The Red and the Black (65 page)

and as self-regard worms its way even into hearts that are temples of the most august virtue: M
^me
de La Mole is right, the maréchale said to herself as she climbed
into her carriage again, there is something distinguished about this
young priest. It must be that, to start with, my presence intimidated
him. In point of fact, everything one comes across in this house is
rather frivolous; such virtue as I see here has had the helping hand
of old age, and badly needed the frosts of passing years. This young
man must have the discernment to have seen the difference; he writes
well; but I very much fear that the entreaty he makes in his letter
for me to enlighten him with my advice will turn out to be none other
than a sentiment that is unaware of its own nature.

Nevertheless, how many conversations have begun like this! What makes
me augur well of this one is the difference between his style and
that of the young men whose letters I have had the opportunity of
reading. One can't help seeing spirituality, deep seriousness and real
conviction in the prose of this young Levite; he must have the sweet
virtue of Massillon.
^*

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Services! talents! qualities! bah! Join a coterie.

TELEMACHUS
^*

THUS the thought of a bishopric was associated for the first time
with Julien in the mind of a woman who was sooner or later to be
handing out the best positions in the Church of France. This trump
card she held would scarcely have swayed Julien; at that moment his
thoughts did not rise to anything beyond his present plight.
Everything made it worse; the sight of his room, for instance, had
become unbearable to him. In the evening, when he returned to it with
his candle, every piece of furniture, every little embellishment
seemed to acquire a voice to acquaint him sourly with some fresh
detail of his misery.

That day as
he came in: I've got forced labour to do, he said to himself with an
eagerness he had not detected in himself for a long while; let's hope
the second letter will be as tedious as the first.

It was more so. What he was copying seemed to him so absurd that he
found himself transcribing it line by line without thinking of the
meaning.

It's even more bombastic, he
said to himself, than the official documents relating to the treaty
of Munster, which my instructor in diplomacy made me copy out in London.

Only then did he remember M
^me
de Fervaques's letters: he had forgotten to hand back the originals
to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos. He looked them out; they were
genuinely almost as amphigoric as the ones written by the young
Russian nobleman. Vagueness was total. They said everything, yet said
nothing. This is the aeolian harp of style, Julien thought. In the
midst of the most lofty thoughts on nothingness, death, infinity etc.,
the only thing real I discern is an appalling fear of ridicule.

The solitary scene we have just summed up was repeated for

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a fortnight on end. Falling asleep as he copied out a sort of
commentary on the Apocalypse, going off the next day with a melancholy
air to deliver a letter, putting his horse back in the stable with
the hope of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, putting in an
appearance at the Opera in the evening when M
^me
de
Fervaques did not come to the Hôtel de La Mole, such were the
monotonous events in Julien's life. It was more interesting when M
^me
de Fervaques called on the marquise; then he could snatch a glimpse of
Mathilde's eyes under one of the wings of the widow's hat, and he
waxed eloquent. His picturesque and sentimental phrases were beginning
to take a turn that was at once more striking and more elegant.

He was well aware that what he was saying was absurd in Mathilde's
eyes, but he wanted her to be struck by the elegance of his diction.
The more what I say is false, the more I must make her admire me,
Julien thought; and then, with appalling nerve, he exaggerated certain
aspects of nature. He soon observed that in order not to appear
vulgar in the maréchale's eyes, he had above all to avoid
straightforward and rational ideas. He went on in this vein, or else
cut short his amplifications, according as he read success or
indifference in the eyes of the two great ladies he had to please.

All in all, his life was less dreadful than when his days were spent in idleness.

But, he said to himself one evening, here I am copying out the
fifteenth of these appalling disquisitions; the first fourteen have
been faithfully remitted to M
^me
de Fervaques's porter. I
shall have the honour of filling up all the pigeon-holes in her desk.
And yet she treats me exactly as if I wasn't writing to her! How will
all this end? Could my constancy bore her as much as it does me? You
just have to admit that this Russian friend of Korasov's who was in
love with the fair Quaker lady from Richmond was a terror in his time;
it simply isn't possible to be more deadly.

