Part 9
Julien at last understood the half-words he had overheard when the high society of the district came to dine at M. de Rênal's. This privileged circle was deeply concerned with the choice of first deputy-mayor, a possibility of which the rest of the town, and especially the liberals, did not even suspect. What gave it importance was that, as everyone knows, the eastern side of the great street of Verrières must recede more than nine feet, for this street has become a royal road.
Now, if M. de Moirod, who had three houses liable to recede, were to become first deputy-mayor, and subsequently mayor in the event of M. de Rênal's being appointed deputy, he would turn a blind eye, and one could make to the houses that encroach upon the public way small, imperceptible repairs, by means of which they would last a hundred years. Despite the deep piety and acknowledged integrity of M. de Moirod, it was certain he would be accommodating, for he had many children. Among the houses that were to recede, nine belonged to the very best people in Verrières.
In Julien's eyes, this intrigue was far more important than the history of the battle of Fontenoy, whose name he saw for the first time in one of the books Fouqué had sent him. There were things that had astonished Julien ever since, five years ago, he had begun going to the curé's in the evenings. But discretion and humility of mind being the first qualities of a theology student, it had always been impossible for him to ask questions.
One day, Mme de Rênal was giving an order to her husband's valet de chambre, the enemy of Julien.
'But, madame, this is the last Friday of the month,' answered the man with a singular air.
'Go,' said Mme de Rênal.
'Well,' said Julien, 'he is going to that hay store, formerly a church and recently restored to worship; but what for? That is one of those mysteries I have never been able to penetrate.'
'It is a most salutary but singular institution,' replied Mme de Rênal; 'women are not admitted: all I know is that everyone there uses the familiar tu. For instance, this servant will find M. Valenod there, and that proud, foolish man will not be displeased to be addressed as tu by Saint-Jean, and will answer in the same tone. If you care to know what goes on there, I shall ask for details from M. de Maugiron and M. Valenod. We pay twenty francs per servant so that one day they may not cut our throats.'
Time flew. The memory of his mistress's charms distracted Julien from his dark ambition. The necessity of not speaking to her of sad and reasonable things, since they were of opposing parties, added, without his suspecting it, to the happiness he owed her and to the sway she was gaining over him.
In the moments when the presence of overly intelligent children reduced them to speaking only the language of cold reason, it was with perfect docility that Julien, looking at her with eyes sparkling with love, listened to her explanations of the world as it goes. Often, in the middle of the account of some cunning piece of roguery, on the occasion of a road or a supply contract that astonished his mind, Mme de Rênal's attention would suddenly wander to the point of delirium; Julien had need to scold her, and she allowed herself with him the same intimate gestures as with her children. For there were days when she had the illusion of loving him as her child. Had she not constantly to answer his naive questions about a thousand simple things that a well-born child does not ignore at fifteen? An instant later, she admired him as her master. His genius went so far as to frighten her; she believed she saw more clearly each day the great man of the future in this young abbé. She saw him pope, she saw him prime minister like Richelieu.
'Shall I live long enough to see you in your glory?' she said to Julien. 'The place is made for a great man; the monarchy, religion have need of it.'
CHAPTER XVIII
A KING AT VERRIÈRES
Are you good for nothing but to be flung there like a corpse of the people, soulless, whose veins have no more blood?
Bishop's discourse, at the chapel of Saint-Clément.
On the 3rd of September at ten in the evening, a gendarme woke all of Verrières by riding up the great street at a gallop; he brought the news that His Majesty the King of *** would arrive the following Sunday, and it was then Tuesday. The prefect authorized, that is to say requested, the formation of a guard of honor; all possible pomp must be displayed. A courier was dispatched to Vergy. M. de Rênal arrived during the night and found the whole town in a ferment. Everyone had his claims; the least busy hired balconies to see the king's entry.
Who would command the guard of honor? M. de Rênal immediately saw how important it was, in the interest of the houses liable to recede, that M. de Moirod should have this command. It might serve as a title to the post of first deputy-mayor. There was nothing to be said against M. de Moirod's devotion; it was beyond compare, but he had never mounted a horse. He was a man of thirty-six, timid in every way, who feared equally falling and ridicule.
The mayor had him summoned at five in the morning.
'You see, sir, that I seek your counsel as if already you held the post to which all honest men would raise you. In this unhappy town, manufactures prosper, the liberal party becomes millionaire, aspires to power, will know how to make weapons of everything. Let us consult the interest of the king, that of the monarchy, and above all the interest of our holy religion. To whom, sir, do you think the command of the guard of honor can be entrusted?'
Despite the horrible fear the horse inspired in him, M. de Moirod ended by accepting this honor as a martyrdom.
'I shall know how to adopt a fitting tone,' he said to the mayor.
