What It Is
The seminary to which Julien Sorel goes on the orders of Abbé Chélan, after the anonymous letter. It is here that hypocrisy stops being a provincial trait and becomes a system of training, and Julien learns to pretend by method, not by impulse.
Where It Appears
In chapter 25 of Book I, the entrance is a ritual of annihilation before Abbé Pirard.
Julien's arrival at the seminary, before Abbé Pirard:
The man did not notice Julien's presence. Julien stood motionless in the middle of the room, where the porter had left him, shutting the door as he went out. Ten minutes passed; the shabbily dressed man was still writing. Julien's emotion and terror were so great that he felt he might collapse at any moment. A philosopher would have said, perhaps mistakenly: Such is the violent impression of ugliness upon a soul made to love what is beautiful.
Pirard, despite his severity, is the one who treats Julien without calculation: he accepted him because of Abbé Chélan, warned him against secret societies, and now tells him plainly. It is he, the strictest of all, who first tells Julien the truth about what awaits him:
your companions will never look at you without hating you; if they pretend to love you, it will be to betray you the better.
Julien at the seminary, among enemies:
Following the maxims he had set 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 was handed a list. Ah, my God! he thought. What do they take me for? Do they think I don't know where I'm treading? He chose Abbé Pirard.
Julien discovers that science and logic do not set him apart, and his fellow students give him a nickname.
Julien realizes that his first steps were mistaken: the science and logic that distinguished him in Verrières count for nothing here, and the moment he grasps the rule of the place lies in this bitter observation:
So learning is worth nothing here? [...] My only merit lay in [...] grasping this nonsense. [...] And I was fool enough to be proud of it!
The habit of reasoning, which no one warned Julien was a crime:
After instilling in him the habit of reasoning correctly and of not being satisfied with empty words, he did not take care to tell him that, in someone who is not highly regarded, this habit is a crime; for every good argument gives offense.
they nicknamed him MARTIN LUTHER; above all, they said, because of that infernal logic he was so proud of.
Listen here: every man for himself in this world, I don't want to be struck by lightning; God may strike you down as an impious man, as a Voltaire.
Julien's despondency at the seminary (see the seminary at Besançon):
He could become a Latin teacher; he needed so little to live on! But then, farewell to a career, farewell to the future of his imagination: it was like dying. Here are the details of one of his sad days.
The exception is Father Chas-Bernard, director of ceremonies, whose professional vanity is sincere.
The human exception in this world is Father Chas-Bernard, director of ceremonies, whose professional vanity (the vestments, the candlesticks, the cathedral's ornaments) is naive and sincere, not calculated. Julien, trained to sniff out ulterior motives in everyone, waits for the blow that never comes, and concludes:
And yet he worked hard, he is happy [...]. What a man! What an example for me!
Above it all, the dispute between Pirard and Abbé de Frilair decides Julien's place in the examination ranking.
Abbé Pirard himself names what drives him, in a thought the book does not leave as subtext:
I am holding back the progress of Jesuitism and idolatry, he thought.
The reach of the network that sets this revenge in motion is described without mincing words:
that skilled man who had so wisely organized the network of the Besançon congregation and whose missives to Paris made judges, the governor, and even the officers of the garrison tremble, would write, in his own hand, the number 198 beside Julien's name.
In chapter 10 of Book II, Julien measures the Paris spring against the one at the seminary.
Ch. X. Julien looking at Mathilde:
My God, how beautiful she is! How her large blue eyes please me, seen up close and gazing at me as they always do! What a difference between this spring and last year's, when I lived unhappily, sustaining myself by sheer force of will, amid three hundred filthy and wicked hypocrites! I was almost as bad as they were.
In chapter 13 of Book II, to complete the charm of Mathilde de La Mole, Julien imagines her as a Catherine de Medici, the ideal of the Maslons, the Frilairs, and the Castanèdes he had admired in his youth.
In chapters 38 and 41 of Book II, Frilair, the vicar general of Besançon, claims to control much of the jury.
Among the twelve people charged with examining whether your protégé's crime is beyond dispute and, above all, whether there was premeditation, I count six friends devoted to my cause, and I have given them to understand that it depends on them whether I am raised to the bishopric.
What It Means
In Verrières, in the Rênal household, Julien already pretended, but on impulse, as the occasion required. At the seminary, pretending becomes a discipline: he learns to look devout and corrects every mistake he makes. In chapter 22 of Book I, the dinner at Valenod's house can be read as a foreshadowing of the seminary:
The contrast with the Rênal household appears with total clarity at the dinner at Monsieur Valenod's house, still in Verrières but already anticipating the seminary (see the seminary at Besançon): in asking that a prisoner who was singing be silenced, Valenod exposes the same machinery Julien will find in Besançon, power exercised over those who cannot answer back.
The seminary is not left behind when Julien leaves for Paris. It returns as a yardstick in the spring with Mathilde, returns as a mold in Julien's distrust of her, and returns as an institution at the end, when the vicar general of Besançon says he can count on six jurors.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Education, Appearance and reality, Religion.
- Characters: Julien Sorel, Abbé Pirard, Abbé de Frilair, Abbé Chélan.
- Neighboring symbols: the uniform and the cassock and the La Mole salon.