by Stendhal
“So here I am in the centre of intrigue and hypocrisy. Here reign the protectors of the Abbé de Frilair.” On the evening of the third day his curiosity got the better of his plan of seeing everything before presenting himself to the Abbé Pirard. The Abbé explained to him coldly the kind of life which he was to expect at M. de la Mole’s.
“If you do not prove useful to him at the end of some months you will go back to the seminary, but not in disgrace. You will live in the house of the marquis, who is one of the greatest seigneurs of France. You will wear black, but like a man who is in mourning, and not like an ecclesiastic. I insist on your following your theological studies three days a week in a seminary where I will introduce you. Every day at twelve o’clock you will establish yourself in the marquis’s library; he counts on making use of you in drafting letters concerning his lawsuits and other matters. The marquis will scribble on the margin of each letter he gets, the kind of answer which is required. I have assured him that at the end of three months you will be so competent to draft the answers, that out of every dozen you hand to the marquis for signature, he will be able to sign eight or nine. In the evening, at eight o’clock, you will tidy up his bureau, and at ten you will be free.
“It may be,” continued the Abbé Pirard, “that some old lady or some smooth-voiced man will hint at immense advantages, or will crudely offer you gold, to show him the letters which the marquis has received.”
“Ah, Monsieur,” exclaimed Julien, blushing.
“It is singular,” said the Abbé with a bitter smile, “that poor as you are, and after a year at a seminary, you still have any of this virtuous indignation left. You must have been very blind.”
“Can it be that blood will tell?” muttered the Abbé in a whisper, as though speaking to himself. “The singular thing is,” he added, looking at Julien, “that the marquis knows you—I don’t know how. He will give you a salary of a hundred louis to commence with. He is a man who only acts by his whim. That is his weakness. He will quarrel with you about the most childish matters. If he is satisfied, your wages may rise in consequence up to eight thousand francs.
“But you realise,” went on the Abbé, sourly, “that he is not giving you all this money simply on account of your personal charm. The thing is to prove yourself useful. If I were in your place I would talk very little, and I would never talk about what I know nothing about.
“Oh, yes,” said the Abbé, “I have made some enquiries for you. I was forgetting M. de la Mole’s family. He has two children—a daughter and a son of nineteen, eminently elegant—the kind of madman who never knows to-day what he will do to-morrow. He has spirit and valour; he has been through the Spanish war. The marquis hopes, I don’t know why, that you will become a friend of the young count Norbert. I told him that you were a great classic, and possibly he reckons on your teaching his son some ready-made phrases about Cicero and Virgil.
“If I were you, I should never allow that handsome young man to make fun of me, and before I accepted his advances, which you will find perfectly polite but a little ironical, I would make him repeat them more than once.
“I will not hide from you the fact that the young count de la Mole is bound to despise you at first, because you are nothing more than a little bourgeois. His grandfather belonged to the court, and had the honour of having his head cut off in the Place de Grève on the 26th April, 1574, on account of a political intrigue.
“As for you, you are the son of a carpenter of Verrières, and what is more, in receipt of his father’s wages. Ponder well over these differences, and look up the family history in Moreri. All the flatterers who dine at their house make from time to time what they call delicate allusions to it.
“Be careful of how you answer the pleasantries of M. the count de la Mole, chief of a squadron of hussars, and a future peer of France, and don’t come and complain to me later on.”
“It seems to me,” said Julien, blushing violently, “that I ought not even to answer a man who despises me.”
“You have no idea of his contempt. It will only manifest itself by inflated compliments. If you were a fool, you might be taken in by it. If you want to make your fortune, you ought to let yourself be taken in by it.”
“Shall I be looked upon as ungrateful,” said Julien, “if I return to my little cell Number 108 when I find that all this no longer suits me?”
“All the toadies of the house will no doubt calumniate you,” said the Abbé, “but I myself will come to the rescue. Adsum qui feci. I will say that I am responsible for that resolution.”
Julien was overwhelmed by the bitter and almost vindictive tone which he noticed in M. Pirard; that tone completely infected his last answer.
The fact is that the Abbé had a conscientious scruple about loving Julien, and it was with a kind of religious fear that he took so direct a part in another’s life.
“You will also see,” he added with the same bad grace, as though accomplishing a painful duty, “you also will see Madame the marquis de la Mole. She is a big blonde woman about forty, devout, perfectly polite, and even more insignificant. She is the daughter of the old Duke de Chaulnes so well known for his aristocratic prejudices. This great lady is a kind of synopsis in high relief of all the fundamental characteristics of women of her rank. She does not conceal for her own part that the possession of ancestors who went through the crusades is the sole advantage which she respects. Money only comes a long way afterwards. Does that astonish you? We are no longer in the provinces, my friend.
