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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modeste Mignon, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Modeste Mignon
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: May 15, 2005 [EBook #1482]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODESTE MIGNON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+                           MODESTE MIGNON
+
+                                 By
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+                           Translated by
+                    Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+                             DEDICATION
+
+                         To a Polish Lady.
+
+  Daughter of an enslaved land, angel through love, witch through
+  fancy, child by faith, aged by experience, man in brain, woman in
+  heart, giant by hope, mother through sorrows, poet in thy dreams,
+  --to _thee_ belongs this book, in which thy love, thy fancy, thy
+  experience, thy sorrow, thy hope, thy dreams, are the warp through
+  which is shot a woof less brilliant than the poesy of thy soul,
+  whose expression, when it shines upon thy countenance, is, to
+  those who love thee, what the characters of a lost language are to
+  scholars.
+
+                                                        De Balzac.
+
+
+
+
+                           MODESTE MIGNON
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER I
+
+                             THE CHALET
+
+At the beginning of October, 1829, Monsieur Simon Babylas Latournelle,
+notary, was walking up from Havre to Ingouville, arm in arm with his
+son and accompanied by his wife, at whose side the head clerk of the
+lawyer's office, a little hunchback named Jean Butscha, trotted along
+like a page. When these four personages (two of whom came the same way
+every evening) reached the elbow of the road where it turns back upon
+itself like those called in Italy "cornice," the notary looked about
+to see if any one could overhear him either from the terrace above or
+the path beneath, and when he spoke he lowered his voice as a further
+precaution.
+
+"Exupere," he said to his son, "you must try to carry out
+intelligently a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you
+are not to ask the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I
+command you to toss it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man
+who expects to have a hand in the government of his country is bound
+to keep within him for the secrets of others. After you have paid your
+respects and compliments to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon, to
+Monsieur and Madame Dumay, and to Monsieur Gobenheim if he is at the
+Chalet, and as soon as quiet is restored, Monsieur Dumay will take you
+aside; you are then to look attentively at Mademoiselle Modeste (yes,
+I am willing to allow it) during the whole time he is speaking to you.
+My worthy friend will ask you to go out and take a walk; at the end of
+an hour, that is, about nine o'clock, you are to come back in a great
+hurry; try to puff as if you were out of breath, and whisper in
+Monsieur Dumay's ear, quite low, but so that Mademoiselle Modeste is
+sure to overhear you, these words: 'The young man has come.'"
+
+Exupere was to start the next morning for Paris to begin the study of
+law. This impending departure had induced Latournelle to propose him
+to his friend Dumay as an accomplice in the important conspiracy which
+these directions indicate.
+
+"Is Mademoiselle Modeste suspected of having a lover?" asked Butscha
+in a timid voice of Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Hush, Butscha," she replied, taking her husband's arm.
+
+Madame Latournelle, the daughter of a clerk of the supreme court,
+feels that her birth authorizes her to claim issue from a
+parliamentary family. This conviction explains why the lady, who is
+somewhat blotched as to complexion, endeavors to assume in her own
+person the majesty of a court whose decrees are recorded in her
+father's pothooks. She takes snuff, holds herself as stiff as a
+ramrod, poses for a person of consideration, and resembles nothing so
+much as a mummy brought momentarily to life by galvanism. She tries to
+give high-bred tones to her sharp voice, and succeeds no better in
+doing that than in hiding her general lack of breeding. Her social
+usefulness seems, however, incontestable when we glance at the
+flower-bedecked cap she wears, at the false front frizzling around
+her forehead, at the gowns of her choice; for how could shopkeepers
+dispose of those products if there were no Madame Latournelle? All
+these absurdities of the worthy woman, who is truly pious and
+charitable, might have passed unnoticed, if nature, amusing herself as
+she often does by turning out these ludicrous creations, had not
+endowed her with the height of a drum-major, and thus held up to view
+the comicalities of her provincial nature. She has never been out of
+Havre; she believes in the infallibility of Havre; she proclaims
+herself Norman to the very tips of her fingers; she venerates her
+father, and adores her husband.
+
+Little Latournelle was bold enough to marry this lady after she had
+attained the anti-matrimonial age of thirty-three, and what is more,
+he had a son by her. As he could have got the sixty thousand francs of
+her "dot" in several other ways, the public assigned his uncommon
+intrepidity to a desire to escape an invasion of the Minotaur, against
+whom his personal qualifications would have insufficiently protected
+him had he rashly dared his fate by bringing home a young and pretty
+wife. The fact was, however, that the notary recognized the really
+fine qualities of Mademoiselle Agnes (she was called Agnes) and
+reflected to himself that a woman's beauty is soon past and gone to a
+husband. As to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court
+bestowed in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle
+is still so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of
+thirty-five years and seven months, that she would still provide him,
+if it were necessary, with her breast and her milk,--an hyperbole which
+alone can fully express her impassioned maternity. "How handsome he
+is, that son of mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they
+walk to church, with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is
+like you," Modeste Mignon answers, very much as she might have said,
+"What horrid weather!" This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite
+important as an accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been
+the chaperone of the young girl against whom the notary and his friend
+Dumay are now plotting to set up what we have called, in the
+"Physiologie du Mariage," a "mouse-trap."
+
+As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the
+purest honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any
+stranger would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to
+which, however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His
+eyesight, said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green
+goggles for the protection of his eyes, which were constantly
+inflamed. The arch of each eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair,
+surrounded the tortoise-shell rim of the glasses and made a couple of
+circles as it were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the
+human face the effect produced by these circumferences placed one
+within the other, and separated by a hollow space or line, you can
+hardly imagine how perplexing such a face will be to you, especially
+if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that
+of Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give to cats. This double
+resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas Latournelle. Above
+the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown, all the more crafty
+in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the
+white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across
+the forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent Norman,
+clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple
+of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men,
+would have sought, without finding it, for the reason of such physical
+misrepresentation.
+
+Jean Butscha, a natural son abandoned by his parents and taken care of
+by the clerk of the court and his daughter, and now, through sheer
+hard work, head-clerk to the notary, fed and lodged by his master, who
+gave him a salary of nine hundred francs, almost a dwarf, and with no
+semblance of youth,--Jean Butscha made Modeste his idol, and would
+willingly have given his life for hers. The poor fellow, whose eyes
+were hollowed beneath their heavy lids like the touch-holes of a
+cannon, whose head overweighted his body, with its shock of crisp
+hair, and whose face was pock-marked, had lived under pitying eyes
+from the time he was seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain
+his whole being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct,
+he went his way over that vast tract of country named on the map of
+the heart Love-without-Hope, the sublime and arid steppes of Desire.
+Modeste had christened this grotesque little being her "Black Dwarf."
+The nickname sent him to the pages of Walter Scott's novel, and he one
+day said to Modeste: "Will you accept a rose against the evil day from
+your mysterious dwarf?" Modeste instantly sent the soul of her adorer
+to its humble mud-cabin with a terrible glance, such as young girls
+bestow on the men who cannot please them. Butscha's conception of
+himself was lowly, and, like the wife of his master, he had never been
+out of Havre.
+
+Perhaps it will be well, for the sake of those who have never seen
+that city, to say a few words as to the present destination of the
+Latournelle family,--the head clerk being included in the latter term.
+Ingouville is to Havre what Montmartre is to Paris,--a high hill at
+the foot of which the city lies; with this difference, that the hill
+and the city are surrounded by the sea and the Seine, that Havre is
+helplessly circumscribed by enclosing fortifications, and, in short,
+that the mouth of the river, the harbor, and the docks present a very
+different aspect from the fifty thousand houses of Paris. At the foot
+of Montmartre an ocean of slate roofs lies in motionless blue billows;
+at Ingouville the sea is like the same roofs stirred by the wind. This
+eminence, or line of hills, which coasts the Seine from Rouen to the
+seashore, leaving a margin of valley land more or less narrow between
+itself and the river, and containing in its cities, its ravines, its
+vales, its meadows, veritable treasures of the picturesque, became of
+enormous value in and about Ingouville, after the year 1816, the
+period at which the prosperity of Havre began. This township has
+become since that time the Auteuil, the Ville-d'Avray, the
+Montmorency, in short, the suburban residence of the merchants of
+Havre. Here they build their houses on terraces around its ampitheatre
+of hills, and breathe the sea air laden with the fragrance of their
+splendid gardens. Here these bold speculators cast off the burden of
+their counting-rooms and the atmosphere of their city houses, which
+are built closely together without open spaces, often without
+court-yards,--a vice of construction with the increasing population of
+Havre, the inflexible line of the fortifications, and the enlargement
+of the docks has forced upon them. The result is, weariness of heart
+in Havre, cheerfulness and joy at Ingouville. The law of social
+development has forced up the suburb of Graville like a mushroom. It
+is to-day more extensive than Havre itself, which lies at the foot of
+its slopes like a serpent.
+
+At the crest of the hill Ingouville has but one street, and (as in all
+such situations) the houses which overlook the river have an immense
+advantage over those on the other side of the road, whose view they
+obstruct, and which present the effect of standing on tip-toe to look
+over the opposing roofs. However, there exist here, as elsewhere,
+certain servitudes. Some houses standing at the summit have a finer
+position or possess legal rights of view which compel their opposite
+neighbors to keep their buildings down to a required height. Moreover,
+the openings cut in the capricious rock by roads which follow its
+declensions and make the ampitheatre habitable, give vistas through
+which some estates can see the city, or the river, or the sea. Instead
+of rising to an actual peak, the hill ends abruptly in a cliff. At the
+end of the street which follows the line of the summit, ravines appear
+in which a few villages are clustered (Sainte-Adresse and two or three
+other Saint-somethings) together with several creeks which murmur and
+flow with the tides of the sea. These half-deserted slopes of
+Ingouville form a striking contrast to the terraces of fine villas
+which overlook the valley of the Seine. Is the wind on this side too
+strong for vegetation? Do the merchants shrink from the cost of
+terracing it? However this may be, the traveller approaching Havre on
+a steamer is surprised to find a barren coast and tangled gorges to
+the west of Ingouville, like a beggar in rags beside a perfumed and
+sumptuously apparelled rich man.
+
+In 1829 one of the last houses looking toward the sea, and which in
+all probability stands about the centre of the Ingouville to-day, was
+called, and perhaps is still called, "the Chalet." Originally it was a
+porter's lodge with a trim little garden in front of it. The owner of
+the villa to which it belonged,--a mansion with park, gardens,
+aviaries, hot-houses, and lawns--took a fancy to put the little
+dwelling more in keeping with the splendor of his own abode, and he
+reconstructed it on the model of an ornamental cottage. He divided
+this cottage from his own lawn, which was bordered and set with
+flower-beds and formed the terrace of his villa, by a low wall along
+which he planted a concealing hedge. Behind the cottage (called, in
+spite of all his efforts to prevent it, the Chalet) were the orchards
+and kitchen gardens of the villa. The Chalet, without cows or dairy,
+is separated from the roadway by a wooden fence whose palings are
+hidden under a luxuriant hedge. On the other side of the road the
+opposite house, subject to a legal privilege, has a similar hedge and
+paling, so as to leave an unobstructed view of Havre to the Chalet.
+
+This little dwelling was the torment of the present proprietor of the
+villa, Monsieur Vilquin; and here is the why and the wherefore. The
+original creator of the villa, whose sumptuous details cry aloud,
+"Behold our millions!" extended his park far into the country for the
+purpose, as he averred, of getting his gardeners out of his pockets;
+and so, when the Chalet was finished, none but a friend could be
+allowed to inhabit it. Monsieur Mignon, the next owner of the
+property, was very much attached to his cashier, Dumay, and the
+following history will prove that the attachment was mutual; to him
+therefore he offered the little dwelling. Dumay, a stickler for legal
+methods, insisted on signing a lease for three hundred francs for
+twelve years, and Monsieur Mignon willingly agreed, remarking,--
+
+"My dear Dumay, remember, you have now bound yourself to live with me
+for twelve years."
