The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
Page 23
I am asking you to give Julien Sorel a scholarship; he will earn it by sitting the necessary examinations. I have introduced him to a little theology, the good, old-fashioned theology of men like Bossuet, * Arnault and Fleury. If you do not find this individual to your liking, send him back to me; the master of the workhouse, whom you know well, is offering him eight hundred francs to be tutor to his children. I am at peace within, thank the Lord. I am growing accustomed to the terrible blow. Vale et me ama. *
Father Pirard, slowing down his voice as he read the signature, uttered the word Chélan with a sigh.
'He's at peace,' he said; 'and indeed, his virtue deserved this reward; may God grant it to me, if the need arises!'
He raised his eyes to heaven and made the sign of the cross. At the sight of this sacred sign, Julien felt some lessening of the profound horror that had chilled his blood ever since he had set foot in this house.
'I have here three hundred and twenty-one candidates aspiring to the holiest of states,' Father Pirard said at last in a tone of voice that was severe but not unkind. 'Only seven or eight of them come to me with recommendations from men
-180-
like Father Chélan; thus among the three hundred and twentyone, you are going to be the ninth. But my protection means neither favour nor indulgence; it means increased watchfulness and severity in dealing with vices. Go and lock this door.'
Julien made an effort to walk, and managed not to collapse. He noticed that a little window near the door into the room looked out over the countryside. He looked at the trees; the sight of them made him feel better, as if he had caught sight of some old friends.
'Loquerisne linguam latinam (Do you speak Latin)?' * Father Pirard asked him as he returned.
'Ita, pater optime (yes, most excellent Father),' replied Julien, gradually coming to himself again. One thing was certain: never had any man in the world seemed less excellent to him than Father Pirard in the half hour that had just gone by.
The conversation continued in Latin. The expression in the priest's eyes softened; Julien regained a certain degree of composure. How feeble I am, he thought, to be overawed by these appearances of virtue! I bet this man is quite simply a rogue like Father Maslon; and Julien congratulated himself on having hidden almost all his money in his boots.
Father Pirard examined Julien on theology, and was surprised at the extent of his knowledge. His astonishment increased when he grilled him specifically on the Holy Scriptures. But when he came to questions on the doctrine of the Church Fathers, he observed that Julien had scarcely even heard of St Jerome, St Augustine, St Bonaventure, St Basil, etc., etc.
Come to think of it, Father Pirard pondered, this is indeed that fatal tendency towards Protestantism that I've always blamed in Chélan. A thorough, too thorough knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.
(Julien had just been talking to him, without being questioned on the subject, about the actual time when Genesis, The Pentateuch etc. were written.)
Where does all this endless reasoning over the Holy Scriptures lead to, thought Father Pirard, apart from independent scrutiny, in other words the most appalling Protestantism? And
-181-
alongside this rash learning, nothing about the Church Fathers to counterbalance this tendency.
But the master of the seminary's amazement knew no bounds when he questioned Julien about the authority of the pope, and expecting to meet with the maxims of the old Gallican Church, found that the young man recited to him the whole of Joseph de Maistre's book.
Strange man, this Chélan, thought Father Pirard. Did he show him this book to teach him to mock it?
It was to no avail that he questioned Julien to try and find out whether he seriously believed in the doctrine of Joseph de Maistre. The young man merely answered from memory. From then on, Julien really excelled, he felt in full control of himself. After a very lengthy examination, it seemed to him that Father Pirard's severity towards him was now a mere matter of form. Indeed, were it not for the principles of austere gravity that for the past fifteen years he had forced himself to adopt towards his theological students, the master of the seminary would have embraced Julien in the name of logic, such were the clarity, precision and sharpness he observed in his replies.
There's a bold and sound mind, he said to himself, but corpus debile (the body is weak).
'Do you often collapse like that?' he asked Julien in French, pointing at the floor with his finger.
'It was the first time in my life; the porter's face had chilled me with terror,' Julien added, blushing like a child.
Father Pirard almost smiled.
'There you have the effect of the vain pomp of this world; you are accustomed, so it seems, to laughing faces--true theatres of falsehood. Truth is austere, sir. But our task here below is austere too, is it not? You'll have to watch out that your conscience guards against this weakness: Too much sensitivity to vain external graces.
'If you were not recommended to me,' Father Pirard resumed in Latin, with obvious pleasure, 'if you were not recommended to me by a man like Father Chélan, I should speak to you in the vain language of this world to which you seem only too accustomed. The full scholarship you are
-182-
requesting, let me tell you, is the most difficult thing in the world to obtain. But Father Chélan has deserved very little indeed by his fifty-six years of apostolic toil if he cannot have a scholarship at the seminary in his gift.'
After these words Father Pirard advised Julien not to join any secret society or Congregation without his consent.
'I give you my word of honour I won't,' said Julien with the heartfelt warmth of a gentleman.
The master of the seminary smiled for the first time.
