Director of the Seminary would have embraced Julien in the name of logic, such clarity, precision, and point did he find in the young man’s answers.
‘This is a bold and healthy mind,’ he said to himself, ‘but corpus debile(a frail body).
‘Do you often fall like that?’ he asked Julien in French, pointing with his finger to the floor.
‘It was the first time in my life; the sight of the porter’s face paralysed me,’ Julien explained, colouring like a child.
The abbe Pirard almost smiled.
‘Such is the effect of the vain pomps of this world; you are evidently accustomed to smiling faces, positive theatres of falsehood. The truth is austere, Sir. But is not our task here below austere also? You will have to see that your conscience is on its guard against this weakness: Undue sensibility to vain outward charms.
‘Had you not been recommended to me,’ said the abbe Pirard, returning with marked pleasure to the Latin tongue, ‘had you not been recommended to me by a man such as the abbe Chelan, I should address you in the vain language of this world to which it appears that you are too well accustomed. The entire bursary for which you apply is, I may tell you, the hardest thing in the world to obtain. But the abbe Chelan has earned little, by fifty-six years of apostolic labours, if he cannot dispose of a bursary at the Seminary.’
After saying these words, the abbe Pirard advised Julien not to join any secret society or congregation without his consent.
‘I give you my word of honour,’ said Julien with the heartfelt warmth of an honest man.
The Director of the Seminary smiled for the first time.
‘That expression is not in keeping here,’ he told him; ‘it is too suggestive of the vain honour of men of the world, which leads them into so many errors and often into crime. You owe me obedience in virtue of the seventeenth paragraph of the Bull Unam Ecclesiam of Saint Pius V. I am your ecclesiastical superior. In this house to hear, my dearly beloved son, is to obey. How much money have you?’
(‘Now we come to the point,’ thought Julien, ‘this is the reason of the “dearly beloved son”.’)
‘Thirty-five francs, Father.’
‘Keep a careful note of how you spend your money; you will have to account for it to me.’
This exhausting interview had lasted three hours. Julien was told to summon the porter.
‘Put Julien Sorel in cell number 103,’ the abbe Pirard told the man.
As a special favour, he was giving Julien a room to himself.
‘Take up his trunk,’ he added.
Julien lowered his eyes and saw his trunk staring him in the face; he had been looking at it for three hours and had never seen it.
On arriving at No. 103, which was a tiny room eight feet square on the highest floor of the building, Julien observed that it looked out towards the ramparts, beyond which one saw the smiling plain which the Doubs divides from the city.
‘What a charming view!’ exclaimed Julien; in speaking thus to himself he was not conscious of the feeling implied by his words. The violent sensations he had experienced in the short time that he had spent in Besancon had completely drained his strength. He sat down by the window on the solitary wooden chair that was in his cell, and at once fell into a profound slumber. He did not hear the supper bell, nor that for Benediction; he had been forgotten.
When the first rays of the sun awakened him next morning, he found himself lying upon the floor.
Chapter 26
THE WORLD, OR WHAT the Rich Lack
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I AM ALONE ON EARTH, no one deigns to think of me. All the people I see making their fortunes have a brazenness and a hard-heartedness which I do not sense in myself. Ah! I shall soon be dead, either of hunger, or from the sorrow of finding men so hard.
YOUNG
He made haste to brush his coat and to go downstairs; he was late. An under-master rebuked him severely; instead of seeking to excuse himself, Julien crossed his arms on his breast:
‘Peccavi, pater optime (I have sinned, I confess my fault, O Father),’ he said with a contrite air.
This was a most successful beginning. The sharp wits among the seminarists saw that they had to deal with a man who was not new to the game. The recreation hour came, Julien saw himself the object of general curiosity. But they found in him merely reserve and silence. Following the maxims that he had laid down for himself, he regarded his three hundred and twenty-one comrades as so many enemies; the most dangerous of all in his eyes was the abbe Pirard.
A few days later, Julien had to choose a confessor, he was furnished with a list.
‘Eh; Great God, for what do they take me?’ he said to himself. ‘Do they suppose I can’t take a hint?’ And he chose the abbe Pirard.
Though he did not suspect it, this step was decisive. A little seminarist, still quite a boy, and a native of Verrieres, who, from the first day, had declared himself his friend, informed him that if he had chosen M. Castanede, the vice-principal of the Seminary, he would perhaps have shown greater prudence.
‘The abbe Castanede is the enemy of M. Pirard, who is suspected of Jansenism’; the little seminarist added, whispering this information in his ear.
All the first steps taken by our hero who fancied himself so prudent were, like his choice of a confessor, foolish in the extreme. Led astray by all the presumption of an imaginative man, he mistook his intentions for facts, and thought himself a consummate hypocrite. His folly went the length of his reproaching himself for his successes in this art of the weak.
‘Alas! It is my sole weapon! In another epoch, it would have been by speaking actions in the face of the enemy that I should have earned my bread.’
Julien, satisfied with his own conduct, looked around him; he found everywhere an appearance of the purest virtue.
Nine or ten of the seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity, and had visions like Saint Teresa and Saint Francis, when he received the Stigmata upon Monte Verna, in the Apennines. But this was a great secret which their friends kept to themselves. These poor young visionaries were almost always in the infirmary. Some hundred others combined with a robust faith an unwearying application. They worked until they made themselves ill, but without learning much. Two or three distinguished themselves by real talent, and, among these, one named Chazel; but Julien felt himself repelled by them, and they by him.
The rest of the three hundred and twenty-one seminarists were composed entirely of coarse creatures who were by no means certain that they understood the Latin words which they repeated all day long. Almost all of them were the sons of peasants, and preferred to earn their bread by reciting a few Latin words rather than by tilling the soil. It was after making this discovery, in the first few days, that Julien promised himself a rapid success. ‘In every service, there is need of intelligent people, for after all there is work to be done,’ he told himself. ‘Under Napoleon, I should have been a serjeant; among these future cures, I shall be a Vicar–General.
‘All these poor devils,’ he added, ‘labourers from the cradle, have lived, until they came here, upon skim milk and black bread. In their cottages, they tasted meat only five or six times in a year. Like the Roman soldiers who found active service a holiday, these boorish peasants are enchanted by the luxuries of the Seminary.’
Julien never read anything in their lack-lustre eyes beyond the satisfaction of a bodily need after dinner, and the expectation of a bodily pleasure before the meal. Such were the people among whom he must distinguish himself; but what