+
+In consequence of certain events which will presently be related, the
+estates of Monsieur Mignon, formerly the richest merchant in Havre,
+were sold to Vilquin, one of his business competitors. In his joy at
+getting possession of the celebrated villa Mignon, the latter forgot
+to demand the cancelling of the lease. Dumay, anxious not to hinder
+the sale, would have signed anything Vilquin required, but the sale
+once made, he held to his lease like a vengeance. And there he
+remained, in Vilquin's pocket as it were; at the heart of Vilquin's
+family life, observing Vilquin, irritating Vilquin,--in short, the
+gadfly of all the Vilquins. Every morning, when he looked out of his
+window, Vilquin felt a violent shock of annoyance as his eye lighted
+on the little gem of a building, the Chalet, which had cost sixty
+thousand francs and sparkled like a ruby in the sun. That comparison
+is very nearly exact. The architect has constructed the cottage of
+brilliant red brick pointed with white. The window-frames are painted
+of a lively green, the woodwork is brown verging on yellow. The roof
+overhangs by several feet. A pretty gallery, with open-worked
+balustrade, surmounts the lower floor and projects at the centre of
+the facade into a veranda with glass sides. The ground-floor has a
+charming salon and a dining-room, separated from each other by the
+landing of a staircase built of wood, designed and decorated with
+elegant simplicity. The kitchen is behind the dining-room, and the
+corresponding room back of the salon, formerly a study, is now the
+bedroom of Monsieur and Madame Dumay. On the upper floor the architect
+has managed to get two large bedrooms, each with a dressing-room, to
+which the veranda serves as a salon; and above this floor, under the
+eaves, which are tipped together like a couple of cards, are two
+servants' rooms with mansard roofs, each lighted by a circular window
+and tolerably spacious.
+
+Vilquin has been petty enough to build a high wall on the side toward
+the orchard and kitchen garden; and in consequence of this piece of
+spite, the few square feet which the lease secured to the Chalet
+resembled a Parisian garden. The out-buildings, painted in keeping
+with the cottage, stood with their backs to the wall of the adjoining
+property.
+
+The interior of this charming dwelling harmonized with its exterior.
+The salon, floored entirely with iron-wood, was painted in a style
+that suggested the beauties of Chinese lacquer. On black panels edged
+with gold, birds of every color, foliage of impossible greens, and
+fantastic oriental designs glowed and shimmered. The dining-room was
+entirely sheathed in Northern woods carved and cut in open-work like
+the beautiful Russian chalets. The little antechamber formed by the
+landing and the well of the staircase was painted in old oak to
+represent Gothic ornament. The bedrooms, hung with chintz, were
+charming in their costly simplicity. The study, where the cashier and
+his wife now slept, was panelled from top to bottom, on the walls and
+ceiling, like the cabin of a steamboat. These luxuries of his
+predecessor excited Vilquin's wrath. He would fain have lodged his
+daughter and her husband in the cottage. This desire, well known to
+Dumay, will presently serve to illustrate the Breton obstinacy of the
+latter.
+
+The entrance to the Chalet is by a little trellised iron door, the
+uprights of which, ending in lance-heads, show for a few inches above
+the fence and its hedge. The little garden, about as wide as the more
+pretentious lawn, was just now filled with flowers, roses, and dahlias
+of the choicest kind, and many rare products of the hot-houses, for
+(another Vilquinard grievance) the elegant little hot-house, a very
+whim of a hot-house, a hot-house representing dignity and style,
+belonged to the Chalet, and separated, or if you prefer, united it to
+the villa Vilquin. Dumay consoled himself for the toils of business in
+taking care of this hot-house, whose exotic treasures were one of
+Modeste's joys. The billiard-room of the villa Vilquin, a species of
+gallery, formerly communicated through an immense aviary with this
+hot-house. But after the building of the wall which deprived him of a
+view into the orchards, Dumay bricked up the door of communication.
+"Wall for wall!" he said.
+
+In 1827 Vilquin offered Dumay a salary of six thousand francs, and ten
+thousand more as indemnity, if he would give up the lease. The cashier
+refused; though he had but three thousand francs from Gobenheim, a
+former clerk of his master. Dumay was a Breton transplanted by fate
+into Normandy. Imagine therefore the hatred conceived for the tenants
+of the Chalet by the Norman Vilquin, a man worth three millions! What
+criminal leze-million on the part of a cashier, to hold up to the eyes
+of such a man the impotence of his wealth! Vilquin, whose desperation
+in the matter made him the talk of Havre, had just proposed to give
+Dumay a pretty house of his own, and had again been refused. Havre
+itself began to grow uneasy at the man's obstinacy, and a good many
+persons explained it by the phrase, "Dumay is a Breton." As for the
+cashier, he thought Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon would be ill-lodged
+elsewhere. His two idols now inhabited a temple worthy of them; the
+sumptuous little cottage gave them a home, where these dethroned
+royalties could keep the semblance of majesty about them,--a species
+of dignity usually denied to those who have seen better days.
+
+Perhaps as the story goes on, the reader will not regret having
+learned in advance a few particulars as to the home and the habitual
+companions of Modeste Mignon, for, at her age, people and things have
+as much influence upon the future life as a person's own character,
+--indeed, character often receives ineffaceable impressions from its
+surroundings.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER II
+
+                        A PORTRAIT FROM LIFE
+
+From the manner with which the Latournelles entered the Chalet a
+stranger would readily have guessed that they came there every
+evening.
+
+"Ah, you are here already," said the notary, perceiving the young
+banker Gobenheim, a connection of Gobenheim-Keller, the head of the
+great banking house in Paris.
+
+This young man with a livid face--a blonde of the type with black
+eyes, whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober
+in speech as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but
+nevertheless vigorously framed--visited the family of his former
+master and the house of his cashier less from affection than from
+self-interest. Here they played whist at two sous a point; a
+dress-coat was not required; he accepted no refreshment except "eau
+sucree," and consequently had no civilities to return. This apparent
+devotion to the Mignon family allowed it to be supposed that Gobenheim
+had a heart; it also released him from the necessity of going into the
+society of Havre and incurring useless expenses, thus upsetting the
+orderly economy of his domestic life. This disciple of the golden calf
+went to bed at half-past ten o'clock and got up at five in the
+morning. Moreover, being perfectly sure of Latournelle's and Butscha's
+discretion, he could talk over difficult business matters, obtain the
+advice of the notary gratis, and get an inkling of the real truth of
+the gossip of the street. This stolid gold-glutton (the epithet is
+Butscha's) belonged by nature to the class of substances which
+chemistry terms absorbents. Ever since the catastrophe of the house of
+Mignon, where the Kellers had placed him to learn the principles of
+maritime commerce, no one at the Chalet had ever asked him to do the
+smallest thing, no matter what; his reply was too well known. The
+young fellow looked at Modeste precisely as he would have looked at a
+cheap lithograph.
+
+"He's one of the pistons of the big engine called 'Commerce,'" said
+poor Butscha, whose clever mind made itself felt occasionally by such
+little sayings timidly jerked out.
+
+The four Latournelles bowed with the most respectful deference to an
+old lady dressed in black velvet, who did not rise from the armchair
+in which she was seated, for the reason that both eyes were covered
+with the yellow film produced by cataract. Madame Mignon may be
+sketched in one sentence. Her august countenance of the mother of a
+family attracted instant notice as that of one whose irreproachable
+life defies the assaults of destiny, which nevertheless makes her the
+target of its arrows and a member of the unnumbered tribe of Niobes.
+Her blonde wig, carefully curled and well arranged upon her head,
+became the cold white face which resembled that of some burgomaster's
+wife painted by Hals or Mirevelt. The extreme neatness of her dress,
+the velvet boots, the lace collar, the shawl evenly folded and put on,
+all bore testimony to the solicitous care which Modeste bestowed upon
+her mother.
+
+When silence was, as the notary had predicted, restored in the pretty
+salon, Modeste, sitting beside her mother, for whom she was
+embroidering a kerchief, became for an instant the centre of
+observation. This curiosity, barely veiled by the commonplace
+salutations and inquiries of the visitors, would have revealed even to
+an indifferent person the existence of the domestic plot to which
+Modeste was expected to fall a victim; but Gobenheim, more than
+indifferent, noticed nothing, and proceeded to light the candles on
+the card-table. The behavior of Dumay made the whole scene terrifying
+to Butscha, to the Latournelles, and above all to Madame Dumay, who
+knew her husband to be capable of firing a pistol at Modeste's lover
+as coolly as though he were a mad dog.
+
+After dinner that day the cashier had gone to walk followed by two
+magnificent Pyrenees hounds, whom he suspected of betraying him, and
+therefore left in charge of a farmer, a former tenant of Monsieur
+Mignon. On his return, just before the arrival of the Latournelles, he
+had taken his pistols from his bed's head and placed them on the
+chimney-piece, concealing this action from Modeste. The young girl
+took no notice whatever of these preparations, singular as they were.
+
+Though short, thick-set, pockmarked, and speaking always in a low
+voice as if listening to himself, this Breton, a former lieutenant in
+the Guard, showed the evidence of such resolution, such sang-froid on
+his face that throughout life, even in the army, no one had ever
+ventured to trifle with him. His little eyes, of a calm blue, were
+like bits of steel. His ways, the look on his face, his speech, his
+carriage, were all in keeping with the short name of Dumay. His
+physical strength, well-known to every one, put him above all danger
+of attack. He was able to kill a man with a blow of his fist, and had
+performed that feat at Bautzen, where he found himself, unarmed, face
+to face with a Saxon at the rear of his company. At the present moment
+the usually firm yet gentle expression of the man's face had risen to
+a sort of tragic sublimity; his lips were pale as the rest of his
+face, indicating a tumult within him mastered by his Breton will; a
+slight sweat, which every one noticed and guessed to be cold,
+moistened his brow. The notary knew but too well that these signs
+might result in a drama before the criminal courts. In fact the
+cashier was playing a part in connection with Modeste Mignon, which
+involved to his mind sentiments of honor and loyalty of far greater
+importance than mere social laws; and his present conduct proceeded
+from one of those compacts which, in case disaster came of it, could
+be judged only in a higher court than one of earth. The majority of
+dramas lie really in the ideas which we make to ourselves about
+things. Events which seem to us dramatic are nothing more than
+subjects which our souls convert into tragedy or comedy according to
+the bent of our characters.
+
+Madame Latournelle and Madame Dumay, who were appointed to watch
+Modeste, had a certain assumed stiffness of demeanor and a quiver in
+their voices, which the suspected party did not notice, so absorbed
+was she in her embroidery. Modeste laid each thread of cotton with a
+precision that would have made an ordinary workwoman desperate. Her
+face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the
+flower she was working. The dwarf, seated between his mistress and
+Gobenheim, restrained his emotion, trying to find means to approach
+Modeste and whisper a word of warning in her ear.
+
+By taking a position in front of Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle,
+with the diabolical intelligence of conscientious duty, had isolated
+Modeste. Madame Mignon, whose blindness always made her silent, was
+even paler than usual, showing plainly that she was aware of the test
+to which her daughter was about to be subjected. Perhaps at the last
+moment she revolted from the stratagem, necessary as it might seem to
+her. Hence her silence; she was weeping inwardly. Exupere, the spring
+of the trap, was wholly ignorant of the piece in which he was to play
+a part. Gobenheim, by reason of his character, remained in a state of
+indifference equal to that displayed by Modeste. To a spectator who
+understood the situation, this contrast between the ignorance of some
+and the palpitating interest of others would have seemed quite poetic.
