their ignorance an immense advantage," Julien would exclaim in his moments of discouragement. The professor has not got to deliver them on their arrival at the seminary from that awful number of worldly ideas which I brought into it, and which they read on my face whatever I do."
Julien watched with an attention bordering on envy the coarsest of the little peasants who arrived at the seminary. From the moment when they were made to doff their shabby jackets to don the black robe, their education consisted of an immense and limitless respect for hard liquid cash as they say in Franche-comté.
That is the consecrated and heroic way of expressing the sublime idea of current money.
These seminarists, like the heroes in Voltaire's novels, found their happiness in dining well. Julien discovered in nearly all of them an innate respect for the man who wears a suit of good cloth. This sentiment appreciates the distributive justice, which is given us at our courts, at its value or even above its true value. "What can one gain," they would often repeat among themselves, "by having a law suit with 'a big man?'"
That is the expression current in the valleys of the Jura to express a rich man. One can judge of their respect for the richest entity of all—the government. Failure to smile deferentially at the mere name of M. the Prefect is regarded as an imprudence in the eyes of the Franche-comté peasant, and imprudence in poor people is quickly punished by lack of bread.
After having been almost suffocated at first by his feeling of contempt, Julien eventually experienced a feeling of pity; it often happened that the fathers of most of his comrades would enter their hovel in winter evenings and fail to find there either bread, chestnuts or potatoes.
"What is there astonishing then?" Julien would say to himself, "if in their eyes the happy man is in the first place the one who has just had a good dinner, and in the second place the one who possesses a good suit? My comrades have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of the happiness of dining well and having a warm suit."
Julien happened to hear a young imaginative seminarist say to his companion.
