Bab Bab 26 · THE WORLD, OR WHAT THE RICH LACK

. THE WORLD, OR WHAT THE RICH LACK

I am alone in the world. No one deigns to spare me

a thought. All those whom I see make their fortune,

have an insolence and hardness of heart which I do not

feel in myself. They hate me by reason of kindness

and good-humour. Oh, I shall die soon, either from

starvation or the unhappiness of seeing men so hard of

heart.--_Young_.

He hastened to brush his clothes and run down. He was late. Instead of

trying to justify himself Julien crossed his arms over his breast.

"Peccavi pater optime (I have sinned, I confess my fault, oh, my

father)," he said with a contrite air.

This first speech was a great success. The clever ones among the

seminarists saw that they had to deal with a man who knew something

about the elements of the profession. The recreation hour arrived, and

Julien saw that he was the object of general curiosity, but he only

manifested reserved silence. Following the maxims he had laid down for

himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one comrades as

enemies. The most dangerous of all in his eyes was the abbé Pirard. A

few days afterwards Julien had to choose a confessor, and was given a

list.

"Great heavens! what do they take me for?" he said to himself. "Do they

think I don't understand what's what?" Then he chose the abbé Pirard.

This step proved decisive without his suspecting it.

A little seminarist, who was quite young and a native of Verrières, and

who had declared himself his friend since the first day, informed him

that he would probably have acted more prudently if he had chosen M.

Castanède, the sub-director of the seminary.

"The abbé Castanède is the enemy of Pirard, who is suspected of

Jansenism," added the little seminarist in a whisper. All the first

steps of our hero were, in spite of the prudence on which he plumed

himself, as much mistakes as his choice of a confessor. Misled as he

was by all the self-confidence of a man of imagination, he took his

projects for facts, and believed that he was a consummate hypocrite.

His folly went so far as to reproach himself for his success in this

kind of weakness.

"Alas, it is my only weapon," he said to himself. "At another period I

should have earned my livelihood by eloquent deeds in the face of the

enemy."

Satisfied as he was with his own conduct, Julien looked around him. He

found everywhere the appearance of the purest virtue.

Eight or ten seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity, and had

visions like Saint Theresa, and Saint Francis, when he received his

stigmata on Mount _Vernia_ in the Appenines. But it was a great secret

and their friends concealed it. These poor young people who had

visions were always in the infirmary. A hundred others combined an

indefatigable application to a robust faith. They worked till they fell

ill, but without learning much. Two or three were distinguished by a

real talent, amongst others a student of the name of Chazel, but both

they and Julien felt mutually unsympathetic.

The rest of these three hundred and twenty-one seminarists consisted

exclusively of coarse persons, who were by no means sure of

understanding the Latin words which they kept on repeating the livelong

day. Nearly all were the sons of peasants, and they preferred to gain

their livelihood by reciting some Latin words than by ploughing the

earth. It was after this examination of his colleagues that Julien,

during the first few days, promised himself a speedy success.

"Intelligent people are needed in every service," he said to himself,

"for, after all, there is work to be done. I should have been a

sergeant under Napoleon. I shall be a grand vicar among these future

curés."

"All these poor devils," he added, "manual labourers as they have been

since their childhood, have lived on curded milk and black bread up

till they arrived here. They would only eat meat five or six times a

year in their hovels. Like the Roman soldiers who used to find war the

time of rest, these poor peasants are enchanted with the delights of

the seminary."

Julien could never read anything in their gloomy eyes but the

satisfaction of physical craving after dinner, and the expectation

of sensual pleasure before the meal. Such were the people among whom

Julien had to distinguish himself; but the fact which he did not know,

and which they refrained from telling him, was that coming out first

in the different courses of dogma, ecclesiastical history, etc., etc.,

which are taken at the seminary, constituted in their eyes, neither

more nor less than a splendid sin.

Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at

bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the

popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France

seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. It is the

submissive heart which counts for everything in its eyes. It suspects,

and rightly so, any success in studies, even sacred ones. What is to

prevent a superior man from crossing over to the opposite side like

Sièyes or Gregory. The trembling Church clings on to the Pope as its

one chance of safety. The Pope alone is in a position to attempt to

paralyse all personal self-examination, and to make an impression by

means of the pompous piety of his court ceremonial on the bored and

morbid spirit of fashionable society.

