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342 favours of which I am the recipient. I know it, I have heard them.…

"On the other hand they're her letters. They may think that I have them on me. They may surprise me in her room and take them from me. I shall have to deal with two, three, or four men. How can I tell? But where are they going to find these men? Where are they to find discreet subordinates in Paris? Justice frightens them.… By God! It may be the Caylus's, the Croisenois', the de Luz's themselves. The idea of the ludicrous figure I should cut in the middle of them at the particular minute may have attracted them. Look out for the fate of Abailard, M. the secretary.

"Well, by heaven, I'll mark you. I'll strike at your faces like Cæsar's soldiers at Pharsalia. As for the letters, I can put them in a safe place."

Julien copied out the two last, hid them in a fine volume of Voltaire in the library and himself took the originals to the post.

"What folly am I going to rush into," he said to himself with surprise and terror when he returned. He had been a quarter of an hour without contemplating what he was to do on this coming night.

"But if I refuse, I am bound to despise myself afterwards. This matter will always occasion me great doubt during my whole life, and to a man like me such doubts are the most poignant unhappiness. Did I not feel like that for Amanda's lover! I think I would find it easier to forgive myself for a perfectly clear crime; once admitted, I could leave off thinking of it.

"Why! I shall have been the rival of a man who bears one of the finest names in France, and then out of pure lightheartedness, declared myself his inferior! After all, it is cowardly not to go; these words clinch everything," exclaimed Julien as he got up … "besides she is quite pretty."

"If this is not a piece of treachery, what a folly is she not committing for my sake. If it's a piece of mystification, by heaven, gentlemen, it only depends on me to turn the jest into earnest and that I will do.

"But supposing they tie my hands together at the moment I enter the room: they may have placed some ingenious machine there.