الفصل الفصل 27 · FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

. FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

The present time, Great God! is the ark of the Lord;

cursed be he who touches it.--_Diderot_.

The reader will kindly excuse us if we give very few clear and definite

facts concerning this period of Julien's life. It is not that we

lack facts; quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw in

the seminary is too black for the medium colour which the author

has endeavoured to preserve throughout these pages. Those of our

contemporaries who have suffered from certain things cannot remember

them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that

of reading a tale.

Julien achieved scant success in his essays at hypocritical gestures.

He experienced moments of disgust, and even of complete discouragement.

He was not a success, even in a a vile career. The slightest help

from outside would have sufficed to have given him heart again, for

the difficulty to overcome was not very great, but he was alone, like

a derelict ship in the middle of the ocean. "And when I do succeed,"

he would say to himself, "think of having to pass a whole lifetime in

such awful company, gluttons who have no thought but for the large

omelette which they will guzzle at dinner-time, or persons like the

abbé Castanède, who finds no crime too black! They will attain power,

but, great heavens! at what cost.

"The will of man is powerful, I read it everywhere, but is it enough to

overcome so great a disgust? The task of all the great men was easy by

comparison. However terrible was the danger, they found it fine, and

who can realise, except myself, the ugliness of my surroundings?"

This moment was the most trying in his whole life. It would have been

so easy for him to have enlisted in one of the fine regiments at the

garrison of Besançon. He could have become a Latin master. He needed so

little for his subsistence, but in that case no more career, no more

future for his imagination. It was equivalent to death. Here is one of

his sad days in detail:

"I have so often presumed to congratulate myself on being different

from the other young peasants! Well, I have lived enough to realise

that _difference engenders hate_," he said to himself one morning.

This great truth had just been borne in upon him by one of his most

irritating failures. He had been working for eight days at teaching a

pupil who lived in an odour of sanctity. He used to go out with him

into the courtyard and listen submissively to pieces of fatuity enough

to send one to sleep standing. Suddenly the weather turned stormy. The

thunder growled, and the holy pupil exclaimed as he roughly pushed him

away.

"Listen! Everyone for himself in this world. I don't want to be burned

by the thunder. God may strike you with lightning like a blasphemer,

like a Voltaire."

"I deserve to be drowned if I go to sleep during the storm," exclaimed

Julien, with his teeth clenched with rage, and with his eyes opened

towards the sky now furrowed by the lightning. "Let us try the conquest

of some other rogue."

The bell rang for the abbé Castanède's course of sacred history. That

day the abbé Castanède was teaching those young peasants already

so frightened by their father's hardships and poverty, that the

Government, that entity so terrible in their eyes, possessed no real

and legitimate power except by virtue of the delegation of God's vicar

on earth.

"Render yourselves worthy, by the holiness of your life and by your

obedience, of the benevolence of the Pope. Be _like a stick in his

hands_," he added, "and you will obtain a superb position, where you

will be far from all control, and enjoy the King's commands, a position

from which you cannot be removed, and where one-third of the salary

is paid by the Government, while the faithful who are moulded by your

preaching pay the other two-thirds."

Castanède stopped in the courtyard after he left the lesson-room. "It

is particularly appropriate to say of a curé," he said to the pupils

who formed a ring round him, "that the place is worth as much as the

man is worth. I myself have known parishes in the mountains where the

surplice fees were worth more than that of many town livings. There was

quite as much money, without counting the fat capons, the eggs, fresh

butter, and a thousand and one pleasant details, and there the curé is

indisputably the first man. There is not a good meal to which he is not

invited, fêted, etc."

Castanède had scarcely gone back to his room before the pupils split up

into knots. Julien did not form part of any of them; he was left out

like a black sheep. He saw in every knot a pupil tossing a coin in the

air, and if he managed to guess right in this game of heads or tails,

his comrades would decide that he would soon have one of those fat

livings.

Anecdotes ensued. A certain young priest, who had scarcely been

ordained a year, had given a tame rabbit to the maidservant of an old

curé, and had succeeded in being asked to be his curate. In a few

months afterwards, for the curé had quickly died, he had replaced him

in that excellent living. Another had succeeded in getting himself

designated as a successor to a very rich town living, by being present

at all the meals of an old, paralytic curé, and by dexterously carving

his poultry. The seminarists, like all young people, exaggerated the

effect of those little devices, which have an element of originality,

and which strike the imagination.

"I must take part in these conversations," said Julien to himself. When

they did not talk about sausages and good livings, the conversation ran

on the worldly aspect of ecclesiastical doctrine, on the differences of

bishops and prefects, of mayors and curés. Julien caught sight of the

conception of a second god, but of a god who was much more formidable

and much more powerful than the other one. That second god was the

Pope. They said among themselves, in a low voice, however, and when

they were quite sure that they would not be heard by Pirard, that

the reason for the Pope not taking the trouble of nominating all the

prefects and mayors of France, was that he had entrusted that duty to

the King of France by entitling him a senior son of the Church.

It was about this time that Julien thought he could exploit, for the

benefit of his own reputation, his knowledge of De Maistre's book

on the Pope. In point of fact, he did astonish his comrades, but it

was only another misfortune. He displeased them by expounding their

own opinions better than they could themselves. Chélan had acted as

imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the

habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words,

but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the

person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is

offensive.

Julien's command of language added consequently a new crime to his

score. By dint of thinking about him, his colleagues succeeded in

expressing the horror with which he would inspire them by a single

expression; they nicknamed him Martin Luther, "particularly," they

said, "because of that infernal logic which makes him so proud."

Several young seminarists had a fresher complexion than Julien, and

could pass as better-looking, but he had white hands, and was unable to

conceal certain refined habits of personal cleanliness. This advantage

proved a disadvantage in the gloomy house in which chance had cast

him. The dirty peasants among whom he lived asserted that he had very

abandoned morals. We fear that we may weary our reader by a narration

of the thousand and one misfortunes of our hero. The most vigorous of

his comrades, for example, wanted to start the custom of beating him.

He was obliged to arm himself with an iron compass, and to indicate,

though by signs, that he would make use of it. Signs cannot figure in a

spy's report to such good advantage as words.