feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_26_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 27
feat_summary_id: part 1, chapter 27
feat_summary: {"name": "Part 1, Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-27", "summary": "Julien goes around flashing his knowledge and intelligence so freely that people start to nickname him Martin Luther, after the man who read the Bible very closely and helped create Protestantism as a breakoff from Catholicism. In other words, the other students question Julien's loyalty to the \"true\" faith of Catholicism. On several occasions, Julien's classmates try to beat him up. But he has a metal tool he uses as a weapon and he keeps fending them off.", "analysis": ""}
text: CHAPTER XXVII
  
  FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE
  
  
          The present time, Great God! is the ark of the Lord;
          cursed be he who touches it.--_Diderot_.
  
  
  The reader will kindly excuse us if we give very few clear and definite
  facts concerning this period of Julien's life. It is not that we
  lack facts; quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw in
  the seminary is too black for the medium colour which the author
  has endeavoured to preserve throughout these pages. Those of our
  contemporaries who have suffered from certain things cannot remember
  them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that
  of reading a tale.
  
  Julien achieved scant success in his essays at hypocritical gestures.
  He experienced moments of disgust, and even of complete discouragement.
  He was not a success, even in a a vile career. The slightest help
  from outside would have sufficed to have given him heart again, for
  the difficulty to overcome was not very great, but he was alone, like
  a derelict ship in the middle of the ocean. "And when I do succeed,"
  he would say to himself, "think of having to pass a whole lifetime in
  such awful company, gluttons who have no thought but for the large
  omelette which they will guzzle at dinner-time, or persons like the
  abbe Castanede, who finds no crime too black! They will attain power,
  but, great heavens! at what cost.
  
  "The will of man is powerful, I read it everywhere, but is it enough to
  overcome so great a disgust? The task of all the great men was easy by
  comparison. However terrible was the danger, they found it fine, and
  who can realise, except myself, the ugliness of my surroundings?"
  
  This moment was the most trying in his whole life. It would have been
  so easy for him to have enlisted in one of the fine regiments at the
  garrison of Besancon. He could have become a Latin master. He needed so
  little for his subsistence, but in that case no more career, no more
  future for his imagination. It was equivalent to death. Here is one of
  his sad days in detail:
  
  "I have so often presumed to congratulate myself on being different
  from the other young peasants! Well, I have lived enough to realise
  that _difference engenders hate_," he said to himself one morning.
  This great truth had just been borne in upon him by one of his most
  irritating failures. He had been working for eight days at teaching a
  pupil who lived in an odour of sanctity. He used to go out with him
  into the courtyard and listen submissively to pieces of fatuity enough
  to send one to sleep standing. Suddenly the weather turned stormy. The
  thunder growled, and the holy pupil exclaimed as he roughly pushed him
  away.
  
  "Listen! Everyone for himself in this world. I don't want to be burned
  by the thunder. God may strike you with lightning like a blasphemer,
  like a Voltaire."
  
  "I deserve to be drowned if I go to sleep during the storm," exclaimed
  Julien, with his teeth clenched with rage, and with his eyes opened
  towards the sky now furrowed by the lightning. "Let us try the conquest
  of some other rogue."
  
  The bell rang for the abbe Castanede's course of sacred history. That
  day the abbe Castanede was teaching those young peasants already
  so frightened by their father's hardships and poverty, that the
  Government, that entity so terrible in their eyes, possessed no real
  and legitimate power except by virtue of the delegation of God's vicar
  on earth.
  
  "Render yourselves worthy, by the holiness of your life and by your
  obedience, of the benevolence of the Pope. Be _like a stick in his
  hands_," he added, "and you will obtain a superb position, where you
  will be far from all control, and enjoy the King's commands, a position
  from which you cannot be removed, and where one-third of the salary
  is paid by the Government, while the faithful who are moulded by your
  preaching pay the other two-thirds."
  
  Castanede stopped in the courtyard after he left the lesson-room. "It
  is particularly appropriate to say of a cure," he said to the pupils
  who formed a ring round him, "that the place is worth as much as the
  man is worth. I myself have known parishes in the mountains where the
  surplice fees were worth more than that of many town livings. There was
  quite as much money, without counting the fat capons, the eggs, fresh
  butter, and a thousand and one pleasant details, and there the cure is
  indisputably the first man. There is not a good meal to which he is not
  invited, feted, etc."
  
  Castanede had scarcely gone back to his room before the pupils split up
  into knots. Julien did not form part of any of them; he was left out
  like a black sheep. He saw in every knot a pupil tossing a coin in the
  air, and if he managed to guess right in this game of heads or tails,
  his comrades would decide that he would soon have one of those fat
  livings.
  
  Anecdotes ensued. A certain young priest, who had scarcely been
  ordained a year, had given a tame rabbit to the maidservant of an old
  cure, and had succeeded in being asked to be his curate. In a few
  months afterwards, for the cure had quickly died, he had replaced him
  in that excellent living. Another had succeeded in getting himself
  designated as a successor to a very rich town living, by being present
  at all the meals of an old, paralytic cure, and by dexterously carving
  his poultry. The seminarists, like all young people, exaggerated the
  effect of those little devices, which have an element of originality,
  and which strike the imagination.
  
  "I must take part in these conversations," said Julien to himself. When
  they did not talk about sausages and good livings, the conversation ran
  on the worldly aspect of ecclesiastical doctrine, on the differences of
  bishops and prefects, of mayors and cures. Julien caught sight of the
  conception of a second god, but of a god who was much more formidable
  and much more powerful than the other one. That second god was the
  Pope. They said among themselves, in a low voice, however, and when
  they were quite sure that they would not be heard by Pirard, that
  the reason for the Pope not taking the trouble of nominating all the
  prefects and mayors of France, was that he had entrusted that duty to
  the King of France by entitling him a senior son of the Church.
  
  It was about this time that Julien thought he could exploit, for the
  benefit of his own reputation, his knowledge of De Maistre's book
  on the Pope. In point of fact, he did astonish his comrades, but it
  was only another misfortune. He displeased them by expounding their
  own opinions better than they could themselves. Chelan had acted as
  imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the
  habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words,
  but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the
  person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is
  offensive.
  
  Julien's command of language added consequently a new crime to his
  score. By dint of thinking about him, his colleagues succeeded in
  expressing the horror with which he would inspire them by a single
  expression; they nicknamed him Martin Luther, "particularly," they
  said, "because of that infernal logic which makes him so proud."
  
  Several young seminarists had a fresher complexion than Julien, and
  could pass as better-looking, but he had white hands, and was unable to
  conceal certain refined habits of personal cleanliness. This advantage
  proved a disadvantage in the gloomy house in which chance had cast
  him. The dirty peasants among whom he lived asserted that he had very
  abandoned morals. We fear that we may weary our reader by a narration
  of the thousand and one misfortunes of our hero. The most vigorous of
  his comrades, for example, wanted to start the custom of beating him.
  He was obliged to arm himself with an iron compass, and to indicate,
  though by signs, that he would make use of it. Signs cannot figure in a
  spy's report to such good advantage as words.
  
  
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Part 1, Chapter 27
target: Julien goes around flashing his knowledge and intelligence so freely that people start to nickname him Martin Luther, after the man who read the Bible very closely and helped create Protestantism as a breakoff from Catholicism. In other words, the other students question Julien's loyalty to the "true" faith of Catholicism. On several occasions, Julien's classmates try to beat him up. But he has a metal tool he uses as a weapon and he keeps fending them off.