“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.
The gravity of the porter, and above all, the cleanness of the court, struck him with admiration. It was fine sunshine. “What magnificent architecture,” he said to his friend. The hotel in question was one of those buildings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with a flat façade built about the time of Voltaire’s death. At no other period had fashion and beauty been so far from one another.
[CHAPTER XXXII]
ENTRY INTO SOCIETY
Ludicrous and pathetic memory: the first drawing-room where one appeared alone and without support at the age of eighteen! the look of a woman sufficed to intimidate me. The more I wished to please the more clumsy I became. I evolved the most unfounded ideas about everything. I would either abandon myself without any reason, or I would regard a man as an enemy simply because he had looked at me with a serious air; but all the same, in the middle of the unhappiness of my timidity, how beautiful did I find a beautiful day—Kant.
Julien stopped in amazement in the middle of the courtyard. “Pull yourself together,” said the abbé Pirard. “You get horrible ideas into your head, besides you are only a child. What has happened to the nil mirari of Horace (no enthusiasm) remember that when they see you established here this crowd of lackeys will make fun of you. They will see in you an equal who has been unjustly placed above them; and, under a masquerade of good advice and a desire to help you, they will try to make you fall into some gross blunder.”