The Red and the Black

by Stendhal

  “You have been recommended to me by M. Chélan. He was the best curé in the diocese; he was an upright man if there ever was one, and my friend for thirty years.”

  “Oh. It’s to M. Pirard then that I have the honour of speaking?” said Julien in a dying voice.

  “Apparently,” replied the director of the seminary, as he looked at him disagreeably.

  The glitter of his little eyes doubled and was followed by an involuntary movement of the muscles of the corner of the mouth. It was the physiognomy of the tiger savouring in advance the pleasure of devouring its prey.

  “Chélan’s letter is short,” he said, as though speaking to himself. “Intelligenti pauca. In the present time it is impossible to write too little.” He read aloud:—

  “I recommend to you Julien Sorel of this parish, whom I baptized nearly twenty years ago, the son of a rich carpenter who gives him nothing. Julien will be a remarkable worker in the vineyard of the Lord. He lacks neither memory nor intelligence; he has some faculty for reflection. Will he persevere in his calling? Is he sincere?”

  “Sincere,” repeated the Abbé Pirard with an astonished air, looking at Julien. But the Abbé’s look was already less devoid of all humanity. “Sincere,” he repeated, lowering his voice, and resuming his reading:—

  “I ask you for a stipend for Julien Sorel. He will earn it by passing the necessary examinations. I have taught him a little theology, that old and good theology of the Bossuets, the Arnaults, and the Fleurys. If the person does not suit you, send him back to me. The director of the workhouse, whom you know well, offers him eight hundred to be tutor to his children. My inner self is tranquil, thanks to God. I am accustoming myself to the terrible blow, ‘Vale et me ama.’”

  The Abbé Pirard, speaking more slowly as he read the signature, pronounced with a sigh the word, “Chélan.”

  “He is tranquil,” he said, “in fact his righteousness deserves such a recompense. May God grant it to me in such a case.” He looked up to heaven and made the sign of the cross. At the sight of that sacred sign Julien felt an alleviation of the profound horror which had frozen him since his entry into the house.

  “I have here three hundred and twenty-one aspirants for the most holy state,” said the Abbé Pirard at last, in a tone, which though severe, was not malicious; “only seven or eight have been recommended to me by such men as the Abbé Chélan; so you will be the ninth of these among the three hundred and twenty-one. But my protection means neither favour nor weakness, it means doubled care, and doubled severity against vice. Go and lock that door.”

  Julian made an effort to walk, and managed not to fall. He noticed that a little window near the entrance door looked out on to the country. He saw the trees; that sight did him as much good as the sight of old friends.

  “‘Loquerisne linquam latinam?’” (Do you speak Latin?) said the Abbé Pirard to him as he came back.

  “‘Ita, pater optime,’” (Yes, excellent Father) answered Julien, recovering himself a little. But it was certain that nobody in the world had ever appeared to him less excellent than had M. Pirard for the last half hour.

  The conversation continued in Latin. The expression in the Abbé’s eyes softened. Julien regained some self-possession. “How weak I am,” he thought, “to let myself be imposed on by these appearances of virtue. The man is probably nothing more than a rascal, like M. Maslon,” and Julien congratulated himself on having hidden nearly all his money in his boots.

  The Abbé Pirard examined Julien in theology; he was surprised at the extent of his knowledge, but his astonishment increased when he questioned him in particular on sacred scriptures. But when it came to questions of the doctrines of the Fathers, he perceived that Julien scarcely even knew the names of Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Basile, etc., etc.

  “As a matter of fact,” thought the Abbé Pirard, “this is simply that fatal tendency to Protestantism for which I have always reproached Chélan. A profound, and only too profound knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.”

  (Julien had just started speaking to him, without being questioned on the point, about the real time when Genesis, the Pentateuch, etc., has been written.)

  “To what does this never-ending reasoning over the Holy Scriptures lead to?” thought the Abbé Pirard, “if not to self-examination, that is to say, the most awful Protestantism. And by the side of this imprudent knowledge, nothing about the Fathers to compensate for that tendency.”

  But the astonishment of the director of the seminary was quite unbounded when having questioned Julien about the authority of the Pope, and expecting to hear the maxims of the ancient Gallican Church, the young man recited to him the whole book of M. de Maistre. “Strange man, that Chélan,” thought the Abbé Pirard. “Did he show him the book simply to teach him to make fun of it?”

  It was in vain that he questioned Julien and endeavoured to guess if he seriously believed in the doctrine of M. de Maistre. The young man only answered what he had learnt by heart. From this moment Julien was really happy. He felt that he was master of himself. After a very long examination, it seemed to him that M. Pirard’s severity towards him was only affected. Indeed, the director of the seminary would have embraced Julien in the name of logic, for he found so much clearness, precision and lucidity in his answers, had it not been for the principles of austere gravity towards his theology pupils which he had inculcated in himself for the last fifteen years.

  “Here we have a bold and healthy mind,” he said to himself, “but corpus debile” (the body is weak).

  “Do you often fall like that?” he said to Julien in French, pointing with his finger to the floor.

