5 A liberal daily newspaper, founded in 1815 in opposition to the Bourbon government.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The World, or What the Rich Man is Missing
needing repair was huge; the task was extremely difficult. But Julien was painstakingly, ceaselessly on guard: he was at work designing himself a brand-new character. His eye movements, for example, caused him serious difficulty. There was good reason, in a place like this, to keep one's eyes lowered. "How presumptuous I was at Verrières!" Julien told himself. "I fancied myself living; I was merely preparing to live. Now I'm finally in the real world, finding it exactly as I will go on finding it, until I've finished playing my part: surrounded by genuine enemies. What an incredible difficulty," he added, "this constantly evolving, never-ending hypocrisy! It makes the labors of Hercules pale by comparison. Our modern Hercules would have to be Pope Sextus V,6 for fifteen years in a row using his modesty to deceive forty cardinals who had seen him, throughout his younger years, both lively and arrogant. "So: knowledge is nothing here!" he said to himself, resentfully. "Progress in dogma, in Church history, etc., only seems to make any difference. Talking about knowledge is a deliberate trap, meant for fools like me to fall into. Alas! All I've accomplished is a swift mastery of all this twaddle. Do they really judge these things at their true value? Do they think of them as I do? And I've been stupid enough to feel proud! All I've gained, for all my long, unending parade of academic honors, is fierce, relentless enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than I do, always throws a whopping blunder into his papers, so he drops into fiftieth place. If he ever takes a first, it's pure absentmindedness. Ah! How useful one word, one single word from Father Pirard would have been!" Once he'd had his eyes opened, the long exercises in aesthetic piety—saying the rosary five times a week, chanting canticles to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, etc., etc.—which had always struck him as mordantly dull, became the most fascinating things he did. In critically evaluating himself, and trying not to exaggerate his capacities, Julien did not aspire all at once—like those seminarians who served as models for the others—to make every single thing he did significant, or in other words to bear witness to a kind of Christian perfection. There is a way of eating a soft-boiled egg, in the seminary, that testifies to progress toward a life of devotion. My reader may be smiling, but let him take the trouble to recall all the many errors committed, precisely in the eating of an egg, by Father Delille,7 when invited to lunch by a great lady of Louis XVI's court. Julien first tried to reach a state of non culpa, or the negative virtue of comparative innocence, in which the young seminarian's walk, the method of moving his arms, his eyes, etc., revealed no worldly concerns, without as yet attaining to absorption in that other, eternal life, and its pure nothingness. Julien was always finding, lettered in charcoal on the corridor walls, observations like the following: "What is sixty years of striving, balanced against either eternal delight or eternally burning in hell?" He no longer scorned them; he understood he had to keep them forever in front of his eyes. "What is it I'm going to do all my life?" he'd say to himself. "I'm going to be selling the faithful a place in heaven. How can I make them really see that place? By the difference between what they view when they look at me, and when they look at others like themselves." After months of ceaseless effort, Julien still looked like a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and holding his mouth did not indicate implicit faith, a readiness to believe everything