The man who was writing raised his head; Julien did not observe this for a moment, and indeed, after he had noticed it, still remained motionless, as though turned to stone by the terrible gaze that was fixed on him. Julien’s swimming eyes could barely make out a long face covered all over with red spots, except on the forehead, which displayed a deathly pallor. Between the red cheeks and white forehead shone a pair of little black eyes calculated to inspire terror in the bravest heart. The vast expanse of his forehead was outlined by a mass of straight hair, as black as jet.
‘Are you coming nearer, or not?’ the man said at length impatiently.
Julien advanced with an uncertain step, and at length, ready to fall to the ground and paler than he had ever been in his life, came to a halt a few feet away from the little table of white wood covered with scraps of paper.
‘Nearer,’ said the man.
Julien advanced farther, stretching out his hand as though in search of something to lean upon.
‘Your name?’
‘Julien Sorel.’
‘You are very late,’ said the other, once more fastening upon him a terrible eye.
Julien could not endure this gaze; putting out his hand as though to support himself, he fell full length upon the floor.
The man rang a bell. Julien had lost only his sense of vision and the strength to move; he could hear footsteps approaching.
He was picked up and placed in the little armchair of white wood. He heard the terrible man say to the porter:
‘An epileptic, evidently; I might have known it.’
When Julien was able to open his eyes, the man with the red face was again writing; the porter had vanished. ‘I must have courage,’ our hero told himself, ‘and above all hide my feelings.’ He felt a sharp pain at his heart. ‘If I am taken ill, heaven knows what they will think of me.’ At length the man stopped writing, and with a sidelong glance at Julien asked:
‘Are you in a fit state to answer my questions?’
‘Yes, Sir,’ said Julien in a feeble voice.
‘Ah! That is fortunate.’
The man in black had half risen and was impatiently seeking for a letter in the drawer of his table of firwood which opened with a creak. He found it, slowly resumed his seat, and once more gazing at Julien, with an air which seemed to wrest from him the little life that remained to him:
‘You are recommended to me by M. Chelan, who was the best cure in the diocese, a good man if ever there was one, and my friend for the last thirty years.’
‘Ah! It is M. Pirard that I have the honour to address,’ said Julien in a feeble voice.
‘So it seems,’ said the Director of the Seminary, looking sourly at him.
The gleam in his little eyes brightened, followed by an involuntary jerk of the muscles round his mouth. It was the physiognomy of a tiger relishing in anticipation the pleasure of devouring its prey.
‘Chelan’s letter is short,’ he said, as though speaking to himself. ‘Intelligenti pauca; in these days, one cannot write too little.’ He read aloud:
‘“I send you Julien Sorel, of this parish, whom I baptised nearly twenty years ago; his father is a wealthy carpenter but allows him nothing. Julien will be a noteworthy labourer in the Lord’s vineyard. Memory, intelligence are not wanting, he has the power of reflection. Will his vocation last? Is it sincere?”’
‘Sincere!’ repeated the abbe Pirard with an air of surprise, gazing at Julien; but this time the abbe’s gaze was less devoid of all trace of humanity. ‘Sincere!’ he repeated, lowering his voice and returning to the letter:
‘“I ask you for a bursary for Julien; he will qualify for it by undergoing the necessary examinations. I have taught him a little divinity, that old and sound divinity of Bossuet, Arnault, Fleury. If the young man is not to your liking, send him back to me; the Governor of our Poorhouse, whom you know well, offers him eight hundred francs to come as tutor to his children. Inwardly I am calm, thank God. I am growing accustomed to the terrible blow. Vale et me ama.”’
The abbe Pirard, relaxing the speed of his utterance as he came to the signature, breathed with a sigh the word ‘Chelan.’
‘He is calm,’ he said; ‘indeed, his virtue deserved that reward; God grant it to me, when my time comes!’
He looked upwards and made the sign of the Cross. At the sight of this holy symbol Julien felt a slackening of the profound horror which, from his entering the building, had frozen him.
‘I have here three hundred and twenty-one aspirants for the holiest of callings,’ the abbe Pirard said at length, in a severe but not hostile tone; ‘only seven or eight have been recommended to me by men like the abbe Chelan; thus among the three hundred and twenty-one you will be the ninth. But my protection is neither favour nor weakness, it is an increase of precaution and severity against vice. Go and lock that door.’
Julien made an effort to walk and managed not to fall. He noticed that a little window, near the door by which he had entered, commanded a view of the country. He looked at the trees; the sight of them did him good, as though he had caught sight of old friends.
‘Loquerisne linguam latinam? (Do you speak Latin?)’ the abbe Pirard asked him as he returned.
‘Ita, pater optime (Yes, excellent Father),’ replied Julien, who was beginning to come to himself. Certainly nobody in the world had appeared to him less excellent than M. Pirard, during the last half-hour.
The conversation continued in Latin. The expression in the abbe’s eyes grew gentler; Julien recovered a certain coolness. ‘How weak I am,’ he thought, ‘to let myself be imposed upon by this show of virtue! This man will be simply a rascal like M. Maslon’; and Julien congratulated himself on having hidden almost all his money in his boots.
The abbe Pirard examined Julien in theology, and was surprised by the extent of his knowledge. His astonishment increased when he questioned him more particularly on the Holy Scriptures. But when he came to questions touching the doctrine of the Fathers, he discovered that Julien barely knew the names of Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Basil, etc., etc.
‘In fact,’ thought the abbe Pirard, ‘here is another instance of that fatal tendency towards Protestantism which I have always had to rebuke in Chelan. A thorough, a too thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures.’
(Julien had just spoken to him, without having been questioned on the subject, of the true date of authorship of Genesis, the Pentateuch, etc.)
‘To what does all this endless discussion of the Holy Scriptures lead,’ thought the abbe Pirard, ‘if not to private judgment, that is to say to the most fearful Protestantism? And, in conjunction with this rash learning, nothing about the Fathers that can compensate for this tendency.’
But the astonishment of the Director of the Seminary knew no bounds when, questioning Julien as to the authority of the Pope, and expecting the maxims of the ancient Gallican church, he heard the young man repeat the whole of M. de Maistre’s book.
‘A strange man, Chelan,’ thought the abbe Pirard; ‘has he given him this book to teach him to laugh at it?’
In vain did he question Julien, trying to discover whether he seriously believed the doctrine of M. de Maistre. The young man could answer him only by rote. From this moment, Julien was really admirable, he felt that he was master of himself. After a prolonged examination it seemed to him that M. Pirard’s severity towards him was no more than an affectation. Indeed, but for the rule