Like all the mediocre beings who chance to witness the manœuvres of a
great general, Julien did not understand the first thing about the
attack mounted by the young Russian on the heart of the fair
Englishwoman. The first forty letters were designed merely to obtain
forgiveness for having made so bold

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as to write at all. The point was to get this gentle creature, who
might perhaps be bored beyond measure, into the habit of receiving
letters that were perhaps a trifle less insipid than her everyday
life.

One morning, Julien was handed a letter; he recognized M
^me
de Fervaques's crest, and broke the seal with a haste that would
have seemed quite impossible to him a few days previously: it was only
an invitation to dinner.

He hastened
to consult Prince Korasov's instructions. Unfortunately, the young
Russian had tried to be as frivolous as Dorat,
^*
when what was required was to be straightforward and intelligible;
Julien was unable to surmise what stance he should adopt at M
^me
de Fervaques's dinner party.

The drawing-room was of the utmost magnificence, gilded like the
Gallery of Diana at the Tuileries, with oil paintings on the
panelling. There were lighter patches on these pictures. Julien
learned later that the subjects had struck the mistress of the house
as lacking in propriety, and she had had the pictures corrected.
^*
What a moral century!
he thought.

In the drawing-room he noticed three of the important figures who had
taken part in composing the secret memorandum. One of them, Monsignor
the Bishop of, -----,
^*
M
^me
de Fervaques's uncle, held the list of ecclesiastical benefices, and
rumour had it that he never refused his niece anything. What an
enormous step forward I've taken, Julien said to himself with a
melancholy smile, and how indifferent I am to it! Here I am having
dinner with the famous Bishop of -----.

The dinner was mediocre and the conversation exasperating. This table
is like the contents of a bad book, Julien thought. All the most
important subjects of human thought are confidently tackled. But you
have only to listen for three minutes to wonder which carries the day:
the speaker's bombast or his appalling ignorance.

The reader has doubtless forgotten that little man of letters called
Tanbeau, the academician's nephew and a future professor, whose job it
seemed to be to poison the salon at the Hôtel de La Mole with his base
slander.

It was through this little man that Julien had the first inkling that M
^me
de Fervaques, while not replying to his letters, might

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well take an indulgent view of the sentiment that dictated them. M.
Tanbeau's black soul was ravaged at the thought of Julien's successes;
but since from another point of view a man of quality cannot be in
two places at once, any more than a fool can, if Sorel becomes the
mistress of the sublime maréchale, said the future professor to himself,
she will find him an advantageous situation in the Church, and I
shall be rid of him at the Hôtel de La Mole.

Father Pirard also gave Julien lengthy sermons on his successes at the Hôtel de Fervaques. There was
sectarian jealousy
between the austere Jansenist and the Jesuit, revivalist and monarchist salon of the virtuous maréhale.

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Now once he was thoroughly convinced of the foolishness and asinine
stupidity of the prior, he usually managed fairly well by calling
white black and black white.

LICHTEMBERG
^*

THE Russian instructions laid down categorically that one was never
to contradict out loud the person one was writing to. One was not, on
any pretext whatsoever, to forsake a stance of the most ecstatic
admiration; the letters always worked from this assumption.

One evening at the Opera, in M
^me
de Fervaques's box, Julien was praising to the skies the ballet based on Manon Lescaut.
^*
His only reason for talking in this way was that he found the work of no interest.

The maréchale said that this ballet was much inferior to the Abbé Prévost's novel.

Goodness! thought Julien both astonished and amused, a lady of such high virtue praising a novel! M
^me
de Fervaques openly professed, two or three times a week, the most
utter scorn for writers who by means of these insipid works try to
corrupt a young generation that is, alas! only too prone to be led
astray by the senses.

'In this immoral and dangerous genre', the maréchale went on, '
Manon Lescaut
,
so I'm told, ranks high on the list. The weaknesses and the
well-deserved anguish of a most criminal character are depicted there,
so I'm told, with a truthfulness which has some depth in it; which
didn't stop your Bonaparte from declaring on St Helena that it's a
novel written for lackeys.'

