"You will also see," he added with the same bad grace, as though accomplishing a painful duty, "you also will see Madame the marquise de La Mole.
She is a big blonde woman about forty, devout, perfectly polite, and even more insignificant.
She is the daughter of the old Duke de Chaulnes so well known for his aristocratic prejudices.
This great lady is a kind of synopsis in high relief of all the fundamental characteristics of women of her rank.
She does not conceal for her own part that the possession of ancestors who went through the crusades is the sole advantage which she respects.
Money only comes a long way afterwards.
Does that astonish you?
We are no longer in the provinces, my friend.
"You will see many great lords in her salon talk about our princes in a tone of singular flippancy.
As for Madame de la Mole, she lowers her voice out of respect every time she mentions the name of a Prince, and above all the name of a Princess.
I would not advise you to say in her hearing that Philip II. or Henry VII. were monsters.
They were kings, a fact which gives them indisputable rights to the respect of creatures without birth like you and me.
Nevertheless," added M. Pirard, "we are priests, for she will take you for one; that being our capacity, she considers us as spiritual valets necessary for her salvation."
"Monsieur," said Julien, "I do not think I shall be long at Paris."
"Good, but remember that no man of our class can make his fortune except through the great lords.
With that indefinable element in your character, at any rate I think it is, you will be persecuted if you do not make your fortune.
There is no middle course for you, make no mistake about it; people see that they do not give you pleasure when they speak to you; in a social country like this you are condemned to unhappiness if you do not succeed in winning respect."
"What would have become of you at Besancon without this whim of the marquis de la Mole?
One day you will realise the extraordinary extent of what he has done for you, and if you are not a monster you will be eternally grateful to him and his family.
How many poor abbes more learned than you have lived years at Paris on the fifteen sous they got for their mass and their ten sous they got for their dissertations in the Sorbonne.
Remember what I told you last winter about the first years of that bad man Cardinal Dubois.
Are you proud enough by chance to think yourself more talented than he was?
"Take, for instance, a quiet and average man like myself; I reckoned on dying in my seminary. I was childish enough to get attached to it.
Well I was on the point of being turned out, when I handed in my resignation.
You know what my fortune consisted of.
I had five hundred and twenty francs capital neither more nor less, not a friend, scarcely two or three acquaintances.
M. de la Mole, whom I had never seen, extricated me from that quandary. He only had to say the word and I was given a living where the parishioners are well-to-do people above all crude vices, and where the income puts me to shame, it is so disproportionate to my work.
I refrained from talking to you all this time simply to enable you to find your level a bit.
"One word more, I have the misfortune to be irritable. It is possible that you and I will cease to be on speaking terms.
"If the airs of the marquise or the spiteful pleasantries of her son make the house absolutely intolerable for you I advise you to finish your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris and rather north than south.
There is more civilisation in the north, and, he added lowering his voice, I must admit that the nearness of the Paris papers puts fear into our petty tyrants.
"If we continue to find pleasure in each other's society and if the marquis's house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the living.
I owe you that and even more, he added interrupting Julien's thanks, for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besancon.
If instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you would have saved me."
The abbe's voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself into his friend's arms.
He could not help saying to him in the most manly manner he could assume:
"I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found another father in you, monsieur."
"That is good, that is good," said the embarrassed abbe, then suddenly remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude "you must never say luck, my child, always say providence."
The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an immense door.
It was the Hotel de la Mole, and to prevent the passers by having any doubt on the subject these words could be read in black marble over the door.
This affectation displeased Julien.
"They are so frightened of the Jacobins.
They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head.
Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and they advertise their house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can recognise it and loot it."
He communicated his thought to the abbe Pirard.
"Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate.
What a dreadful idea you have got into your head."
"Nothing could be simpler," said Julien.
The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the the court, struck him with admiration.
It was fine sunshine.