+Nowadays romance-writers arrange such effects; and it is quite within
+their province to do so, for nature in all ages takes the liberty to
+be stronger than they. In this instance, as you will see, nature,
+social nature, which is a second nature within nature, amused herself
+by making truth more interesting than fiction; just as mountain
+torrents describe curves which are beyond the skill of painters to
+convey, and accomplish giant deeds in displacing or smoothing stones
+which are the wonder of architects and sculptors.
+
+It was eight o'clock. At that season twilight was still shedding its
+last gleams; there was not a cloud in the sky; the balmy air caressed
+the earth, the flowers gave forth their fragrance, the steps of
+pedestrians turning homeward sounded along the gravelly road, the sea
+shone like a mirror, and there was so little wind that the wax candles
+upon the card-tables sent up a steady flame, although the windows were
+wide open. This salon, this evening, this dwelling--what a frame for
+the portrait of the young girl whom these persons were now studying
+with the profound attention of a painter in presence of the Margharita
+Doni, one of the glories of the Pitti palace. Modeste,--blossom
+enclosed, like that of Catullus,--was she worth all these precautions?
+
+You have seen the cage; behold the bird! Just twenty years of age,
+slender and delicate as the sirens which English designers invent for
+their "Books of Beauty," Modeste was, like her mother before her, the
+captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France,
+where we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German
+women is the poetry of the heart coming to the surface of the being
+and spending itself--in affectations if the owner is silly, in divine
+charms of manner if she is "spirituelle" and intelligent. Remarkable
+for her pale golden hair, Modeste belonged to the type of woman
+called, perhaps in memory of Eve, the celestial blonde; whose satiny
+skin is like a silk paper applied to the flesh, shuddering at the
+winter of a cold look, expanding in the sunshine of a loving glance,
+--teaching the hand to be jealous of the eye. Beneath her hair, which
+was soft and feathery and worn in many curls, the brow, which might
+have been traced by a compass so pure was its modelling, shone forth
+discreet, calm to placidity, and yet luminous with thought: when and
+where could another be found so transparently clear or more
+exquisitely smooth? It seemed, like a pearl, to have its orient. The
+eyes, of a blue verging on gray and limpid as the eyes of a child, had
+all the mischief, all the innocence of childhood, and they harmonized
+well with the arch of the eyebrows, faintly indicated by lines like
+those made with a brush on Chinese faces. This candor of the soul was
+still further evidenced around the eyes, in their corners, and about
+the temples, by pearly tints threaded with blue, the special privilege
+of these delicate complexions. The face, whose oval Raphael so often
+gave to his Madonnas, was remarkable for the sober and virginal tone
+of the cheeks, soft as a Bengal rose, upon which the long lashes of
+the diaphanous eyelids cast shadows that were mingled with light. The
+throat, bending as she worked, too delicate perhaps, and of milky
+whiteness, recalled those vanishing lines that Leonardo loved. A few
+little blemishes here and there, like the patches of the eighteenth
+century, proved that Modeste was indeed a child of earth, and not a
+creation dreamed of in Italy by the angelic school. Her lips, delicate
+yet full, were slightly mocking and somewhat sensuous; the waist,
+which was supple and yet not fragile, had no terrors for maternity,
+like those of girls who seek beauty by the fatal pressure of a corset.
+Steel and dimity and lacings defined but did not create the serpentine
+lines of the elegant figure, graceful as that of a young poplar
+swaying in the wind.
+
+A pearl-gray dress with crimson trimmings, made with a long waist,
+modestly outlined the bust and covered the shoulders, still rather
+thin, with a chemisette which left nothing to view but the first
+curves of the throat where it joined the shoulders. From the aspect of
+the young girl's face, at once ethereal and intelligent, where the
+delicacy of a Greek nose with its rosy nostrils and firm modelling
+marked something positive and defined; where the poetry enthroned upon
+an almost mystic brow seemed belied at times by the pleasure-loving
+expression of the mouth; where candor claimed the depths profound and
+varied of the eye, and disputed them with a spirit of irony that was
+trained and educated,--from all these signs an observer would have
+felt that this young girl, with the keen, alert ear that waked at
+every sound, with a nostril open to catch the fragrance of the
+celestial flower of the Ideal, was destined to be the battle-ground of
+a struggle between the poesies of the dawn and the labors of the day;
+between fancy and reality, the spirit and the life. Modeste was a pure
+young girl, inquisitive after knowledge, understanding her destiny,
+and filled with chastity,--the Virgin of Spain rather than the Madonna
+of Raphael.
+
+She raised her head when she heard Dumay say to Exupere, "Come here,
+young man." Seeing them together in the corner of the salon she
+supposed they were talking of some commission in Paris. Then she
+looked at the friends who surrounded her, as if surprised by their
+silence, and exclaimed in her natural manner, "Why are you not
+playing?"--with a glance at the green table which the imposing Madame
+Latournelle called the "altar."
+
+"Yes, let us play," said Dumay, having sent off Exupere.
+
+"Sit there, Butscha," said Madame Latournelle, separating the
+head-clerk from the group around Madame Mignon and her daughter by
+the whole width of the table.
+
+"And you, come over here," said Dumay to his wife, making her sit
+close by him.
+
+Madame Dumay, a little American about thirty-six years of age, wiped
+her eyes furtively; she adored Modeste, and feared a catastrophe.
+
+"You are not very lively this evening," remarked Modeste.
+
+"We are playing," said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.
+
+No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made
+still more so by explaining Dumay's position towards Modeste. If the
+brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must
+pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these
+preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating
+the main circumstances which govern all dramas.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER III
+
+                           PRELIMINARIES
+
+Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
+the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
+tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that
+the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
+pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth
+Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this
+catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to
+Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies
+were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the
+department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search
+of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own
+Provence. Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which
+gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal
+Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to
+save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of
+the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La
+Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other
+people's heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist
+disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the
+list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and
+bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was
+soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and
+all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a refuge for
+the family in the Upper Alps.
+
+Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley
+of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
+louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
+when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his
+fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches
+perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of
+Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity
+--taking it, like many another youth, for a vocation--on the red cloth
+of war. On his way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton.
+The pair became intimate, partly from the contrasts in their
+characters; they drank from the same cup at the wayside torrents,
+broke the same biscuit, and were both made sergeants at the peace
+which followed the battle of Marengo.
+
+When the war recommenced, Charles Mignon was promoted into the cavalry
+and lost sight of his comrade. In 1812 the last of the Mignon de La
+Bastie was an officer of the Legion of honor and major of a regiment
+of cavalry. Taken prisoner by the Russians he was sent, like so many
+others, to Siberia. He made the journey in company with another
+prisoner, a poor lieutenant, in whom he recognized his old friend Jean
+Dumay, brave, neglected, undecorated, unhappy, like a million of other
+woollen epaulets, rank and file--that canvas of men on which Napoleon
+painted the picture of the Empire. While in Siberia, the
+lieutenant-colonel, to kill time, taught writing and arithmetic to the
+Breton, whose early education had seemed a useless waste of time to Pere
+Scevola. Charles found in the old comrade of his marching days one of
+those rare hearts into which a man can pour his griefs while telling
+his joys.
+
+The young Provencal had met the fate which attends all handsome
+bachelors. In 1804, at Frankfort on the Main, he was adored by Bettina
+Wallenrod, only daughter of a banker, and he married her with all the
+more enthusiasm because she was rich and a noted beauty, while he was
+only a lieutenant with no prospects but the extremely problematical
+future of a soldier of fortune of that day. Old Wallenrod, a decayed
+German baron (there is always a baron in a German bank) delighted to
+know that the handsome lieutenant was the sole representative of the
+Mignon de La Bastie, approved the love of the blonde Bettina, whose
+beauty an artist (at that time there really was one in Frankfort) had
+lately painted as an ideal head of Germany. Wallenrod invested enough
+money in the French funds to give his daughter thirty thousand francs
+a year, and settled it on his anticipated grandsons, naming them
+counts of La Bastie-Wallenrod. This "dot" made only a small hole in
+his cash-box, the value of money being then very low. But the Empire,
+pursuing a policy often attempted by other debtors, rarely paid its
+dividends; and Charles was rather alarmed at this investment, having
+less faith than his father-in-law in the imperial eagle. The
+phenomenon of belief, or of admiration which is ephemeral belief, is
+not so easily maintained when in close quarters with the idol. The
+mechanic distrusts the machine which the traveller admires; and the
+officers of the army might be called the stokers of the Napoleonic
+engine,--if, indeed, they were not its fuel.
+
+However, the Baron Wallenrod-Tustall-Bartenstild promised to come if
+necessary to the help of the household. Charles loved Bettina
+Wallenrod as much as she loved him, and that is saying a good deal;
+but when a Provencal is moved to enthusiasm all his feelings and
+attachments are genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore
+that blonde beauty, escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer,
+gifted with an angelic nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The
+pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the
+time when he poured his griefs into the Breton's heart. Dumay loved
+these little ones without having seen them, solely through the
+sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the
+father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in
+1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808. The unfortunate
+lieutenant-colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings,
+was sent, at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot,
+accompanied by the lieutenant. No difference of epaulets could count
+between the two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was
+disembarking at Cannes.
+
+Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who
+had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even
+by his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of
+the Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying
+on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite
+as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had
+purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men
+during his magnificent campaign in France. "I tie in goddon," said the
+father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet
+a grief which distressed him. "I owe no mann anything--" and he died,
+still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.
+
+Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck,
+Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him
+lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of
+the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general
+after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of
+Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and
+left Tours before the disbandment of the army.
+
+In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife's property out of the
+funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending
+to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where
+persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of
+Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had
+saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the
+hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the
+anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little
+girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confidence that
+the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the
+honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as
+well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil
+capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to
+which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.
+
+While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making
+choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various
+ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the
+brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he
+listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the
+means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself
+the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He
+bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New
+York freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He
+sent Dumay on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned,
+after making a double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase
+of cottons at a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his
+family in the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the
+principles of banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of
+a native of Provence.
+
+This double operation of Dumay's was worth a fortune to the house of
+Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his
+agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
+poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
+a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
+Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand
+francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
+became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's
+books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
+sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune
+had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
+the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's
+liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
+money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never
+in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as
+this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the
+knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune
+to the richest commercial house in Havre.
+
+Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
+lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
+disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
+attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,
+or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
+Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of
+economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
+francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay
+laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
+When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added
+something to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier's
+services, until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight
+thousand francs. In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie,
+a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of
+residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins
+Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.
+
+The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by
+the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had
+taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a
+grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound
+fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying
+in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The
+exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The
+failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father,
+leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the
+fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles's return came
+near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of
+the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a
+renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of
+continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest
+in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the
+splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration
+enjoyed by her husband, his absolute affection, giving her an
+unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him,--all
+these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her
+doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the
+bright evening of her stormy life, a hidden catastrophe, buried in the
+heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention,
+came as the precursor of renewed trials.
+
+In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles
+Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris,
+and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal
+palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped
+down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the
+grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon
+his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All
+he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his
+creditors.
+
+"Havre shall never see me doing nothing," said the colonel to the
+lieutenant. "Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per
+cent."
+
+"Three, my colonel."
+
+"At nothing, then," cried Mignon, peremptorily; "you shall have your
+share in the profits of what I now undertake. The 'Modeste,' which is
+no longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my
+wife and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good
+news."
+
+Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. "I
+think," he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, "that my
+colonel has a plan laid out."
+
+The following day at dawn he accompanied his master on board the
+"Modeste" bound for Constantinople. There, on the poop of the vessel,
+the Breton said to the Provencal,--
+
+"What are your last commands, my colonel?"
