Part 2 Chapter 27
The Best Positions in the ChurchService! talent! merit! bah! belong to a coterie.
TELEMACHUSThus the idea of a Bishopric was for the first time blended with that ofJulien in the head of a woman who sooner or later would be distributingthe best positions in the Church of France. This prospect would havemade little difference to him; for the moment, his thoughts rose to nothing that was alien to his present misery: everything intensified it; for instance the sight of his bedroom had become intolerable to him. At night,when he came upstairs with his candle, each piece of furniture, everylittle ornament seemed to acquire the power of speech to inform himharshly of some fresh detail of his misery.
This evening, 'I am a galley slave,' he said to himself, as he entered it,with a vivacity long unfamiliar to him: 'let us hope that the second letterwill be as boring as the first.'
It was even more so. What he was copying seemed to him so absurdthat he began to transcribe it line for line, without a thought of themeaning.
'It is even more emphatic,' he said to himself, 'than the official documents of the Treaty of Muenster, which my tutor in diplomacy made mecopy out in London.'
It was only then that he remembered the letters from Madame de Fervaques, the originals of which he had forgotten to restore to the graveSpaniard, Don Diego Bustos. He searched for them; they were really almost as fantastic a rigmarole as those of the young Russian gentleman.
They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'Itis the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most loftythoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no realitysave a shocking fear of ridicule.'
The monologue which we have here abridged was repeated nightly fora fortnight. Falling asleep while transcribing a sort of commentary on theApocalypse, going next day to deliver a letter with a melancholy air,leaving his horse in the stable yard with the hope of catching a glimpseof Mathilde's gown, working, putting in an appearance in the evening atthe Opera when Madame de Fervaques did not come to the Hotel de LaMole; such were the monotonous events of Julien's existence. They became more interesting when Madame de Fervaques paid a visit to theMarquise; then he could steal a glance at Mathilde's eyes beneath theside of the Marechale's hat, and would wax eloquent. His picturesqueand sentimental phrases began to assume a turn at once more strikingand more elegant.
He was fully aware that what he was saying seemed absurd to Mathilde, but he sought to impress her by the elegance of his diction. 'Thefalser the things I say, the more I ought to appeal to her,' thought Julien;and then, with a shocking boldness, he began to exaggerate certain aspects of nature. He very soon perceived that, if he were not to appearvulgar in the eyes of the Marechale, he must above all avoid any simpleor reasonable idea. He continued on these lines, or abridged his amplifications according as he read success or indifference in the eyes of the twogreat ladies to whom he must appeal.
On the whole, his life was less horrible than at the time when his dayspassed in inaction.
'But,' he said to himself one evening, 'here I am transcribing the fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have beenfaithfully delivered to the Marechale's Swiss. I shall soon have the honour of filling all the pigeonholes in her desk. And yet she treats me exactly as though I were not writing! What can be the end of all this? Canmy constancy bore her as much as it bores me? I am bound to say thatthis Russian, Korasoff's friend, who was in love with the fair Quakeressof Richmond, must have been a terrible fellow in his day; no one couldbe more deadly.'
Like everyone of inferior intelligence whom chance brings into touchwith the operations of a great general, Julien understood nothing of theattack launched by the young Russian upon the heart of the fair Englishmaid. The first forty letters were intended only to make her pardon hisboldness in writing. It was necessary to make this gentle person, whoperhaps was vastly bored, form the habit of receiving letters that wereperhaps a trifle less insipid than her everyday life.
One morning, a letter was handed to Julien; he recognised the armorialbearings of Madame de Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagernesswhich would have seemed quite impossible to him a few days earlier: itwas only an invitation to dine.
He hastened to consult Prince Korasoff's instructions. Unfortunately,the young Russian had chosen to be as frivolous as Dorat, just where heought to have been simple and intelligible; Julien could not discover themoral attitude which he was supposed to adopt at the Marechale's table.
Her drawing-room was the last word in magnificence, gilded like theGalerie de Diane in the Tuileries, with oil paintings in the panels. Therewere blank spaces in these paintings, Julien learned later on that the subjects had seemed hardly decent to the lady of the house, who had hadthe pictures corrected. 'A moral age!' he thought.
In this drawing-room he remarked three of the gentlemen who hadbeen present at the drafting of the secret note. One of them, the RightReverend Bishop of ——, the Marechale's uncle, had the patronage of benefices, and, it was said, could refuse nothing to his niece. 'What a vaststride I have made,' thought Julien, with a melancholy smile, 'and howcold it leaves me! Here I am dining with the famous Bishop of ——.'
The dinner was indifferent and the conversation irritating. 'It is like thetable of contents of a dull book,' thought Julien. 'All the greatest subjectsof human thought are proudly displayed in it. Listen to it for threeminutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis ofthe speaker or his shocking ignorance.'
The reader has doubtless forgotten that little man of letters, namedTanbeau, the nephew of the Academician and an embryo professor, who,with his vile calumnies, seemed to be employed in poisoning thedrawing-room of the Hotel de La Mole.
It was from this little man that Julien first gleaned the idea that itmight well be that Madame de Fervaques, while refraining from answering his letters, looked with indulgence upon the sentiment that dictatedthem. The black heart of M. Tanbeau was torn asunder by the thought ofJulien's successes; but inasmuch as, looking at it from another angle, adeserving man cannot, any more than a fool, be in two places at once, 'ifSorel becomes the lover of the sublime Marechale,' the future professortold himself, 'she will place him in the Church in some advantageousmanner, and I shall be rid of him at the Hotel de La Mole.'
M. l'abbe Pirard also addressed long sermons to Julien on his successesat the Hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy between the austere Jansenist and the Jesuitical, regenerative and monarchicaldrawing-room of the virtuous Marechale.