"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."