"Oh, yes," said the abbé, "I have made some enquiries for you. I was forgetting M. de la Mole's family. He has two children--a daughter and a son of nineteen, eminently elegant--the kind of madman who never knows to-day what he will do to-morrow. He has spirit and valour; he has been through the Spanish war. The marquis hopes, I don't know why, that you will become a friend of the young count Norbert. I told him that you were a great classic, and possibly he reckons on your teaching his son some ready-made phrases about Cicero and Virgil. "If I were you, I should never allow that handsome young man to make fun of me, and before I accepted his advances, which you will find perfectly polite but a little ironical, I would make him repeat them more than once. "I will not hide from you the fact that the young count de La Mole is bound to despise you at first, because you are nothing more than a little bourgeois. His grandfather belonged to the court, and had the honour of having his head cut off in the Place de Grève on the 26th April, 1574, on account of a political intrigue. "As for you, you are the son of a carpenter of Verrières, and what is more, in receipt of his father's wages. Ponder well over these differences, and look up the family history in Moreri. All the flatterers who dine at their house make from time to time what they call delicate allusions to it. "Be careful of how you answer the pleasantries of M. the count de La Mole, chief of a squadron of hussars, and a future peer of France, and don't come and complain to me later on." "It seems to me," said Julien, blushing violently, "that I ought not even to answer a man who despises me." "You have no idea of his contempt. It will only manifest itself by inflated compliments. If you were a fool, you might be taken in by it. If you want to make your fortune, you ought to let yourself be taken in by it." "Shall I be looked upon as ungrateful," said Julien, "if I return to my little cell Number 108 when I find that all this no longer suits me?" "All the toadies of the house will no doubt calumniate you," said the abbé, "but I myself will come to the rescue. Adsum qui feci. I will say that I am responsible for that resolution." Julien was overwhelmed by the bitter and almost vindictive tone which he noticed in M. Pirard; that tone completely infected his last answer. The fact is that the abbé had a conscientious scruple about loving Julien, and it was with a kind of religious fear that he took so direct a part in another's life.