"Take, for instance, a quiet and average man like myself; I reckoned on dying in my seminary. I was childish enough to get attached to it. Well I was on the point of being turned out, when I handed in my resignation. You know what my fortune consisted of. I had five hundred and twenty francs capital neither more nor less, not a friend, scarcely two or three acquaintances. M. de la Mole, whom I had never seen, extricated me from that quandary. He only had to say the word and I was given a living where the parishioners are well-to-do people above all crude vices, and where the income puts me to shame, it is so disproportionate to my work. I refrained from talking to you all this time simply to enable you to find your level a bit. "One word more, I have the misfortune to be irritable. It is possible that you and I will cease to be on speaking terms. "If the airs of the marquise or the spiteful pleasantries of her son make the house absolutely intolerable for you I advise you to finish your studies in some seminary thirty leagues from Paris and rather north than south. There is more civilisation in the north, and, he added lowering his voice, I must admit that the nearness of the Paris papers puts fear into our petty tyrants. "If we continue to find pleasure in each other's society and if the marquis's house does not suit you, I will offer you the post of my curate, and will go equal shares with you in what I get from the living. I owe you that and even more, he added interrupting Julien's thanks, for the extraordinary offer which you made me at Besançon. If instead of having five hundred and twenty francs I had had nothing you would have saved me." The abbé's voice had lost its tone of cruelty, Julien was ashamed to feel tears in his eyes. He was desperately anxious to throw himself into his friend's arms. He could not help saying to him in the most manly manner he could assume: "I was hated by my father from the cradle; it was one of my great misfortunes, but I shall no longer complain of my luck, I have found another father in you, monsieur." "That is good, that is good," said the embarrassed abbé, then suddenly remembering quite appropriately a seminary platitude "you must never say luck, my child, always say providence." The fiacre stopped. The coachman lifted up the bronze knocker of an immense door. It was the Hôtel de la Mole, and to prevent the passers by having any doubt on the subject these words could be read in black marble over the door. This affectation displeased Julien. "They are so frightened of the Jacobins. They see a Robespierre and his tumbril behind every head. Their panic is often gloriously grotesque and they advertise their house like this so that in the event of a rising the rabble can recognise it and loot it." He communicated his thought to the abbé Pirard. "Yes, poor child, you will soon be my curate. What a dreadful idea you have got into your head." "Nothing could be simpler," said Julien.