3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

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СКАЧАТЬ remark addressed to him by that little seminarist from Verrieres who seemed such a boy, led him to make an important discovery. Ever since he had been in the Seminary, Julien’s conduct had been nothing but a succession of false steps. He laughed bitterly at himself.

      As a matter of fact, the important actions of his life were wisely ordered; but he paid no attention to details, and the clever people in a Seminary look only at details. And so he passed already among his fellow students as a free thinker. He had been betrayed by any number of trifling actions.

      In their eyes he was convicted of this appalling vice, he thought, he judged for himself, instead of blindly following authority and example. The abbe Pirard had been of no assistance to him; he had not once uttered a word to him apart from the tribunal of penitence, and even there he listened rather than spoke. It would have been very different had Julien chosen the abbe Castanede.

      The moment that Julien became aware of his own folly, his interest revived. He wished to know the whole extent of the harm, and, with this object, emerged a little from that haughty and obstinate silence with which he repulsed his fellows. It was then that they took their revenge on him. His advances were received with a contempt which went the length of derision. He realised that since his entering the Seminary, not an hour had passed, especially during recreation, that had not borne some consequence for or against him, had not increased the number of his enemies, or won him the good will of some seminarist who was genuinely virtuous or a trifle less boorish than the rest. The damage to be repaired was immense, the task one of great difficulty. Thenceforward Julien’s attention was constantly on the alert; it was a case of portraying himself in an entirely new character.

      The control of his eyes, for instance, gave him a great deal of trouble. It is not without reason that in such places they are kept lowered. ‘What was not my presumption at Verrieres!’ Julien said to himself, ‘I imagined I was alive; I was only preparing myself for life; here I am at last in the world, as I shall find it until I have played out my part, surrounded by real enemies. What an immense difficulty,’ he went on, ‘is this incessant hypocrisy! It would put the labours of Hercules to shame. The Hercules of modern times is Sixtus V, who for fifteen years on end, by his modesty, deceived forty Cardinals, who had seen him proud and vigorous in his youth.

      ‘So learning is really nothing here!’ he told himself with scorn; ‘progress in dogma, in sacred history, and the rest of it, count only in appearance. All that is said on that topic is intended to make fools like myself fall into the trap. Alas, my sole merit consisted in my rapid progress, in my faculty for grasping all that nonsense. Can it be that in their hearts they esteem it at its true value; judge of it as I do? And I was fool enough to be proud of myself! Those first places in class which I always obtain have served only to give me bitter enemies. Chazel, who knows far more than I, always puts into his compositions some piece of stupidity which sends him down to the fiftieth place; if he obtains the first, it is when he is not thinking. Ah! one word, a single word from M. Pirard, how useful it would have been to me!’

      >From the moment in which Julien’s eyes were opened, the long exercises of ascetic piety, such as the Rosary five times weekly, the hymns to the Sacred Heart, etc., etc., which had seemed to him of such deadly dullness, became the most interesting actions of his life. Sternly criticising his own conduct, and seeking above all not to exaggerate his methods, Julien did not aspire from the first, like the seminarists who served as models to the rest, to perform at every moment some significant action, that is to say one which gave proof of some form of Christian perfection. In Seminaries, there is a way of eating a boiled egg which reveals the progress one has made in the godly life.

      The reader, who is perhaps smiling, will please to remember all the mistakes made, in eating an egg, by the abbe Delille when invited to luncheon by a great lady of the Court of Louis XVI.

      Julien sought at first to arrive at the non culpa, to wit, the state of the young seminarist whose gait, his way of moving his arms, eyes, etc., do not, it is true, indicate anything worldly, but do not yet show the creature absorbed by the idea of the next life and the absolute nullity of this.

      Everywhere Julien found inscribed in charcoal, on the walls of the passages, sentences like the following: ‘What are sixty years of trial, set in the balance with an eternity of bliss or an eternity of boiling oil in hell!’ He no longer despised them; he realised that he must have them always before his eyes. ‘What shall I be doing all my life?’ he said to himself; ‘I shall be selling the faithful a place in heaven. How is that place to be made visible to them? By the difference between my exterior and that of a layman.’

      After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants. They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

      What pains did he not take to arrive at that expression of blind and fervent faith, which is so frequently to be found in the convents of Italy, and such perfect examples of which Guercino has bequeathed to us laymen in his paintings in churches.^[4]

      On the greatest festivals the seminarists were given sausages with pickled cabbage. Julien’s neighbours at table observed that he remained unmoved by this good fortune; it was one of his first crimes. His comrades saw in it an odious mark of the most stupid hypocrisy; nothing made him so many enemies. ‘Look at that gentleman, look at that proud fellow,’ they would say, ‘pretending to despise our best ration, sausages with cabbage! The wretched conceit of the damned fellow!’ He should have refrained as an act of penance from eating the whole of his portion, and should have made the sacrifice of saying to some friend, with reference to the pickled cabbage: ‘What is there that man can offer to an All Powerful Being, if it be not voluntary suffering?’

      Julien lacked the experience which makes it so easy for us to see things of this sort.

      ‘Alas! The ignorance of these young peasants, my comrades, is a great advantage to them,’ Julien would exclaim in moments of discouragement. ‘When they arrive in the Seminary, the teacher has not to rid them of the appalling number of worldly thoughts which I brought with me, and which they read on my face, do what I will.’

      Julien studied with an attention that bordered upon envy the more boorish of the young peasants who arrived at the Seminary. At the moment when they were stripped of their ratteen jackets to be garbed in the black cassock, their education was limited to an immense and unbounded respect for dry and liquid money, as the saying goes in the Franche–Comte.

      It is the sacramental and heroic fashion of expressing the sublime idea of ready cash.

      Happiness, for these seminarists, as for the heroes of Voltaire’s tales, consists first and foremost in dining well. Julien discovered in almost all of them an innate respect for the man who wears a coat of fine cloth. This sentiment estimates distributive justice, as it is dealt out to us by our courts, at its true worth, indeed below its true worth. ‘What is to be gained,’ they would often say among themselves, ‘by going to law with the big?’

      ‘Big’ is the word used in the valleys of the Jura to denote a rich man. One may imagine their respect for the richest party of all: the Government!

      Not to smile respectfully at the mere name of the Prefect is reckoned, among the peasants of the Franche–Comte, an imprudence; and imprudence, among the poor, is promptly punished with want of bread.

      After having been almost suffocated at first by his sense of scorn, Julien ended by feeling pity: it had often been the lot of the fathers of the majority of his comrades to come home on a winter evening to their cottages, and to find there no bread, no chestnuts, СКАЧАТЬ