But what is the good of enumerating his friends and his enemies?
The whole business is squalid, and all the more squalid in proportion to the truth of the picture.
And yet the clergy supply the only teachers of morals which the people have. What would happen to the people without them?
Will the paper ever replace the cure?
Since Julien's new dignity, the director of the seminary made a point of never speaking to him without witnesses.
These tactics were prudent, both for the master and for the pupil, but above all it was meant for a test.
The invariable principle of that severe Jansenist Pirard was this—"if a man has merit in your eyes, put obstacles in the way of all he desires, and of everything which he undertakes.
If the merit is real, he will manage to overthrow or get round those obstacles."
It was the hunting season.
It had occurred to Fouque to send a stag and a boar to the seminary as though they came from Julien's parents.
The dead animals were put down on the floor between the kitchen and the refectory.
It was there that they were seen by all the seminarists on their way to dinner.
They constituted a great attraction for their curiosity.
The boar, dead though it was, made the youngest ones feel frightened. They touched its tusks.
They talked of nothing else for a whole week.
This gift, which raised Julien's family to the level of that class of society which deserves respect, struck a deadly blow at all jealousy.
He enjoyed a superiority, consecrated by fortune. Chazel, the most distinguished of the seminarists, made advances to him, and always reproached him for not having previously apprised them of his parents' position and had thus involved them in treating money without sufficient respect.
A conscription took place, from which Julien, in his capacity as seminarist, was exempt.
This circumstance affected him profoundly.
"So there is just passed for ever that moment which, twenty years earlier, would have seen my heroic life begin.
He was walking alone in the seminary garden. He heard the masons who were walling up the cloister walls talking between themselves.
"Yes, we must go.
There's the new conscription.
When the other was alive it was good business.
A mason could become an officer then, could become a general then. One has seen such things."
"You go and see now.
It's only the ragamuffins who leave for the army.
Any one who has anything stays in the country here."
"The man who is born wretched stays wretched, and there you are."
"I say, is it true what they say, that the other is dead?" put in the third mason.
"Oh well, it's the 'big men' who say that, you see.
The other one made them afraid."
"What a difference. How the fortification went ahead in his time.
And to think of his being betrayed by his own marshals."
This conversation consoled Julien a little.
As he went away, he repeated with a sigh:
"Le seul roi dont le peuple a garde la memoire."
The time for the examination arrived.
Julien answered brilliantly. He saw that Chazel endeavoured to exhibit all his knowledge.
On the first day the examiners, nominated by the famous Grand Vicar de Frilair, were very irritated at always having to put first, or at any rate second, on their list, that Julien Sorel, who had been designated to them as the Benjamin of the Abbe Pirard.
There were bets in the seminary that Julien would come out first in the final list of the examination, a privilege which carried with it the honour of dining with my Lord Bishop.
But at the end of a sitting, dealing with the fathers of the Church, an adroit examiner, having first interrogated Julien on Saint Jerome and his passion for Cicero, went on to speak about Horace, Virgil and other profane authors.
Julien had learnt by heart a great number of passages from these authors without his comrades' knowledge.
Swept away by his successes, he forgot the place where he was, and recited in paraphrase with spirit several odes of Horace at the repeated request of the examiner.
Having for twenty minutes given him enough rope to hang himself, the examiner changed his expression, and bitterly reproached him for the time he had wasted on these profane studies, and the useless or criminal ideas which he had got into his head.
"I am a fool, sir. You are right," said Julien modestly, realising the adroit stratagem of which he was the victim.
This examiner's dodge was considered dirty, even at the seminary, but this did not prevent the abbe de Frilair, that adroit individual who had so cleverly organised the machinery of the Besancon congregation, and whose despatches to Paris put fear into the hearts of judges, prefect, and even the generals of the garrison, from placing with his powerful hand the number 198 against Julien's name.
He enjoyed subjecting his enemy, Pirard the Jansenist, to this mortification.
His chief object for the last ten years had been to deprive him of the headship of the seminary.
The abbe, who had himself followed the plan which he had indicated to Julien, was sincere, pious, devoted to his duties and devoid of intrigue, but heaven in its anger had given him that bilious temperament which is by nature so deeply sensitive to insults and to hate.