These
words restored all Julien's mental energy. Someone has tried to
discredit me in the maréchale's eyes; they've told her about my
enthusiasm for Napoleon. She's sufficiently put out at this fact to
yield to the temptation of letting me know how she feels. This
discovery kept him amused all evening and

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made him amusing. As he took leave of the maréchale in the foyer of
the Opera: 'Remember, sir,' she said to him, 'that devotion to
Bonaparte is incompatible with devotion to me; the most that is
allowed is to accept him as a necessity imposed by Providence. Anyway,
the man's soul was too rigid to appreciate artistic masterpieces.'

Devotion to me
!
Julien repeated to himself; that means nothing, or means everything.
Here you have mysteries of language that are quite beyond our poor
provincials. And he thought a lot about M
^me
de Rênal as he copied out an inordinately long letter intended for the maréchale.

'Why is it', she asked him the next day with a look of indifference
that he found contrived and unconvincing, 'that you talked to me about
' London' and ' Richmond' in a letter you wrote yesterday, so it
seems, on returning from the Opera?'

Julien was very embarrassed; he had done his copying line by line,
without thinking about what he was writing, and had apparently
forgotten to replace the words ' London' and ' Richmond' from the
original with ' Paris' and ' Saint-Cloud'. He made two or three
attempts at a sentence in reply, but was unable to finish any of them;
he felt on the verge of breaking into helpless laughter. At length,
as he fumbled for words, he hit upon this idea: 'Exalted by discussion
of the most sublime, the most weighty concerns of the human soul, my
own may have had a moment's distraction while writing to you.'

The impression I'm creating is such, he said to himself, that I'd do
well to spare myself its irksome repercussions for the remainder of
the evening. He left the Hôtel de Fervaques at the double. Later on
that evening, when he looked over the original of the letter he had
copied out the previous day, he soon came to the ill-fated place where
the young Russian spoke of London and Richmond. Julien was most
astonished to find this letter almost tender.

It was the contrast between the apparent frivolity of his
conversation and the sublime, almost apocalyptic profundity of his
letters that had caused him to be singled out. The length of his
sentences was especially pleasing to the maréchale; this isn't the
jerky style made fashionable by Voltaire, that immoral

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man! Although our hero did everything in the world to banish any kind
of common sense from his conversation, it still had an antimonarchist
and ungodly flavour which did not escape M
^me
de Fervaques.
Surrounded by eminently moral figures, who frequently, however, did
not have so much as a single idea per evening, this lady was deeply
struck by anything resembling novelty; but at the same time she
thought it incumbent upon her to take offence. She called this failing
bearing the mark of worldly frivolity ...

But salons like this are only worth a visit when one has something to
solicit. The full boredom of the uneventful life that Julien was
leading is no doubt shared by the reader. These are the lowlands of
our journey.

During all the time taken up in Julien's life by the Fervaques episode, M
^lle
de la Mole found it necessary to take herself firmly in hand in order
not to think about him. She was in the throes of violent inner
conflicts; sometimes she flattered herself that she despised this most
dreary young man; but in spite of herself his conversation enthralled
her. What astonished her above all was his perfect falseness; he
didn't utter a single word to the maréchale that wasn't a lie, or at
least an appalling travesty of his way of thinking, which Mathilde was
so perfectly familiar with on virtually every topic. This
Machiavellian streak impressed her. What profundity! she said to
herself; what a contrast with the bombastic idiots or the common
rogues like M. Tanbeau who talk in this style!

Nevertheless, some days were quite dreadful for Julien. It was in
fulfilment of the most painful of duties that he made his daily
appearance in the maréchale's salon. His efforts to play a part
succeeded in draining him of all emotional strength. Often, at night,
as he crossed the vast courtyard of the Hôtel de Fervaques, it was
only through sheer character and reasoning power that he just managed to
keep himself from sinking into despair.

I overcame despair in the seminary, he told himself: and yet what a
dreadful prospect I had in front of me at the time! I either succeeded
or failed in making my fortune, but in either case I saw myself
condemned to spend the whole of my life in the intimate company of the
most despicable and revolting

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