feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_66_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 37
feat_summary_id: part 2, chapter 37
feat_summary: {"name": "Part 2, Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-37", "summary": "Julien's old friend Father Chelan visits him. The man calls him a monster. His old buddy Fouqe comes and tells him he has a good chance of avoiding the death penalty in court, since Madame de Renal survived. Fouqe also offers to sell everything he owns to bribe Julien's way out of prison. Nonetheless, Julien tells every lawyer who visits him that he tried to kill Madame and that it was premeditated. If he lied, he could probably get off. But he won't.", "analysis": ""}
text: CHAPTER LXVII
  
  A TURRET
  
  
          The tomb of a friend.--_Sterne_.
  
  
  He heard a loud noise in the corridor. It was not the time when the
  gaoler usually came up to his prison. The osprey flew away with a
  shriek. The door opened, and the venerable cure Chelan threw himself
  into his arms. He was trembling all over and had his stick in his hands.
  
  "Great God! Is it possible, my child--I ought to say monster?"
  
  The good old man could not add a single word. Julien was afraid he
  would fall down. He was obliged to lead him to a chair. The hand of
  time lay heavy on this man who had once been so active. He seemed to
  Julien the mere shadow of his former self.
  
  When he had regained his breath, he said, "It was only the day before
  yesterday that I received your letter from Strasbourg with your five
  hundred francs for the poor of Verrieres. They brought it to me in
  the mountains at Liveru where I am living in retirement with my
  nephew Jean. Yesterday I learnt of the catastrophe.... Heavens, is it
  possible?" And the old man left off weeping. He did not seem to have
  any ideas left, but added mechanically, "You will have need of your
  five hundred francs, I will bring them back to you."
  
  "I need to see you, my father," exclaimed Julien, really touched. "I
  have money, anyway."
  
  But he could not obtain any coherent answer. From time to time, M.
  Chelan shed some tears which coursed silently down his cheeks. He then
  looked at Julien, and was quite dazed when he saw him kiss his hands
  and carry them to his lips. That face which had once been so vivid,
  and which had once portrayed with such vigour the most noble emotions
  was now sunk in a perpetual apathy. A kind of peasant came soon to
  fetch the old man. "You must not fatigue him," he said to Julien, who
  understood that he was the nephew. This visit left Julien plunged in a
  cruel unhappiness which found no vent in tears. Everything seemed to
  him gloomy and disconsolate. He felt his heart frozen in his bosom.
  
  This moment was the cruellest which he had experienced since the
  crime. He had just seen death and seen it in all its ugliness. All his
  illusions about greatness of soul and nobility of character had been
  dissipated like a cloud before the hurricane.
  
  This awful plight lasted several hours. After moral poisoning, physical
  remedies and champagne are necessary. Julien would have considered
  himself a coward to have resorted to them. "What a fool I am," he
  exclaimed, towards the end of the horrible day that he had spent
  entirely in walking up and down his narrow turret. "It's only, if I
  had been going to die like anybody else, that the sight of that poor
  old man would have had any right to have thrown me into this awful fit
  of sadness: but a rapid death in the flower of my age simply puts me
  beyond the reach of such awful senility."
  
  In spite of all his argumentation, Julien felt as touched as any
  weak-minded person would have been, and consequently felt unhappy
  as the result of the visit. He no longer had any element of rugged
  greatness, or any Roman virtue. Death appeared to him at a great height
  and seemed a less easy proposition.
  
  "This is what I shall take for my thermometer," he said to himself.
  "To-night I am ten degrees below the courage requisite for
  guillotine-point level. I had that courage this morning. Anyway, what
  does it matter so long as it comes back to me at the necessary moment?"
  This thermometer idea amused him and finally managed to distract him.
  
  When he woke up the next day he was ashamed of the previous day. "My
  happiness and peace of mind are at stake." He almost made up his mind
  to write to the Procureur-General to request that no one should be
  admitted to see him. "And how about Fouque," he thought? "If he takes
  it upon himself to come to Besancon, his grief will be immense."
  It had perhaps been two months since he had given Fouque a thought.
  "I was a great fool at Strasbourg. My thoughts did not go beyond my
  coat-collar. He was much engrossed by the memory of Fouque, which
  left him more and more touched. He walked nervously about. Here I
  am, clearly twenty degrees below death point.... If this weakness
  increases, it will be better for me to kill myself. What joy for the
  abbe Maslon, and the Valenods, if I die like an usher."
  
  Fouque arrived. The good, simple man, was distracted by grief. His one
  idea, so far as he had any at all, was to sell all he possessed in
  order to bribe the gaoler and secure Julien's escape. He talked to him
  at length of M. de Lavalette's escape.
  
