These measures so enlightened the marquis as to his own affairs that he could indulge the pleasure of undertaking two or three speculations without the help of his nominee who always robbed him.
“Take three thousand francs for yourself,” he said one day to his young steward.
“Monsieur, I should lay myself open to calumny.”
“What do you want then?” retorted the marquis irritably.
“Perhaps you will be kind enough to make out a statement of account and enter it in your own hand in the book. That order will give me a sum of 3,000 francs. Besides it’s M. the abbé Pirard who had the idea of all this exactness in accounts.” The marquis wrote out his instructions in the register with the bored air of the Marquis de Moncade listening to the accounts of his steward M. Poisson.
Business was never talked when Julien appeared in the evening in his blue suit. The kindness of the marquis was so flattering to the self-respect of our hero, which was always morbidly sensitive, that in spite of himself, he soon came to feel a kind of attachment for this nice old man. It is not that Julien was a man of sensibility as the phrase is understood at Paris, but he was not a monster, and no one since the death of the old major had talked to him with so much kindness. He observed that the marquis showed a politeness and consideration for his own personal feelings which he had never found in the old surgeon. He now realised that the surgeon was much prouder of his cross than was the marquis of his blue ribbon. The marquis’s father had been a great lord.
One day, at the end of a morning audience for the transaction of business, when the black suit was worn, Julien happened to amuse the marquis who kept him for a couple of hours, and insisted on giving him some banknotes which his nominee had just brought from the house.
“I hope M. le Marquis, that I am not deviating from the profound respect which I owe you, if I beg you to allow me to say a word.”
“Speak, my friend.”
“M. le Marquis will deign to allow me to refuse this gift. It is not meant for the man in the black suit, and it would completely spoil those manners which you have kindly put up with in the man in the blue suit.” He saluted with much respect and went out without looking at his employer.