The Red and the Black (39 page)

the Blessed Virgin, etc. I refuse, and I'm then insulted over and
over again. I'm stupid enough to take offence. I can no longer leave
home in the morning to go and enjoy the beauty of our local mountains
without coming across some trouble which drags me away from my
contemplations and is an unpleasant reminder of human beings and their
wickedness. During Rogation Day processions, for instance, with their
chanting that I enjoy (it's probably a Greek melody), my fields are
no longer blessed "because", says the curate, "they belong to one of
the ungodly." Some cow belonging to a pious old peasant woman dies,
and she says it's because there's a pond nearby owned by me the
infidel, a philosopher from Paris; and a week later I find all my fish
floating belly up, poisoned with lime. I'm harassed on all sides, in
all sorts of ways. The magistrate, who's a decent fellow, but fears
for his post, always passes judgement against me. The peace of the
countryside is hell to me. Once everyone saw that I had been dropped
by the curate, who leads the Congregation in the village, and that I
wasn't backed by the retired captain, who leads the liberals, they
all got their knives into me, right down to the stonemason I'd kept in
business for the past year, and the cartwright who tried to get away
with diddling me when he repaired my ploughs.

'In order to have some support and to win at any rate some of my
lawsuits, I became a liberal; but as you say, along came those
wretched elections, my vote was solicited...'

'For a stranger?'

'Not at all, for a man I know only too well. I refused--how
dreadfully rash! From then on, I had all the liberals to cope with as
well, and my position became intolerable. I think if it had occurred
to the curate to accuse me of murdering my housekeeper, there would
have been twenty witnesses from both parties who would have sworn they
saw the crime committed.'

'You
want to live in the country without furthering the passions of your
neighbours, without even listening to their gossip: what a
blunder!...'

'Well anyway, I've put things right. Monfleury is up for sale, I stand to lose fifty thousand francs if need be, but I'm

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full of joy, I'm leaving this hellhole of hypocrisy and hassle. I'm
going to seek solitude and rustic peace in the only place they are to
be found in France, in a fourth-floor flat in Paris overlooking the
Champs-Elysées. And what's more, I've even reached the point of
considering whether I shan't begin my political career, in the
neighbourhood of Saint-Philippe du Roule,
^*
by handing back the consecrated bread to the parish.'

'None of this would have happened to you under Bonaparte,' said Falcoz, his eyes glinting with anger and regret.

'That's all very well, but why didn't he manage to stay put, this
Bonaparte of yours? Everything I suffer from today is his work.'

At this point Julien became doubly attentive. He had realized from
his first words that the Bonapartist Falcoz was the former friend of
M. de Rênal whom the latter had repudiated in 1816; and that the
philosopher Saint-Giraud must be a brother of the chief clerk at the
prefecture of ----who was adept at getting himself allocated houses
belonging to local communes for very reasonable sums.

'And all that is the work of your friend Bonaparte,' went on
Saint-Giraud. 'A gentleman, as harmless as they come, with forty years
and five hundred thousand francs to his credit, can't settle in the
provinces and find peace there; Bonaparte's priests and nobles drive
him out.'

'Ah! don't speak ill of
him,' exclaimed Falcoz. 'Never has France risen so high in the esteem
of nations as during the thirteen years of his reign. That was a time
when there was greatness in everything ever done.'

'Your emperor--the devil take him--', went on the man of forty-four,
'was only great on his battlefields, and when he restored the finances
around 1802. What's to be made of all his later actions? With his
chamberlains, his pomp and his official functions at the Tuileries, he
gave us a new edition of all the silly trappings of the monarchy. It
had been revised, and would have done for another century or two. The
nobles and the priests preferred to go back to the old edition, but
they haven't got the iron hand you need to sell it to the public.'

'There speaks a former printer!'

'Who's driving me off my land?' continued the printer in

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anger. 'The clergy, whom Napoleon recalled with his Concordat
^*
instead of treating them as the State treats doctors, barristers or
astronomers, simply seeing them as citizens, without worrying about
what business they engage in to try to earn their living. Would there
be impertinent gentlemen around today, if your Bonaparte hadn't
created barons and counts? No, the fashion for them had gone out. Next
in line after the clergy, it was the minor country noblemen who vexed
me most, and forced me to become a liberal.'

The conversation was endless; the text of it was something France
will ponder for the next half-century. As Saint-Giraud repeated over
and over again that it was impossible to live in the provinces, Julien
timidly volunteered the example of M. de Rênal.

'Goodness me, young man, that's a good one!' exclaimed Falcoz; 'he's
turned himself into a hammer in order not to be an anvil, and a
terrible hammer at that. But I see old Valenod is more than a match
for him. Do you know that scoundrel? He's the real one. What'll your
M. de Rênal say when he finds himself stripped of his office one of
these fine mornings, and old Valenod put in his place?'

'He'll be left staring his crimes in the face,' said SaintGiraud. 'So
you know Verrières, do you, young man? Well, Bonaparte--heaven
confound him and all his monarchist trappings--Bonaparte made possible
the reign of men like M. de Rênal and Father Chélan, which brought in
its wake the reign of Valenods and Maslons.'

This gloomy political conversation astonished Julien and kept his mind from wandering down sensuous paths.

He was not particularly struck by the first sight of Paris glimpsed
in the distance. The castles he was building in the air about the fate
awaiting him had to vie with the ever vivid memory of the twenty-four
hours he had just spent in Verrières. He swore to himself that he would
never abandon his loved one's children, and would give up everything
in order to protect them if the folly of the clergy were to land us
with a republic and persecution of the nobility.

