"You will finish up," said that Liberal voter, "with a place in the Government, which will compel you to take some step which will be calumniated. It will only be by your own disgrace that I shall have news of you. Remember that, even from the financial standpoint, it is better to earn a hundred louis in a good timber business, of which one is his own master, than to receive four thousand francs from a Government, even though it were that of King Solomon." Julien saw nothing in this except the pettiness of spirit of a country bourgeois. At last he was going to make an appearance in the theatre of great events. Everything was over-shadowed in his eyes by the happiness of going to Paris, which he imagined to be populated by people of intellect, full of intrigues and full of hypocrisy, but as polite as the Bishop of Besançon and the Bishop of Agde. He represented to his friend that he was deprived of any free choice in the matter by the abbé Pirard's letter.' The following day he arrived at Verrières about noon. He felt the happiest of men for he counted on seeing Madame de Rênal again. He went first to his protector the good abbé Chélan. He met with a severe welcome. "Do you think you are under any obligation to me?" said M. Chélan to him, without answering his greeting. "You will take breakfast with me. During that time I will have a horse hired for you and you will leave Verrières without seeing anyone." "Hearing is obeying," answered Julien with a demeanour smacking of the seminary, and the only questions now discussed were theology and classical Latin. He mounted his horse, rode a league, and then perceiving a wood and not seeing any one who could notice him enter, he plunged into it. At sunset, he sent away the horse. Later, he entered the cottage of a peasant, who consented to sell him a ladder and to follow him with it to the little wood which commands the _Cours de la Fidélité_ at Verrières. "I have been following a poor mutineer of a conscript ... or a smuggler," said the peasant as he took leave of him, "but what does it matter? My ladder has been well paid for, and I myself have done a thing or two in that line."