'That expression is out of place here,' he said. 'It is too reminiscent of the vain honour of worldly men which leads them to commit so many lapses, and crimes as often as not. You owe me holy obedience in virtue of paragraph seventeen of Pope Pius V's Bull Unam Ecclesiam. * I am your ecclesiastical superior. In this house, to hear, my dearest son, is to obey. How much money have you got?'
Now we're getting there, said Julien to himself, that's what the 'dearest son' was all about.
'Thirty-five francs, Father.'
'Make a careful note of how you spend this money; I shall expect you to give me an account of it.'
This painful session had lasted three hours; Julien summoned the porter.
'Put Julien Sorel in cell n° 103,' Father Pirard instructed this man.
As a great honour, he was giving Julien a separate room.
'Take his trunk there,' he added.
Julien looked down and recognized his own trunk standing opposite him; he had been staring at it for the past three hours and had not recognized it.
When he reached n° 103, which was a little closet of a room eight foot square on the top floor of the house, Julien observed that it looked out on to the ramparts; beyond them you could see the lovely plain separated off from the town by the river Doubs.
What a delightful view! exclaimed Julien; as he spoke to himself thus, he had no feeling for the meaning of these words. The feelings of such intensity that he had experienced in the short time he had been in Besançon had completely drained
-183-
his strength. He sat down by the window on the only wooden chair in the cell and fell at once into a deep sleep. He did not hear the supper bell, nor the one for vespers; he had been forgotten.
When the first rays of the sun woke him the following morning, he found himself lying on the floor.
-184-
CHAPTER 26
The world or what the rich man lacks
I am alone on earth, no one deigns to think of me. All those I see making their fortunes have an effrontery and a hardness of heart that I do not detect in myself. They hate me for my easy good-nature. Ah! I shall soon die, either of hunger or from unhappiness at finding men so hard-hearted. YOUNG *
HE hastily brushed o
ff his suit and went downstairs; he was late. An assistant master scolded him severely; instead of attempting to justify himself, Julien folded his arms over his chest:
'Peccavi, pater optime' (I have sinned, I confess the error of my ways, O Father), he said with a contrite air.
This beginning was a great success. The more acute of the seminarists saw that they were dealing with a man who was well beyond the rudiments of the profession. Recreation time came round. Julien became an object of general curiosity. But his only response was reserve and silence. In accordance with the maxims he had drawn up for himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one fellow students as enemies; the most dangerous of all in his eyes was Father Pirard.
A few days later, Julien had to choose a confessor; he was presented with a list.
Heavens above! who do they take me for? he said to himself. Do they think I can't read between the lines? And he chose Father Pirard.
Without his suspecting it, this step was decisive. A very young little seminarist, a native of Verrières, who had declared himself Julien's friend from the very first day, informed him that if he had chosen Father Castanède the vice-master of the seminary he would perhaps have acted with greater prudence.
'Father Castanède is the enemy of Father Pirard, who is suspected of Jansenism,' the young seminarist added in Julien's ear.
-185-
All the first moves made by our hero who thought himself so cautious were, like the choice of a confessor, acts of sheer thoughtlessness. Led astray by all the presumptuousness of an imaginative young man, he took his intentions for facts and believed himself to be a consummate hypocrite. His folly led him so far as to reproach himself with his successes in this art born of weakness.
Alas! It's my only weapon! In another age, he said to himself, eloquent actions in the face of the enemy would have been my way of earning my living.
Satisfied with his conduct, Julien looked around him; everywhere he saw outward signs of the purest virtue.
Nine or ten seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity and had visions like St Theresa and St Francis when he received the stigmata on Mount Verna * in the Apennines. But it was a great secret, their friends concealed it. These poor youths with visions were nearly always in the infirmary. Some hundred others combined a robust faith with tireless application. They made themselves ill from overwork, but failed to learn much. Two or three stood out from the rest through genuine talent, among their number a certain Chazel; but Julien felt remote from them, and they from him.
The remainder of the three hundred and twenty-one seminarists were nothing but boorish individuals who could not be relied on to understand the Latin words they repeated day in day out. Almost all of them were peasants' sons who preferred to earn their living by reciting a handful of Latin words than by tilling the soil. It was this observation that allowed Julien right from the start to forecast rapid success for himself. In any form of service there is a need for people of intelligence, he reflected, for after all there's a job to be done. Under Napoleon I'd have been a sergeant; among these future parish priests, I shall be a vicar-general.
All these poor devils, he went on, have been manual labourers since childhood, and lived on junket and black bread until arriving here. In their cottages they only ate meat five or six times a year. Like Roman soldiers who considered war to be a time for rest, these boorish peasants are thrilled with the delights of the seminary.