+
+"That no man shall enter the Chalet," cried the father with strong
+emotion. "Dumay, guard my last child as though you were a bull-dog.
+Death to the man who seduces another daughter! Fear nothing, not even
+the scaffold--I will be with you."
+
+"My colonel, go in peace. I understand you. You shall find
+Mademoiselle Mignon on your return such as you now give her to me, or
+I shall be dead. You know me, and you know your Pyrenees hounds. No
+man shall reach your daughter. Forgive me for troubling you with
+words."
+
+The two soldiers clasped arms like men who had learned to understand
+each other in the solitudes of Siberia.
+
+On the same day the Havre "Courier" published the following terrible,
+simple, energetic, and honorable notice:--
+
+  "The house of Charles Mignon suspends payment. But the
+  undersigned, assignees of the estate, undertake to pay all
+  liabilities. On and after this date, holders of notes may obtain
+  the usual discount. The sale of the landed estates will fully
+  cover all current indebtedness.
+
+  "This notice is issued for the honor of the house, and to prevent
+  any disturbance in the money-market of this town.
+
+  "Monsieur Charles Mignon sailed this morning on the 'Modeste' for
+  Asia Minor, leaving full powers with the undersigned to sell his
+  whole property, both landed and personal.
+
+    DUMAY, assignee of the Bank accounts,
+    LATOURNELLE, notary, assignee of the city and villa property,
+    GOBENHEIM, assignee of the commercial property."
+
+Latournelle owed his prosperity to the kindness of Monsieur Mignon,
+who lent him one hundred thousand francs in 1817 to buy the finest law
+practice in Havre. The poor man, who had no pecuniary means, was
+nearly forty years of age and saw no prospect of being other than
+head-clerk for the rest of his days. He was the only man in Havre
+whose devotion could be compared with Dumay's. As for Gobenheim, he
+profited by the liquidation to get a part of Monsieur Mignon's
+business, which lifted his own little bank into prominence.
+
+While unanimous regrets for the disaster were expressed in
+counting-rooms, on the wharves, and in private houses, where praises
+of a man so irreproachable, honorable, and beneficent filled every
+mouth, Latournelle and Dumay, silent and active as ants, sold land,
+turned property into money, paid the debts, and settled up everything.
+Vilquin showed a good deal of generosity in purchasing the villa, the
+town-house, and a farm; and Latournelle made the most of his
+liberality by getting a good price out of him. Society wished to show
+civilities to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon; but they had already
+obeyed the father's last wishes and taken refuge in the Chalet, where
+they went on the very morning of his departure, the exact hour of
+which had been concealed from them. Not to be shaken in his resolution
+by his grief at parting, the brave man said farewell to his wife and
+daughter while they slept. Three hundred visiting cards were left at
+the house. A fortnight later, just as Charles had predicted, complete
+forgetfulness settled down upon the Chalet, and proved to these women
+the wisdom and dignity of his command.
+
+Dumay sent agents to represent his master in New York, Paris, and
+London, and followed up the assignments of the three banking-houses
+whose failure had caused the ruin of the Havre house, thus realizing
+five hundred thousand francs between 1826 and 1828, an eighth of
+Charles's whole fortune; then, according to the latter's directions
+given on the night of his departure, he sent that sum to New York
+through the house of Mongenod to the credit of Monsieur Charles
+Mignon. All this was done with military obedience, except in a matter
+of withholding thirty thousand francs for the personal expenses of
+Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon as the colonel had ordered him to do,
+but which Dumay did not do. The Breton sold his own little house for
+twenty thousand francs, which sum he gave to Madame Mignon, believing
+that the more capital he sent to his colonel the sooner the latter
+would return.
+
+"He might perish for the want of thirty thousand francs," Dumay
+remarked to Latournelle, who bought the little house at its full
+value, where an apartment was always kept ready for the inhabitants of
+the Chalet.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           A SIMPLE STORY
+
+Such was the result to the celebrated house of Mignon at Havre of the
+crisis of 1825-26, which convulsed many of the principal business
+centres in Europe and caused the ruin of several Parisian bankers,
+among them (as those who remember that crisis will recall) the
+president of the chamber of commerce.
+
+We can now understand how this great disaster, coming suddenly at the
+close of ten years of domestic happiness, might well have been the
+death of Bettina Mignon, again separated from her husband and ignorant
+of his fate,--to her as adventurous and perilous as the exile to
+Siberia. But the grief which was dragging her to the grave was far
+other than these visible sorrows. The caustic that was slowly eating
+into her heart lay beneath a stone in the little graveyard of
+Ingouville, on which was inscribed:--
+
+                      BETTINA CAROLINE MIGNON
+
+                       Died aged twenty-two.
+
+                           Pray for her.
+
+This inscription is to the young girl whom it covered what many
+another epitaph has been for the dead lying beneath them,--a table of
+contents to a hidden book. Here is the book, in its dreadful brevity;
+and it will explain the oath exacted and taken when the colonel and
+the lieutenant bade each other farewell.
+
+A young man of charming appearance, named Charles d'Estourny, came to
+Havre for the commonplace purpose of being near the sea, and there he
+saw Bettina Mignon. A "soi-disant" fashionable Parisian is never
+without introductions, and he was invited at the instance of a friend
+of the Mignons to a fete given at Ingouville. He fell in love with
+Bettina and with her fortune, and in three months he had done the work
+of seduction and enticed her away. The father of a family of daughters
+should no more allow a young man whom he does not know to enter his
+home than he should leave books and papers lying about which he has
+not read. A young girl's innocence is like milk, which a small matter
+turns sour,--a clap of thunder, an evil odor, a hot day, a mere
+breath.
+
+When Charles Mignon read his daughter's letter of farewell he
+instantly despatched Madame Dumay to Paris. The family gave out that a
+journey to another climate had suddenly been advised for Caroline by
+their physician; and the physician himself sustained the excuse,
+though unable to prevent some gossip in the society of Havre. "Such a
+vigorous young girl! with the complexion of a Spaniard, and that black
+hair!--she consumptive!" "Yes, they say she committed some
+imprudence." "Ah, ah!" cried a Vilquin. "I am told she came back
+bathed in perspiration after riding on horseback, and drank iced
+water; at least, that is what Dr. Troussenard says."
+
+By the time Madame Dumay returned to Havre the catastrophe of the
+failure had taken place, and society paid no further attention to the
+absence of Bettina or the return of the cashier's wife. At the
+beginning of 1827 the newspapers rang with the trial of Charles
+d'Estourny, who was found guilty of cheating at cards. The young
+corsair escaped into foreign parts without taking thought of
+Mademoiselle Mignon, who was of little value to him since the failure
+of the bank. Bettina heard of his infamous desertion and of her
+father's ruin almost at the same time. She returned home struck by
+death, and wasted away in a short time at the Chalet. Her death at
+least protected her reputation. The illness that Monsieur Mignon
+alleged to be the cause of her absence, and the doctor's order which
+sent her to Nice were now generally believed. Up to the last moment
+the mother hoped to save her daughter's life. Bettina was her darling
+and Modeste was the father's. There was something touching in the two
+preferences. Bettina was the image of Charles, just as Modeste was the
+reproduction of her mother. Both parents continued their love for each
+other in their children. Bettina, a daughter of Provence, inherited
+from her father the beautiful hair, black as a raven's wing, which
+distinguishes the women of the South, the brown eye, almond-shaped and
+brilliant as a star, the olive tint, the velvet skin as of some golden
+fruit, the arched instep, and the Spanish waist from which the short
+basque skirt fell crisply. Both mother and father were proud of the
+charming contrast between the sisters. "A devil and an angel!" they
+said to each other, laughing, little thinking it prophetic.
+
+After weeping for a month in the solitude of her chamber, where she
+admitted no one, the mother came forth at last with injured eyes.
+Before losing her sight altogether she persisted, against the wishes
+of her friends, in visiting her daughter's grave, on which she riveted
+her gaze in contemplation. That image remained vivid in the darkness
+which now fell upon her, just as the red spectrum of an object shines
+in our eyes when we close them in full daylight. This terrible and
+double misfortune made Dumay, not less devoted, but more anxious about
+Modeste, now the only daughter of the father who was unaware of his
+loss. Madame Dumay, idolizing Modeste, like other women deprived of
+their children, cast her motherliness about the girl,--yet without
+disregarding the commands of her husband, who distrusted female
+intimacies. Those commands were brief. "If any man, of any age, or any
+rank," Dumay said, "speaks to Modeste, ogles her, makes love to her,
+he is a dead man. I'll blow his brains out and give myself to the
+authorities; my death may save her. If you don't wish to see my head
+cut off, do you take my place in watching her when I am obliged to go
+out."
+
+For the last three years Dumay had examined his pistols every night.
+He seemed to have put half the burden of his oath upon the Pyrenean
+hounds, two animals of uncommon sagacity. One slept inside the Chalet,
+the other was stationed in a kennel which he never left, and where he
+never barked; but terrible would have been the moment had the pair
+made their teeth meet in some unknown adventurer.
+
+We can now imagine the sort of life led by mother and daughter at the
+Chalet. Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, often accompanied by
+Gobenheim, came to call and play whist with Dumay nearly every
+evening. The conversation turned on the gossip of Havre and the petty
+events of provincial life. The little company separated between nine
+and ten o'clock. Modeste put her mother to bed, and together they said
+their prayers, kept up each other's courage, and talked of the dear
+absent one, the husband and father. After kissing her mother for
+good-night, the girl went to her own room about ten o'clock. The next
+morning she prepared her mother for the day with the same care, the
+same prayers, the same prattle. To her praise be it said that from the
+day when the terrible infirmity deprived her mother of a sense,
+Modeste had been like a servant to her, displaying at all times the
+same solicitude; never wearying of the duty, never thinking it
+monotonous. Such constant devotion, combined with a tenderness rare
+among young girls, was thoroughly appreciated by those who witnessed
+it. To the Latournelle family, and to Monsieur and Madame Dumay,
+Modeste was, in soul, the pearl of price.
+
+On sunny days, between breakfast and dinner, Madame Mignon and Madame
+Dumay took a little walk toward the sea. Modeste accompanied them, for
+two arms were needed to support the blind mother. About a month before
+the scene to which this explanation is a parenthesis, Madame Mignon
+had taken counsel with her friends, Madame Latournelle, the notary,
+and Dumay, while Madame Dumay carried Modeste in another direction for
+a longer walk.
+
+"Listen to what I have to say," said the blind woman. "My daughter is
+in love. I feel it; I see it. A singular change has taken place within
+her, and I do not see how it is that none of you have perceived it."
+
+"In the name of all that's honorable--" cried the lieutenant.
+
+"Don't interrupt me, Dumay. For the last two months Modeste has taken
+as much care of her personal appearance as if she expected to meet a
+lover. She has grown extremely fastidious about her shoes; she wants
+to set off her pretty feet; she scolds Madame Gobet, the shoemaker. It
+is the same thing with her milliner. Some days my poor darling is
+absorbed in thought, evidently expectant, as if waiting for some one.
+Her voice has curt tones when she answers a question, as though she
+were interrupted in the current of her thoughts and secret
+expectations. Then, if this awaited lover has come--"
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Sit down, Dumay," said the blind woman. "Well, then Modeste is gay.
+Oh! she is not gay to your sight; you cannot catch these gradations;
+they are too delicate for eyes that see only the outside of nature.
