‘You are not to look askance at that gentleman; he is my brother-inlaw.’
‘What do I care? He looked at me.’
‘Do you wish to get me into trouble? No doubt, he looked at you, perhaps he will even come up and speak to you. I have told him that you are one of my mother’s family and that you have just come from Genlis. He is a Franc–Comtois and has never been farther than Dole, on the road into Burgundy; so tell him whatever you like, don’t be afraid.’
Julien continued to hesitate; she added rapidly, her barmaid’s imagination supplying her with falsehoods in abundance:
‘I dare say he did look at you, but it was when he was asking me who you were; he is a man who is rude with everyone, he didn’t mean to insult you.’
Julien’s eye followed the alleged brother-inlaw; he saw him buy a number for the game of pool which was beginning at the farther of the two billiard tables. Julien heard his loud voice exclaim: ‘I volunteer!’ He passed nimbly behind Miss Amanda’s back and took a step towards the billiard table. Amanda seized him by the arm.
‘Come and pay me first,’ she said to him.
‘Quite right,’ thought Julien; ‘she is afraid I may leave without paying.’ Amanda was as greatly agitated as himself, and had turned very red; she counted out his change as slowly as she could, repeating to him in a whisper as she did so:
‘Leave the cafe this instant, or I shan’t like you any more; I do like you, though, very much.’
Julien did indeed leave, but slowly. ‘Is it not incumbent upon me,’ he repeated to himself, ‘to go and stare at that rude person in my turn, and breathe in his face?’ This uncertainty detained him for an hour on the boulevard, outside the cafe; he watched to see if his man came out. He did not however appear, and Julien withdrew.
He had been but a few hours in Besancon, and already he had something to regret. The old Surgeon–Major had long ago, notwithstanding his gout, taught him a few lessons in fencing; this was all the science that Julien could place at the service of his anger. But this embarrassment would have been nothing if he had known how to pick a quarrel otherwise than by striking a blow; and, if they had come to fisticuffs, his rival, a giant of a man, would have beaten him and left him discomfited.
‘For a poor devil like me,’ thought Julien, ‘without protectors and without money, there will be no great difference between a Seminary and a prison; I must leave my lay clothes in some inn, where I can put on my black coat. If I ever succeed in escaping from the Seminary for an hour or two, I can easily, in my lay clothes, see Miss Amanda again.’ This was sound reasoning; but Julien, as he passed by all the inns in turn, had not the courage to enter any of them.
Finally, as he came again to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, his roving gaze met that of a stout woman, still reasonably young, with a high complexion, a happy and gay expression. He went up to her and told her his story.
‘Certainly, my fine young priest,’ the landlady of the Ambassadeurs said to him, ‘I shall keep your lay clothes for you, indeed I will have them brushed regularly. In this weather, it is a mistake to leave a broadcloth coat lying.’ She took a key and led him herself to a bedroom, advising him to write down a list of what he was leaving behind.
‘Lord, how nice you look like that, M. l’abbe Sorel,’ said the stout woman, when he came down to the kitchen. ‘I am going to order you a good dinner; and,’ she added in an undertone, ‘it will only cost you twenty sous, instead of the fifty people generally pay; for you must be careful with your little purse.’
‘I have ten louis,’ retorted Julien with a certain note of pride.
‘Oh, good Lord!’ replied the good landlady in alarm, ‘do not speak so loud; there are plenty of bad folk in Besancon. They will have that out of you in less than no time. Whatever you do, never go into the cafes, they are full of rogues.’
‘Indeed!’ said Julien, to whom this last statement gave food for thought.
‘Never go anywhere except to me, I will give you your coffee. Bear in mind that you will always find a friend here and a good dinner for twenty sous; that’s good enough for you, I hope. Go and sit down at the table, I am going to serve you myself.’
‘I should not be able to eat,’ Julien told her. ‘I am too much excited, I am going to enter the Seminary as soon as I leave here.’
The good woman would not allow him to leave until she had stuffed his pockets with provisions. Finally Julien set out for the dread spot, the landlady from her doorstep pointing out the way.
Chapter 25
THE SEMINARY
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Three hundred and thirty-six dinners at 83 centimes, three hundred and thirty-six suppers at 38 centimes, chocolate to such as are entitled to it; how much is there to be made on the contract?
THE VALENOD OF BESANCON
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HE SAW FROM A DISTANCE the cross of gilded iron over the door; he went towards it slowly; his legs seemed to be giving way under him. ‘So there is that hell upon earth, from which I can never escape!’ Finally he decided to ring. The sound of the bell echoed as though in a deserted place. After ten minutes, a pale man dressed in black came and opened the door to him. Julien looked at him and at once lowered his gaze. This porter had a singular physiognomy. The prominent green pupils of his eyes were convex as those of a cat’s; the unwinking contours of his eyelids proclaimed the impossibility of any human feeling; his thin lips were stretched and curved over his protruding teeth. And yet this physiognomy did not suggest a criminal nature, so much as that entire insensibility which inspires far greater terror in the young. The sole feeling that Julien’s rapid glance could discern in that long, smug face was a profound contempt for every subject that might be mentioned to him, which did not refer to another and a better world.
Julien raised his eyes with an effort, and in a voice which the palpitation of his heart made tremulous explained that he wished to speak to M. Pirard, the Director of the Seminary. Without a word, the man in black made a sign to him to follow. They climbed two flights of a wide staircase with a wooden baluster, the warped steps of which sloped at a downward angle from the wall, and seemed on the point of collapse. A small door, surmounted by a large graveyard cross of white wood painted black, yielded to pressure and the porter showed him into a low and gloomy room, the whitewashed walls of which were adorned with two large pictures dark with age. There, Julien was left to himself; he was terrified, his heart throbbed violently; he would have liked to find the courage to weep. A deathly silence reigned throughout the building.
After a quarter of an hour, which seemed to him a day, the sinister porter reappeared on the threshold of a door at the other end of the room, and, without condescending to utter a word, beckoned to him to advance. He entered a room even larger than the first and very badly lighted. The walls of this room were whitewashed also; but they were bare of ornament. Only in a corner by the door, Julien noticed in passing a bed of white wood, two straw chairs and a little armchair made of planks of firwood without a cushion. At the other end of the room, near a small window with dingy panes, decked with neglected flowerpots, he saw a man seated at a table and dressed in a shabby cassock; he appeared to be in a rage, and was taking one after another from a pile of little sheets of paper which he spread out on his table after writing a few words on each. He did not observe Julien’s presence. The latter remained motionless, standing in the middle of the room, where he had been left by the porter, who had gone out again shutting