Chapter summary
On the mail coach to Paris, Julien Sorel listens to Falcoz, the Bonapartist and old childhood friend of Verrières' mayor, and to the philosopher Saint-Giraud, a former printer who sells the Monfleury estate and flees the province. The vicar persecutes him because he refuses donations to pious associations, and the liberals persecute him because he refuses to vote for their candidate. Falcoz says none of this would have happened in Bonaparte's time, and Saint-Giraud replies that it was Napoleon, by bringing back the priests and creating barons and counts, who made possible the power of the notables of Verrières that Julien knows, Rênal and Chélan, which was followed by that of Valenod and Father Maslon. In Paris, Julien has the cabriolet take him first to Malmaison, a place that for him belongs to the memory of Napoleon, and there he weeps; only on the third day does he present himself to Abbé Pirard.
Pirard explains the life awaiting him in the house of the Marquis de La Mole: he will wear the black habit like someone in mourning, study theology at a seminary three times a week and, at noon in the library, write the replies to the marquis's letters for a salary of a hundred louis. He warns that someone with a smooth voice may offer gold for the marquis's letters; that Count Norbert, the marquis's nineteen-year-old son, will scorn him as a petty bourgeois; that an ancestor of the La Moles was beheaded in 1574 through political intrigue; and that the marquise, daughter of the old Duke de Chaulnes, values only ancestors who went on the Crusades. If the house does not suit him, Pirard offers to share the parish with him, and Julien, moved, says he has found in him a father once more. The carriage stops before the La Mole mansion, whose name is engraved in black marble over the door, and Julien takes the display as a sign of fear of the Jacobins: they show off the house so the rabble will recognize it and loot it in case of riot.
Analysis
Arriving in Paris, Julien asks a cabriolet to take him to Malmaison before looking for Pirard, and he weeps there: the city that awaits him is, above all, Napoleon's. He presents himself to the man who found him the post only on the third day. The order shows what weighs most on him: the memory of the hero comes before the promise of a position.
Saint-Giraud sums up the mechanism that drives the honest man out of the province, and Julien, who has just left Verrières, absorbs every word:
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