Sundays with Stendhal 7: The Air of a Thinker

After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants. They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

(The Red and the Black, Part One, Chapter 26, “The World, or What the Rich Lack.”  Special edition of SwS for my nephew James Knabe, finishing up his first semester as a grad student in the English department at Yale.)