The collector of taxes, the receiver of customs, the chief constable and two or three other public officials arrived with their wives. They were followed by several wealthy Liberals. Dinner was announced. Julien, already in the worst of humours, suddenly reflected that on the other side of the dining-room wall there were wretched prisoners, whose rations of meat had perhaps been squeezed to purchase all this tasteless splendour with which his hosts sought to dazzle him.
‘They are hungry perhaps at this moment,’ he said to himself; his throat contracted, he found it impossible to eat and almost to speak. It was much worse a quarter of an hour later; they could hear in the distance a few snatches of a popular and, it must be admitted, not too refined song which one of the inmates was singing. M. Valenod glanced at one of his men in full livery, who left the room, and presently the sound of singing ceased. At that moment, a footman offered Julien some Rhine wine in a green glass, and Madame Valenod took care to inform him that this wine cost nine francs the bottle, direct from the grower. Julien, the green glass in his hand, said to M. Valenod:
‘I don’t hear that horrid song any more.’
‘Gad! I should think not, indeed,’ replied the Governor triumphantly. ‘I’ve made the rascal shut up.’
This was too much for Julien; he had acquired the manners but had not yet the heart appropriate to his station. Despite all his hypocrisy, which he kept in such constant practice, he felt a large tear trickle down his cheek.
He tried to hide it with the green glass, but it was simply impossible for him to do honour to the Rhine wine. ‘Stop the man singing!’ he murmured to himself, ‘O my God, and Thou permittest it!’
Fortunately for him, no one noticed his ill-bred emotion. The collector of taxes had struck up a royalist ditty. During the clamour of the refrain, sung in chorus: ‘There,’ Julien’s conscience warned him, ‘you have the sordid fortune which you will achieve, and you will enjoy it only in these conditions and in such company as this! You will have a place worth perhaps twenty thousand francs, but it must be that while you gorge to repletion you stop the poor prisoner from singing; you will give dinner parties with the money you have filched from his miserable pittance, and during your dinner he will be more wretched still! O Napoleon! How pleasant it was in your time to climb to fortune through the dangers of a battle; but meanly to intensify the sufferings of the wretched!’
I admit that the weakness which Julien displays in this monologue gives me a poor opinion of him. He would be a worthy colleague for those conspirators in yellow gloves, who profess to reform all the conditions of life in a great country, and would be horrified at having to undergo the slightest inconvenience themselves.
Julien was sharply recalled to his proper part. It was not that he might dream and say nothing that he had been invited to dine in such good company.
A retired calico printer, a corresponding member of the Academy of Besancon and of that of Uzes, was speaking to him, down the whole length of the table, inquiring whether all that was commonly reported as to his astonishing prowess in the study of the New Testament was true.
A profound silence fell instantly; a New Testament appeared as though by magic in the hands of the learned member of the two academies. Julien having answered in the affirmative, a few words in Latin were read out to him at random. He began to recite: his memory did not betray him, and this prodigy was admired with all the noisy energy of the end of a dinner. Julien studied the glowing faces of the women. Several of them were not ill-looking. He had made out the wife of the collector who sang so well.
‘Really, I am ashamed to go on speaking Latin so long before these ladies,’ he said, looking at her. ‘If M. Rubigneau’ (this was the member of the two academies) ‘will be so good as to read out any sentence in Latin, instead of going on with the Latin text, I shall endeavour to improvise a translation.’
This second test set the crown of glory on his achievement.
There were in the room a number of Liberals, men of means, but the happy fathers of children who were capable of winning bursaries, and in this capacity suddenly converted after the last Mission. Despite this brilliant stroke of policy, M. de Renal had never consented to have them in his house. These worthy folk, who knew Julien only by reputation and from having seen him on horseback on the day of the King of ——‘s visit, were his most vociferous admirers. ‘When will these fools tire of listening to this Biblical language, of which they understand nothing?’ he thought. On the contrary, this language amused them by its unfamiliarity; they laughed at it. But Julien had grown tired.
He rose gravely as six o’clock struck and mentioned a chapter of the new theology of Liguori, which he had to learn by heart in order to repeat it next day to M. Chelan. ‘For my business,’ he added pleasantly, ‘is to make other people repeat lessons, and to repeat them myself.’
His audience laughed heartily and applauded; this is the kind of wit that goes down at Verrieres. Julien was by this time on his feet, everyone else rose, regardless of decorum; such is the power of genius. Madame Valenod kept him for a quarter of an hour longer; he really must hear the children repeat their catechism; they made the most absurd mistakes which he alone noticed. He made no attempt to correct them. ‘What ignorance of the first principles of religion,’ he thought. At length he said good-bye and thought that he might escape; but the children must next attempt one of La Fontaine’s Fables.
‘That author is most immoral,’ Julien said to Madame Valenod; ‘in one of his Fables on Messire Jean Chouart, he has ventured to heap ridicule on all that is most venerable. He is strongly reproved by the best commentators.’
Before leaving the house Julien received four or five invitations to dinner. ‘This young man does honour to the Department,’ his fellow-guests, in great hilarity, were all exclaiming at once. They went so far as to speak of a pension voted out of the municipal funds, to enable him to continue his studies in Paris.
While this rash idea was making the dining-room ring, Julien had stolen away to the porch. ‘Oh, what scum! What scum!’ he murmured three or four times, as he treated himself to the pleasure of drinking in the fresh air.
He felt himself a thorough aristocrat for the moment, he who for long had been so shocked by the disdainful smile and the haughty superiority which he found lurking behind all the compliments that were paid him at M. de Renal’s. He could not help feeling the extreme difference. ‘Even if we forget,’ he said to himself as he walked away, ‘that the money has been stolen from the poor prisoners, and that they are forbidden to sing as well, would it ever occur to M. de Renal to tell his guests the price of each bottle of wine that he offers them? And this M. Valenod, in going over the list of his property, which he does incessantly, cannot refer to his house, his land and all the rest of it, if his wife is present, without saying your house, your land.’
This lady, apparently so conscious of the joy of ownership, had just made an abominable scene, during dinner, with a servant who had broken a wineglass and spoiled one of her sets; and the servant had answered her with the most gross insolence.
‘What a household!’ thought Julien; ‘if they were to give me half of all the money they steal, I wouldn’t live among them. One fine day I should give myself away; I should be unable to keep back the contempt they inspire in me.’
He was obliged, nevertheless, obeying Madame de Renal’s orders, to attend several dinners of this sort; Julien was the fashion; people forgave him his uniform and the guard of honour, or rather that imprudent display was the true cause of his success. Soon, the only question discussed in Verrieres was who would be successful in the struggle to secure the learned young man’s services, M. de Renal or the Governor of the Poorhouse. These two gentlemen formed with M. Maslon a triumvirate which for some years past had tyrannised the town. People