finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_25_part_0.txt
The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 26
part 1, chapter 26
{"name": "Part 1, Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-26", "summary": "When lunchtime comes at the seminary, everyone is curious about Julien. They're impressed that he can already read and speak Latin. Julien doesn't realize that during these days, he receives several letters that Father Pirard throws into a fire because he doesn't like the passion in them. Maybe they're from Madame de Renal. One day, one of these letters says farewell forever. Again, Julien never receives it. Julien's friend Fouqe bribes his way into the seminary and asks Julien why he never goes out. Julien has meanwhile gotten himself a reputation as a free thinker, which is a horrible thing inside the seminary. Julien finally becomes aware of just how closely people watch one another in adult society. He spends the next few months trying to change his appearance and body language, but he can't stop looking like a freethinker. One day, Father Pirard calls on Julien and confronts him with the card he took from Besancon with the cafe waitress' name on it. The card also contains instructions about how Julien can secretly meet with this girl. It looks bad, but Julien says he never acted on the card, since it can be proven that he's never left the sight of the seminary priests. Pirard agrees, but still says it was a bad idea to keep this card, since it suggests that Julien still thinks about romantic meetings with girls.", "analysis": ""}
CHAPTER 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 abbe 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 abbe Pirard.

This step proved decisive without his suspecting it.

A little seminarist, who was quite young and a native of Verrieres, 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.
Castanede, the sub-director of the seminary.

"The abbe Castanede 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
cures."

"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
Sieyes 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
abbe Pirard. "At any rate this lad has not loved an infidel woman."

One day the abbe Pirard opened a letter which seemed half-blotted out
by tears. It was an adieu for ever. "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 Fouque suddenly appeared in his room one morning.

"I have been able to get in at last. I have duly been five times to
Besancon 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 friends went on for ever. Julien changed
colour when Fouque 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 abbe Maslon, who has
played the spy so long on that poor M. Chelan, Madame de Renal would
have nothing to do with him. She goes to confession to Dijon or
Besancon."

"She goes to Besancon," said Julien, flushing all over his forehead.

"Pretty often," said Fouque in a questioning manner.

"Have you got any _Constitutionnels_ on you?"

"What do you say?" replied Fouque.

"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 Fouque. "Liberals even in the seminary! Poor France,"
he added, assuming the abbe 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 Verrieres.
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.

He had been convicted in their eyes of this enormity, _he thought and
judged for himself_ instead of blindly following authority and example.
The abbe Pirard had been no help to him. He had not spoken to him
on a single occasion apart from the confessional, and even there he
listened more than he spoke. Matters would have been very different if
he had chosen the abbe Castanede. The moment that Julien realised his
folly, he ceased to be bored. He wished to know the whole extent of the
evil, and to effect this emerged a little from that haughty obstinate
silence with which he had scrupulously rebuffed his comrades. It was
now that they took their revenge on him. His advances were welcomed by
a contempt verging on derision. He realised that there had not been one
single hour from the time of his entry into the seminary, particularly
during recreation time, which had not resulted in affecting him one
way or another, which had not increased the number of his enemies, or
won for him the goodwill of some seminarist who was either sincerely
virtuous or of a fibre slightly less coarse than that of the others.
The evil to repair was infinite, and the task very difficult.
Henceforth, Julien's attention was always on guard. The problem before
him was to map out a new character for himself.

The moving of his eyes for example, occasioned him a great deal of
trouble. It is with good reason that they are carried lowered in these
places.

"How presumptuous I was at Verrieres," said Julien to himself. "I
thought I lived; I was only preparing for life, and here I am at last
in the world such as I shall find it, until my part comes to an end,
surrounded by real enemies. What immense difficulties," he added,
"are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute. It is
enough to put the labours of Hercules into the shade. The Hercules of
modern times is the Pope Sixtus Quintus, who deceived by his modesty
fifteen years on end forty Cardinals who had seen the liveliness and
haughtiness of his whole youth.

"So knowledge is nothing here," he said to himself with disgust.
"Progress in doctrine, in sacred history, etc., only seem to count.
Everything said on those subjects is only intended to entrap fools like
me. Alas my only merit consists in my rapid progress, and in the way in
which I grasp all their nonsense. Do they really value those things at
their true worth? Do they judge them like I do. And I had the stupidity
to be proud of my quickness. The only result of my coming out top has
been to give me inveterate enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than
I do, always throws some blunder in his compositions which gets him put
back to the fiftieth place. If he comes out first, it is only because
he is absent-minded. O how useful would one word, just one word, of M.
Pirard, have been to me."

