"How presumptuous I was at Verrières," said Julien to himself. "I thought I lived; I was only preparing for life, and here I am at last in the world such as I shall find it, until my part comes to an end, surrounded by real enemies. What immense difficulties," he added, "are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute. It is enough to put the labours of Hercules into the shade. The Hercules of modern times is the Pope Sixtus Quintus, who deceived by his modesty fifteen years on end forty Cardinals who had seen the liveliness and haughtiness of his whole youth. "So knowledge is nothing here," he said to himself with disgust. "Progress in doctrine, in sacred history, etc., only seem to count. Everything said on those subjects is only intended to entrap fools like me. Alas my only merit consists in my rapid progress, and in the way in which I grasp all their nonsense. Do they really value those things at their true worth? Do they judge them like I do. And I had the stupidity to be proud of my quickness. The only result of my coming out top has been to give me inveterate enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than I do, always throws some blunder in his compositions which gets him put back to the fiftieth place. If he comes out first, it is only because he is absent-minded. O how useful would one word, just one word, of M. Pirard, have been to me." As soon as Julien was disillusioned, the long exercises in ascetic piety, such as the attendances in the chapel five times a week, the intonation of hymns at the chapel of the Sacré Cœur, etc., etc., which had previously seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most interesting opportunities for action. Thanks to a severe introspection, and above all, by trying not to overdo his methods, Julien did not attempt at the outset to perform significant actions (that is to say, actions which are proof of a certain Christian perfection) like those seminarists who served as a model to the rest. Seminarists have a special way, even of eating a poached egg, which betokens progress in the devout life. The reader who smiles at this will perhaps be good enough to remember all the mistakes which the abbé Delille made over the eating of an egg when he was invited to breakfast with a lady of the Court of Louis XVI. Julien first tried to arrive at the state of _non culpa_, that is to say the state of the young seminarist whose demeanour and manner of moving his arms, eyes, etc. while in fact without any trace of worldliness, do not yet indicate that the person is entirely absorbed by the conception of the other world, and the idea of the pure nothingness of this one.