry Julien's admiration to its height.

An hour later, the marquis entered, looked at the copies and remarked with astonishment that Julien wrote _cela_ with two _l_'s, _cella_. All the abbé told me of his learning would it be simply a tale! The marquis, much discouraged, said to him gently:

—You are not sure of your spelling?

—It is true, said Julien, without thinking in the least of the wrong he was doing himself; he was touched by the marquis's kindness, which recalled to him the brusque tone of M. de Rênal.

It is time lost, all this experience of a little Franche-Comté abbé, thought the marquis; but I had such need of a sure man!

—That is written with only one l, he said to the marquis; when your copies are finished, look in the dictionary for the words whose spelling you are unsure of.

At six o'clock, the marquis had him sent for; he looked with evident pain at Julien's boots:

—I have a fault to reproach myself with; I did not tell you that every day at half past five you must dress.

Julien looked at him without understanding.

—I mean put on stockings; Arsène will remind you; today I shall make your excuses.

On finishing these words, M. de La Mole led Julien into a salon resplendent with gilding. In similar circumstances, M. de Rênal never failed to double his pace so as to have the advantage of passing first through the door. The little vanity of his former patron made Julien step on the marquis's feet, and hurt him greatly because of his gout. Ah! he is awkward besides, said the latter to himself. He presented him to a tall woman of imposing aspect. It was the marquise. Julien found her look impertinent, a little like Mme de Maugiron, the sub-prefect's wife of the Verrières arrondissement, when she attended the Saint-Charles dinner. Somewhat troubled by the extreme magnificence of the salon, Julien did not hear what M. de La Mole said. The marquise scarcely deigned to look at him. There were some men among whom Julien recognized with ineffable pleasure the young envoy of Agde, who had deigned to speak to him some months before, at the Bray-le-Haut ceremony. This young prelate was no doubt frightened by the tender eyes fixed on him by Julien's timidity, and cared not to recognize this provincial.

The men gathered in this salon seemed to Julien to have something sad and constrained; one speaks low in Paris, and does not exaggerate small things.

A pretty young man, with a mustache, very pale and very slender, entered toward half past six; he had a very small head.

—You will always keep us waiting, said the marquise, to whom he was kissing the hand.

Julien understood that this was the Count de La Mole. He found him charming at first sight.

Is it possible, he said to himself, that this is the man whose offensive jests are to drive me from this house.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”