Scarcely was there time to have the uniforms arranged, which seven years before had served at the passage of a prince of the blood.
At seven o'clock Mme de Rênal arrived from Vergy with Julien and the children. She found her salon filled with liberal ladies who preached union of the parties, and came to beg her to engage her husband to grant a place among the guard of honor to their men. One of them claimed that if her husband were not chosen, grief would make him bankrupt. Mme de Rênal quickly dismissed all these people; she seemed greatly occupied.
Julien was astonished and even more angered that she made a mystery to him of what agitated her. 'I had foreseen it,' he said to himself bitterly; 'her love vanishes before the happiness of receiving a king in her house. All this fuss dazzles her. She will love me again when the ideas of her caste no longer trouble her brain.'
Strange thing, he loved her the more for it.
The upholsterers were beginning to fill the house; he watched long in vain for an occasion to say a word to her. At last he found her coming out of his own room, Julien carrying one of his garments. They were alone. He wished to speak to her. She fled, refusing to listen. 'I am a fool to love such a woman; ambition makes her as mad as her husband.'
She was even more so: one of her great desires, which she had never confessed to Julien for fear of shocking him, was to see him lay aside, if only for a day, his dreary black habit. With an ingenuity truly admirable in a woman so natural, she obtained first from M. de Moirod, and then from the sub-prefect M. de Maugiron, that Julien should be named guard of honor in preference to five or six young men, sons of very wealthy manufacturers, two at least of exemplary piety. M. Valenod, who counted on lending his carriage to the prettiest women of the town and showing off his fine Norman horses, consented to give one of his horses to Julien, the being he hated most. But all the guards of honor had, of their own or borrowed, one of those sky-blue uniforms with two silver colonel's epaulettes, which had shone seven years before. Mme de Rênal wanted a new habit, and she had but four days to send to Besançon and have returned the uniform coat, arms, hat, etc., all that makes a guard of honor. The amusing part is that she found it imprudent to have Julien's coat made at Verrières. She wished to surprise him and the town.
The business of the guards of honor and of public spirit settled, the mayor had to occupy himself with a great religious ceremony: the King of *** would not pass through Verrières without visiting the famous relic of Saint Clement preserved at Bray-le-Haut, a short league from the town. A numerous clergy was desired; this was the most difficult matter to arrange. M. Maslon, the new curé, wished at all costs to avoid the presence of M. Chélan. In vain M. de Rênal represented to him that it would be imprudent. M. the Marquis de La Mole, whose ancestors were so long governors of the province, had been designated to accompany the King of ***. He had known the Abbé Chélan for thirty years. He would certainly ask after him on arriving at Verrières, and if he found him discraced, he was the man to go seek him in the little house where he had retired, accompanied by all the cortège he could muster. What an insult!
'I am dishonored here and at Besançon,' answered the Abbé Maslon, 'if he appears in my clergy. A Jansenist, good God!'
'Whatever you may say, my dear abbé,' replied M. de Rênal, 'I shall not expose the administration of Verrières to receive an affront from M. de La Mole. You do not know him; he thinks well at court, but here, in the provinces, he is a malicious satirical joker, seeking only to embarrass people. He is capable, solely to amuse himself, of covering us with ridicule in the eyes of the liberals.'
It was only in the night of Saturday to Sunday, after three days of parleying, that the pride of the Abbé Maslon bent before the mayor's fear, which turned to courage. A honeyed letter had to be written to the Abbé Chélan, begging him to assist at the ceremony of the relic of Bray-le-Haut, if his great age and infirmities permitted. M. Chélan asked for and obtained an invitation letter for Julien, who was to accompany him as sub-deacon.
From the morning of Sunday, thousands of peasants arriving from the neighboring mountains flooded the streets of Verrières. The sun was most beautiful. At last, toward three o'clock, all this crowd was stirred; a great fire was seen upon a rock two leagues from Verrières. This signal announced that the king had just entered the territory of the department. Immediately the sound of all the bells, and the repeated discharges of an old Spanish cannon belonging to the town, marked its joy at this great event. Half the population mounted the roofs. All the women were at the balconies. The guard of honor set in motion. The brilliant uniforms were admired; each recognized a relation, a friend. They mocked the fear of M. de Moirod, whose prudent hand at every instant was ready to seize the saddle-bow. But one observation made all others forgotten: the first horseman of the ninth rank was a very pretty young man, very slim, whom at first they did not recognize. Soon a cry of indignation from some, from others silence of astonishment, announced a general sensation. They recognized in this young man, mounted on one of M. Valenod's Norman horses, little Sorel, the carpenter's son. There was but one cry against the mayor, especially among the liberals. What, because this little workman disguised as an abbé was tutor to his brats, he had the audacity to name him guard of honor, to the prejudice of such and such gentlemen, rich manufacturers!
