feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_56_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 27
feat_summary_id: part 2, chapter 27
feat_summary: {"name": "Part 2, Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-27", "summary": "Weeks go by and Julien keeps sending Madame Fervaques all the letters Prince Korasoff gave him. He's not sure if his plan is working, but he sticks with it. One of Julien's enemies, Monsieur Tanbeau, is jealous of the success he's clearly having with Madame Fervaques. He assumes that Julien is angling for a promotion in the church, which Madame has the power to grant him. But either way, Tanbeau half-hopes that Julien will be promoted so he'll leave the de La Mole house.", "analysis": ""}
text: CHAPTER LVII
  
  THE FINEST PLACES IN THE CHURCH
  
  
      Services! talents! merits! bah! belong to a coterie.
                                                 _Telemaque_.
  
  
  The idea of a bishopric had thus become associated with the idea of
  Julien in the mind of a woman, who would sooner or later have at her
  disposal the finest places in the Church of France. This idea had not
  struck Julien at all; at the present time his thoughts were strictly
  limited to his actual unhappiness. Everything tended to intensify
  it. The sight of his room, for instance, had become unbearable. When
  he came back in the evening with his candle, each piece of furniture
  and each little ornament seemed to become articulate, and to announce
  harshly some new phase of his unhappiness.
  
  "I have a hard task before me today," he said to himself as he came in
  with a vivacity which he had not experienced for a long time; "let us
  hope that the second letter will be as boring as the first."
  
  It was more so. What he was copying seemed so absurd that he finished
  up by transcribing it line for line without thinking of the sense.
  
  "It is even more bombastic," he said to himself, "than those official
  documents of the treaty of Munster which my professor of diplomacy made
  me copy out at London."
  
  It was only then that he remembered madame de Fervaque's letters which
  he had forgotten to give back to the grave Spaniard Don Diego Bustos.
  He found them. They were really almost as nonsensical as those of
  the young Russian nobleman. Their vagueness was unlimited. It meant
  everything and nothing. "It's the AEolian harp of style," thought
  Julien. "The only real thing I see in the middle of all these lofty
  thoughts about annihilation, death, infinity, etc., is an abominable
  fear of ridicule."
  
  The monologue which we have just condensed was repeated for fifteen
  days on end. Falling off to sleep as he copied out a sort of commentary
  on the Apocalypse, going with a melancholy expression to deliver it
  the following day, taking his horse back to the stable in the hope
  of catching sight of Mathilde's dress, working, going in the evening
  to the opera on those evenings when madame de Fervaques did not come
  to the Hotel de la Mole, such were the monotonous events in Julien's
  life. His life had more interest, when madame la Fervaques visited the
  marquise; he could then catch a glimpse of Mathilde's eyes underneath
  a feather of the marechale's hat, and he would wax eloquent. His
  picturesque and sentimental phrases began to assume a style, which was
  both more striking and more elegant.
  
  He quite realised that what he said was absurd in Mathilde's eyes, but
  he wished to impress her by the elegance of his diction. "The falser my
  speeches are the more I ought to please," thought Julien, and he then
  had the abominable audacity to exaggerate certain elements in his own
  character. He soon appreciated that to avoid appearing vulgar in the
  eyes of the marechale it was necessary to eschew simple and rational
  ideas. He would continue on these lines, or would cut short his grand
  eloquence according as he saw appreciation or indifference in the eyes
  of the two great ladies whom he had set out to please.
  
  Taking it all round, his life was less awful than when his days were
  passed in inaction.
  
  "But," he said to himself one evening, "here I am copying out the
  fifteenth of these abominable dissertations; the first fourteen have
  been duly delivered to the marechale's porter. I shall have the honour
  of filling all the drawers in her escritoire. And yet she treats me
  as though I never wrote. What can be the end of all this? Will my
  constancy bore her as much as it does me? I must admit that that
  Russian friend of Korasoff's who was in love with the pretty Quakeress
  of Richmond, was a terrible man in his time; no one could be more
  overwhelming."
  
  Like all mediocre individuals, who chance to come into contact with the
  manoeuvres of a great general, Julien understood nothing of the attack
  executed by the young Russian on the heart of the young English girl.
  The only purpose of the first forty letters was to secure forgiveness
  for the boldness of writing at all. The sweet person, who perhaps lived
  a life of inordinate boredom, had to be induced to contract the habit
  of receiving letters, which were perhaps a little less insipid than her
  everyday life.
  
  One morning a letter was delivered to Julien. He recognised the arms
  of madame la Fervaques, and broke the seal with an eagerness which
  would have seemed impossible to him some days before. It was only an
  invitation to dinner.
  
  He rushed to prince Korasoffs instructions. Unfortunately the young
  Russian had taken it into his head to be as flippant as Dorat, just
  when he should have been simple and intelligible! Julien was not able
  to form any idea of the moral position which he ought to take up at the
  marechale's dinner.
  
  The salon was extremely magnificent and decorated like the gallery de
  Diane in the Tuileries with panelled oil-paintings.
  
  There were some light spots on these pictures. Julien learnt later that
  the mistress of the house had thought the subject somewhat lacking in
  decency and that she had had the pictures corrected. "What a moral
  century!" he thought.
  
  He noticed in this salon three of the persons who had been present
  at the drawing up of the secret note. One of them, my lord bishop of
  ---- the marechale's uncle had the disposition of the ecclesiastical
  patronage, and could, it was said, refuse his niece nothing. "What
  immense progress I have made," said Julien to himself with a melancholy
  smile, "and how indifferent I am to it. Here I am dining with the
  famous bishop of ----."
  
  The dinner was mediocre and the conversation wearisome.
  
  "It's like the small talk in a bad book," thought Julien. "All the
  greatest subjects of human thought are proudly tackled. After listening
  for three minutes one asks oneself which is greater--the speaker's
  bombast, or his abominable ignorance?"
  
  The reader has doubtless forgotten the little man of letters named
  Tanbeau, who was the nephew of the Academician, and intended to be
  professor, who seemed entrusted with the task of poisoning the salon of
  the Hotel de la Mole with his base calumnies.
  
  It was this little man who gave Julien the first inkling that though,
  madame de Fervaques did not answer, she might quite well take an
  indulgent view of the sentiment which dictated them. M. Tanbeau's
  sinister soul was lacerated by the thought of Julien's success; "but
  since, on the other hand, a man of merit cannot be in two places at the
  same time any more than a fool," said the future professor to himself,
  "if Sorel becomes the lover of the sublime marechale, she will obtain
  some lucrative position for him in the church, and I shall be rid of
  him in the Hotel de la Mole."
  
  M. the abbe Pirard addressed long sermons to Julien concerning his
  success at the hotel de Fervaques. There was a sectarian jealousy
  between the austere Jansenist and the salon of the virtuous marechale
  which was Jesuitical, reactionary, and monarchical.
  
  
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Part 2, Chapter 27
target: Weeks go by and Julien keeps sending Madame Fervaques all the letters Prince Korasoff gave him. He's not sure if his plan is working, but he sticks with it. One of Julien's enemies, Monsieur Tanbeau, is jealous of the success he's clearly having with Madame Fervaques. He assumes that Julien is angling for a promotion in the church, which Madame has the power to grant him. But either way, Tanbeau half-hopes that Julien will be promoted so he'll leave the de La Mole house.