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516 and your education, which I advanced to you, but which you are not thinking of."

"Such is paternal love," repeated Julien to himself, dejectedly, when he was at last alone. Soon the gaoler appeared.

"Monsieur, I always bring my visitors a good bottle of champagne after near relations have come to see them. It is a little dear, six francs a bottle, but it rejoices the heart."

"Bring three glasses," said Julien to him, with a childish eagerness, "and bring in two of the prisoners whom I have heard walking about in the corridor." The gaoler brought two men into him who had once been condemned to the gallows, and had now been convicted of the same offence again, and were preparing to return to penal servitude. They were very cheerful scoundrels, and really very remarkable by reason of their subtlety, their courage, and their coolness.

"If you give me twenty francs," said one of them to Julien, "I will tell you the story of my life in detail. It's rich."

"But you will lie," said Julien.

"Not me," he answered, "my friend there, who is jealous of my twenty francs will give me away if I say anything untrue."

His history was atrocious. It was evidence of a courageous heart which had only one passion—that of money.

After their departure Julien was no longer the same man. All his anger with himself had disappeared. The awful grief which had been poisoned and rendered more acute by the weakness of which he had been a victim since madame de Rênal's departure had turned to melancholy.

"If I had been less taken in by appearances," he said to himself, "I would have had a better chance of seeing that the Paris salons are full of honest men like my father, or clever scoundrels like those felons. They are right. The men in the salons never get up in the morning with this poignant thought in their minds, how am I going to get my dinner? They boast about their honesty and when they are summoned on the jury, they take pride in convicting the man who has stolen a silver dish because he felt starving.

"But if there is a court, and it's a question of losing or winning a portfolio, my worthy salon people will commit crimes exactly similar to those, which the need of getting a dinner inspired those two felons to perpetrate.