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264 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 abbé 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 abbé 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 abbé 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.