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244 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 Besançon. If instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you would have saved me."

The abbé'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 abbé, 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 abbé 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. "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.