Julien, as he began to get some glimpse of these various truths,

which are none the less in total contradiction to all the official

pronouncements of any seminary, fell into a profound melancholy. He

worked a great deal and rapidly succeeded in learning things which were

extremely useful to a priest, extremely false in his own eyes, and

devoid of the slightest interest for him. He felt there was nothing

else to do.

"Am I then forgotten by the whole world," he thought. He did not know

that M. Pirard had received and thrown into the fire several letters

with the Dijon stamp in which the most lively passion would pierce

through the most formal conventionalism of style. "This love seems to

be fought by great attacks of remorse. All the better," thought the

abbé Pirard. "At any rate this lad has not loved an infidel woman."

One day the abbé Pirard opened a letter which seemed half-blotted out

by tears. It was an adieu for ever. "At last," said the writer to

Julien, "Heaven has granted me the grace of hating, not the author of

my fall, but my fall itself. The sacrifice has been made, dear one, not

without tears as you see. The safety of those to whom I must devote

my life, and whom you love so much, is the decisive factor. A just

but terrible God will no longer see His way to avenge on them their

mother's crimes. Adieu, Julien. Be just towards all men." The end of

the letter was nearly entirely illegible. The writer gave an address at

Dijon, but at the same time expressed the hope that Julien would not

answer, or at any rate would employ language which a reformed woman

could read without blushing. Julien's melancholy, aggravated by the

mediocre nourishment which the contractor who gave dinners at thirteen

centimes per head supplied to the seminary, began to affect his health,

when Fouqué suddenly appeared in his room one morning.

"I have been able to get in at last. I have duly been five times to

Besançon in order to see you. Could never get in. I put someone by the

door to watch. Why the devil don't you ever go out?"

"It is a test which I have imposed on myself."

"I find you greatly changed, but here you are again. I have just

learned from a couple of good five franc pieces that I was only a fool

not to have offered them on my first journey."

The conversation of the two friends went on for ever. Julien changed

colour when Fouqué said to him,

"Do you know, by the by, that your pupils' mother has become positively

devout."

And he began to talk in that off-hand manner which makes so singular an

impression on the passionate soul, whose dearest interests are being

destroyed without the speaker having the faintest suspicion of it.

"Yes, my friend, the most exalted devoutness. She is said to make

pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of the abbé Maslon, who has

played the spy so long on that poor M. Chélan, Madame de Rênal would

have nothing to do with him. She goes to confession to Dijon or

Besançon."

"She goes to Besançon," said Julien, flushing all over his forehead.

"Pretty often," said Fouqué in a questioning manner.

"Have you got any _Constitutionnels_ on you?"

"What do you say?" replied Fouqué.

"I'm asking if you've got any _Constitutionnels_?" went on Julien

in the quietest tone imaginable. "They cost thirty sous a number here."

"What!" exclaimed Fouqué. "Liberals even in the seminary! Poor France,"

he added, assuming the abbé Maslon's hypocritical voice and sugary tone.

This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero, if he had not

been put on the track of an important discovery by some words addressed

to him the following day by the little seminarist from Verrières.

Julien's conduct since he had been at the seminary had been nothing but

a series of false steps. He began to make bitter fun of himself.

In point of fact the important actions in his life had been cleverly

managed, but he was careless about details, and cleverness in a

seminary consists in attention to details. Consequently, he had already

the reputation among his comrades of being a _strong-minded person._ He

had been betrayed by a number of little actions.

He had been convicted in their eyes of this enormity, _he thought and

judged for himself_ instead of blindly following authority and example.

The abbé Pirard had been no help to him. He had not spoken to him

on a single occasion apart from the confessional, and even there he

listened more than he spoke. Matters would have been very different if

he had chosen the abbé Castanède. The moment that Julien realised his

folly, he ceased to be bored. He wished to know the whole extent of the

evil, and to effect this emerged a little from that haughty obstinate

silence with which he had scrupulously rebuffed his comrades. It was

now that they took their revenge on him. His advances were welcomed by

a contempt verging on derision. He realised that there had not been one

single hour from the time of his entry into the seminary, particularly

during recreation time, which had not resulted in affecting him one

way or another, which had not increased the number of his enemies, or

won for him the goodwill of some seminarist who was either sincerely

virtuous or of a fibre slightly less coarse than that of the others.

The evil to repair was infinite, and the task very difficult.