As soon as Julien was disillusioned, the long exercises in ascetic
piety, such as the attendances in the chapel five times a week, the
intonation of hymns at the chapel of the Sacre Coeur, etc., etc.,
which had previously seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most
interesting opportunities for action. Thanks to a severe introspection,
and above all, by trying not to overdo his methods, Julien did not
attempt at the outset to perform significant actions (that is to say,
actions which are proof of a certain Christian perfection) like those
seminarists who served as a model to the rest.

Seminarists have a special way, even of eating a poached egg, which
betokens progress in the devout life.

The reader who smiles at this will perhaps be good enough to remember
all the mistakes which the abbe Delille made over the eating of an egg
when he was invited to breakfast with a lady of the Court of Louis XVI.

Julien first tried to arrive at the state of _non culpa_, that is
to say the state of the young seminarist whose demeanour and manner
of moving his arms, eyes, etc. while in fact without any trace of
worldliness, do not yet indicate that the person is entirely absorbed
by the conception of the other world, and the idea of the pure
nothingness of this one.

Julien incessantly found such phrases as these charcoaled on the walls
of the corridors. "What are sixty years of ordeals balanced against
an eternity of delights or any eternity of boiling oil in hell?" He
despised them no longer. He realised that it was necessary to have them
incessantly before his eyes. "What am I going to do all my life," he
said to himself. "I shall sell to the faithful a place in heaven. How
am I going to make that place visible to their eyes? By the difference
between my appearance and that of a layman."

After several months of absolutely unremitting application, Julien
still had the appearance of thinking. The way in which he would move
his eyes and hold his mouth did not betoken that implicit faith which
is ready to believe everything and undergo everything, even at the cost
of martyrdom. Julien saw with anger that he was surpassed in this by
the coarsest peasants. There was good reason for their not appearing
full of thought.

What pains did he not take to acquire that facial expression of blindly
fervent faith which is found so frequently in the Italian convents,
and of which Le Guerchin has left such perfect models in his Church
pictures for the benefit of us laymen.

On feast-days, the seminarists were regaled with sausages and cabbage.
Julien's table neighbours observed that he did not appreciate this
happiness. That was looked upon as one of his paramount crimes.
His comrades saw in this a most odious trait, and the most foolish
hypocrisy. Nothing made him more enemies.

"Look at this bourgeois, look at this stuck-up person," they would
say, "who pretends to despise the best rations there are, sausages and
cabbage, shame on the villain! The haughty wretch, he is damned for
ever."

"Alas, these young peasants, who are my comrades, find their ignorance
an immense advantage," Julien would exclaim in his moments of
discouragement. "The professor has not got to deliver them on their
arrival at the seminary from that awful number of worldly ideas which I
brought into it, and which they read on my face whatever I do."

Julien watched with an attention bordering on envy the coarsest of the
little peasants who arrived at the seminary. From the moment when they
were made to doff their shabby jackets to don the black robe, their
education consisted of an immense and limitless respect for _hard
liquid cash_ as they say in Franche-Comte.

That is the consecrated and heroic way of expressing the sublime idea
of current money.

These seminarists, like the heroes in Voltaire's novels, found their
happiness in dining well. Julien discovered in nearly all of them
an innate respect for the man who wears a suit of good cloth. This
sentiment appreciates the distributive justice, which is given us at
our courts, at its value or even above its true value. "What can one
gain," they would often repeat among themselves, "by having a law suit
with 'a big man?'"

That is the expression current in the valleys of the Jura to express
a rich man. One can judge of their respect for the richest entity
of all--the government. Failure to smile deferentially at the mere
name of M. the Prefect is regarded as an imprudence in the eyes of
the Franche-Comte peasant, and imprudence in poor people is quickly
punished by lack of bread.

After having been almost suffocated at first by his feeling of
contempt, Julien eventually experienced a feeling of pity; it often
happened that the fathers of most of his comrades would enter their
hovel in winter evenings and fail to find there either bread, chestnuts
or potatoes.

