1 The famous memorialist of the court of Louis XIV and the Regency, the Duke de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) was greatly preoccupied with questions of rank, etiquette, and genealogy.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Love of A Moral Sort
But Julien, who had now taken action, was less miserable. Back in his room, he happened to glance at the leather binder Prince Korasoff had given him to hold his gift of fifty-three love letters. Julien saw the prince's annotation, below the first letter: "to be sent a week after you first meet her." "I'm late!" he exclaimed to himself. "It's been a very long time since I met Madame de Fervaques." He quickly set to copying the first letter: it was a sermon, full of virtuous observations, and incredibly boring. He was lucky enough to fall asleep, by the second page. Some hours later, he was awakened by bright sunshine. One of the most painful moments in his life occurred, every morning, when he woke and was once again aware of his misery. But on this day, he completed his copy of the letter, laughing. "Is it really possible," he was saying to himself, "that a young man truly exists, capable of writing like this!" He noted several sentences that ran a full nine lines each. At the close of the original, he saw a note, in pencil: These letters must be delivered by you: on horseback, wearing a black tie and a blue frock coat. You are to hand the letter to the porter, looking as if you felt guilty of something; your eyes must be full of profound melancholy. If some maid servant notices you, wipe your eyes, rather furtively. Say a few words to the servant. Julien faithfully followed his orders. "This is all very bold of me," Julien thought as he was leaving Madame de Fervaques's mansion, "but all the worse for Korasoff. Imagine daring to write love letters to such a celebrated prude! I'll be treated with the utmost contempt, and nothing could please me more. And, really, this is the only kind of comedy I care for. Yes: To cover this disgusting creature I call me in ridicule, that will please me. If I took myself seriously, I'd commit a crime, just for the distraction." For the past month, Julien's most satisfying moments had been when he brought his horse back to the stable. Korasoff had forbidden him, in the most explicit terms, from using any pretext whatever to look at the mistress who'd rejected him. But the clatter of this horse's hooves, a sound that she knew so well, and the way Julien rapped his whip on the door, to summon a stable hand, sometimes brought Mathilde to stand behind her window curtain. The chiffon was so thin he could see right through it. If he held himself just so, he could see her, from underneath his riding hat, without having to meet her eyes. "Which means," he assured himself, "that she can't see my eyes, either, so this doesn't constitute looking." Madame de Fervaques's demeanor that night betrayed no sign that, earlier in the day, she had received the philosophical-mystical-religious dissertation he'd handed, with such utter melancholy, to her porter. Chance had shown Julien, the night before, how he might make himself eloquent: he arranged his chair so he could see Mathilde's eyes. And she, for her part, rose from the blue sofa only moments after Madame de Fervaques's arrival: it was open desertion of her usual evening company. Monsieur de Croisenois seemed disturbed by this latest whim; his obvious sorrow eased Julien's misery of its most painful agonies. Such unexpected occurrences made him speak like an angel. And since vanity worms its way, even into hearts serving as temples of the most solemn virtue: "Madame de La Mole was right," Madame de Fervaques said to herself as she stepped back into her carriage. "That young priest is a man of distinction. It must be that, at first, being in my presence intimidated him. And it is true that everyone I meet in that house tends to be frivolous. The only virtue I find there is the sort that age brings with it, and which the frosts of growing old have immensely assisted. This young man, surely, knows the difference. He writes well, but I strongly suspect that the request he made in his letter, that I give him my advice, must really be founded in feelings of which he is himself not fully aware.
The Red and the Black
"All the same, how often conversions begin this way! What makes me expect good things from this one is how differently he writes, compared to the other young men whose letters I've come upon. It's impossible not to see spirituality, and deep seriousness and profound conviction, in this young ecclesiastic's prose. He will become a master of sweet virtue, like Massillon himself."
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Church's Best Jobs
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Church's Best Jobs Service? Talent? Merit? Bah! Belong to a clique. —Fénelon, Télémaque1 And so the notion of a bishopric was joined, for the first time, with ideas about Julien, in the mind of a woman who, sooner or later, would be bestowing the most powerful, the most lucrative posts in the French Church. This honor would scarcely have concerned Julien: just then, his mind was not capable of reaching toward anything but his current misery. All things intensified it: the view from his room, for example, had become unendurable. When he walked upstairs with his candle at night, every piece of furniture, every trifling ornament, seemed to him to become vocal and proclaim some new detail of his affliction. "Today," he told himself, returning to his room with a liveliness he'd not felt in a long time, "I've got some compulsory labor. Let's hope the second letter will be as boring as the first." It was worse. The stuff he was copying struck him as so absurd that he began reproducing it line by line, without any regard to sense. "This is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than the official documents of the Munster Treaty, which my diplomacy professor made me copy out in London." And then, for the first time, he thought of Madame de Fervaques's letters, the originals of which he'd forgotten to return to that sober Spaniard, Don Diego Bustos. He hunted them up; they were in fact virtually as obscure and rambling as those of the young Russian nobleman. They possessed a perfect vagueness, wishing to say everything, and saying nothing. "This is the Aeolian harp of style," Julien thought. "Set among the highest thoughts of nothingness, of death, of infinity, etc., the only real thing I see is a horrible fear of appearing ridiculous." The monologue we have just summarized was repeated over and over, for the following two weeks. Falling asleep while copying a kind of commentary on the Apocalypse; the next day, going to deliver a letter, with the prescribed melancholic mien; bringing his horse back to the stable, and hoping to catch a glimpse of Mathilde's dress; attending the opera, that evening, when Madame de Fervaques did not visit the de La Mole house: these events comprised the monotonous moments of Julien's life. Things were more interesting when Madame de Fervaques visited Madame de La Mole: he could catch glimpses of Mathilde's eyes, under cover of the brim of Madame de Fervaques's hat, and then he spoke eloquently. His picturesque and sentimental language began to take on more striking and more elegant forms. He realized that, to Mathilde, he was speaking absurdities, but he was anxious to impress her with the elegance of his diction. "The more falsehoods I speak, the more pleased she should be," Julien thought. And then, with frightful boldness, he heightened and exaggerated certain aspects of physical nature. It had not taken him long to understand that, to keep Madame de Fervaques from thinking him vulgar, it was necessary above all other things to