Erit tibi, fili mi, successor meus tanquam leo querens quem devoret. (For my successor will be to you, my son, like a ravening lion seeking someone to devour). The following morning Julien noticed a certain strangeness in the manner in which his comrades spoke to him. It only made him more reserved. "This," he thought, "is the result of M. Pirard's resignation. It is known over the whole house, and I pass for his favourite. There ought logically to be an insult in their demeanour." But he could not detect it. On the contrary, there was an absence of hate in the eyes of all those he met along the corridors. "What is the meaning of this? It is doubtless a trap. Let us play a wary game." Finally the little seminarist said to him with a laugh, "Cornelii Taciti opera omnia (complete works of Tacitus)." On hearing these words, they all congratulated Julien enviously, not only on the magnificent present which he had received from my lord, but also on the two hours' conversation with which he had been honoured. They knew even its minutest details. From that moment envy ceased completely. They courted him basely. The abbé Castanède, who had manifested towards him the most extreme insolence the very day before, came and took his arm and invited him to breakfast. By some fatality in Julien's character, while the insolence of these coarse creatures had occasioned him great pain, their baseness afforded him disgust, but no pleasure. Towards mid-day the abbé Pirard took leave of his pupils, but not before addressing to them a severe admonition. "Do you wish for the honours of the world," he said to them. "For all the social advantages, for the pleasure of commanding pleasures, of setting the laws at defiance, and the pleasure of being insolent with impunity to all? Or do you wish for your eternal salvation? The most backward of you have only got to open your eyes to distinguish the true ways." He had scarcely left before the devotees of the _Sacré Cœur de Jésus_ went into the chapel to intone a Te Deum. Nobody in the seminary took the ex-director's admonition seriously. "He shows a great deal of temper because he is losing his job," was what was said in every quarter. Not a single seminarist was simple enough to believe in the voluntary resignation of a position which put him into such close touch with the big contractors.