What would have happened on the night of his arrival in Verrières if, just as he was leaning his ladder against the

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window of M
^me
de Rênal's bedroom, he had found the room occupied by a stranger or by M. de Rênal?

But then what bliss, for the first two hours, when his loved one
genuinely wanted to send him away, and he pleaded his cause sitting
beside her in the dark! A person of Julien's sensibility is pursued by
such memories throughout a lifetime. The remainder of this encounter
was already merging with the earlier phases of their affair fourteen
months previously.

Julien was roused
from his deep dreaming by the coach coming to a halt. They had just
driven into the courtyard of the post-house in the Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. 'I want to go to La Malmaison,'
^*
he said to a cab which drew up.

'At this hour, sir, what for then?'

'None of your business! Get a move on.'

All true passion is concerned only with itself. This is why, it seems
to me, passions are so ridiculous in Paris, where your neighbour is
always claiming you should spend time thinking of him. I shall refrain
from describing Julien's emotions at La Malmaison. He wept. 'What! in
spite of the ugly white walls built this year, which break up the
park?'
^*
'Yes, sir: for Julien, as for posterity, nothing separated Arcola, St Helena and La Malmaison.'

In the evening Julien hesitated a long time before setting foot in
the theatre: he had strange ideas about this place of perdition.

A deep-seated mistrust prevented him from admiring the living city of
Paris; he was only moved by the monuments left behind by his hero.

So here I am in the centre of intrigue and hypocrisy! This is where the protectors of Father de Frilair hold sway.

In the evening of the third day, curiosity got the better of his plan
to see everything before presenting himself to Father Pirard. The
priest explained coldly to him what sort of life was awaiting him in
M. de La Mole's household.

'If in a
few months' time you aren't being of use, you will return to the
seminary, but by the front door. You are going to reside with the
marquis, who is one of the greatest noblemen in France. You will wear a
black suit, but like someone in mourning, not like a man in holy
orders. I insist on your

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continuing your theological studies three times a week in a seminary
to which I shall give you an introduction. Every day at noon you will
take up your post in the marquis's library; he intends to employ you
to write letters in connection with lawsuits and other business. The
marquis jots down briefly in the margin of each letter he receives the
kind of reply that is called for. I have made the claim that in three
months' time you would be in a position to draft these replies, so
that out of a dozen you hand to the marquis for his signature, he'll
be able to sip eight or nine. In the evening, at eight o'clock, you
will tidy up his study, and at ten you will be free.

'It may be', Father Pirard went on, 'that some old lady or some
soft-spoken man will let you glimpse enormous advantages elsewhere or
will quite crudely offer you gold in exchange for showing them the
letters received by the marquis...'

'Oh, sir!' exclaimed Julien, flushing.

'It is odd', said the priest with a bitter smile, 'that for all your
poverty, and after a year in a seminary, you should still go in for
displays of righteous indignation. You must have been pretty blind!'

'Could this be his blood that speaks?' the priest muttered under his
breath, as if talking to himself. 'The strange thing is', he added,
looking at Julien, 'that the marquis knows you... I don't know how.
He's giving you a salary of one hundred louis to begin with. He's a
man who only acts on impulse, that's the flaw in his character; he
will vie with you in acts of childishness. If he is satisfied, your
salary may rise later on to as much as eight thousand francs.

'But you must be well aware', Father Pirard continued sourly, 'that
he's not giving you all this money for nothing. You have to make
yourself useful. If I were in your position, I should say very little,
and above all never a word on matters about which I knew nothing.

'Ah!' he said, 'I've 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, the height of elegance, a sort of madman who never knows
what he's going to be doing from one moment to the next. He has wits
and courage; he fought in the Spanish War.
^*
The marquis hopes, I don't know why,

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that you will become a friend to the young Count Norbert. I said you
were a great Latin scholar, perhaps he's counting on your teaching his
son a few stock phrases on Cicero and Virgil.

'In your position I should never let myself be teased by this
handsome young man; and before yielding to his advances, which are
exquisitely polite, yet a bit spoilt by irony, I should get him to
repeat them more than once.

'I shall
not conceal from you that the young Count de La Mole is bound to
despise you to begin with, because you are merely one of the lower
middle classes. His own ancestor belonged at Court, and had the honour
of having his head cut off in the Place de Grève
^*
on the 26th of April 1574 for involvement in a political plot. You,
on the other hand, are the son of a carpenter from Verrières, and
what's more, in the pay of his father. Weigh up these differences
carefully, and study the history of this family in Moreri;
^*
all the flatterers who dine in their house make what they call delicate allusions to it from time to time.

'Watch out how you reply to the jokes made by his lordship Count
Norbert de La Mole, squadron commander in the Hussars and future peer
of France, and don't come to me with your complaints later on.'

'It seems to me', said Julien, going very red, 'that I shouldn't reply at all to a man who scorns me.'

'You have no idea what that kind of scorn is like; it will only
manifest itself through exaggerated compliments. If you were a fool,
you might be taken in by them; if you wished to make your way in the
world, you would have to be taken in by them.'

'If the day comes when none of this appeals to me any more, will I be
thought an ungrateful creature if I return to my little cell n° 103?'

'It's more than likely,' replied
Father Pirard, 'that all the hangers-on in the marquis's entourage
will slander you, but I shall appear in person as a witness.
Adsum qui feci
.
^*
I shall say that this resolution was prompted by me.'

Julien was distressed by the bitter and almost hostile tone he
detected in Father Pirard's voice; it utterly spoilt his reply.

The fact is that Father Pirard had prickings of conscience over his affection for Julien, and suffered a kind of religious

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