And he remembered certain disdainful looks which madame de La Mole, and especially her lady friends, had favoured him with.
The pleasure of scoring over the marquis de Croisenois completed the rout of this echo of virtue.
"How I should like to make him angry," said Julien. "With what confidence would I give him a sword thrust now!" And he went through the segoon thrust. "Up till now I have been a mere usher, who exploited basely the little courage he had. After this letter I am his equal.
"Yes," he slowly said to himself, with an infinite pleasure, "the merits of the marquis and myself have been weighed in the balance, and it is the poor carpenter from the Jura who turns the scale.
"Good!" he exclaimed, "this is how I shall sign my answer. Don't imagine, mademoiselle de La Mole, that I am forgetting my place. I will make you realise and fully appreciate that it is for a carpenter's son that you are betraying a descendant of the famous Guy de Croisenois who followed St. Louis to the Crusade."
Julien was unable to control his joy. He was obliged to go down into the garden. He had locked himself in his room, but he found it too narrow to breathe in.
"To think of it being me, the poor peasant from the Jura," he kept on repeating to himself, "to think of it being me who am eternally condemned to wear this gloomy black suit! Alas twenty years ago I would have worn a uniform like they do! In those days a man like me either got killed or became a general at thirty-six. The letter which he held clenched in his hand gave him a heroic pose and stature. Nowadays, it is true, if one sticks to this black suit, one gets at forty an income of a hundred thousand francs and the blue ribbon like my lord bishop of Beauvais.
"Well," he said to himself with a Mephistophelian smile, "I have more brains than they. I am shrewd enough to choose the uniform of my century. And he felt a quickening of his ambition and of his attachment to his ecclesiastical dress. What cardinals of even lower birth than mine have not succeeded in governing! My compatriot Granvelle, for instance."
Julien's agitation became gradually calmed! Prudence