“You will see many great lords in her salon talk about our princes in a tone of singular flippancy. As for Madame de la Mole, she lowers her voice out of respect every time she mentions the name of a Prince, and above all the name of a Princess. I would not advise you to say in her hearing that Philip II. or Henry VII. were monsters. They were kings, a fact which gives them indisputable rights to the respect of creatures without birth like you and me. Nevertheless,” added M. Pirard, “we are priests, for she will take you for one; that being our capacity, she considers us as spiritual valets necessary for her salvation.”
“Monsieur,” said Julien, “I do not think I shall be long at Paris.”
“Good, but remember that no man of our class can make his fortune except through the great lords. With that indefinable element in your character, at any rate I think it is, you will be persecuted if you do not make your fortune. There is no middle course for you, make no mistake about it; people see that they do not give you pleasure when they speak to you; in a social country like this you are condemned to unhappiness if you do not succeed in winning respect.
“What would have become of you at Besançon without this whim of the Marquis de la Mole? One day you will realise the extraordinary extent of what he has done for you, and if you are not a monster you will be eternally grateful to him and his family. How many poor abbés more learned than you have lived years at Paris on the fifteen sous they got for the mass and their ten sous they got for their dissertations in the Sorbonne? Remember what I told you last winter about the first years of that bad man Cardinal Dubois. Are you proud enough by chance to think yourself more talented than he was?
“Take, for instance, a quiet and average man like myself; I reckoned on dying in my seminary. I was childish enough to get attached to it. Well I was on the point of being turned out, when I handed in my resignation. You know what my fortune consisted of. I had five hundred and twenty francs capital, neither more nor less; not a friend, scarcely two or three acquaintances. M. de la Mole, whom I had never seen, extricated me from that quandary. He only had to say the word and I was given a living where the parishioners are well-to-do people above all crude vices, and where the income puts me to shame, it is so disproportionate to my work. I refrained from talking to you all this time simply to enable you to find your level a bit.
“One word more, I have the misfortune to be irritable. It is possible that you and I will cease to be on speaking terms.
“If th
e airs of the marquise or the spiteful pleasantries of her son make the house absolutely intolerable for you, I advise you to finish your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris and rather north than south. There is more civilisation in the north,” and, he added lowering his voice, “I must admit that the nearness of the Paris papers puts fear into our petty tyrants.
“If we continue to find pleasure in each other’s society and if the marquis’s house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the living. I owe you that and even more,” he added, interrupting Julien’s thanks, “for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besançon. If instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you would have saved me.”
The Abbé’s voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself into his friend’s arms. He could not help saying to him in the most manly manner he could assume:
“I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found another father in you, monsieur.”
“That is good, that is good,” said the embarrassed Abbé, then suddenly remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude, “you must never say luck, my child, always say providence.”
The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an immense door. It was the Hotel de la Mole, and to prevent the passersby having any doubt on the subject, these words could be read in black marble over the door.
This affectation displeased Julien. “They are so frightened of the Jacobins. They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head. Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and the advertise their house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can recognise it and loot it.” He communicated his thought to the Abbé Pirard.
“Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate. What a dreadful idea you have got into your head.”
“Nothing could be simpler,” said Julien.
The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the court, struck him with admiration. It was fine sunshine. “What magnificent architecture,” he said to his friend. The hôtel in question was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat façade built about the time of Voltaire’s death. At no other period had fashion and beauty been so far from one another.
XXXII. Entry into Society
Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room where one appeared alone and without support at the age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to intimidate me. The more I wished to please the more clumsy I became. I evolved the most unfounded ideas about everything. I would either abandon myself without any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply because he had looked at me with a serious air; but all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful day—Kant
Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. “Pull yourself together,” said the Abbé Pirard. “You get horrible ideas into your head, besides you are only a child. What has happened to the nil marari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you. They will see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to make you fall into some gross blunder.”
“Let them do their worst,” said Julien biting his lip, and he became as distrustful as ever.
The salons on the first storey which our gentlemen went through before reaching the marquis’ study, would have seemed to you, my reader, as gloomy as they were magnificent. If they had been given to you just as they were, you would have refused to live in them. This was the domain of yawning and melancholy reasoning. They redoubled Julien’s rapture. “How can anyone be unhappy?” he thought, “who lives in so splendid an abode.”