+Her gaiety is betrayed to me by the tones of her voice, by certain
+accents which I alone can catch and understand. Modeste then, instead
+of sitting still and thoughtful, gives vent to a wild, inward activity
+by impulsive movements,--in short, she is happy. There is a grace, a
+charm in the very ideas she utters. Ah, my friends, I know happiness
+as well as I know sorrow; I know its signs. By the kiss my Modeste
+gives me I can guess what is passing within her. I know whether she
+has received what she was looking for, or whether she is uneasy or
+expectant. There are many gradations in a kiss, even in that of an
+innocent young girl, and Modeste is innocence itself; but hers is the
+innocence of knowledge, not of ignorance. I may be blind, but my
+tenderness is all-seeing, and I charge you to watch over my daughter."
+
+Dumay, now actually ferocious, the notary, in the character of a man
+bound to ferret out a mystery, Madame Latournelle, the deceived
+chaperone, and Madame Dumay, alarmed for her husband's safety, became
+at once a set of spies, and Modeste from this day forth was never left
+alone for an instant. Dumay passed nights under her window wrapped in
+his cloak like a jealous Spaniard; but with all his military sagacity
+he was unable to detect the least suspicious sign. Unless she loved
+the nightingales in the villa park, or some fairy prince, Modeste
+could have seen no one, and had neither given nor received a signal.
+Madame Dumay, who never went to bed till she knew Modeste was asleep,
+watched the road from the upper windows of the Chalet with a vigilance
+equal to her husband's. Under these eight Argus eyes the blameless
+child, whose every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the
+ordeal so fully acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four
+friends declared to each other privately that Madame Mignon was
+foolishly over-anxious. Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to
+church and brought her back again, was commissioned to tell the mother
+that she was mistaken about her daughter.
+
+"Modeste," she said, "is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
+herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
+another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
+that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was
+Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
+"she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
+I'm sure I don't know where such people" (Victor Hugo, Lamartine,
+Byron being _such people_ to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie)
+"get their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as
+I did not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to
+try to read the thing. Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but
+it actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn't possibly finish
+it. Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint,
+and waves of war! However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we
+must expect absurdities,--though his are really inexcusable. He takes
+you to Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the
+torrents talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins!
+Did you ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the
+lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling
+along from page to page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put
+in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English.
+But I certainly sha'n't learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't
+learn it to teach Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil
+to all these English romances. I'm too good a Norman to fall in love
+with foreign things,--above all when they come from England."
+
+Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling
+at the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold. The stern
+scion of a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of
+her doctrine.
+
+"And, therefore, my dear Madame Mignon," she went on, "you have taken
+Modeste's fancies, which are nothing but the results of her reading,
+for a love-affair. Remember, she is just twenty. Girls fall in love
+with themselves at that age; they dress to see themselves
+well-dressed. I remember I used to make my little sister, now dead,
+put on a man's hat and pretend we were monsieur and madame. You see,
+you had a very happy youth in Frankfort; but let us be just,--Modeste
+is living here without the slightest amusement. Although, to be sure,
+her every wish is attended to, still she knows she is shut up and
+watched, and the life she leads would give her no pleasure at all if
+it were not for the amusement she gets out of her books. Come, don't
+worry yourself; she loves nobody but you. You ought to be very glad
+that she goes into these enthusiasms for the corsairs of Byron and
+the heroes of Walter Scott and your own Germans, Egmont, Goethe,
+Werther, Schiller, and all the other 'ers.'"
+
+"Well, madame, what do you say to that?" asked Dumay, respectfully,
+alarmed at Madame Mignon's silence.
+
+"Modeste is not only inclined to love, but she loves some man,"
+answered the mother, obstinately.
+
+"Madame, my life is at stake, and you must allow me--not for my sake,
+but for my wife, my colonel, for all of us--to probe this matter to
+the bottom, and find out whether it is the mother or the watch-dog who
+is deceived."
+
+"It is you who are deceived, Dumay. Ah! if I could but see my
+daughter!" cried the poor woman.
+
+"But whom is it possible for her to love?" asked the notary. "I'll
+answer for my Exupere."
+
+"It can't be Gobenheim," said Dumay, "for since the colonel's
+departure he has not spent nine hours a week in this house. Besides,
+he doesn't even notice Modeste--that five-franc piece of a man! His
+uncle Gobenheim-Keller is all the time writing him, 'Get rich enough
+to marry a Keller.' With that idea in his mind you may be sure he
+doesn't know which sex Modeste belongs to. No other men ever come
+here,--for of course I don't count Butscha, poor little fellow; I love
+him! He is your Dumay, madame," said the cashier to Madame
+Latournelle. "Butscha knows very well that a mere glance at Modeste
+would cost him a Breton ducking. Not a soul has any communication with
+this house. Madame Latournelle who takes Modeste to church ever since
+your--your misfortune, madame, has carefully watched her on the way
+and all through the service, and has seen nothing suspicious. In
+short, if I must confess the truth, I have myself raked all the paths
+about the house every evening for the last month, and found no trace
+of footsteps in the morning."
+
+"Rakes are neither costly nor difficult to handle," remarked the
+daughter of Germany.
+
+"But the dogs?" cried Dumay.
+
+"Lovers have philters even for dogs," answered Madame Mignon.
+
+"If you are right, my honor is lost! I may as well blow my brains
+out," exclaimed Dumay.
+
+"Why so, Dumay?" said the blind woman.
+
+"Ah, madame, I could never meet my colonel's eye if he did not find
+his daughter--now his only daughter--as pure and virtuous as she was
+when he said to me on the vessel, 'Let no fear of the scaffold hinder
+you, Dumay, if the honor of my Modeste is at stake.'"
+
+"Ah! I recognize you both," said Madame Mignon in a voice of strong
+emotion.
+
+"I'll wager my salvation that Modeste is as pure as she was in her
+cradle," exclaimed Madame Dumay.
+
+"Well, I shall make certain of it," replied her husband, "if Madame la
+Comtesse will allow me to employ certain means; for old troopers
+understand strategy."
+
+"I will allow you to do anything that shall enlighten us, provided it
+does no injury to my last child."
+
+"What are you going to do, Jean?" asked Madame Dumay; "how can you
+discover a young girl's secret if she means to hide it?"
+
+"Obey me, all!" cried the lieutenant, "I shall need every one of you."
+
+If this rapid sketch were clearly developed it would give a whole
+picture of manners and customs in which many a family could recognize
+the events of their own history; but it must suffice as it is to
+explain the importance of the few details heretofore given about
+persons and things on the memorable evening when the old soldier had
+made ready his plot against the young girl, intending to wrench from
+the recesses of her heart the secret of a love and a lover seen only
+by a blind mother.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER V
+
+                     THE PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED
+
+An hour went by in solemn stillness broken only by the cabalistic
+phrases of the whist-players: "Spades!" "Trumped!" "Cut!" "How are
+honors?" "Two to four." "Whose deal?"--phrases which represent in
+these days the higher emotions of the European aristocracy. Modeste
+continued to work, without seeming to be surprised at her mother's
+silence. Madame Mignon's handkerchief slipped from her lap to the
+floor; Butscha precipitated himself upon it, picked it up, and as he
+returned it whispered in Modeste's ear, "Take care!" Modeste raised a
+pair of wondering eyes, whose puzzled glance filled the poor cripple
+with joy unspeakable. "She is not in love!" he whispered to himself,
+rubbing his hands till the skin was nearly peeled off. At this moment
+Exupere tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon
+like an avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, "The young
+man is here!" Dumay sprang for his pistols and rushed out.
+
+"Good God! suppose he kills him!" cried Madame Dumay, bursting into
+tears.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Modeste, looking innocently at her friends
+and not betraying the slightest fear.
+
+"It is all about a young man who is hanging round the house," cried
+Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Well!" said Modeste, "why should Dumay kill him?"
+
+"Sancta simplicita!" ejaculated Butscha, looking at his master as
+proudly as Alexander is made to contemplate Babylon in Lebrun's great
+picture.
+
+"Where are you going, Modeste?" asked the mother as her daughter rose
+to leave the room.
+
+"To get ready for your bedtime, mamma," answered Modeste, in a voice
+as pure as the tones of an instrument.
+
+"You haven't paid your expenses," said the dwarf to Dumay when he
+returned.
+
+"Modeste is as pure as the Virgin on our altar," cried Madame
+Latournelle.
+
+"Good God! such excitements wear me out," said Dumay; "and yet I'm a
+strong man."
+
+"May I lose that twenty-five sous if I have the slightest idea what
+you are about," remarked Gobenheim. "You seem to me to be crazy."
+
+"And yet it is all about a treasure," said Butscha, standing on tiptoe
+to whisper in Gobenheim's ear.
+
+"Dumay, I am sorry to say that I am still almost certain of what I
+told you," persisted Madame Mignon.
+
+"The burden of proof is now on you, madame," said Dumay, calmly; "it
+is for you to prove that we are mistaken."
+
+Discovering that the matter in question was only Modeste's honor,
+Gobenheim took his hat, made his bow, and walked off, carrying his ten
+sous with him,--there being evidently no hope of another rubber.
+
+"Exupere, and you too, Butscha, may leave us," said Madame
+Latournelle. "Go back to Havre; you will get there in time for the
+last piece at the theatre. I'll pay for your tickets."
+
+When the four friends were alone with Madame Mignon, Madame
+Latournelle, after looking at Dumay, who being a Breton understood the
+mother's obstinacy, and at her husband who was fingering the cards,
+felt herself authorized to speak up.
+
+"Madame Mignon, come now, tell us what decisive thing has struck your
+mind."
+
+"Ah, my good friend, if you were a musician you would have heard, as I
+have, the language of love that Modeste speaks."
+
+The piano of the demoiselles Mignon was among the few articles of
+furniture which had been moved from the town-house to the Chalet.
+Modeste often conjured away her troubles by practising, without a
+master. Born a musician, she played to enliven her mother. She sang by
+nature, and loved the German airs which her mother taught her. From
+these lessons and these attempts at self-instruction came a phenomenon
+not uncommon to natures with a musical vocation; Modeste composed, as
+far as a person ignorant of the laws of harmony can be said to
+compose, tender little lyric melodies. Melody is to music what imagery
+and sentiment are to poetry, a flower that blossoms spontaneously.
+Consequently, nations have had melodies before harmony,--botany comes
+later than the flower. In like manner, Modeste, who knew nothing of
+the painter's art except what she had seen her sister do in the way of
+water-color, would have stood subdued and fascinated before the
+pictures of Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Durer,
+Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands.
+Lately, for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of
+nightingales, musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused
+the attention of her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness
+for composition and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.
+
+"If your suspicions have no other foundation," said Latournelle to
+Madame Mignon, "I pity your susceptibilities."
+
+"When a Breton girl sings," said Dumay gloomily, "the lover is not far
+off."
+
+"I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising," said the
+mother, "and you shall judge for yourselves--"
+
+"Poor girl!" said Madame Dumay, "If she only knew our anxiety she
+would be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially
+if she thought it would save Dumay."
+
+"My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow," said Madame
+Mignon; "perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have
+discovered by trickery."
+
+Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is
+everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies,
+these honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being
+able to ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-
+affair, or the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the
+result of a struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the
+despotism of a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the
+never-ending repetition of the first scene played by man when the
+curtain of the Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.
+
+And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right
+of it?
+
+None of the persons who were about Modeste could understand that
+maiden heart--for the soul and the face we have described were in
+harmony. The girl had transported her existence into another world, as
+much denied and disbelieved in in these days of ours as the new world
+of Christopher Columbus in the sixteenth century. Happily, she kept
+her own counsel, or they would have thought her crazy. But first we
+must explain the influence of the past upon her nature.
+
+Two events had formed the soul and developed the mind of this young
+girl. Monsieur and Madame Mignon, warned by the fate that overtook
+Bettina, had resolved, just before the failure, to marry Modeste. They
+chose the son of a rich banker, formerly of Hamburg, but established
+in Havre since 1815,--a man, moreover, who was under obligations to
+them. The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of
+Havre, blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle
+classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion,
+abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure
+that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen
+him since. Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob
+Althor, the father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I
+really don't know what you mean."