'These gentlemen,' said a lady banker, 'ought well to do some injury to this little insolent, born in the mud.'
'He is sly and wears a sabre,' answered the neighbor; 'he would be treacherous enough to slash their faces.' The talk of the noble society was more dangerous. The ladies asked one another whether this high indecorum proceeded from the mayor alone. Generally they did justice to his contempt for lack of birth.
While he was the occasion of so much talk, Julien was the happiest of men. Naturally bold, he sat better on horseback than most of the young men of this mountain town. He saw in the eyes of the women that he was the subject of remark.
His epaulettes were more brilliant, because they were new. His horse reared at every instant; he was at the height of joy.
His happiness knew no bounds when, passing near the old rampart, the noise of the little cannon made his horse leap out of rank. By great chance he did not fall; from that moment he felt a hero. He was Napoleon's orderly officer and charging a battery.
One person was happier than he. First she had seen him pass from one of the windows of the town hall; then mounting a carriage and making rapidly a great detour, she arrived in time to tremble when his horse carried him out of rank. At last, her carriage issuing at full gallop by another gate of the town, she managed to rejoin the road by which the king was to pass, and could follow the guard of honor at twenty paces' distance, amid a noble dust. Ten thousand peasants cried: 'Long live the king!' when the mayor had the honor of addressing His Majesty. An hour later, when all speeches were heard and the king was about to enter the town, the little cannon began again to fire in hurried volleys. But an accident followed, not for the gunners who had proved themselves at Leipzig and Montmirail, but for the future first deputy-mayor, M. de Moirod. His horse gently deposited him in the only mudhole on the high road, which caused a scandal, because he had to be pulled out of it so that the king's carriage might pass.
His Majesty descended at the fine new church, which that day was decked with all its crimson hangings. The king was to dine, and immediately after remount his carriage to go venerate the relic of Saint Clement. Scarcely was the king in the church than Julien galloped to M. de Rênal's house. There he sighed and laid aside his fine sky-blue habit, his sabre, his epaulettes, to resume the shabby little black coat. He remounted and in a few moments was at Bray-le-Haut, which occupies the summit of a very fine hill. 'Enthusiasm multiplies these peasants,' thought Julien. 'One cannot stir at Verrières, and here are more than ten thousand around this ancient abbey.' Half ruined by revolutionary vandalism, it had been magnificently restored since the Restoration, and people were beginning to speak of miracles. Julien rejoined the Abbé Chélan, who scolded him soundly and gave him a cassock and a surplice. He dressed quickly and followed M. Chélan, who was going to the young Bishop of Agde. He was a nephew of M. de La Mole, recently appointed, and had been charged with showing the relic to the king. But the bishop could not be found.
The clergy grew impatient. They awaited their chief in the dark, Gothic cloister of the ancient abbey. Twenty-four curés had been assembled to represent the old chapter of Bray-le-Haut, composed before 1789 of twenty-four canons. After deploring for three quarters of an hour the youth of the bishop, the curés thought it fitting that the Dean should withdraw toward Monseigneur to warn him that the king was about to arrive, and that it was urgent to repair to the choir. The great age of M. Chélan had made him dean; despite the ill humor he showed toward Julien, he signed to him to follow. Julien wore his surplice very well. By means of I know not what ecclesiastical toilet device, he had rendered his fine curled hair very flat; but, by an oversight that redoubled M. Chélan's anger, beneath the long folds of his cassock one could perceive the spurs of the guard of honor.
Arrived at the bishop's apartment, great liveried lackeys scarcely deigned to answer the old curé that Monseigneur was not visible. They mocked him when he wished to explain that in his quality of dean of the noble chapter of Bray-le-Haut he had the privilege of being admitted at all times to the officiating bishop.
Julien's haughty temper was offended by the insolence of the lackeys. He began to traverse the dormitories of the ancient abbey, shaking all the doors he met. A very small one yielded to his efforts, and he found himself in a cell amid Monseigneur's valets de chambre, in black dress with chains about their necks. At his hurried air, these gentlemen took him for one sent by the bishop and let him pass. He took a few steps and found himself in a vast Gothic hall, extremely dark, and entirely wainscoted with black oak; with one exception, the ogive windows had been walled up with bricks. The coarseness of this masonry was disguised by nothing, and made a sad contrast with the ancient magnificence of the woodwork. The two great sides of this hall, celebrated among Burgundian antiquaries and which Duke Charles the Bold had built toward 1470 in expiation of some sin, were furnished with richly carved wooden stalls. There could be seen, figured in woods of different colors, all the mysteries of the Apocalypse.
