This moment was more painful than death.
He called the turnkey who was devoted to him, and sent sent him two or three times at intervals of one hour to see if the priest was still by the prison gates.
"Monsieur," said the turnkey to him on each occasion, "he is on both his knees in the mud; he is praying at the top of his voice, and saying litanies for your soul.
"The impudent fellow," thought Julien.
At this moment he actually heard a dull buzz. It was the responses of the people to the litanies.
His patience was strained to the utmost when he saw the turnkey himself move his lips while he repeated the Latin words.
"They are beginning to say," added the turnkey, "that you must have a very hardened heart to refuse the help of this holy man."
"Oh my country, how barbarous you still are!" exclaimed Julien, beside himself with anger.
And he continued his train of thought aloud, without giving a thought to the turn-key's presence.
"The man wants an article in the paper about him, and that's a way in which he will certainly get it.
"Oh you cursed provincials!
At Paris I should not be subjected to all these annoyances.
There they are more skilled in their charlatanism.
"Show in the holy priest," he said at last to the turnkey, and great streams of sweat flowed down his forehead.
The turnkey made the sign of the cross and went out rejoicing.
The holy priest turned out to be very ugly, he was even dirtier than he was ugly.
The cold rain intensified the obscurity and dampness of the cell.
The priest wanted to embrace Julien, and began to wax pathetic as he spoke to him.
The basest hypocrisy was only too palpable; Julien had never been so angry in his whole life.
A quarter of an hour after the priest had come in Julien felt an absolute coward.
Death appeared horrible to him for the first time.
He began to think about the state of decomposition which his body would be in two days after the execution, etc., etc.
He was on the point of betraying himself by some sign of weakness or throwing himself on the priest and strangling him with his chain, when it occurred to him to beg the holy man to go and say a good forty franc mass for him on that very day.
It was twelve o'clock, so the priest took himself off. _____
CHAPTER LXXIV _____
As soon as he had gone out Julien wept desperately and for a long time.
He gradually admitted to himself that if madame de Renal had been at Besancon he would have confessed his weakness to her.
The moment when he was regretting the absence of this beloved woman he heard Mathilde's step.
"The worst evil of being in prison," he thought "is one's inability to close one's door."
All Mathilde said only irritated him.
She told him that M. de Valenod had had his nomination to the prefectship in his pocket on the day of his trial, and had consequently dared to defy M. de Frilair and give himself the pleasure of condemning him to death.
"Why did your friend take it into his head," M. de Frilair just said to me, "to awaken and attack the petty vanity of that bourgeois aristocracy.
Why talk about caste?
He pointed out to them what they ought to do in their own political interest; the fools had not been giving it a thought and were quite ready to weep.
That caste interest intervened and blinded their eyes to the horror of condemning a man to death.
One must admit that M. Sorel is very inexperienced.
If we do not succeed in saving him by a petition for a reprieve, his death will be a kind of suicide."
Mathilde was careful not to tell Julien a matter concerning which she had now no longer any doubts; it was that the abbe de Frilair seeing that Julien was ruined, had thought that it would further his ambitious projects to try and become his successor.
"Go and listen to a mass for me," he said to Mathilde, almost beside himself with vexation and impotent rage, and leave me a moment in peace.
Mathilde who was already very jealous of madame de Renal's visits and who had just learned of her departure realised the cause of Julien's bad temper and burst into tears.
Her grief was real; Julien saw this and was only the more irritated.
He had a crying need of solitude, and how was he to get it?
Eventually Mathilde, after having tried to melt him by every possible argument, left him alone. But almost at the same moment, Fouque presented himself.
"I need to be alone," he said, to this faithful friend, and as he saw him hesitate: "I am composing a memorial for my petition for pardon ... one thing more ... do me a favour, and never speak to me about death.
If I have need of any especial services on that day, let me be the first to speak to you about it."
When Julien had eventually procured solitude, he found himself more prostrate and more cowardly than he had been before.
The little force which this enfeebled soul still possessed had all been spent in concealing his condition from mademoiselle de la Mole.
Towards the evening he found consolation in this idea.
"If at the very moment this morning, when death seemed so ugly to me, I had been given notice of my execution, the public eye would have acted as a spur to glory, my demeanour would perhaps have had a certain stiffness about it, like a nervous fop entering a salon.
A few penetrating people, if there are any amongst these provincial might have managed to divine my weakness....