Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/263

Rh "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 Besançon 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 abbés 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