+
+This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was
+a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle
+and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardly desertion. The
+daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their
+wishes gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and
+grooms, and otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in
+possession of an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to
+kiss her hand, and take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted
+his flowers and all the little proofs of tenderness with which it is
+proper to surround the lady of our choice; she even worked him a
+purse, believing in such ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but
+cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the Vilquins, and the Althors.
+
+Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame
+Mignon and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine
+with the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot
+of the lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the
+eldest Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful,
+and of high birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of
+her engagement she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million.
+Her poverty, well known to all, became a sentinel defending the
+approaches to the Chalet fully as well as the prudence of the
+Latournelles or the vigilance of Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a
+time on Mademoiselle Mignon's position only to insult her.
+
+"Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course."
+
+"What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the
+chance to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take
+her!"
+
+"After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--"
+
+And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste's
+imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and
+the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing
+that Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of
+them as they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed
+surprise that the mother and daughter were willing to live on among
+the scenes of their former splendor. From her open window behind the
+closed blinds Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--
+
+"I am sure I can't think how they can live there," some one would say
+as he paced the villa lawn,--perhaps to assist Vilquin in getting rid
+of his tenant.
+
+"What do you suppose they live on? they haven't any means of earning
+money."
+
+"I am told the old woman has gone blind."
+
+"Is Mademoiselle Mignon still pretty? Dear me, how dashing she used to
+be! Well, she hasn't any horses now."
+
+Most young girls on hearing these spiteful and silly speeches, born of
+an envy that now rushed, peevish and drivelling, to avenge the past,
+would have felt the blood mount to their foreheads; others would have
+wept; some would have undergone spasms of anger; but Modeste smiled,
+as we smile at the theatre while watching the actors. Her pride could
+not descend so low as the level of such speeches.
+
+The other event was more serious than these mercenary meannesses.
+Bettina Caroline died in the arms of her younger sister, who had
+nursed her with the devotion of girlhood, and the curiosity of an
+untainted imagination. In the silence of long nights the sisters
+exchanged many a confidence. With what dramatic interest was poor
+Bettina invested in the eyes of the innocent Modeste? Bettina knew
+love through sorrow only, and she was dying of it. Among young girls
+every man, scoundrel though he be, is still a lover. Passion is the
+one thing absolutely real in the things of life, and it insists on its
+supremacy. Charles d'Estourny, gambler, criminal, and debauchee,
+remained in the memory of the sisters, the elegant Parisian of the
+fetes of Havre, the admired of the womenkind. Bettina believed she had
+carried him off from the coquettish Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he
+was her sister's happy lover. Such adoration in young girls is
+stronger than all social condemnations. To Bettina's thinking, justice
+had been deceived; if not, how could it have sentenced a man who had
+loved her for six months?--loved her to distraction in the hidden
+retreat to which he had taken her,--that he might, we may add, be at
+liberty to go his own way. Thus the dying girl inoculated her sister
+with love. Together they talked of the great drama which imagination
+enhances; and Bettina carried with her to the grave her sister's
+ignorance, leaving her, if not informed, at least thirsting for
+information.
+
+Nevertheless, remorse had set its fangs too sharply in Bettina's heart
+not to force her to warn her sister. In the midst of her own
+confessions she had preached duty and implicit obedience to Modeste.
+On the evening of her death she implored her to remember the tears
+that soaked her pillow, and not to imitate a conduct which even
+suffering could not expiate. Bettina accused herself of bringing a
+curse upon the family, and died in despair at being unable to obtain
+her father's pardon. Notwithstanding the consolations which the
+ministers of religion, touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she
+cried in heartrending tones with her latest breath: "Oh father!
+father!" "Never give your heart without your hand," she said to
+Modeste an hour before she died; "and above all, accept no attentions
+from any man without telling everything to papa and mamma."
+
+These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the
+hour of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had
+exacted a solemn oath. The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from
+beneath her pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid,
+Francoise Cochet, to be engraved in Havre with these words, "Think of
+Bettina, 1827," and placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to
+keep it there until she married. Thus there had been between these two
+young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless
+visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north
+wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were
+always subordinate to their horror of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die
+under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the
+baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by
+grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone
+the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends
+can take the place of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the
+dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay
+cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the
+provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and
+the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in
+the equinoctial storms,--all this monastic tranquillity did in fact
+hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the
+spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young
+girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her
+plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of
+a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it
+were to watch for the passing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the
+expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under
+the fire of Dumay's pistols.
+
+During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung
+herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in
+it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German
+quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
+learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the
+matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
+knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three
+literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
+Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great
+works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
+from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,
+from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
+three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in
+its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
+sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming
+admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event; a
+masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her
+happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her
+heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the
+beautiful illusions of its youth. But of this radiant existence not a
+gleam reached the surface of daily life; it escaped the ken of Dumay
+and his wife and the Latournelles; the ears of the blind mother alone
+caught the crackling of its flame.
+
+The profound disdain which Modeste now conceived for ordinary men gave
+to her face a look of pride, an inexpressible untamed shyness, which
+tempered her Teutonic simplicity, and accorded well with a peculiarity
+of her head. The hair growing in a point above the forehead seemed the
+continuation of a slight line which thought had already furrowed
+between the eyebrows, and made the expression of untameability perhaps
+a shade too strong. The voice of this charming child, whom her father,
+delighting in her wit, was wont to call his "little proverb of
+Solomon," had acquired a precious flexibility of organ through the
+practice of three languages. This advantage was still further enhanced
+by a natural bell-like tone both sweet and fresh, which touched the
+heart as delightfully as it did the ear. If the mother could no longer
+see the signs of a noble destiny upon her daughter's brow, she could
+study the transitions of her soul's development in the accents of that
+voice attuned to love.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                      A MAIDEN'S FIRST ROMANCE
+
+To this period of Modeste's eager rage for reading succeeded the
+exercise of a strange faculty given to vigorous imaginations,--the
+power, namely, of making herself an actor in a dream-existence; of
+representing to her own mind the things desired, with so vivid a
+conception that they seemed actually to attain reality; in short, to
+enjoy by thought,--to live out her years within her mind; to marry; to
+grow old; to attend her own funeral like Charles V.; to play within
+herself the comedy of life and, if need be, that of death. Modeste was
+indeed playing, but all alone, the comedy of Love. She fancied herself
+adored to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of social
+life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the
+executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or,
+like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles
+were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men
+amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress,
+exhausting in her own behalf the luck of Gil Blas, or the triumphs of
+Pasta, Malibran, and Florine. Then, weary of the horrors and
+excitements, she returned to actual life. She married a notary, she
+ate the plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a
+Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the
+trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the
+romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an
+eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star
+which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father
+returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her
+various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own
+independence); she owned a magnificent estate and castle, servants,
+horses, carriages, the choicest of everything that luxury could
+bestow, and kept her suitors uncertain until she was forty years old,
+at which age she made her choice.
+
+This edition of the Arabian Nights in a single copy lasted nearly a
+year, and taught Modeste the sense of satiety through thought. She
+held her life too often in her hand, she said to herself
+philosophically and with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too
+often, "Well, what is it, after all?" not to have plunged to her waist
+in the deep disgust which all men of genius feel when they try to
+complete by intense toil the work to which they have devoted
+themselves. Her youth and her rich nature alone kept Modeste at this
+period of her life from seeking to enter a cloister. But this sense of
+satiety cast her, saturated as she still was with Catholic
+spirituality, into the love of Good, the infinite of heaven. She
+conceived of charity, service to others, as the true occupation of
+life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of finding in it no
+food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an insect at
+the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments
+for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the
+grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card
+or drew out his last trump.
+
+Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a singular track of
+thought. She imagined that if she became sinless (speaking
+ecclesiastically) she would attain to such a condition of sanctity
+that God would hear her and accomplish her desires. "Faith," she
+thought, "can move mountains; Christ has said so. The Saviour led his
+apostle upon the waters of the lake Tiberias; and I, all I ask of God
+is a husband to love me; that is easier than walking upon the sea."
+She fasted through the next Lent, and did not commit a single sin;
+then she said to herself that on a certain day coming out of church
+she should meet a handsome young man who was worthy of her, whom her
+mother would accept, and who would fall madly in love with her. When
+the day came on which she had, as it were, summoned God to send her an
+angel, she was persistently followed by a rather disgusting beggar;
+moreover, it rained heavily, and not a single young man was in the
+streets. On another occasion she went to walk on the jetty to see the
+English travellers land; but each Englishman had an Englishwoman,
+nearly as handsome as Modeste herself, who saw no one at all
+resembling a wandering Childe Harold. Tears overcame her, as she sat
+down like Marius on the ruins of her imagination. But on the day when
+she subpoenaed God for the third time she firmly believed that the
+Elect of her dreams was within the church, hiding, perhaps out of
+delicacy, behind one of the pillars, round all of which she dragged
+Madame Latournelle on a tour of inspection. After this failure, she
+deposed the Deity from omnipotence. Many were her conversations with
+the imaginary lover, for whom she invented questions and answers,
+bestowing upon him a great deal of wit and intelligence.
+
+The high ambitions of her heart hidden within these romances were the
+real explanation of the prudent conduct which the good people who
+watched over Modeste so much admired; they might have brought her any
+number of young Althors or Vilquins, and she would never have stooped
+to such clowns. She wanted, purely and simply, a man of genius,
+--talent she cared little for; just as a lawyer is of no account to a
+girl who aims for an ambassador. Her only desire for wealth was to
+cast it at the feet of her idol. Indeed, the golden background of
+these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart,
+filled with womanly delicacy; for its dominant desire was to make some
+Tasso, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher
+Columbus happy.
+
+Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who
+longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in
+their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing
+melodies which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau.
+Or she fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively
+his contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry
+of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
+Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the
+seventeenth century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked
+herself, "loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man
+of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?" She had,
+as the reader perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the
+English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly
+admired the behavior of the young Englishwoman who offered herself to
+Crebillon, the son, who married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza
+Draper was her life and her happiness for several months. She made
+herself ideally the heroine of a like romance, and many a time she
+rehearsed in imagination the sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so
+charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes
+with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of the wittiest of
+English writers.
+
+Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the
+works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the
+author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most
+suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials,
+initiated herself into a destitution where the thoughts of genius
+brooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied
+herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to
+their own faculty. This noble compassion, this intuition of the
+struggles of toilers, this worship of genius, are among the choicest
+perceptions that flutter through the souls of women. They are, in the
+first place, a secret between the woman and God, for they are hidden;
+in them there is nothing striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity,
+--that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.
+
+Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came
+to Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of
+these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and
+the hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what
+it was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy,
+these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth
+into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to
+find its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision
+of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than
+flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge
+she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her
+father's hearth and bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and
+sentiment had lately come to a climax and taken shape. Modeste wished
+to be the friend and companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way
+superior to the crowd of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to
+give him her heart, her life, her infinite tenderness freed from the
+trammels of passion, until she had carefully and deeply studied him.
+
+She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it. Profound
+tranquillity settled down upon her soul. Her cheeks took on a soft
+color; and she became the beautiful and noble image of Germany, such
+as we have lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of
+Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double
+existence. She performed with humble, loving care all the minute
+duties of the homely life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide
+the poetry of her ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor
+methodically on material things to leave their souls the freer to
+develop in prayer. All great minds have bound themselves to some form
+of mechanical toil to obtain greater mastery of thought. Spinosa
+ground glasses for spectacles; Bayle counted the tiles on the roof;
+Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus subdued, the soul could
+spread its wings in all security.