-186-
The only thing Julien ever read in their dour gaze was the satisfaction of physical need after dinner and the anticipation of physical pleasure before the meal. It was among people like these that he had to distinguish himself; but what Julien did not know, and everyone was careful not to tell him, was that to be first in the various classes in dogma, ecclesiastical history etc., etc. that are attended in a seminary, constituted in their eyes nothing less than a sin of pride. Since Voltaire, since the institution of government by two Chambers, * which is basically nothing more than mistrust and independent scrutiny, and gives the mind of nations the bad habit of being mistrustful, the Church of France seems to have grasped that books are her real enemies. * Submission of the heart is everything in her eyes. Success in studies, even sacred ones, is suspect in her eyes, and rightly so. Who is to prevent the superior man from going over to the other side like Sieyès * or Grégoire! * The Church clings in trembling to the pope as if he were the only chance of salvation. The pope alone can try to paralyse individual scrutiny by the pious pomp of his Court ceremonies, and to make an impression on the sick and weary minds of worldly folk.
Julien half-perceived these various truths, which all the words uttered in a seminary none the less go to belie, and he fell into a bout of profound melancholy. He worked very hard, and soon succeeded in learning things of great use to a priest, but totally false in his eyes, and of no interest to him whatsoever. He believed there was nothing else for him to do.
So have I been forgotten by everyone on earth? he wondered. He was unaware that Father Pirard had received and cast into the fire one or two letters with a Dijon postmark, in which despite the conventions of the most proper style, signs of the most ardent passion showed through. Great remorse seemed to be wrestling with this love. So much the better, thought Father Pirard; at least the woman this young man once loved isn't an impious one.
One day Father Pirard opened a letter which seemed half obliterated by tears; it was an eternal farewell. 'At last', said the writer to Julien,
-187-
Heaven has granted me the grace to hate not the agent of my sin, for he will always be what I hold most dear in the world, but my sin in itself. The sacrifice is made, my dear. And not without tears, as you can see. The salvation of those I am committed to--ones you loved so dearly--overrides everything else. A just but terrible God will not any longer be able to avenge on them their mother's crimes. Farewell, Julien, be just towards your fellow men.
This last part of this letter was almost totally illegible. The writer gave an address in Dijon, and yet hoped that Julien would never answer, or at least would do so in words that a woman who had returned to the path of virtue could hear without blushing.
Julien's melancholy, compounded by the indifferent food supplied to the seminary by the purveyor of dinners at eightythree centimes, was beginning to affect his health, when one morning Fouqué suddenly appeared in his room.
'At last I've managed to get inside. I've come to Besançon five times--no fault of yours--just in order to see you. Stony faces every time. I posted someone at the seminary door; why the devil don't you ever go out?'
'It's an ordeal I've imposed on myself.'
'You seem to me to have changed a lot. At last I'm setting eyes on you again. Two five-franc coins in fine silver have just taught me that I was a mere idiot not to have produced them on the very first visit.'
The conversation between the two friends was endless. Julien changed colour when Fouqué said to him:
'By the way, have you heard? Your pupils' mother has fallen into excesses of devotional piety.'
And he spoke in that casual tone which makes such a strange impression on passionate beings whose dearest concerns are being thrown into turmoil unbeknown to the speaker.
'Yes, my good friend, the most fanatical piety. They say she goes on pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of Father Maslon who spied on poor Father Chélan for so long, Mme de Rênal would have none of him. She goes to confession in Dijon or Besançon.'
'She comes to Besançon?' asked Julien, flushing all over his brow.
-188-
'Pretty often,' replied Fouqué with a questioning look.
'Have you got any copies of Le Constitutionnel on you?'
'What did you say?'
'I'm asking if you've got any copies of the Le Constitutionnel, Julien went on in the calmest of voices. 'They sell for thirty sous each here.'
'What! liberals, even in the seminary!' exclaimed Fouqué. 'Poor France!' he added, adopting the hyp
ocritical voice and the dulcet tones of Father Maslon.
This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero if, on the very next day, something said to him by the little seminarist from Verrières who struck him as immature had not led him to make an important discovery. Since his arrival in the seminary, Julien's conduct had been nothing but a succession of false moves. He laughed bitterly at himself.
If the truth be told, the important actions in his life were skilfully conducted; but he did not pay attention to details, and the clever operators in a seminary only look at details. So he already had the reputation among his contemporaries of being a free thinker. He had been betrayed by a host of petty actions.
In their eyes he was guilty of this monstrous vice: he thought and formed opinions independently, instead of blindly following authority and example. Father Pirard had been of no help to him; he had not addressed a single word to him outside the confessional, where in any case he listened more than he spoke. Matters would have been very different if he had chosen Father Castanède.
As soon as Julien perceived his folly, he ceased to be bored. He determined to discover the full extent of the damage and, to this effect, he emerged to some degree from the haughty and obstinate silence with which he rebuffed his fellows. This was the moment for them to get their revenge on him. His advances were met with a scorn which verged on derision. He recognized that since his arrival in the seminary there had not been a single hour, especially during recreations, which had not told either for or against him, which had not increased the number of his enemies, or won him the goodwill of some seminarist of sincere virtue or slightly less boorish than the
-189-
others. The damage to be made good was immense, the task exceedingly difficult. From then on Julien's attention was constantly on the watch; he had to map out a completely new character for himself.