  “It’s the first time in my life. The porter’s face unnerved me,” added Julien, blushing like a child. The Abbé Pirard almost smiled.

  “That’s the result of vain, worldly pomp. You are apparently accustomed to smiling faces, those veritable theatres of falsehood. Truth is austere, Monsieur, but is not our task down here also austere? You must be careful that your conscience guards against that weakness of yours, too much sensibility to vain external graces.

  “If you had not been recommended to me,” said the Abbé Pirard, resuming the Latin language with an obvious pleasure, “If you had not been recommended by a man, by the Abbé Chélan, I would talk to you the vain language of that world, to which it would appear you are only too well accustomed. I would tell you that the full stipend which you solicit is the most difficult thing in the world to obtain. But the fifty-six years which the Abbé Chélan has spent in apostolic work have stood him in poor stead if he cannot dispose of a stipend at the seminary.”

  After these words, the Abbé Pirard recommended Julien not to enter any secret society or congregation without his consent.

  “I give you my word of honour,” said Julien, with all an honest man’s expansion of heart. The director of the seminary smiled for the first time.

  “That expression is not used here,” he said to him. “It is too reminiscent of that vain honour of worldly people, which leads them to so many errors and often to so many crimes. You owe me obedience by virtue of paragraph seventeen of the bull Unam Ecclesiam of St. Pius the Fifth. I am your ecclesiastical superior. To hear in this house, my dear son, is to obey. How much money have you?”

  (“So here we are,” said Julien to himself, “that was the reason of the ‘my very dear son’.”)

  “Thirty-five francs, my father.”

  “Write out carefully how you use that money. You will have to give me an account of it.”

  This painful audience had lasted three hours. Julien summoned the porter.

  “Go and install Julien Sorel in cell No. 103,” said the Abbé Pirard to the man.

  As a great favour he let Julien have a place all to himself. “Carry his box there,” he added.

  Julien lowered his eyes, and recognised his box just in front of him. He had been looking at it for three hours and had not recognised it.

  As
he arrived at No. 103, which was a little room eight feet square on the top story of the house, Julien noticed that it looked out on to the ramparts, and he perceived beyond them the pretty plain which the Doubs divides from the town.

  “What a charming view!” exclaimed Julien. In speaking like this he did not feel what the words actually expressed. The violent sensations which he had experienced during the short time that he had been at Besançon had absolutely exhausted his strength. He sat down near the window on the one wooden chair in the cell, and fell at once into a profound sleep. He did not hear either the supper bell or the bell for benediction. They had forgotten him. When the first rays of the sun woke him up the following morning, he found himself lying on the floor.

  XXVI. The World, or What the Rich Lack

  I am alone in the world. No one deigns to spare me a thought. All those whom I see make their fortune, have an insolence and hardness of heart which I do not feel in myself. They hate me by reason of kindness and good-humour. Oh, I shall die soon, either from starvation or the unhappiness of seeing men so hard of heart.—Young

  He hastened to brush his clothes and run down. He was late. Instead of trying to justify himself, Julien crossed his arms over his breast.

  “Peccavi pater optime (I have sinned, I confess my fault, oh, my father),” he said with a contrite air.

  This first speech was a great success. The clever ones among the seminarists saw that they had to deal with a man who knew something about the elements of the profession. The recreation hour arrived, and Julien saw that he was the object of general curiosity, but he only manifested reserved silence. Following the maxims he had laid down for himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one comrades as enemies. The most dangerous of all in his eyes was the Abbé Pirard. A few days afterwards Julien had to choose a confessor, and was given a list.

  “Great heavens! what do they take me for?” he said to himself. “Do they think I don’t understand what’s what?” Then he chose the Abbé Pirard.

  This step proved decisive without his suspecting it.

  A very little seminarist, who was quite young and a native of Verrières, and who had declared himself his friend since the first day, informed him that he would probably have acted more prudently if he had chosen M. Castanède, the sub-director of the seminary.

  “The Abbé Castanède is the enemy of Pirard, who is suspected of Jansenism,” added the little seminarist in a whisper. All the first steps of our hero were, in spite of the prudence on which he plumed himself, as much mistakes as his choice of a confessor. Misled as he was by all the self-confidence of a man of imagination, he took his projects for facts, and believed that he was a consummate hypocrite. His folly went so far as to reproach himself for his success in this kind of weakness.

  “Alas, it is my only weapon,” he said to himself. “At another period I should have earned my livelihood by eloquent deeds in the face of the enemy.”

  Satisfied as he was with his own conduct, Julien looked around him. He found everywhere the appearance of the purest virtue.

  Eight or ten seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity, and had visions like Saint Theresa, and Saint Francis, when he received his stigmata on Mount Vernia in the Appenines. But it was a great secret and their friends concealed it. These poor young people who had visions were always in the infirmary. A hundred others combined an indefatigable application to a robust faith. They worked till they fell ill, but without learning much. Two or three were distinguished by a real talent, amongst others a student of the name of Chazel, but both they and Julien felt mutually unsympathetic.

