If he talked about any matter the conversation immediately made a step forward; he imported facts into it; it was a pleasure to hear him.
In politics, however, he was a brazen cynic.
"I am independent, I am," he was saying to a gentleman with three stars, of whom apparently he was making fun.
"Why insist on my having to-day the same opinion I had six weeks ago.
In that case my opinion would be my master."
Four grave young men who were standing round scowled; these gentlemen did not like flippancy.
The comte saw that he had gone too far.
Luckily he perceived the honest M. Balland, a veritable hypocrite of honesty.
The count began to talk to him; people closed up, for they realised that poor Balland was going to be the next victim.
M. Balland, although he was horribly ugly and his first steps in the world were almost unmentionable, had by dint of his morals and his morality married a very rich wife who had died; he subsequently married a second very rich one who was never seen in society.
He enjoyed, in all humility, an income of sixty thousand francs, and had his own flatterers.
Comte Chalvet talked to him pitilessly about all this.
There was soon a circle of thirty persons around them.
Everybody was smiling, including the solemn young men who were the hope of the century.
"Why does he come to M. de la Mole where he is obviously only a laughing stock?" thought Julien.
He approached the abbe Pirard to ask him.
M. Balland made his escape.
"Good," said Norbert, "there is one of the spies of my father gone; there is only the little limping Napier left."
"Can that be the key of the riddle?" thought Julien, "but if so, why does the marquis receive M. Balland?"
The stern abbe Pirard was scowling in a corner of the salon listening to the lackeys announcing the names.
"This is nothing more than a den," he was saying like another Basil,
"I see none but shady people come in."
As a matter of fact the severe abbe did not know what constitutes high society.
But his friends the Jansenites, had given him some very precise notions about those men who only get into society by reason of their extreme subtlety in the service of all parties, or of their monstrous wealth.
For some minutes that evening he answered Julien's eager questions fully and freely, and then suddenly stopped short grieved at having always to say ill of every one, and thinking he was guilty of a sin.
Bilious Jansenist as he was, and believing as he did in the duty of Christian charity, his life was a perpetual conflict.
"How strange that abbe Pirard looks," said mademoiselle de la Mole, as Julien came near the sofa.
Julien felt irritated, but she was right all the same.
M. Pirard was unquestionably the most honest man in the salon, but his pimply face, which was suffering from the stings of conscience, made him look hideous at this particular moment.
"Trust physiognomy after this," thought Julien, "it is only when the delicate conscience of the abbe Pirard is reproaching him for some trifling lapse that he looks so awful; while the expression of that notorious spy Napier shows a pure and tranquil happiness." The abbe Pirard, however, had made great concessions to his party. He had taken a servant, and was very well dressed.
Julien noticed something strange in the salon, it was that all eyes were being turned towards the door, and there was a semi silence.
The flunkey was announcing the famous Barron Tolly, who had just become publicly conspicuous by reason of the elections.
Julien came forward and had a very good view of him.
The baron had been the president of an electoral college; he had the brilliant idea of spiriting away the little squares of paper which contained the votes of one of the parties.
But to make up for it he replaced them by an equal number of other little pieces of paper containing a name agreeable to himself.
This drastic man?uvre had been noticed by some of the voters, who had made an immediate point of congratulating the Baron de Tolly. The good fellow was still pale from this great business.
Malicious persons had pronounced the word galleys.
M. de la Mole received him coldly.
The poor Baron made his escape.
"If he leaves us so quickly it's to go to M. Comte's," said Comte Chalvet and everyone laughed.
Little Tanbeau was trying to win his spurs by talking to some silent noblemen and some intriguers who, though shady, were all men of wit, and were on this particular night in great force in M. de la Mole's salon (for he was mentioned for a place in the ministry).
If he had not yet any subtlety of perception he made up for it as one will see by the energy of his words.
"Why not sentence that man to ten years' imprisonment," he was saying at the moment when Julien approached his knot.
"Those reptiles should be confined in the bottom of a dungeon, they ought to languish to death in gaol, otherwise their venom will grow and become more dangerous.
What is the good of sentencing him to a fine of a thousand crowns?
He is poor, so be it, all the better, but his party will pay for him.
What the case required was a five hundred francs fine and ten years in a dungeon."
"Well to be sure, who is the monster they are speaking about?" thought Julien who was viewing with amazement the vehement tone and hysterical gestures of his colleague.
At this moment the thin, drawn, little face of the academician's nephew was hideous.
Julien soon learnt that they were talking of the greatest poet of the century.