"Can it be that blood will tell," muttered the abbé in a whisper, as though speaking to himself. "The singular thing is," he added, looking at Julien, "that the marquis knows you—I don't know how. He will give you a salary of a hundred louis to commence with. He is a man who only acts by his whim. That is his weakness. He will quarrel with you about the most childish matters. If he is satisfied, your wages may rise in consequence up to eight thousand francs.
"But you realise," went on the abbé, sourly, "that he is not giving you all this money simply on account of your personal charm. The thing is to prove yourself useful. If I were in your place I would talk very little, and I would never talk about what I know nothing about.
"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."