Henceforth, Julien's attention was always on guard. The problem before

him was to map out a new character for himself.

The moving of his eyes for example, occasioned him a great deal of

trouble. It is with good reason that they are carried lowered in these

places.

"How presumptuous I was at Verrières," said Julien to himself. "I

thought I lived; I was only preparing for life, and here I am at last

in the world such as I shall find it, until my part comes to an end,

surrounded by real enemies. What immense difficulties," he added,

"are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute. It is

enough to put the labours of Hercules into the shade. The Hercules of

modern times is the Pope Sixtus Quintus, who deceived by his modesty

fifteen years on end forty Cardinals who had seen the liveliness and

haughtiness of his whole youth.

"So knowledge is nothing here," he said to himself with disgust.

"Progress in doctrine, in sacred history, etc., only seem to count.

Everything said on those subjects is only intended to entrap fools like

me. Alas my only merit consists in my rapid progress, and in the way in

which I grasp all their nonsense. Do they really value those things at

their true worth? Do they judge them like I do. And I had the stupidity

to be proud of my quickness. The only result of my coming out top has

been to give me inveterate enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than

I do, always throws some blunder in his compositions which gets him put

back to the fiftieth place. If he comes out first, it is only because

he is absent-minded. O how useful would one word, just one word, of M.

Pirard, have been to me."

As soon as Julien was disillusioned, the long exercises in ascetic

piety, such as the attendances in the chapel five times a week, the

intonation of hymns at the chapel of the Sacré Cœur, etc., etc.,

which had previously seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most

interesting opportunities for action. Thanks to a severe introspection,

and above all, by trying not to overdo his methods, Julien did not

attempt at the outset to perform significant actions (that is to say,

actions which are proof of a certain Christian perfection) like those

seminarists who served as a model to the rest.

Seminarists have a special way, even of eating a poached egg, which

betokens progress in the devout life.

The reader who smiles at this will perhaps be good enough to remember

all the mistakes which the abbé Delille made over the eating of an egg

when he was invited to breakfast with a lady of the Court of Louis XVI.

Julien first tried to arrive at the state of _non culpa_, that is

to say the state of the young seminarist whose demeanour and manner

of moving his arms, eyes, etc. while in fact without any trace of

worldliness, do not yet indicate that the person is entirely absorbed

by the conception of the other world, and the idea of the pure

nothingness of this one.

Julien incessantly found such phrases as these charcoaled on the walls

of the corridors. "What are sixty years of ordeals balanced against

an eternity of delights or any eternity of boiling oil in hell?" He

despised them no longer. He realised that it was necessary to have them

incessantly before his eyes. "What am I going to do all my life," he

said to himself. "I shall sell to the faithful a place in heaven. How

am I going to make that place visible to their eyes? By the difference

between my appearance and that of a layman."

After several months of absolutely unremitting application, Julien

still had the appearance of thinking. The way in which he would move

his eyes and hold his mouth did not betoken that implicit faith which

is ready to believe everything and undergo everything, even at the cost

of martyrdom. Julien saw with anger that he was surpassed in this by

the coarsest peasants. There was good reason for their not appearing

full of thought.

What pains did he not take to acquire that facial expression of blindly

fervent faith which is found so frequently in the Italian convents,

and of which Le Guerchin has left such perfect models in his Church

pictures for the benefit of us laymen.

On feast-days, the seminarists were regaled with sausages and cabbage.

Julien's table neighbours observed that he did not appreciate this

happiness. That was looked upon as one of his paramount crimes.

His comrades saw in this a most odious trait, and the most foolish

hypocrisy. Nothing made him more enemies.

"Look at this bourgeois, look at this stuck-up person," they would

say, "who pretends to despise the best rations there are, sausages and

cabbage, shame on the villain! The haughty wretch, he is damned for

ever."

"Alas, these young peasants, who are my comrades, find their ignorance

an immense advantage," Julien would exclaim in his moments of

discouragement. "The professor has not got to deliver them on their

arrival at the seminary from that awful number of worldly ideas which I

brought into it, and which they read on my face whatever I do."

Julien watched with an attention bordering on envy the coarsest of the

little peasants who arrived at the seminary. From the moment when they

were made to doff their shabby jackets to don the black robe, their

education consisted of an immense and limitless respect for _hard

liquid cash_ as they say in Franche-Comté.

