The Red and the Black/Chapter 57
CHAPTER LVII
THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH
The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
"I have a hard task before me to-day," he said to himself as he came in with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."
It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.
"It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made me copy out at London."
It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos. He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant everything and nothing. "It's the Æolian harp of style," thought Julien. "The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable fear of ridicule."
The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, going in the evening to the opera on those evenings when madame de Fervaques did not come to the hôtel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien's life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde's eyes underneath a feather of the maréchale's hat, and he would wax eloquent. His picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was both more striking and more elegant.
He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde's eyes, but he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. " The falser my speeches are the more I ought to please," thought Julien, and he then had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the eyes of the maréchale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.
Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were passed in inaction.
"But," he said to himself one evening, "here I am copying out the fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have been duly delivered to the maréchale's porter. I shall have the honour of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that Russian friend of Korasoff's who was in love with the pretty Quakeress of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more overwhelming."
Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the manœuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl. The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived a life of inordinate boredom, had to be induced to contract the habit of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid that her everyday life.
One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms of madame la Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an. invitation to dinner.
He rushed to prince Korasoff's instructions. Unfortunately the young Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the maréchale's dinner.
The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de Diane in the Tuilleries with panelled oil-paintings.
There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. "What a moral century! " he thought.
He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of the marechale's uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. "What immense progress I have made," said Julien to himself with a melancholy smile, "and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the famous bishop of ."
The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.
"It's like the small talk in a bad book," thought Julien. "All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater—the speaker's bombast, or his abominable ignorance?"
The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of the hôtel de la Mole with his base calumnies.
It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau's sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien's success; "but since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the same time any more than a fool," said the future professor to himself, "if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime maréchale, she will obtain some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of him in the hôtel de la Mole."
M. the abbé Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous maréchale which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.