+
+Madame Mignon, reading her daughter's soul, was therefore right.
+Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little
+understood, the first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of
+all sentiments, a very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts
+from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired
+the blue plumage of the bird that sings afar in the paradise of young
+girls, which no hand can touch, no gun can cover, as it flits across
+the sight; she loved those magic colors, like sparkling jewels
+dazzling to the eye, which youth can see, and never sees again when
+Reality, the hideous hag, appears with witnesses accompanied by the
+mayor. To live the very poetry of love and not to see the lover--ah,
+what sweet intoxication! what visionary rapture! a chimera with
+flowing man and outspread wings!
+
+The following is the puerile and even silly event which decided the
+future life of this young girl.
+
+Modeste happened to see in a bookseller's window a lithographic
+portrait of one of her favorites, Canalis. We all know what lies such
+pictures tell,--being as they are the result of a shameless
+speculation, which seizes upon the personality of celebrated
+individuals as if their faces were public property.
+
+In this instance Canalis, sketched in a Byronic pose, was offering to
+public admiration his dark locks floating in the breeze, a bare
+throat, and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess.
+Victor Hugo's forehead will make more persons shave their heads than
+the number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory of Napoleon.
+This portrait of Canalis (poetic through mercantile necessity) caught
+Modeste's eye. The day on which it caught her eye one of Arthez's best
+books happened to be published. We are compelled to admit, though it
+may be to Modeste's injury, that she hesitated long between the
+illustrious poet and the illustrious prose-writer. Which of these
+celebrated men was free?--that was the question.
+
+Modeste began by securing the co-operation of Francoise Cochet, a maid
+taken from Havre and brought back again by poor Bettina, whom Madame
+Mignon and Madame Dumay now employed by the day, and who lived in
+Havre. Modeste took her to her own room and assured her that she would
+never cause her parents any grief, never pass the bounds of a young
+girl's propriety, and that as to Francoise herself she would be well
+provided for after the return of Monsieur Mignon, on condition that
+she would do a certain service and keep it an inviolable secret. What
+was it? Why, a nothing--perfectly innocent. All that Modeste wanted of
+her accomplice was to put certain letters into the post at Havre and
+to bring some back which would be directed to herself, Francoise
+Cochet. The treaty concluded, Modeste wrote a polite note to Dauriat,
+publisher of the poems of Canalis, asking, in the interest of that
+great poet, for some particulars about him, among others if he were
+married. She requested the publisher to address his answer to
+Mademoiselle Francoise, "poste restante," Havre.
+
+Dauriat, incapable of taking the epistle seriously, wrote a reply in
+presence of four or five journalists who happened to be in his office
+at the time, each of whom added his particular stroke of wit to the
+production.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Canalis (Baron of), Constant Cys Melchior, member
+  of the French Academy, born in 1800, at Canalis (Correze), five
+  feet four inches in height, of good standing, vaccinated, spotless
+  birth, has given a substitute to the conscription, enjoys perfect
+  health, owns a small patrimonial estate in the Correze, and wishes
+  to marry, but the lady must be rich.
+
+  He beareth per pale, gules an axe or, sable three escallops
+  argent, surmounted by a baron's coronet; supporters, two larches,
+  vert. Motto: "Or et fer" (no allusion to Ophir or auriferous).
+
+  The original Canalis, who went to the Holy Land with the First
+  Crusade, is cited in the chronicles of Auvergne as being armed
+  with an axe on account of the family indigence, which to this day
+  weighs heavily on the race. This noble baron, famous for
+  discomfiting a vast number of infidels, died, without "or" or
+  "fer," as naked as a worm, near Jerusalem, on the plains of
+  Ascalon, ambulances not being then invented.
+
+  The chateau of Canalis (the domain yields a few chestnuts)
+  consists of two dismantled towers, united by a piece of wall
+  covered by a fine ivy, and is taxed at twenty-two francs.
+
+  The undersigned (publisher) calls attention to the fact that he
+  pays ten thousand francs for every volume of poetry written by
+  Monsieur de Canalis, who does not give his shells, or his nuts
+  either, for nothing.
+
+  The chanticler of the Correze lives in the rue de
+  Paradis-Poissoniere, number 29, which is a highly suitable
+  location for a poet of the angelic school. Letters must be
+  _post-paid_.
+
+  Noble dames of the faubourg Saint-Germain are said to take the
+  path to Paradise and protect its god. The king, Charles X., thinks
+  so highly of this great poet as to believe him capable of
+  governing the country; he has lately made him officer of the
+  Legion of honor, and (what pays him better) president of the court
+  of Claims at the foreign office. These functions do not hinder
+  this great genius from drawing an annuity out of the fund for the
+  encouragement of the arts and belles letters.
+
+  The last edition of the works of Canalis, printed on vellum, royal
+  8vo, from the press of Didot, with illustrations by Bixiou, Joseph
+  Bridau, Schinner, Sommervieux, etc., is in five volumes, price,
+  nine francs post-paid.
+
+This letter fell like a cobble-stone on a tulip. A poet, secretary of
+claims, getting a stipend in a public office, drawing an annuity,
+seeking a decoration, adored by the women of the faubourg
+Saint-Germain--was that the muddy minstrel lingering along the quays,
+sad, dreamy, worn with toil, and re-entering his garret fraught with
+poetry? However, Modeste perceived the irony of the envious
+bookseller, who dared to say, "I invented Canalis; I made Nathan!"
+Besides, she re-read her hero's poems,--verses extremely seductive,
+insincere, and hypocritical, which require a word of analysis, were it
+only to explain her infatuation.
+
+Canalis may be distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the angelic
+school, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous
+sweetness, and a delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with
+his strident cry is an eagle, Canalis, rose and white, is a flamingo.
+In him women find the friend they seek, their interpreter, a being who
+understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe
+confidant. The wide margins given by Didot to the last edition were
+crowded with Modeste's pencilled sentiments, expressing her sympathy
+with this tender and dreamy spirit. Canalis does not possess the gift
+of life; he cannot breathe existence into his creations; but he knows
+how to calm vague sufferings like those which assailed Modeste. He
+speaks to young girls in their own language; he can allay the anguish
+of a bleeding wound and lull the moans, even the sobs of woe. His gift
+lies not in stirring words, nor in the remedy of strong emotions, he
+contents himself with saying in harmonious tones which compel belief,
+"I suffer with you; I understand you; come with me; let us weep
+together beside the brook, beneath the willows." And they follow him!
+They listen to his empty and sonorous poetry like infants to a nurse's
+lullaby. Canalis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness
+which is genuine in the prose writer and artificial in the poet, by
+his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his
+infantile philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early
+youth that he leads us back to the prairie-land of our illusions. We
+can be pitiless to the eagles, requiring from them the quality of the
+diamond, incorruptible perfection; but as for Canalis, we take him for
+what he is and let the rest go. He seems a good fellow; the
+affectations of the angelic school have answered his purpose and
+succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when she plays the ingenue
+cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth, innocence betrayed, in short,
+the wounded angel.
+
+Modeste, recovering her first impression, renewed her confidence in
+that soul, in that countenance as ravishing as the face of Bernardin de
+Saint-Pierre. She paid no further attention to the publisher. And so,
+about the beginning of the month of August she wrote the following
+letter to this Dorat of the sacristy, who still ranks as a star of the
+modern Pleiades.
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Many a time, monsieur, I have wished to
+  write to you; and why? Surely you guess why,--to tell you how much
+  I admire your genius. Yes, I feel the need of expressing to you
+  the admiration of a poor country girl, lonely in her little
+  corner, whose only happiness is to read your thoughts. I have read
+  Rene, and I come to you. Sadness leads to reverie. How many other
+  women are sending you the homage of their secret thoughts? What
+  chance have I for notice among so many? This paper, filled with my
+  soul,--can it be more to you than the perfumed letters which
+  already beset you. I come to you with less grace than others, for
+  I wish to remain unknown and yet to receive your entire confidence
+  --as though you had long known me.
+
+  Answer my letter and be friendly with me. I cannot promise to make
+  myself known to you, though I do not positively say I will not
+  some day do so.
+
+  What shall I add? Read between the lines of this letter, monsieur,
+  the great effort which I am making: permit me to offer you my
+  hand,--that of a friend, ah! a true friend.
+
+Your servant,       O. d'Este M.
+
+
+  P.S.--If you do me the favor to answer this letter address your
+  reply, if you please, to Mademoiselle F. Cochet, "poste restante,"
+  Havre.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VII
+
+                    A POET OF THE ANGELIC SCHOOL
+
+All young girls, romantic or otherwise, can imagine the impatience in
+which Modeste lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues
+of fire. The trees were like a plumage. She was not conscious of a
+body; she hovered in space, the earth melted away under her feet. Full
+of admiration for the post-office, she followed her little sheet of
+paper on its way; she was happy, as we all are happy at twenty years
+of age, in the first exercise of our will. She was possessed, as in
+the middle ages. She made pictures in her mind of the poet's abode, of
+his study; she saw him unsealing her letter; and then followed myriads
+of suppositions.
+
+After sketching the poetry we cannot do less than give the profile of
+the poet. Canalis is a short, spare man, with an air of good-breeding,
+a dark-complexioned, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like
+that of a man who has more vanity than pride. He loves luxury, rank,
+and splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men.
+Proud of his birth, even more than of his talent, he destroys the
+value of his ancestors by making too much of them in the present day,
+--after all, the Canalis are not Navarreins, nor Cadignans, nor
+Grandlieus. Nature, however, helps him out in his pretensions. He has
+those eyes of Eastern effulgence which we demand in a poet, a delicate
+charm of manner, and a vibrant voice; yet a taint of natural
+charlatanism destroys the effect of nearly all these advantages; he is
+a born comedian. If he puts forward his well-shaped foot, it is
+because the attitude has become a habit; if he uses exclamatory terms
+they are part of himself; if he poses with high dramatic action he has
+made that deportment his second nature. Such defects as these are not
+incompatible with a general benevolence and a certain quality of
+errant and purely ideal chivalry, which distinguishes the paladin from
+the knight. Canalis has not devotion enough for a Don Quixote, but he
+has too much elevation of thought not to put himself on the nobler
+side of questions and things. His poetry, which takes the town by
+storm on all profitable occasions, really injures the man as a poet;
+for he is not without mind, but his talent prevents him from
+developing it; he is overweighted by his reputation, and is always
+aiming to make himself appear greater than he has the credit of being.
+Thus, as often happens, the man is entirely out of keeping with the
+products of his thought. The author of these naive, caressing, tender
+little lyrics, these calm idylls pure and cold as the surface of a
+lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious little
+creature in a tightly buttoned frock-coat, with the air of a diplomat
+seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of aristocracy, full
+of pretension, thirsting for money, already spoiled by success in two
+directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and of laurel. A
+government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand
+francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the Academy,
+three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes and the
+cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
+thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with
+another, by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for
+Modeste's hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he
+usually spent five or six thousand francs more every year; but the
+king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had
+hitherto supplied the deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's
+coronation which earned him a whole silver service,--having refused a
+sum of money on the ground that a Canalis owed his duty to his
+sovereign.
+
+But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
+budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his
+lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
+one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to
+hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue. De Marsay, who did not
+like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to
+the quick of his vanity. "Canalis," he said, "always reminds me of
+that brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a
+battle because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little
+tune." Canalis's ambition was to enter political life, and he made
+capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the
+embassy of the Duc de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according
+to Parisian gossip, in the capacity of "attache to the duchess." How
+many times a sarcasm or a single speech has decided the whole course
+of a man's life. Colla, the late president of the Cisalpine republic,
+and the best lawyer in Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was
+forty years of age that he knew nothing of botany. He was piqued,
+became a second Jussieu, cultivated flowers, and compiled and
+published "The Flora of Piedmont," in Latin, a labor of ten years.
