There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. “What a moral century!” he thought.
He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of ---- the maréchale’s uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. “What immense progress I have made,” said Julien to himself with a melancholy smile, “and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the famous bishop of ——.”
The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.
“It’s like the small talk in a bad book,” thought Julien. “All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater—the speaker’s bombast, or his abominable ignorance?”
The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of the Hôtel de la Mole with his base calumnies.
It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though, madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau’s sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien’s success; “but since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the same time any more than a fool,” said the future professor to himself, “if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime maréchale, she will obtain some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of him in the Hôtel de la Mole.”
M. the abbé Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous maréchale which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.