Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/196

176 cemetery cross of white wood painted black at the top was opened with difficulty, and the porter made him enter a dark low room, whose whitewashed walls were decorated with two big pictures blackened by age. In this room Julien was left alone. He was overwhelmed. His heart was beating violently. He would have been happy to have ventured to cry. A silence of death reigned over the whole house.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed a whole day to him, the sinister looking porter reappeared on the threshold of a door at the other end of the room, and without vouchsafing a word, signed to him to advance. He entered into a room even larger than the first, and very badly lighted. The walls also were whitened, but there was no furniture. Only in a corner near the door Julien saw as he passed a white wooden bed, two straw chairs, and a little pinewood armchair without any cushions. He perceived at the other end of the room, near a small window with yellow panes decorated with badly kept flower vases, a man seated at a table, and covered with a dilapidated cassock. He appeared to be in a temper, and took one after the other a number of little squares of paper, which he arranged on his table after he had written some words on them. He did not notice Julien's presence. The latter did not move, but kept standing near the centre of the room in the place where the porter, who had gone out and shut the door, had left him.

Ten minutes passed in this way: the badly dressed man kept on writing all the time. Julien's emotion and terror were so great that he thought he was on the point of falling. A philosopher would have said, possibly wrongly, "It is a violent impression made by ugliness on a soul intended by nature to love the beautiful."

The man who was writing lifted up his head. Julien only perceived it after a moment had passed, and even after seeing it, he still remained motionless, as though struck dead by the terrible look of which he was the victim. Julien's troubled eyes just managed to make out a long face, all covered with red blotches except the forehead, which manifested a mortal pallor. Two little black eyes, calculated to terrify the most courageous, shone between these red cheeks and that white forehead. The vast area of his forehead was bounded by thick, flat, jet black hair.