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stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. "Pull yourself together," said the abbé 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.