Chapter summary
Julien Sorel arrives late on the first day at the seminary, answers the reprimand with a Peccavi, pater optime! and begins to treat the three hundred and twenty-one fellow students as enemies. He chooses Abbé Pirard as confessor without knowing that this sets him against the vice-director Castanède. Pirard, without his knowing, intercepts the letters from Dijon in which passion struggles with remorse, and Fouqué visits him and tells him that Madame de Rênal has become devout. The next day, a remark from the little seminarian of Verrières shows him that, there, being first in one's studies is a sin, and that a face of blind faith is worth more than learning, so he sets about composing a new personality, down to the way he looks and eats. Finally Pirard summons him because of an address of Amanda Binet written on a playing card, which Castanède's police took from his trunk. Pirard believes his account and warns him that keeping such a thing was imprudent.
Analysis
Julien treats the three hundred and twenty-one fellow students as enemies because he reads the seminary as Verrières, where each one wants the place of the other. But here what is rewarded is the opposite of what made him shine: obeying without seeming to think. He trains every gesture, from the look to the way he eats, and fails precisely where he tries to go unnoticed, since his lack of appetite for the sausage with sauerkraut earns him new enemies.
Julien in the seminary, among enemies: Following the maxims he had imposed on himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one fellow students enemies, the most dangerous of all being Abbé Pirard. A few days later, Julien had to choose a confessor, and a list was presented to him. Ah, my God! Who do they take me for?, he thought. Do they think I don't know where I'm stepping? He chose Abbé Pirard.
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