The collector of taxes, the superintendent of indirect taxes, the officer of gendarmerie, and two or three other public officials arrived with their wives.
They were followed by some rich Liberals. Dinner was announced.
It occurred to Julien, who was already feeling upset, that there were some poor prisoners on the other side of the dining-room wall, and that an illicit profit had perhaps been made over their rations of meat in order to purchase all that garish luxury with which they were trying to overwhelm him.
"Perhaps they are hungry at this very minute," he said to himself. He felt a choking in his throat. He found it impossible to eat and almost impossible to speak.
Matters became much worse a quarter of an hour afterwards; they heard in the distance some refrains of a popular song that was, it must be confessed, a little vulgar, which was being sung by one of the inmates.
M. Valenod gave a look to one of his liveried servants who disappeared and soon there was no more singing to be heard.
At that moment a valet offered Julien some Rhine wine in a green glass and Madame Valenod made a point of asking him to note that this wine cost nine francs a bottle in the market.
Julien held up his green glass and said to M. Valenod,
"They are not singing that wretched song any more."
"Zounds, I should think not," answered the triumphant governor.
"I have made the rascals keep quiet."
These words were too much for Julien. He had the manners of his new position, but he had not yet assimilated its spirit.
In spite of all his hypocrisy and its frequent practice, he felt a big tear drip down his cheek.
He tried to hide it in the green glass, but he found it absolutely impossible to do justice to the Rhine wine.
"Preventing singing he said to himself: Oh, my God, and you suffer it."
Fortunately nobody noticed his ill-bred emotion.
The collector of taxes had struck up a royalist song.
"So this," reflected Julien's conscience during the hubbub of the refrain which was sung in chorus, "is the sordid prosperity which you will eventually reach, and you will only enjoy it under these conditions and in company like this.
You will, perhaps, have a post worth twenty thousand francs; but while you gorge yourself on meat, you will have to prevent a poor prisoner from singing; you will give dinners with the money which you have stolen out of his miserable rations and during your dinners he will be still more wretched.
Oh, Napoleon, how sweet it was to climb to fortune in your way through the dangers of a battle, but to think of aggravating the pain of the unfortunate in this cowardly way."
I own that the weakness which Julien had been manifesting in this soliloquy gives me a poor opinion of him.
He is worthy of being the accomplice of those kid-gloved conspirators who purport to change the whole essence of a great country's existence, without wishing to have on their conscience the most trivial scratch.
Julien was sharply brought back to his role.
He had not been invited to dine in such good company simply to moon dreamily and say nothing.
A retired manufacturer of cotton prints, a corresponding member of the Academy of Besancon and of that of Uzes, spoke to him from the other end of the table and asked him if what was said everywhere about his astonishing progress in the study of the New Testament was really true.
A profound silence was suddenly inaugurated.
A New Testament in Latin was found as though by magic in the possession of the learned member of the two Academies.
After Julien had answered, part of a sentence in Latin was read at random.
Julien then recited.
His memory proved faithful and the prodigy was admired with all the boisterous energy of the end of dinner.
Julien looked at the flushed faces of the ladies. A good many were not so plain.
He recognised the wife of the collector, who was a fine singer.
"I am ashamed, as a matter of fact, to talk Latin so long before these ladies," he said, turning his eyes on her.
"If M. Rubigneau," that was the name of the member of the two Academies, "will be kind enough to read a Latin sentence at random instead of answering by following the Latin text, I will try to translate it impromptu."
This second test completed his glory.
Several Liberals were there, who, though rich, were none the less the happy fathers of children capable of obtaining scholarships, and had consequently been suddenly converted at the last mission.
In spite of this diplomatic step, M. de Renal had never been willing to receive them in his house.
These worthy people, who only knew Julien by name and from having seen him on horseback on the day of the king of ——'s entry, were his most noisy admirers.
"When will those fools get tired of listening to this Biblical language, which they don't understand in the least," he thought.
But, on the contrary, that language amused them by its strangeness and made them smile.
But Julien got tired.
As six o'clock struck he got up gravely and talked about a chapter in Ligorio's New Theology which he had to learn by heart to recite on the following day to M. Chelan, "for," he added pleasantly, "my business is to get lessons said by heart to me, and to say them by heart myself."
There was much laughter and admiration; such is the kind of wit which is customary in Verrieres.
Julien had already got up and in spite of etiquette everybody got up as well, so great is the dominion exercised by genius.
Madame Valenod kept him for another quarter of an hour. He really must hear her children recite their catechisms. They made the most absurd mistakes which he alone noticed.
He was careful not to point them out.
"What ignorance of the first principles of religion," he thought.
Finally he bowed and thought he could get away; but they insisted on his trying a fable of La Fontaine.
"That author is quite immoral," said Julien to Madame Valenod.
A certain fable on Messire Jean Chouart dares to pour ridicule on all that we hold most venerable.