He wanted to present him to the Bishop.
"Are you feeling well, my child?" said the abbe to him, seeing him so pale, and almost incapable of walking.
"You have worked too much."
The abbe gave him his arm.
"Come, sit down behind me here, on the little seat of the dispenser of holy water; I will hide you."
They were now beside the main door.
"Calm yourself. We have still a good twenty minutes before Monseigneur appears.
Try and pull yourself together. I will lift you up when he passes, for in spite of my age, I am strong and vigorous."
Julien was trembling so violently when the Bishop passed, that the abbe Chas gave up the idea of presenting him.
"Do not take it too much to heart," he said. "I will find another opportunity."
The same evening he had six pounds of candles which had been saved, he said, by Julien's carefulness, and by the promptness with which he had extinguished them, carried to the seminary chapel.
Nothing could have been nearer the truth.
The poor boy was extinguished himself. He had not had a single thought after meeting Madame de Renal. _____
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FIRST PROMOTION _____
He knew his age, he knew his department, and he is rich. —The Forerunner. _____
Julien had not emerged from the deep reverie in which the episode in the cathedral had plunged him, when the severe abbe Pirard summoned him.
"M. the abbe Chas-Bernard has just written in your favour. I am on the whole sufficiently satisfied with your conduct.
You are extremely imprudent and irresponsible without outward signs of it.
However, up to the present, you have proved yourself possessed of a good and even generous heart. Your intellect is superior.
Taking it all round, I see in you a spark which one must not neglect.
"I am on the point of leaving this house after fifteen years of work. My crime is that I have left the seminarists to their free will, and that I have neither protected nor served that secret society of which you spoke to me at the Confessional.
I wish to do something for you before I leave.
I would have done so two months earlier, for you deserve it, had it not been for the information laid against you as the result of the finding in your trunk of Amanda Binet's address.
I will make you New and Old Testament tutor.
Julien was transported with gratitude and evolved the idea of throwing himself on his knees and thanking God.
He yielded to a truer impulse, and approaching the abbe Pirard, took his hand and pressed it to his lips.
"What is the meaning of this?" exclaimed the director angrily, but Julien's eyes said even more than his act.
The abbe Pirard looked at him in astonishment, after the manner of a man who has long lost the habit of encountering refined emotions.
The attention deceived the director. His voice altered.
"Well yes, my child, I am attached to you.
Heaven knows that I have been so in spite of myself.
I ought to show neither hate nor love to anyone.
I see in you something which offends the vulgar.
Jealousy and calumny will pursue you in whatever place Providence may place you. Your comrades will never behold you without hate, and if they pretend to like you, it will only be to betray you with greater certainty.
For this there is only one remedy. Seek help only from God, who, to punish you for your presumption, has cursed you with the inevitable hatred of your comrades.
Let your conduct be pure. That is the only resource which I can see for you.
If you love truth with an irresistible embrace, your enemies will sooner or later be confounded."
It had been so long since Julien had heard a friendly voice that he must be forgiven a weakness. He burst out into tears.
The abbe Pirard held out his arms to him. This moment was very sweet to both of them.
Julien was mad with joy. This promotion was the first which he had obtained. The advantages were immense.
To realise them one must have been condemned to pass months on end without an instant's solitude, and in immediate contact with comrades who were at the best importunate, and for the most part insupportable.
Their cries alone would have sufficed to disorganise a delicate constitution.
The noise and joy of these peasants, well-fed and well-clothed as they were, could only find a vent for itself, or believe in its own completeness when they were shouting with all the strength of their lungs.
Now Julien dined alone, or nearly an hour later than the other seminarists.
He had a key of the garden and could walk in it when no one else was there.
Julien was astonished to perceive that he was now hated less. He, on the contrary, had been expecting that their hate would become twice as intense.
That secret desire of his that he should not be spoken to, which had been only too manifest before, and had earned him so many enemies, was no longer looked upon as a sign of ridiculous haughtiness. It became, in the eyes of the coarse beings who surrounded him, a just appreciation of his own dignity.
The hatred of him sensibly diminished, above all among the youngest of his comrades, who were now his pupils, and whom he treated with much politeness.
Gradually he obtained his own following. It became looked upon as bad form to call him Martin Luther.