"The day of my arrival at Besançon I was hungry, and I entered a café. My spirit was full of revulsion for so profane a place, but I thought that my breakfast would cost me less than at an inn. A lady, who seemed to be the mistress of the establishment, took pity on my inexperience. 'Besançon is full of bad characters,' she said to me. 'I fear something will happen to you, sir. If some mishap should occur to you, have recourse to me and send to my house before eight o'clock. If the porters of the seminary refuse to execute your errand, say you are my cousin and a native of Genlis.'" "I will have all this chatter verified," exclaimed the abbé Pirard, unable to stand still, and walking about the room. "Back to the cell." The abbé followed Julien and locked him in. The latter immediately began to examine his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal cards had been so carefully hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but several things had been disarranged. Nevertheless, he had never been without the key. What luck that, during the whole time of my blindness, said Julien to himself, I never availed myself of the permission to go out that Monsieur Castanède would offer me so frequently, with a kindness which I now understand. Perhaps I should have had the weakness to have changed my clothes and gone to see the fair Amanda, and then I should have been ruined. When they gave up hope of exploiting that piece of information for the accomplishment of his ruin, they had used it to inform against him. Two hours afterwards the director summoned him. "You did not lie," he said to him, with a less severe look, "but keeping an address like that is an indiscretion of a gravity which you are unable to realise. Unhappy child! It may perhaps do you harm in ten years' time." CHAPTER XXVII FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE The present time, Great God! is the ark of the Lord; cursed be he who touches it.--_Diderot_. The reader will kindly excuse us if we give very few clear and definite facts concerning this period of Julien's life. It is not that we lack facts; quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw in the seminary is too black for the medium colour which the author has endeavoured to preserve throughout these pages. Those of our contemporaries who have suffered from certain things cannot remember them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that of reading a tale.