His embarrassment was extreme, he was hearing some strange things said.
Chapter 22
THE DISCUSSION
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The republic — for every person today willing to sacrifice all to the common good, there are thousands and millions who know only their own pleasures and their vanity. One is esteemed in Paris for one’s carriage, not for one’s virtue.
NAPOLEON, Memorial
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THE FOOTMAN BURST IN, announcing: ‘Monsieur le Duc de ——.’
‘Hold your tongue, you fool,’ said the Duke as he entered the room. He said this so well, and with such majesty that Julien could not help thinking that knowing how to lose his temper with a footman was the whole extent of this great personage’s knowledge. Julien raised his eyes and at once lowered them again. He had so clearly divined the importance of this new arrival that he trembled lest his glance should be thought an indiscretion.
This Duke was a man of fifty, dressed like a dandy, and treading as though on springs. He had a narrow head with a large nose, and a curved face which he kept thrusting forward. It would have been hard for anyone to appear at once so noble and so insignificant. His coming was a signal for the opening of the discussion.
Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical studies by the voice of M. de La Mole. ‘Let me present to you M. l’abbe Sorel,’ said the Marquis. ‘He is endowed with an astonishing memory; it was only an hour ago that I spoke to him of the mission with which he might perhaps be honoured, and, in order to furnish us with a proof of his memory, he has learned by heart the first page of the Quotidienne.’
‘Ah! The foreign news, from poor N— — ’ said the master of the house. He picked up the paper eagerly and, looking at Julien with a whimsical air, in the effort to appear important: ‘Begin, Sir,’ he said to him.
The silence was profound, every eye was fixed on Julien; he repeated his lesson so well that after twenty lines: ‘That will do,’ said the Duke. The little man with the boar’s eyes sat down. He was the chairman for, as soon as he had taken his place, he indicated a card table to Julien, and made a sign to him to bring it up to his side. Julien established himself there with writing materials. He counted twelve people seated round the green cloth.
‘M. Sorel,’ said the Duke, ‘retire to the next room. We shall send for you.’
The master of the house assumed an uneasy expression. ‘The shutters are not closed,’ he murmured to his neighbour. ‘It is no use your looking out of the window,’ he foolishly exclaimed to Julien. ‘Here I am thrust into a conspiracy at the very least,’ was the latter’s thought. ‘Fortunately, it is not one of the kind that end on the Place de Greve. Even if there were danger, I owe that and more to the Marquis. I should be fortunate, were it granted me to atone for all the misery which my follies may one day cause him!’
Without ceasing to think of his follies and of his misery, he studied his surroundings in such a way that he could never forget them. Only then did he remember that he had not heard the Marquis tell his footman the name of the street, and the Marquis had sent for a cab, a thing he never did.
Julien was left for a long time to his reflections. He was in a parlour hung in green velvet with broad stripes of gold. There was on the side-table a large ivory crucifix, and on the mantelpiece the book Du Pape, by M. de Maistre, with gilt edges, and magnificently bound. Julien opened it so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. Every now and then there was a sound of raised voices from the next room. At length the door opened, his name was called.
‘Remember, Gentlemen,’ said the chairman, ‘that from this moment we are addressing the Duc de ——. This gentleman,’ he said, pointing to Julien, ‘is a young Levite, devoted to our sacred cause, who will have no difficulty in repeating, thanks to his astonishing memory, our most trivial words.
‘Monsieur has the floor,’ he said, indicating the personage with the fatherly air, who was wearing three or four waistcoats. Julien felt that it would have been more natural to call him the gentleman with the waistcoats. He supplied himself with paper and wrote copiously.
(Here the author would have liked to insert a page of dots. ‘That will not look pretty,’ says the publisher, ‘and for so frivolous a work not to look pretty means death.’
‘Politics,’ the author resumes, ‘are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the sound of any of the instruments. This mention of politics is going to give deadly offence to half my readers, and to bore the other half, who have already found far more interesting and emphatic politics in their morning paper.’
‘If your characters do not talk politics,’ the publisher retorts, ‘they are no longer Frenchmen of 1830, and your book ceases to hold a mirror, as you claim. . . . ’)
Julien’s report amounted to twenty-six pages; the following is a quite colourless extract; for I have been obliged, as usual, to suppress the absurdities, the frequency of which would have appeared tedious or highly improbable. (Compare the Gazette des Tribunaux. )
The man with the waistcoats and the fatherly air (he was a Bishop, perhaps), smiled often, and then his eyes, between their tremulous lids, assumed a strange brilliance and an expression less undecided than was his wont. This personage, who was invited to speak first, before the Duke (‘but what Duke?’ Julien asked himself), apparently to express opinions and to perform the functions of Attorney General, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and absence of definite conclusions with which those officers are often reproached. In the course of the discussion the Duke went so far as to rebuke him for this.
After several phrases of morality and indulgent philosophy, the man with the waistcoats said:
‘Noble England, guided by a great man, the immortal Pitt, spent forty thousand million francs in destroying the Revolution. If this assembly will permit me to express somewhat boldly a melancholy reflection, England does not sufficiently understand that with a man like Bonaparte, especially when one had had to oppose to him only a collection of good intentions, there was nothing decisive save personal measures . . . ’
‘Ah! Praise of assassination again!’ said the master of the house with an uneasy air.
‘Spare us your sentimental homilies,’ exclaimed the chairman angrily; his boar’s eye gleamed with a savage light. ‘Continue,’ he said to the man with the waistcoats. The chairman’s cheeks and brow turned purple.
‘Noble England,’ the speaker went on, ‘is crushed today, for every Englishman, before paying for his daily bread, is obliged to pay the interest on the forty thousand million francs which were employed against the Jacobins. She has no longer a Pitt . . . ’
‘She has the Duke of Wellington,’ said a military personage who assumed an air of great importance.
‘Silence, please, Gentlemen,’ cried the chairman; ‘if we continue to disagree, there will have been no use in our sending for M. Sorel.’
‘We know that Monsieur is full of ideas,’ said the Duke with an air of vexation and a glance at the interrupter, one of Napoleon’s Generals. Julien saw that this was an allusion to something personal and highly offensive. Everyone smiled; the turncoat General seemed beside himself with rage.