  "You pain me," Julien said to him. "M. de Lavalette was innocent--I
  am guilty. Though you did not mean to, you made me think of the
  difference...."
  
  "But is it true? What? were you going to sell all you possessed?" said
  Julien, suddenly becoming mistrustful and observant.
  
  Fouque was delighted at seeing his friend answer his obsessing idea,
  and detailed at length, and within a hundred francs, what he would get
  for each of his properties.
  
  "What a sublime effort for a small country land-owner," thought Julien.
  "He is ready to sacrifice for me the fruits of all the economies, and
  all the little semi-swindling tricks which I used to be ashamed of when
  I saw him practice them."
  
  "None of the handsome young people whom I saw in the Hotel de la Mole,
  and who read Rene, would have any of his ridiculous weaknesses: but,
  except those who are very young and who have also inherited riches
  and are ignorant of the value of money, which of all those handsome
  Parisians would be capable of such a sacrifice?"
  
  All Fouque's mistakes in French and all his common gestures seemed to
  disappear. He threw himself into his arms. Never have the provinces
  in comparison with Paris received so fine a tribute. Fouque was so
  delighted with the momentary enthusiasm which he read in his friend's
  eyes that he took it for consent to the flight.
  
  This view of the sublime recalled to Julien all the strength that the
  apparition of M. Chelan had made him lose. He was still very young;
  but in my view he was a fine specimen. Instead of his character passing
  from tenderness to cunning, as is the case with the majority of men,
  age would have given him that kindness of heart which is easily melted
  ... but what avail these vain prophecies.
  
  The interrogations became more frequent in spite of all the efforts
  of Julien, who always endeavoured by his answers to shorten the whole
  matter.
  
  "I killed, or at any rate, I wished to occasion death, and I did so
  with premeditation," he would repeat every day. But the judge was
  a pedant above everything. Julien's confessions had no effect in
  curtailing the interrogations. The judge's conceit was wounded. Julien
  did not know that they had wanted to transfer him into an awful cell,
  and that it was only, thanks to Fouque's efforts, that he was allowed
  to keep his pretty room at the top of a hundred and eighty steps.
  
  M. the abbe de Frilair was one of the important customers who entrusted
  Fouque with the purveying of their firewood. The good tradesmen managed
  to reach the all powerful grand vicar. M. de Frilair informed him,
  to his unspeakable delight, that he was so touched by Julien's good
  qualities, and by the services which he had formerly rendered to the
  seminary, that he intended to recommend him to the judges. Fouque
  thought he saw a hope of saving his friend, and as he went out, bowing
  down to the ground, requested M. the grand vicar, to distribute a sum
  of ten louis in masses to entreat the acquittal of the accused.
  
  Fouque was making a strange mistake. M. de Frilair was very far from
  being a Valenod. He refused, and even tried to make the good peasant
  understand that he would do better to keep his money. Seeing that it
  was impossible to be clear without being indiscreet, he advised him to
  give that sum as alms for the use of the poor prisoners, who, in point
  of fact, were destitute of everything.
  
  "This Julien is a singular person, his action is unintelligible,"
  thought M. de Frilair, "and I ought to find nothing unintelligible.
  Perhaps it will be possible to make a martyr of him.... In any case,
  I shall get to the bottom of the matter, and shall perhaps find an
  opportunity of putting fear into the heart of that madame de Renal
  who has no respect for us, and at the bottom detests me.... Perhaps
  I might be able to utilise all this as a means of a brilliant
  reconciliation with M. de la Mole, who has a weakness for the little
  seminarist."
  
  The settlement of the lawsuit had been signed some weeks previously,
  and the abbe Pirard had left Besancon after having duly mentioned
  Julien's mysterious birth, on the very day when the unhappy man tried
  to assassinate madame de Renal in the church of Verrieres.
  
  There was only one disagreeable event between himself and his death
  which Julien anticipated. He consulted Fouque concerning his idea
  of writing to M. the Procureur-General asking to be exempt from all
  visits. This horror at the sight of a father, above all at a moment
  like this, deeply shocked the honest middle-class heart of the wood
  merchant.
  
  He thought he understood why so many people had a passionate hatred for
  his friend. He concealed his feelings out of respect for misfortune.
  
  "In any case," he answered coldly, "such an order for privacy would not
  be applied to your father."
  
  
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Part 2, Chapter 37
target: Julien's old friend Father Chelan visits him. The man calls him a monster. His old buddy Fouqe comes and tells him he has a good chance of avoiding the death penalty in court, since Madame de Renal survived. Fouqe also offers to sell everything he owns to bribe Julien's way out of prison. Nonetheless, Julien tells every lawyer who visits him that he tried to kill Madame and that it was premeditated. If he lied, he could probably get off. But he won't.