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.