Finally our gentlemen arrived at the ugliest rooms in this superb suite. There was scarcely any light. They found there a little keen man with a lively eye and a blonde wig. The Abbé turned round to Julien and presented him. It was the marquis. Julien had much difficulty in recognising him, he found his manner was so polite. It was no longer the grand seigneur with that haughty manner of the abbey of Bray-le-Haut. Julien thought that his wig had far too many hairs. As the result of this opinion he was not at all intimidated. The descendant of the friend of Henry III. seemed to him at first of a rather insignificant appearance. He was extremely thin and very restless, but he soon noticed that the marquis had a politeness which was even more pleasant to his listener than that of the Bishop of Besançon himself. The audience only lasted three minutes. As they went out the Abbé said to Julien,
“You looked at the marquis just as you would have looked at a picture. I am not a great expert in what these people here call politeness. You will soon know more about it than I do, but really the boldness of your looks seemed scarcely polite.”
They had got back into the fiacre. The driver stopped near the boulevard; the Abbé ushered Julien into a suite of large rooms. Julien noticed that there was no furniture. He was looking at the magnificent gilded clock representing a subject which he thought very indecent, when a very elegant gentleman approached him with a smiling air. Julien bowed slightly.
The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. Julien shuddered and leapt back, he reddened with rage. The Abbé Pirard, in spite of his gravity, laughed till the tears came into his eyes. The gentleman was a tailor.
“I give you your liberty for two days,” said the Abbé as they went out. “You cannot be introduced before then to Madame de la Mole. Any one else would watch over you as if you were a young girl during these first few moments of your life in this new Babylon. Get ruined at once if you have got to be ruined, and I will be rid of my own weakness of being fond of you. The day after to-morrow this tailor will bring you two suits, you will give the man who tries them on five francs. Apart from that don’t let these Parisians hear the sound of your voice. If you say a word they will manage somehow to make fun of you. They have a talent for it. Come and see me the day after to-morrow at noon.... Go and ruin yourself. . . . I was forgetting, go and order boots and a hat at these addresses.”
Julien scrutinised the handwriting of the addresses.
“It’s the marquis’s hand,” said the Abbé; “he is an energetic man who foresees everything, and prefers doing to ordering. He is taking you into his house, so that you may spare him that kind of trouble. Will you have enough brains to execute efficiently all the instructions which he will give you with scarcely a word of explanation? The future will show; look after yourself.”
Julien entered the shops indicated by the addresses without saying a single word. He observed that he was received with respect, and that the bootmaker, as he wrote his name down in the ledger, put M. de Sorel.
When he was in the Cemetery of Père La Chaise a very obliging gentleman, and what is more, one who was Liberal in his views, suggested that he should show Julien the tomb of Marshal Ney, which a sagacious statecraft had deprived of the honour of an epitaph, but when he left this Liberal, who with tears in his eyes almost clasped him in his arms, Julien was without his watch. Enriched by this experience, two days afterwards he presented himself to the Abbé Pirard, who looked at him for a long time.
“Perhaps you are going to become a fop,” said the Abbé to him severely. Julien looked like a very young man in full mourning; as a matter of fact, he looked very well, but the good Abbé was too provincial himself to see that Julien still carried his shoulders in that particular way which signifies in the provinces both elegance and importance. When the marquis saw Julien his opinion of his graces differed so radically from that of the good Abbé as he said,
“Would you have any objection to M. le Sorel taking some dancing lessons?”
The Abbé was thunderstruck.
“No,” he an
swered at last. “Julien is not a priest.”
The marquis went up the steps of a little secret staircase two at a time, and installed our hero in a pretty attic which looked out on the big garden of the hôtel. He asked him how many shirts he had got at the linen drapers.
“Two,” answered Julien, intimidated at seeing so great a lord condescend to such details.
“Very good,” replied the marquis quite seriously, and with a certain curt imperiousness which gave Julien food for thought. “Very good, get twenty-two more shirts. Here are your first quarter’s wages.”
As he went down from the attic the marquis called an old man. “Arsène,” he said to him, “you will serve M. Sorel.” A few minutes afterwards Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library. It was a delicious moment. To prevent his emotion being discovered he went and hid in a little dark corner. From there he contemplated with rapture the brilliant backs of the books. “I shall be able to read all these,” he said to himself. “How can I fail to like it here? M. de Rênal would have thought himself dishonoured for ever by doing one-hundredth part of what the Marquis de la Mole has just done for me.
“But let me have a look at the copies I have to make.” Having finished this work Julien ventured to approach the books. He almost went mad with joy as he opened an edition of Voltaire. He ran and opened the door of the library to avoid being surprised. He then indulged in the luxury of opening each of the eighty volumes. They were magnificently bound and were the masterpiece of the best binder in London. It was even more than was required to raise Julien’s admiration to the maximum.
An hour afterwards the marquis came in and was surprised to notice that Julien spelt cela with two “ll” cella. “Is all that the Abbé told me of his knowledge simply a fairy tale?” The marquis was greatly discouraged and gently said to him,
“You are not sure of your spelling?”