"Ah! foreign news of that poor N—" said the master of the house.
He took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered humorous by its own self-importance.
"Speak, monsieur," he said to him.
The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines,
"That is enough."
The little man who looked like a boar sat down.
He was the president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him.
Julien established himself at it with writing materials.
He counted twelve persons seated round the green table cloth.
"M. Sorel," said the Duke, "retire into next room, you will be called."
The master of the house began to look very anxious.
"The shutters are not shut," he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper.
"It is no good looking out of the window," he stupidly cried to Julien—"so here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy," thought the latter.
"Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Greve.
Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis, and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him."
While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory for ever.
He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way.
Julien was left to his own reflections for a long time.
He was in a salon upholstered in red velvet with large pieces of gold lace.
A large ivory crucifix was on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M. de Maistre's book The Pope was on the mantelpiece.
Julien opened it so as not to appear to be eavesdropping.
From time to time they talked loudly in the next room.
At last the door was opened and he was called in.
"Remember, gentlemen," the president was saying "that from this moment we are talking in the presence of the duke of ——.
This gentleman," he said, pointing to Julien, "is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily our very slightest words."
"It is your turn to speak, Monsieur," he said pointing to the paternal looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats.
Julien thought it would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the waistcoats.
He took some paper and wrote a great deal.
(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of dots.
"That," said his publisher, "would be clumsy and in the case of so light a work clumsiness is death."
"Politics," replies the author, "is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months.
Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic.
It does not harmonise with the sound of any instrument.
These politics will give mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half, who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the morning paper in its own drastic manner."
"If your characters don't talk politics," replied the publisher, "they cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as you claim?")
Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed either offensive or intolerable (see the Gazette des Tribunaux).
The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an unusually decided expression.
This personage whom they made speak first before the duke ("but what duke is it?" thought Julien to himself) with the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials are so often taxed.
During the course of the discussion the duke went so far as to reproach him on this score.
After several sentences of morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,
"Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution.
If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions there is nothing decisive except personal methods."
"Ah! praising assassination again!" said the master of the house anxiously.
"Spare us your sentimental sermons," cried the president angrily. His boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance.
"Go on," he said to the man with the waistcoats.
The cheeks and the forehead of the president became purple.
"Noble England," replied the advocate-general, "is crushed to-day: for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the Jacobins.
She has no more Pitt."
"She has the Duke of Wellington," said a military personage looking very important.
"Please, gentlemen, silence," exclaimed the president.