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 abbé Castanède, 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 Besançon. 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 abbé Castanède's course of sacred history. That day the abbé Castanède 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.