As a matter of fact the severe abbé did not know what constitutes high society. But his friends the Jansenites, had given him some very precise notions about those men who only get into society by reason of their extreme subtlety in the service of all parties, or of their monstrous wealth. For some minutes that evening he answered Julien’s eager questions fully and freely, and then suddenly stopped short grieved at having always to say ill of every one, and thinking he was guilty of a sin. Bilious Jansenist as he was, and believing as he did in the duty of Christian charity, his life was a perpetual conflict.
“How strange that abbé Pirard looks,” said mademoiselle de la Mole, as Julien came near the sofa.
Julien felt irritated, but she was right all the same. M. Pirard was unquestionably the most honest man in the salon, but his pimply face, which was suffering from the stings of conscience, made him look hideous at this particular moment. “Trust physiognomy after this,” thought Julien, “it is only when the delicate conscience of the abbé Pirard is reproaching him for some trifling lapse that he looks so awful; while the expression of that notorious spy Napier shows a pure and tranquil happiness.” The abbé Pirard, however, had made great concessions to his party. He had taken a servant, and was very well dressed.
Julien noticed something strange in the salon, it was that all eyes were being turned towards the door, and there was a semi silence. The flunkey was announcing the famous Barron Tolly, who had just become publicly conspicuous by reason of the elections. Julien came forward and had a very good view of him. The baron had been the president of an electoral college; he had the brilliant idea of spiriting away the little squares of paper which contained the votes of one of the parties. But to make up for it he replaced them by an equal number of other little pieces of paper containing a name agreeable to himself. This drastic manœuvre had been noticed by some of the voters, who had made an immediate point of congratulating the Baron de Tolly. The good fellow was still pale from this great business. Malicious persons had pronounced the word galleys. M. de la Mole received him coldly. The poor Baron made his escape.
“If he leaves us so quickly it’s to go to M. Comte’s,”[1] said Comte Chalvet and everyone laughed.
Little Tanbeau was trying to win his spurs by talking to some silent noblemen and some intriguers who, though shady, were all men of wit, and were on this particular night in great force in M. de la Mole’s salon (for he was mentioned for a place in the ministry). If he had not yet any subtlety of perception he made up for it as one will see by the energy of his words.
“Why not sentence that man to ten years’ imprisonment,” he was saying at the moment when Julien approached his knot. “Those reptiles should be confined in the bottom of a dungeon, they ought to languish to death in gaol, otherwise their venom will grow and become more dangerous. What is the good of sentencing him to a fine of a thousand crowns? He is poor, so be it, all the better, but his party will pay for him. What the case required was a five hundred francs fine and ten years in a dungeon.”
“Well to be sure, who is the monster they are speaking about?” thought Julien who was viewing with amazement the vehement tone and hysterical gestures of his colleague. At this moment the thin, drawn, little face of the academician’s nephew was hideous. Julien soon learnt that they were talking of the greatest poet of the century.
“You monster,” Julien exclaimed half aloud, while tears of generosity moistened his eyes. “You little rascal,” he thought, “I will pay you out for this.”
“Yet,” he thought, “those are the unborn hopes of the party of which the marquis is one of the chiefs. How many crosses and how many sinecures would that celebrated man whom he is now defaming have accumulated if he had sold himself—I won’t say to the mediocre ministry of M. de Nerval—but to one of those reasonably honest ministries which we have seen follow each other in succession.”