7 An obscure country priest who found sudden fame when he published a translation of Virgil's Georgica; he was adopted as a protégé by the very rich and very literary Madame Geoffrin, in whose elegant salon he was something of a fish out of water. There is no record of the egg incident.
The Red and the Black
and endure everything, even martyrdom. Julien was angry, seeing himself inferior in this sort of thing to the coarsest of coarse peasants. They had excellent reasons for not looking like thinkers. How hard he strove to achieve a face of fervent, blind faith, prepared to believe anything and suffer everything—the face so often found in Italian monasteries, and of which, among our nonecclesiastics, Guercino8 has left, in his religious paintings, such perfect models. During high festivals, the seminarians were given sausage with sauerkraut. Those who sat near Julien, in the refectory, noticed how indifferently pleased this made him: it was one of his most serious offenses. His classmates saw it as an obnoxious trait of intensely stupid hypocrisy: nothing made him more enemies. "Look at this bourgeois, look at this snob," they said, "pretending to be scornful of the very best of all food, sausage and sauerkraut! Oh, what a rotten fellow! What conceit! What eternal damnation!" "Alas!" Julien cried, in his moments of discouragement, "the ignorance of these young peasants, my classmates, is an immense advantage for them! When they entered the seminary, their teachers didn't have to free them from the fearful number of worldly ideas I bear, and which they can see on my face no matter what I do." With an attentiveness bordering on jealousy, Julien studied the coarsest of the peasant seminarians. When they'd stripped off their ratteen jackets, so they could put on their black garments, their education had been limited to a limitless respect for money— hard or soft, as folk in Franche-Comté phrase it. This is the holy, epic way of expressing that sublime conception, cash. Happiness, for these seminarians, as for the heroes of Voltaire's novels, is above all else a good dinner. Julien found in almost all of them an innate respect for anyone who wore cotton broadcloth clothing. Such an attitude values distributive justice, the sort we receive in our courts of law, at exactly its true worth—or perhaps a bit less than that. "What good does it do," they kept saying among themselves, "suing a big shot?" That's the phrase they use in the valleys of the Jura, when they refer to a rich man. Imagine their respect for the wealthiest of the wealthy—the government! In these Franche-Comté peasants' eyes, not to smile respectfully, when the governor's name was mentioned, was sheer recklessness. After all, a poor man's recklessness is quickly punished by an absence of food. After having virtually suffocated early on, in his feelings of contempt, Julien ended by experiencing pity. Most of his classmates' fathers well knew what it was like, coming home to their cottage on a winter night and finding no bread, no potatoes, no chestnuts. "Why should it seem surprising," Julien said to himself, "if in their eyes a happy man is, first of all, someone who's just had a good meal, and next to that someone who wears decent clothes? My classmates have a fixed vocation, or in other words they see in the priesthood a long continuation of exactly that happiness—eating well and having warm clothes in the winter." Once, he heard a young seminarian, blessed with an imagination, saying to a companion: "Why shouldn't I become pope, just like Sextus VI, who was a swineherd?" "Only Italians get to be pope," said his friend. "But I'm sure they'll pick some of us, the lucky ones, for posts as vicar-generals, canons, and maybe bishops...Father P., Bishop of Châlons, is a barrel-maker's son, and that's what my father does."