"What magnificent architecture," he said to his friend.
The hotel in question was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat facade built about the time of Voltaire's death.
At no other period had fashion and beauty been so far from one another. _____
CHAPTER XXXII
ENTRY INTO SOCIETY _____
Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room where one appeared alone and without support at the age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to intimidate me.
The more I wished to please the more clumsy I became.
I evolved the most unfounded ideas about everything. I would either abandon myself without any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply because he had looked at me with a serious air; but all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful day—Kant. _____
Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard.
"Pull yourself together," said the abbe Pirard. "You get horrible ideas into your head, besides you are only a child.
What has happened to the nil mirari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you.
They will see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to make you fall into some gross blunder."
"Let them do their worst," said Julien biting his lip, and he became as distrustful as ever.
The salons on the first storey which our gentlemen went through before reaching the marquis' study, would have seemed to you, my reader, as gloomy as they were magnificent.
If they had been given to you just as they were, you would have refused to live in them.
This was the domain of yawning and melancholy reasoning.
They redoubled Julien's rapture.
"How can any one be unhappy?" he thought, "who lives in so splendid an abode."
Finally our gentlemen arrived at the ugliest rooms in this superb suite. There was scarcely any light.
They found there a little keen man with a lively eye and a blonde wig.
The abbe turned round to Julien and presented him.
It was the marquis.
Julien had much difficulty in recognising him, he found his manner was so polite.
It was no longer the grand seigneur with that haughty manner of the abbey of Bray-le-Haut.
Julien thought that his wig had much too many hairs.
As the result of this opinion he was not at all intimidated.
The descendant of the friend of Henry III. seemed to him at first of a rather insignificant appearance.
He was extremely thin and very restless, but he soon noticed that the marquis had a politeness which was even more pleasant to his listener than that of the Bishop of Besancon himself.
The audience only lasted three minutes.
As they went out the abbe said to Julien,
"You looked at the marquis just as you would have looked at a picture. I am not a great expert in what these people here call politeness.
You will soon know more about it than I do, but really the boldness of your looks seemed scarcely polite."
They had got back into the fiacre. The driver stopped near the boulevard; the abbe ushered Julien into a suite of large rooms.
Julien noticed that there was no furniture.
He was looking at the magnificent gilded clock representing a subject which he thought very indecent, when a very elegant gentleman approached him with a smiling air.
Julien bowed slightly.
The gentleman smiled and put his hand on his shoulder.
Julien shuddered and leapt back, he reddened with rage.
The abbe Pirard, in spite of his gravity, laughed till the tears came into his eyes.
The gentleman was a tailor.
"I give you your liberty for two days," said the abbe as they went out. "You cannot be introduced before then to Madame de la Mole.
Any one else would watch over you as if you were a young girl during these first few moments of your life in this new Babylon.
Get ruined at once if you have got to be ruined, and I will be rid of my own weakness of being fond of you.
The day after to-morrow this tailor will bring you two suits, you will give the man who tries them on five francs.
Apart from that don't let these Parisians hear the sound of your voice.
If you say a word they will manage somehow to make fun of you.
They have a talent for it.
Come and see me the day after to-morrow at noon.... Go and ruin yourself.... I was forgetting, go and order boots and a hat at these addresses."
Julien scrutinised the handwriting of the addresses.
"It's the marquis's hand," said the abbe; "he is an energetic man who foresees everything, and prefers doing to ordering.