Chapter summary
In a house on a street the Marquis de La Mole does not name, a duke whose name the book does not give, only asterisks, arrives, and the session of the conspiracy opens. The marquis introduces Julien Sorel as a young clergyman of prodigious memory, and Julien proves it by reciting by heart twenty lines from the first page of the newspaper La Quotidienne. A president with boar's eyes seats him at a table to write; the duke has him wait in the adjoining room, and later they call him back to note down what each one says, in minutes that run to twenty-six pages. The reporter, a man with a paternal air and several waistcoats, explains that England, ruined by the forty billion francs spent against the revolution, no longer has the money to pay for a new campaign by the powers of the Continent, and he is interrupted several times by a general who served Napoleon and now covets a decoration. In the middle of the minutes, the narrator interrupts the account with a feigned dialogue between author and editor: the author says that politics in a novel is a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, and the editor replies that without politics the characters would not be Frenchmen of 1830.
The marquis takes the floor and says that without English gold, Austria, Russia and Prussia can fight only two or three battles. He demands from the general at least one company of men ready to fight for the cause, and proposes forming in each department a force of five hundred devoted men, half of them noblemen, paid for with a fifth of each noble's income. He warns that the throne, the altar and the nobility may perish tomorrow without this force, and that between freedom of the press and the existence of gentlemen there is a mortal war. A churchman of high rank cuts the debate short, asking that disagreeable truths cease, and concludes that one does not tell a man whose gangrenous leg must be amputated that it is healthy: the noble duke, whose name the book does not give, is the surgeon. Julien finally understands for whom the note is intended, and thinks that very night he will gallop to that great personage.
Analysis
This passage from Napoleon, taken from The Memorial of Saint Helena, is the epigraph to chapter XXII, "The Discussion," and is signed "NAPOLEON, MEMORIAL":
In Paris, one earns consideration by one's carriage, not by one's virtue.
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