8 "See, at the Louvre Museum, François, Duke of Aquitaine, laying down his armor to take the monk's habit." Guercino (1591–1666), an Italian painter, pupil of Caravaggio. Stendhal had a great interest in Italian art; one of his early books was A History of Painting in Italy (1817).
Chapter Twenty-Six: The World, or What the Rich Man is Missing
One day, during a dogma lesson, Father Pirard summoned Julien. The poor young man was thrilled to leave the physical and moral atmosphere in which he was immersed. The director gave him exactly the kind of welcome he'd experienced, and been so terrified by, the day he'd entered the seminary. "Explain what's written on this playing card," he said, and the way he looked at Julien made him wish he could sink down into the ground. Julien read: "Amanda Binet, at the Giraffe Café, before eight o'clock. Say you're from Genlis, and my mother's cousin." Julien saw at once what danger he was in: Father Castaneda's spies had sniffed out this address, and stolen it. "The day I entered the seminary," he said, looking at Father Pirard's forehead, because he could not endure those terrible eyes, "I was trembling. Father Chélan had warned me this was a place full of denunciations and all kinds of wickedness. Spying on your classmates, and denouncing them, were encouraged. Heaven wishes it to be that way, to show young priests life as it really is, and to inspire them with disgust for the world and all its displays." "And you use your rhetoric even on me!" cried Father Pirard, furious. "You little rascal!" "At Verrières," Julien replied coldly, "my brothers beat me any time they were jealous." "Get to the point! the point!" Father Pirard shouted, almost beside himself. Not in the least intimidated, Julien went on with his story. "The day I came to Besançon, about noon, I was hungry, I went into a café. I felt intense repugnance for such a profane place, but I thought my lunch would cost me less there than in an inn. A lady, who seemed to be the proprietress, took pity on me, an obvious newcomer in the city. 'Besançon is full of crooks,' she told me. 'I fear for you, sir. If any harm comes to you, just seek my help, send me word before eight o'clock. If the porter at the seminary won't send your note, tell him you're my cousin, and like me a native of Genlis'..." "All this jabbering will be looked into," cried Father Pirard, unable to stay in one place, walking up and down his room. "Back to your cell!" The director followed him in and locked the door. Then he set himself to inspecting Julien's trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal playing card had been carefully hidden. There was nothing missing from the trunk, but things had gotten disarranged—and yet he had always kept the key with him. "What good luck," Julien told himself, "that during those days of my blindness, I never made use of permission to go out of the seminary, so often offered by Father Castaneda, and with a goodwill that, now, I quite understand. If I'd been weak enough to change my clothes and go see pretty Amanda, I'd have been lost. When they gave up on using their information that way, and not wanting to just throw it away, they denounced me." Two hours later, the director summoned him again. "You were not lying," he said, not looking at him as harshly. "But holding on to an address like this is careless beyond your conception, and profoundly serious. You miserable child! Ten years from now, who knows? It might disgrace you."
The Red and the Black
Chapter Twenty-Seven: First Experience of Life The present age, oh Lord! It's like the Ark of the Covenant. Woe to anyone who touches it. —Diderot1 The reader will allow us to skip over most of the clear, precise facts of this time in Julien's life. It's not that we don't have them—quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw, there in the seminary, was entirely too black for the more moderate coloring we seek in these pages. Those who have suffered certain things can only remember them with a horror that paralyzes every other pleasure—even that of reading a story. Julien did not make much progress in his attempts at an externalized hypocrisy. He lapsed into moments of disgust and even of complete discouragement. He had not been successful, even in this sordid career. Any help at all, from anywhere or anyone, would have been enough to lift his heart; the difficulties he needed to conquer would not have seemed so enormous. But he was as alone as an abandoned ship in the middle of the ocean. "And if I did succeed," he said to himself, "to have all the rest of my life to spend in such company! Gluttons who think only of the bacon omelet they gobble down at dinner, or those like Father Castaneda, for whom there's no such thing as a crime too black! They'll get the power they're after, but oh great God, at what a price! "Man has a powerful will; I read this everywhere. But can it be powerful enough to overcome such disgust? Great men's tasks used to be easy. No matter the danger, they appreciated its beauty. But who can understand, except me, this ugliness all around me?" It was, for his life, the acid test. It would have been so easy to enlist in one of the fine regiments garrisoned at Besançon! Or he could have become a Latin teacher: he needed so little to live on! But then, no more career, no more future for him to imagine. That would be death. Here are the details of just one of his depressing days. "I've congratulated myself, often, for thinking I was different from the other young peasants! Well, I've lived long enough to see that difference creates hatred," he told himself one morning. This great truth had just been demonstrated by one of his most stinging failures. He had labored for a week, making himself pleasant to one of the seminarians who lived as if already canonized. He walked with him in the courtyard, humbly listening to stupid prattle until he couldn't keep his eyes open. Suddenly the weather turned stormy, thunder rumbled, and the saintly one called out, pushing Julien away in the rudest fashion: "Listen, it's everyone for himself in this world. I'm not interested in being burned up by a thunderbolt. God might strike you down as an infidel, just like Voltaire." His teeth clenched in rage, and his wide-open eyes staring at a sky streaked by lightning: "I'd deserve to be swept away, if I fell asleep during a storm!" Julien cried to himself. "Let's try to win over some other righteous snot!" The bell announced Father Castaneda's class in ecclesiastical history. Instructing these young peasants, terrified by hard work and their fathers' poverty, Father Castaneda taught, that day, that the government, which seemed to them so terrifying, only had true and legitimate power because the pope delegated it. "Make yourselves worthy of the pope's kindness and goodwill by the saintliness of your lives, by your obedience. Become like a rod in his hands, " he added, "and you will ascend to