  The rest of these three hundred and twenty-one seminarists consisted exclusively of coarse persons, who were by no means sure of understanding the Latin words which they kept on repeating the livelong day. Nearly all were the sons of peasants, and they preferred to gain their livelihood by reciting some Latin words than by ploughing the earth. It was after this examination of his colleagues that Julien, during the first few days, promised himself a speedy success.

  “Intelligent people are needed in every service,” he said to himself, “for, after all, there is work to be done. I should have been a sergeant under Napoleon. I shall be a grand vicar among these future curés.”

  “All these poor devils,” he added, “manual labourers as they have been since their childhood, have lived on curded milk and black bread up till they arrived here. They would only eat meat five or six times a year in their hovels. Like the Roman soldiers who used to find war the time of rest, these poor peasants are enchanted with the delights of the seminary.”

  Julien could never read anything in their gloomy eyes but the satisfaction of physical craving after dinner, and the expectation of sensual pleasure before the meal. Such were the people among whom Julien had to distinguish himself; but the fact which he did not know, and which they refrained from telling him, was that coming out first in the different courses of dogma, ecclesiastical history, etc., etc., which are taken at the seminary, constituted in their eyes, neither more nor less than a splendid sin.

  Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. It is the submissive heart which counts for everything in its eyes. It suspects, and rightly so, any success in studies, even sacred ones. What is to prevent a superior man from crossing over to the opposite side like Sièyes or Gregory? The trembling Church clings on to the Pope as its one chance of safety. The Pope alone is in a position to attempt to paralyse all personal self-examination, and to make an impression by means of the pompous piety of his court ceremonial on the bored and morbid spirit of fashionable society.

  Julien, as he began to get some glimpse of these various truths, which are none the less in total contradiction to all the official pronouncements of any seminary, fell into a profound melancholy. He worked a great deal and rapidly succeeded in learning things which were extremely useful to a priest, extremely false in his own eyes, and devoid of the slightest interest for him. He felt there was nothing else to do.

  “Am I then forgotten by the whole world,” he thought. He did not know that M. Pirard had received and thrown into the fire several letters with the Dijon stamp in which the most lively passion would pierce through the most formal conventionalism of style. “This love seems to be fought by great attacks of remorse. All the better,” thought the Abbé Pirard. “At any rate this lad has not loved an infidel woman.”

  One day the Abbé Pirard opened a letter which seemed half-blotted out by tears. It was an adieu forever. “At last,” said the writer to Julien, “Heaven has granted me the grace of hating, not the author of my fall, but my fall itself. The sacrifice has been made, dear one, not without tears as you see. The safety of those to whom I must devote my life, and whom you love so much, is the decisive factor. A just but terrible God will no longer see His way to avenge on them their mother’s crimes. Adieu, Julien. Be just towards all men.” The end of the letter was nearly entirely illegible. The writer gave an address at Dijon, but at the same time expressed the hope that Julien would not answer, or at any rate would employ language which a reformed woman could read without blushing. Julien’s melancholy, aggravated by the mediocre nourishment which the contractor who gave dinners at thirteen centimes per head supplied to the seminary, began to affect his health, when Fouqué suddenly appeared in his room one morning.

  “I have been able to get in at last. I have duly been five times to Besançon in order to see you. Could never get in. I put someone by the door to watch. Why the devil don’t you ever go out?”

  “It is a test which I have imposed on myself.”

  “I find you greatly changed, but here you are again. I have just learned from a couple of good five franc pieces that I was only a fool not to have offered them on my first journey.”

  The conversation of the two frien
ds went on for ever. Julien changed colour when Fouqué said to him,

  “Do you know, by the by, that your pupils’ mother has become positively devout.”

  And he began to talk in that off-hand manner which makes so singular an impression on the passionate soul, whose dearest interests are being destroyed without the speaker having the faintest suspicion of it.

  “Yes, my friend, the most exalted devoutness. She is said to make pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of the Abbé Maslon, who has played the spy so long on that poor M. Chélan, Madame de Rênal would have nothing to do with him. She goes to confession to Dijon or Besançon.”

  “She goes to Besançon,” said Julien, flushing all over his forehead.

  “Pretty often,” said Fouqué in a questioning manner.

  “Have you got any Constitutionnels on you?”

  “What do you say?” replied Fouqué.

  “I’m asking if you’ve got any Constitutionnels?” went on Julien in the quietest tone imaginable. “They cost thirty sous a number here.”

  “What!” exclaimed Fouqué. “Liberals even in the seminary! Poor France,” he added, assuming the Abbé Maslon’s hypocritical voice and sugary tone.

  This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero, if he had not been put on the track of an important discovery by some words addressed to him the following day by the little seminarist from Verrières. Julien’s conduct since he had been at the seminary had been nothing but a series of false steps. He began to make bitter fun of himself.

  In point of fact the important actions in his life had been cleverly managed, but he was careless about details, and cleverness in a seminary consists in attention to details. Consequently, he had already the reputation among his comrades of being a strong-minded person. He had been betrayed by a number of little actions.