"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 C?ur, 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.