At the seminary at Besançon, Julien Sorel discovers that knowledge is worth nothing there and that intelligence on display creates enemies. It is where his hypocrisy stops being an impulse and becomes a method.
He arrives by order of Abbé Chélan, who, after the affair with Madame de Rênal becomes known in Verrières, demands that he leave within three days, for the seminary or for the house of his friend Fouqué. The director, Abbé Pirard, examines him and is astonished at what he knows of Holy Scripture. But Julien soon grasps the rule of the place: "So science is worth nothing here?" The first places in the studies only earn him enemies, and the habit of reasoning, which Abbé Chélan had not warned him was a crime for someone not expected to reason, earns him the nickname "MARTIN LUTHER."
He treats his fellow students as enemies and studies the gestures of devotion, in a place where even the way one eats a boiled egg shows one's progress in devout life. Pirard, severe but honest, protects him and appoints him as a tutor in the New and Old Testaments. The protection has a price. In the quarrel between Pirard, a Jansenist, and the vicar general Frilair, a man of the Congregation, Frilair writes with his own hand "number 198" beside Julien's name in the competition, to humiliate his enemy.
The seminary opens the door to Paris, because Pirard recommends Julien to the Marquis de La Mole, who has a lawsuit against Frilair. And it returns at the end: it is the same Frilair who says he counts on six of the twelve jurors who judge Julien.