This melancholy magnificence, degraded by the sight of bare bricks and plaster still quite white, touched Julien. He stopped in silence. At the other end of the hall, near the only window through which daylight entered, he saw a movable mahogany mirror. A young man, in violet robe and lace surplice, but bareheaded, was stationed three paces from the glass. This piece of furniture seemed strange in such a place, and had no doubt been brought from the town. Julien found that the young man looked irritated; with his right hand he was gravely giving blessings toward the mirror.
'What can this mean,' he thought; 'is it a preparatory ceremony this young priest is performing? Perhaps he is the bishop's secretary... he will be insolent like the lackeys... faith, no matter, let us try.'
He advanced and traversed rather slowly the length of the hall, his gaze ever fixed upon the single window, and looking at this young man who continued to give blessings executed slowly but in infinite number, and without resting an instant.
As he drew nearer, he distinguished better his angry air. The richness of the surplice trimmed with lace involuntarily stopped Julien a few paces from the magnificent mirror.
'It is my duty to speak,' he said to himself at last; but the beauty of the hall had moved him, and he was already wounded by the harsh words he was about to be addressed.
The young man saw him in the pier-glass, turned round, and suddenly abandoning his angry air, said to him in the gentlest tone:
'Well! Sir, is it arranged at last?'
Julien remained stupefied. As the young man turned toward him, Julien saw the pectoral cross upon his breast: it was the Bishop of Agde.
'So young,' thought Julien; 'scarcely six or eight years older than I...'
And he was ashamed of his spurs.
'Monseigneur,' he answered timidly, 'I am sent by the dean of the chapter, M. Chélan.'
'Ah! he is greatly recommended to me,' said the bishop in a polite tone that redoubled Julien's enchantment. 'But I beg your pardon, Sir, I took you for the person who is to bring me my mitre. It was badly packed at Paris; the silver cloth is horribly damaged toward the top. That will make the most vulgar effect,' added the young bishop with a sad air, 'and still they make me wait!'
'Monseigneur, I shall go seek the mitre, if Your Grandeur permits.'
Julien's fine eyes had their effect.
'Go, Sir,' answered the bishop with a charming politeness; 'I must have it at once. I am desolated to make the gentlemen of the chapter wait.'
When Julien had reached the middle of the hall he turned toward the bishop and saw him resumed in giving blessings. 'What can this be?' Julien asked himself; 'no doubt it is an ecclesiastical preparation necessary to the ceremony about to take place.' As he arrived at the cell where the valets de chambre were, he saw the mitre in their hands. These gentlemen, yielding in spite of themselves to Julien's imperious glance, handed him Monseigneur's mitre.
He felt proud to carry it: crossing the hall, he walked slowly; he held it with respect. He found the bishop seated before the glass; but, from time to time, his right hand, though weary, still gave the blessing. Julien helped him place his mitre. The bishop shook his head.
'Ah! it will hold,' said he to Julien with a contented air. 'Will you move aside a little?'
Then the bishop went very quickly to the middle of the room, then drew near the mirror with slow steps, resumed his angry air, and gravely gave blessings.
Julien was motionless with astonishment; he was tempted to understand, but dared not. The bishop stopped, and looking at him with an air that rapidly lost its gravity:
'What say you of my mitre, Sir, does it sit well?'
'Very well, Monseigneur.'
'It is not too far back? that would look rather foolish; but one must not wear it pulled down over the eyes like an officer's shako either.'
'It seems to me to sit very well.'
'The King of *** is accustomed to a venerable clergy and no doubt very grave. I should not wish, especially because of my age, to appear too light.'
And the bishop set himself again to walk while giving blessings.
'It is clear,' said Julien, daring at last to understand; 'he is practicing giving the blessing.'
After some moments:
'I am ready,' said the bishop. 'Go, Sir, warn the dean and the gentlemen of the chapter.'
Soon M. Chélan, followed by the two oldest curés, entered by a very large magnificently sculptured door, which Julien had not perceived. But this time he remained in his rank the last of all, and could see the bishop only above the shoulders of the ecclesiastics who crowded at that door.
The bishop traversed the hall slowly; when he reached the threshold, the curés formed in procession. After a little disorder, the procession began to move, intoning a psalm. The bishop advanced last, between M. Chélan and another very old curé. Julien slipped quite close to Monseigneur, as attached to the Abbé Chélan. They followed the long corridors of the abbey of Bray-le-Haut; despite the brilliant sun, they were dark and damp. They arrived at last at the cloister portico. Julien was stupefied with admiration for so fine a ceremony. Ambition reawakened by the young age of the bishop, the sensitivity and exquisite politeness of this prelate contended for his heart. This politeness was quite another thing than that of M. de Rênal, even on his good days. 'The higher one rises toward the first rank of society,' said Julien, 'the more one finds these charming manners.'
“Stories of the world, in your language.”