The Red and the Black (30 page)

with two large pictures blackened with age. There Julien was left on
his own; he was shattered, his heart was thumping; he would have been
glad to have dared to cry. A deathly silence reigned throughout the
house.

When a quarter of an hour had
gone by, seeming like a whole day to Julien, the sinister-faced porter
reappeared on the threshold of a door at the far end of the room, and
without deigning to speak, beckoned to him to come forward. He went
into a room even bigger than the first and very poorly lit. The walls
were likewise whitewashed, but it was unfurnished. Only in a corner
by the door did Julien see as he passed a deal bed, two wicker chairs
and a little slatted pine armchair without cushions. At the other end
of the room, next to a little window with yellowing panes, adorned
with tatty vases of flowers, he caught sight of a man sitting at a
table, wearing a shabby cassock; he appeared to be angry, and was
picking up little squares of paper one by one from a heap, and tidying
them away on this table after writing one or two words on each. He
did not notice Julien's presence. The latter was standing motionless
in the middle of the room, exactly where he had been left by the
porter, who had gone out again shutting the door behind him.

Ten minutes went by thus; the ill-dressed man was still writing.
Julien's emotion and terror were such that he felt as if he were about
to collapse. A philosopher would have remarked, perhaps wrongly:
'It's the violent impression made by ugliness on a sensibility meant
to love what is beautiful.'

The man
writing looked up; Julien only noticed after a moment or two, and even
when he did, he went on standing stock still as if the terrible look
which was fastened on him had struck him a mortal blow. Julien's eyes
were swimming: he had difficulty in making out a long face covered
with red blotches everywhere except on the forehead, which displayed
a deathly pallor. Between the red cheeks and the white forehead shone
two small black eyes such as would frighten the bravest of men. The
broad expanse of forehead was outlined by thick, smooth, jet-black
hair.

'Are you going to come closer then? yes or no?' the man said at last, impatiently.

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Julien went forward unsteadily, and at length, on the point of
collapse and paler than he had ever been in his life before, he
stopped three paces away from the little deal table covered with
squares of paper.

'Closer,' said the man.

Julien went forward a little more, stretching out his hand as if trying to lean on something.

'Your name?'

' Julien Sorel.'

'You're very late,' came the response, and again the terrible eyes transfixed him.

Julien was unable to bear this gaze; stretching out his hand as if to support himself, he fell prostrate on the floor.

The man rang a bell. Julien had only lost the use of his eyes and the strength to move; he heard footsteps approaching.

Someone picked him up and put him in the little deal chair. He heard the terrible man saying to the porter:

'He fell down in a fit, so it would appear; this really is the limit.'

When Julien was able to open his eyes, the red-faced man was writing
away again; the porter had disappeared. I must be brave, our hero said
to himself, and above all hide my feelings: he felt violently sick;
if I have an accident, God knows what they'll think of me. At last the
man stopped writing, and looking sideways at Julien:

'Are you in a fit state to answer me?'

'Yes, sir,' said Julien in a feeble voice.

'Ah! that's fortunate.'

The man in black had half-risen from his seat and was impatiently
looking for a letter in the drawer of his pine table, which creaked as
it opened. He found it, sat down slowly, and turned to Julien again
with a look fit to wrest from him the little life that remained:

'You are recommended to me by Father Chélan: he was the best priest
in the diocese, a man of virtue if ever there was one, and my friend
for the last thirty years.'

'Ah! It's M. Pirard I have the honour of speaking to,' said Julien in expiring tones.

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'So it would appear,' retorted the master of the seminary, looking at him in annoyance.

His little eyes flashed with twice the intensity, and there was a
twitching of the muscles at the corners of his mouth. It was the face
of a tiger savouring in advance the pleasure of devouring its prey.

' Chélan's letter is brief,' he said, as if speaking to himself. '
Intelligenti pauca;
^*
in this day and age, one can scarcely write too little.' He read aloud:

I am sending you Julien Sorel, of this parish, whom I baptized coming
up for twenty years ago; son of a wealthy carpenter, who gives him
nothing, however. Julien will be an outstanding worker in the Lord's
vineyard. Memory and intelligence are not lacking, and there is a
capacity for thought. Will his calling be a lasting one? Is it sincere?

'Sincere!'
repeated Father Pirard in astonishment, looking at Julien; but the priest's gaze was already less lacking in humanity.
'Sincere!'
he repeated, lowering his voice, and he went on reading:

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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 off 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.

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