Julien incessantly found such phrases as these charcoaled on the walls of the corridors. "What are sixty years of ordeals balanced against an eternity of delights or any eternity of boiling oil in hell?" He despised them no longer. He realised that it was necessary to have them incessantly before his eyes. "What am I going to do all my life," he said to himself. "I shall sell to the faithful a place in heaven. How am I going to make that place visible to their eyes? By the difference between my appearance and that of a layman." After several months of absolutely unremitting application, Julien still had the appearance of thinking. The way in which he would move his eyes and hold his mouth did not betoken that implicit faith which is ready to believe everything and undergo everything, even at the cost of martyrdom. Julien saw with anger that he was surpassed in this by the coarsest peasants. There was good reason for their not appearing full of thought. What pains did he not take to acquire that facial expression of blindly fervent faith which is found so frequently in the Italian convents, and of which Le Guerchin has left such perfect models in his Church pictures for the benefit of us laymen. On feast-days, the seminarists were regaled with sausages and cabbage. Julien's table neighbours observed that he did not appreciate this happiness. That was looked upon as one of his paramount crimes. His comrades saw in this a most odious trait, and the most foolish hypocrisy. Nothing made him more enemies. "Look at this bourgeois, look at this stuck-up person," they would say, "who pretends to despise the best rations there are, sausages and cabbage, shame on the villain! The haughty wretch, he is damned for ever." "Alas, these young peasants, who are my comrades, find 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?'"