"That is right," thought Julien. "She is frightened that I shall leave without paying." Amanda was as agitated as he was, and very red. She gave him the change as slowly as she could, while she repeated to him, in a low voice,
"Leave the café this instant, or I shall love you no more, and yet I do love you very much."
Julien did go out, but slowly. "Am I not in duty bound, he repeated to himself, to go and stare at that coarse person in my turn?" This uncertainty kept him on the boulevard in the front of the café for an hour; he kept looking if his man was coming out. He did not come out, and Julien went away.
He had only been at Besançon some hours, and already he had overcome one pang of remorse. The old surgeon-major had formerly given him some fencing lessons, in spite of his gout. That was all the science which Julien could enlist in the service of his anger. But this embarrassment would have been nothing if he had only known how to vent his temper otherwise than by the giving of a blow, for if it had come to a matter of fisticuffs, his enormous rival would have beaten him and then cleared out.
"There is not much difference between a seminary and a prison," said Julien to himself, "for a poor devil like me, without protectors and without money. I must leave my civilian clothes in some inn, where I can put my black suit on again. If I ever manage to get out of the seminary for a few hours, I shall be able to see Mdlle. Amanda again in my lay clothes. This reasoning was all very fine. Though Julien passed in front of all the inns, he did not dare to enter a single one.
Finally, as he was passing again before the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, his anxious eyes encountered those of a big woman, still fairly young, with a high colour, and a gay and happy air. He approached her and told his story.
"Certainly, my pretty little abbé," said the hostess of the Ambassadeurs to him, "I will keep your lay clothes for you, and I will even have them regularly brushed. In weather like this, it is not good to leave a suit of cloth without touching it." She took a key, and conducted him herself to a room, and advised him to make out a note of what he was leaving.
"Good heavens. How well you look like that, M. the abbé
