IN THE HOTEL DE
LA
MOLE
267
governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated.
As
these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe
in the thing they represent, they choose to talk of nothing but the
weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to ac–
cept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly–
rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition
and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the
atmosphere of society. So much for the pervading boredom.
But Julien'S reaction, too, and the very fact that he and the
former director of his seminary, the Abbe Pirard, are present at all
in the house of the Marquis de la Mole, are only to be understood
in terms of the actual historical moment. Julien's passionate and ima–
ginative nature has from his earliest youth been filled with enthusiasm
for the great ideas of the Revolution and of Rousseau, for the great
events of the Napoleonic period; from his earliest youth he has felt
nothing but loathing and scorn for the piddling hypocrisy and the
petty lying corruption of the classes in power since Napoleon'S fall.
He is too imaginative, too ambitious, and too fond of power, to be
satisfied with a mediocre life within the bourgeoisie, such as his
friend Fouquet proposes to him. Having observed that a man of
petty-bourgeois origin can attain to a situation of command' only
through the nearly all-powerful Church, he had consciously and
deliberately become a hypocrite; and his great talents would have
assured him a brilliant intellectual career, had not
his
real personal
and political feelings, the direct passionateness of his nature, been
prone to burst forth at decisive moments. One such moment of self–
betrayal we have in the passage before us, when Julien confides
his
feelings in the Marquis'S salon to the Abbe Pirard,
his
former teacher
and protector; for the intellectual freedom to which
it
testifies is
unthinkable without an admixture of intellectual arrogance and a
sense of inner superiority hardly becoming in a young ecclesiastic
and protege of the house. (In this particular instance his frankness
does
him
no harm; the Abbe Pirard is his friend, and upon Mathilde,
who happens to overhear him, his words make an entirely different
impression from that which he should expect and fear.) The Abbe
is here described as a true parvenu, who knows how highly the honor
of sitting at a great man's table should be esteemed and hence
dis–
approves of Julien's remarks; as another motive for the Abbes dis-