That is the consecrated and heroic way of expressing the sublime idea

of current money.

These seminarists, like the heroes in Voltaire's novels, found their

happiness in dining well. Julien discovered in nearly all of them

an innate respect for the man who wears a suit of good cloth. This

sentiment appreciates the distributive justice, which is given us at

our courts, at its value or even above its true value. "What can one

gain," they would often repeat among themselves, "by having a law suit

with 'a big man?'"

That is the expression current in the valleys of the Jura to express

a rich man. One can judge of their respect for the richest entity

of all--the government. Failure to smile deferentially at the mere

name of M. the Prefect is regarded as an imprudence in the eyes of

the Franche-Comté peasant, and imprudence in poor people is quickly

punished by lack of bread.

After having been almost suffocated at first by his feeling of

contempt, Julien eventually experienced a feeling of pity; it often

happened that the fathers of most of his comrades would enter their

hovel in winter evenings and fail to find there either bread, chestnuts

or potatoes.

"What is there astonishing then?" Julien would say to himself, "if in

their eyes the happy man is in the first place the one who has just had

a good dinner, and in the second place the one who possesses a good

suit? My comrades have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see

in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of the happiness of

dining well and having a warm suit."

Julien happened to hear a young imaginative seminarist say to his

companion.

"Why shouldn't I become Pope like Sixtus Quintus who kept pigs?"

"They only make Italians Popes," answered his friend. "But they will

certainly draw lots amongst us for the great vicarships, canonries and

perhaps bishoprics. M. P---- Bishop of Châlons, is the son of a cooper.

That's what my father is."

One day, in the middle of a theology lesson, the Abbé Pirard summoned

Julien to him. The young fellow was delighted to leave the dark, moral

atmosphere in which he had been plunged. Julien received from the

director the same welcome which had frightened him so much on the first

day of his entry.

"Explain to me what is written on this playing card?" he said, looking

at him in a way calculated to make him sink into the earth.

Julien read:

"Amanda Binet of the Giraffe Café before eight o'clock. Say you're from

Genlis, and my mother's cousin."

Julien realised the immense danger. The spies of the abbé Castanède had

stolen the address.

"I was trembling with fear the day I came here," he answered, looking

at the abbé Pirard's forehead, for he could not endure that terrible

gaze. "M. Chélan told me that this is a place of informers and

mischief-makers of all kinds, and that spying and tale-bearing by one

comrade on another was encouraged by the authorities. Heaven wishes it

to be so, so as to show life such as it is to the young priests, and

fill them with disgust for the world and all its pomps."

"And it's to me that you make these fine speeches," said the abbé

Pirard furiously. "You young villain."

"My brothers used to beat me at Verrières," answered Julien coldly,

"When they had occasion to be jealous of me."

"Indeed, indeed," exclaimed M. Pirard, almost beside himself.

Julien went on with his story without being in the least intimidated:--

"The day of my arrival at Besançon I was hungry, and I entered a

café. My spirit was full of revulsion for so profane a place, but I

thought that my breakfast would cost me less than at an inn. A lady,

who seemed to be the mistress of the establishment, took pity on my

inexperience. 'Besançon is full of bad characters,' she said to me. 'I

fear something will happen to you, sir. If some mishap should occur to

you, have recourse to me and send to my house before eight o'clock. If

the porters of the seminary refuse to execute your errand, say you are

my cousin and a native of Genlis.'"

"I will have all this chatter verified," exclaimed the abbé Pirard,

unable to stand still, and walking about the room.

"Back to the cell."

The abbé followed Julien and locked him in. The latter immediately

began to examine his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal cards had

been so carefully hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but several

things had been disarranged. Nevertheless, he had never been without

the key. What luck that, during the whole time of my blindness, said

Julien to himself, I never availed myself of the permission to go out

that Monsieur Castanède would offer me so frequently, with a kindness

which I now understand. Perhaps I should have had the weakness to have

changed my clothes and gone to see the fair Amanda, and then I should

have been ruined. When they gave up hope of exploiting that piece of

information for the accomplishment of his ruin, they had used it to

inform against him. Two hours afterwards the director summoned him.

"You did not lie," he said to him, with a less severe look, "but

keeping an address like that is an indiscretion of a gravity which you

are unable to realise. Unhappy child! It may perhaps do you harm in ten

years' time."