THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH
Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a côterie.
_Télémaque_.
The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of
Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her
disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not
struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly
limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify
it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When
he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture
and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce
harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
"I have a hard task before me today," he said to himself as he came in
with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us
hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."
It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished
up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.
"It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official
documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made
me copy out at London."
It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which
he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos.
He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of
the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant
everything and nothing. "It's the Æolian harp of style," thought
Julien. "The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty
thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable
fear of ridicule."
The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen
days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary
on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it
the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope
of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, going in the evening
to the opera on those evenings when madame de Fervaques did not come
to the Hôtel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien's
life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the
marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde's eyes underneath
a feather of the maréchale's hat, and he would wax eloquent. His
picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was
both more striking and more elegant.
He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde's eyes, but
he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. "The falser my
speeches are the more I ought to please," thought Julien, and he then
had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own
character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the
eyes of the maréchale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational
ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand
eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes
of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.
Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were
passed in inaction.
"But," he said to himself one evening, "here I am copying out the
fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have
been duly delivered to the maréchale's porter. I shall have the honour
of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me
as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my
constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that
Russian friend of Korasoff's who was in love with the pretty Quakeress
of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more
overwhelming."
Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the
manœuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack
executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl.
The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness
for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived
a life of inordinate boredom, had to be induced to contract the habit
of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid than her
everyday life.
One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms
of madame la Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which
would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an
invitation to dinner.
He rushed to prince Korasoffs instructions. Unfortunately the young
Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just
when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able
to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the
maréchale's dinner.
The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de
Diane in the Tuileries with panelled oil-paintings.
There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that
the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in
decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. "What a moral
century!" he thought.
He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present
at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of
---- the maréchale's uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical
patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. "What
immense progress I have made," said Julien to himself with a melancholy
smile, "and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the
famous bishop of ----."
The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.
"It's like the small talk in a bad book," thought Julien. "All the
greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening
for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater--the speaker's
bombast, or his abominable ignorance?"
The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named
Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be
professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of
the Hôtel de la Mole with his base calumnies.
It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though,
madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an
indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau's
sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien's success; "but
since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the
same time any more than a fool," said the future professor to himself,
"if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime maréchale, she will obtain
some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of
him in the Hôtel de la Mole."
M. the abbé Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his
success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy
between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous maréchale
which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.