“Nevertheless how many conversions have begun like that! What makes me consider this a good omen is the difference between his style and that of the young people whose letters I have had an opportunity of seeing. One cannot avoid recognising unction, profound seriousness, and much conviction in the prose of this young acolyte; he has no doubt the sweet virtue of a Massillon.”
[CHAPTER LVII]
THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH
Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a côterie.
Télémaque.
The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
“I have a hard task before me today,” he said to himself as he came in with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; “let us hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first.”
It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.