"What is there astonishing then?" Julien would say to himself, "if in
their eyes the happy man is in the first place the one who has just had
a good dinner, and in the second place the one who possesses a good
suit? My comrades have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see
in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of the happiness of
dining well and having a warm suit."

Julien happened to hear a young imaginative seminarist say to his
companion.

"Why shouldn't I become Pope like Sixtus Quintus who kept pigs?"

"They only make Italians Popes," answered his friend. "But they will
certainly draw lots amongst us for the great vicarships, canonries and
perhaps bishoprics. M. P---- Bishop of Chalons, is the son of a cooper.
That's what my father is."

One day, in the middle of a theology lesson, the Abbe Pirard summoned
Julien to him. The young fellow was delighted to leave the dark, moral
atmosphere in which he had been plunged. Julien received from the
director the same welcome which had frightened him so much on the first
day of his entry.

"Explain to me what is written on this playing card?" he said, looking
at him in a way calculated to make him sink into the earth.

Julien read:

"Amanda Binet of the Giraffe Cafe before eight o'clock. Say you're from
Genlis, and my mother's cousin."

Julien realised the immense danger. The spies of the abbe Castanede had
stolen the address.

"I was trembling with fear the day I came here," he answered, looking
at the abbe Pirard's forehead, for he could not endure that terrible
gaze. "M. Chelan told me that this is a place of informers and
mischief-makers of all kinds, and that spying and tale-bearing by one
comrade on another was encouraged by the authorities. Heaven wishes it
to be so, so as to show life such as it is to the young priests, and
fill them with disgust for the world and all its pomps."

"And it's to me that you make these fine speeches," said the abbe
Pirard furiously. "You young villain."

"My brothers used to beat me at Verrieres," answered Julien coldly,
"When they had occasion to be jealous of me."

"Indeed, indeed," exclaimed M. Pirard, almost beside himself.

Julien went on with his story without being in the least intimidated:--

"The day of my arrival at Besancon I was hungry, and I entered a
cafe. My spirit was full of revulsion for so profane a place, but I
thought that my breakfast would cost me less than at an inn. A lady,
who seemed to be the mistress of the establishment, took pity on my
inexperience. 'Besancon is full of bad characters,' she said to me. 'I
fear something will happen to you, sir. If some mishap should occur to
you, have recourse to me and send to my house before eight o'clock. If
the porters of the seminary refuse to execute your errand, say you are
my cousin and a native of Genlis.'"

"I will have all this chatter verified," exclaimed the abbe Pirard,
unable to stand still, and walking about the room.

"Back to the cell."

The abbe followed Julien and locked him in. The latter immediately
began to examine his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal cards had
been so carefully hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but several
things had been disarranged. Nevertheless, he had never been without
the key. What luck that, during the whole time of my blindness, said
Julien to himself, I never availed myself of the permission to go out
that Monsieur Castanede would offer me so frequently, with a kindness
which I now understand. Perhaps I should have had the weakness to have
changed my clothes and gone to see the fair Amanda, and then I should
have been ruined. When they gave up hope of exploiting that piece of
information for the accomplishment of his ruin, they had used it to
inform against him. Two hours afterwards the director summoned him.

"You did not lie," he said to him, with a less severe look, "but
keeping an address like that is an indiscretion of a gravity which you
are unable to realise. Unhappy child! It may perhaps do you harm in ten
years' time."






Part 1, Chapter 26
When lunchtime comes at the seminary, everyone is curious about Julien. They're impressed that he can already read and speak Latin. Julien doesn't realize that during these days, he receives several letters that Father Pirard throws into a fire because he doesn't like the passion in them. Maybe they're from Madame de Renal. One day, one of these letters says farewell forever. Again, Julien never receives it. Julien's friend Fouqe bribes his way into the seminary and asks Julien why he never goes out. Julien has meanwhile gotten himself a reputation as a free thinker, which is a horrible thing inside the seminary. Julien finally becomes aware of just how closely people watch one another in adult society. He spends the next few months trying to change his appearance and body language, but he can't stop looking like a freethinker. One day, Father Pirard calls on Julien and confronts him with the card he took from Besancon with the cafe waitress' name on it. The card also contains instructions about how Julien can secretly meet with this girl. It looks bad, but Julien says he never acted on the card, since it can be proven that he's never left the sight of the seminary priests. Pirard agrees, but still says it was a bad idea to keep this card, since it suggests that Julien still thinks about romantic meetings with girls.