+"I'll master De Marsay some of these days!" thought the crushed poet;
+"after all, Canning and Chateaubriand are both in politics."
+
+Canalis would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but
+he was afraid of the French press, whose criticisms are savage upon
+any writer who takes four alexandrines to express one idea. Of all the
+poets of our day only three, Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and De Vigny,
+have been able to win the double glory of poet and prose-writer, like
+Racine and Voltaire, Moliere, and Rabelais,--a rare distinction in the
+literature of France, which ought to give a man a right to the
+crowning title of poet.
+
+So then, the bard of the faubourg Saint-Germain was doing a wise thing
+in trying to house his little chariot under the protecting roof of the
+present government. When he became president of the court of Claims at
+the foreign office, he stood in need of a secretary,--a friend who
+could take his place in various ways; cook up his interests with
+publishers, see to his glory in the newspapers, help him if need be in
+politics,--in short, a cat's paw and satellite. In Paris many men of
+celebrity in art, science, and literature have one or more
+train-bearers, captains of the guard, chamberlains as it were, who live
+in the sunshine of their presence,--aides-de-camp entrusted with
+delicate missions, allowing themselves to be compromised if necessary;
+workers round the pedestal of the idol; not exactly his servants, nor
+yet his equals; bold in his defence, first in the breach, covering all
+retreats, busy with his business, and devoted to him just so long as
+their illusions last, or until the moment when they have got all they
+wanted. Some of these satellites perceive the ingratitude of their
+great man; others feel that they are simply made tools of; many weary
+of the life; very few remain contented with that sweet equality of
+feeling and sentiment which is the only reward that should be looked
+for in an intimacy with a superior man,--a reward that contented Ali
+when Mohammed raised him to himself.
+
+Many of these men, misled by vanity, think themselves quite as capable
+as their patron. Pure devotion, such as Modeste conceived it, without
+money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare.
+Nevertheless there are Mennevals to be found, more perhaps in Paris
+than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its
+peaceful toil; these are the wandering Benedictines of our social
+world, which offers them no other monastery. These brave, meek hearts
+live, by their actions and in their hidden lives, the poetry that
+poets utter. They are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in
+their lonely vigils and meditations,--as truly poets as others of the
+name on paper, who fatten in the fields of literature at so much a
+verse; like Lord Byron, like all who live, alas, by ink, the
+Hippocrene water of to-day, for want of a better.
+
+Attracted by the fame of Canalis, also by the prospect of political
+interest, and advised thereto by Madame d'Espard, who acted in the
+matter for the Duchesse de Chaulieu, a young lawyer of the court of
+Claims became secretary and confidential friend of the poet, who
+welcomed and petted him very much as a broker caresses his first
+dabbler in the funds. The beginning of this companionship bore a very
+fair resemblance to friendship. The young man had already held the
+same relation to a minister, who went out of office in 1827, taking
+care before he did so to appoint his young secretary to a place in the
+foreign office. Ernest de La Briere, then about twenty-seven years of
+age, was decorated with the Legion of honor but was without other
+means than his salary; he was accustomed to the management of business
+and had learned a good deal of life during his four years in a
+minister's cabinet. Kindly, amiable, and over-modest, with a heart
+full of pure and sound feelings, he was averse to putting himself in
+the foreground. He loved his country, and wished to serve her, but
+notoriety abashed him. To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was
+far more desirable than that of the minister himself. As soon as he
+became the friend and secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of
+labor for him, but by the end of eighteen months he had learned to
+understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary
+expression only. The truth of the old proverb, "The cowl doesn't make
+the monk," is eminently shown in literature. It is extremely rare to
+find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect
+accord. The faculties are not the man himself. This disconnection,
+whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds from an unexplored, possibly an
+unexplorable mystery. The brain and its products of all kinds (for in
+art the hand of man is a continuation of his brain) are a world apart,
+which flourishes beneath the cranium in absolute independence of
+sentiments, feelings, and all that is called virtue, the virtue of
+citizens, fathers, and private life. This, however true, is not
+absolutely so; nothing is absolutely true of man. It is certain that a
+debauched man will dissipate his talent, that a drunkard will waste it
+in libations; while, on the other hand, no man can give himself talent
+by wholesome living: nevertheless, it is all but proved that Virgil,
+the painter of love, never loved a Dido, and that Rousseau, the model
+citizen, had enough pride to had furnished forth an aristocracy. On
+the other hand Raphael and Michael Angelo do present the glorious
+conjunction of genius with the lines of character. Talent in men is
+therefore, in all moral points, very much what beauty is in women,
+--simply a promise. Let us, therefore, doubly admire the man in whom
+both heart and character equal the perfection of his genius.
+
+When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst
+species of egoist (for there are some amiable forms of the vice), he
+felt a delicacy in leaving him. Honest natures cannot easily break the
+ties that bind them, especially if they have tied them voluntarily.
+The secretary was therefore still living in domestic relations with
+the poet when Modeste's letter arrived,--in such relations, be it
+said, as involved a perpetual sacrifice of his feelings. La Briere
+admitted the frankness with which Canalis had laid himself bare before
+him. Moreover, the defects of the man, who will always be considered a
+great poet during his lifetime and flattered as Martmontel was
+flattered, were only the wrong side of his brilliant qualities.
+Without his vanity and his magniloquence it is possible that he might
+never have acquired the sonorous elocution which is so useful and even
+necessary an instrument in political life. His cold-bloodedness
+touched at certain points on rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation
+had a lining of generosity. Results, we must remember, are to the
+profit of society; motives concern God.
+
+But after the arrival of Modeste's letter Ernest deceived himself no
+longer as to Canalis. The pair had just finished breakfast and were
+talking together in the poet's study, which was on the ground-floor of
+a house standing back in a court-yard, and looked into a garden.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Canalis, "I was telling Madame de Chaulieu the
+other day that I ought to bring out another poem; I knew admiration
+was running short, for I have had no anonymous letters for a long
+time."
+
+"Is it from an unknown woman?"
+
+"Unknown? yes!--a D'Este, in Havre; evidently a feigned name."
+
+Canalis passed the letter to La Briere. The little poem, with all its
+hidden enthusiasms, in short, poor Modeste's heart, was disdainfully
+handed over, with the gesture of a spoiled dandy.
+
+"It is a fine thing," said the lawyer, "to have the power to attract
+such feelings; to force a poor woman to step out of the habits which
+nature, education, and the world dictate to her, to break through
+conventions. What privileges genius wins! A letter such as this,
+written by a young girl--a genuine young girl--without hidden
+meanings, with real enthusiasm--"
+
+"Well, what?" said Canalis.
+
+"Why, a man might suffer as much as Tasso and yet feel recompensed,"
+cried La Briere.
+
+"So he might, my dear fellow, by a first letter of that kind, and even
+a second; but how about the thirtieth? And suppose you find out that
+these young enthusiasts are little jades? Or imagine a poet rushing
+along the brilliant path in search of her, and finding at the end of
+it an old Englishwoman sitting on a mile-stone and offering you her
+hand! Or suppose this post-office angel should really be a rather ugly
+girl in quest of a husband? Ah, my boy! the effervescence then goes
+down."
+
+"I begin to perceive," said La Briere, smiling, "that there is
+something poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling
+flowers."
+
+"And then," resumed Canalis, "all these women, even when they are
+simple-minded, have ideals, and you can't satisfy them. They never say
+to themselves that a poet is a vain man, as I am accused of being;
+they can't conceive what it is for an author to be at the mercy of a
+feverish excitement, which makes him disagreeable and capricious; they
+want him always grand, noble; it never occurs to them that genius is a
+disease, or that Nathan lives with Florine; that D'Arthez is too fat,
+and Joseph Bridau is too thin; that Beranger limps, and that their own
+particular deity may have the snuffles! A Lucien de Rubempre, poet and
+cupid, is a phoenix. And why should I go in search of compliments only
+to pull the string of a shower-bath of horrid looks from some
+disillusioned female?"
+
+"Then the true poet," said La Briere, "ought to remain hidden, like
+God, in the centre of his worlds, and be only seen in his own
+creations."
+
+"Glory would cost too dear in that case," answered Canalis. "There is
+some good in life. As for that letter," he added, taking a cup of tea,
+"I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet she
+does not hide in the corner boxes, like a duchess in love with an
+actor; she feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection
+enough, and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem: 'I am the
+nymph Calypso, enamored of Telemachus.' Mystery and feigned names are
+the resources of little minds. For my part I no longer answer masks--"
+
+"I should love a woman who came to seek me," cried La Briere. "To all
+you say I reply, my dear Canalis, that it cannot be an ordinary girl
+who aspires to a distinguished man; such a girl has too little trust,
+too much vanity; she is too faint-hearted. Only a star, a--"
+
+"--princess!" cried Canalis, bursting into a shout of laughter; "only
+a princess can descend to him. My dear fellow, that doesn't happen
+once in a hundred years. Such a love is like that flower that blossoms
+every century. Princesses, let me tell you, if they are young, rich,
+and beautiful, have something else to think of; they are surrounded
+like rare plants by a hedge of fools, well-bred idiots as hollow as
+elder-bushes! My dream, alas! the crystal of my dream, garlanded from
+hence to the Correze with roses--ah! I cannot speak of it--it is in
+fragments at my feet, and has long been so. No, no, all anonymous
+letters are begging letters; and what sort of begging? Write yourself
+to that young woman, if you suppose her young and pretty, and you'll
+find out. There is nothing like experience. As for me, I can't
+reasonably be expected to love every woman; Apollo, at any rate he of
+Belvedere, is a delicate consumptive who must take care of his
+health."
+
+"But when a woman writes to you in this way her excuse must certainly
+be in her consciousness that she is able to eclipse in tenderness and
+beauty every other woman," said Ernest, "and I should think you might
+feel some curiosity--"
+
+"Ah," said Canalis, "permit me, my juvenile friend, to abide by the
+beautiful duchess who is all my joy."
+
+"You are right, you are right!" cried Ernest. However, the young
+secretary read and re-read Modeste's letter, striving to guess the
+mind of its hidden writer.
+
+"There is not the least fine-writing here," he said, "she does not
+even talk of your genius; she speaks to your heart. In your place I
+should feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty,--this proposed
+agreement--"
+
+"Then, sign it!" cried Canalis, laughing; "answer the letter and go to
+the end of the adventure yourself. You shall tell me the results three
+months hence--if the affair lasts so long."
+
+Four days later Modeste received the following letter, written on
+extremely fine paper, protected by two envelopes, and sealed with the
+arms of Canalis.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--The admiration for fine works (allowing that my
+  books are such) implies something so lofty and sincere as to
+  protect you from all light jesting, and to justify before the
+  sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me.
+
+  But first I must thank you for the pleasure which such proofs of
+  sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them,--for the maker
+  of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic
+  worth of their writings,--so readily does self-esteem lend itself
+  to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an
+  unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of
+  criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience,
+  even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.
+
+  Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower
+  of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in
+  the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you
+  have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that
+  might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet
+  of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;
+  they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish,
+  ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing
+  innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with
+  many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your
+  affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be
+  interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought
+  that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not
+  suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am
+  deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding
+  you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,
+  one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual
+  carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous
+  imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,
+  perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where
+  you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which
+  drives all poetry from the manuscript?
+
+  But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life
+  you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose
+  mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can
+  equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that
+  no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,
+  what will you gain,--you, a young girl, brought up to be the
+  virtuous mother of a family,--if you learn to comprehend the
+  terrible agitations of a poet's life in this dreadful capital,
+  which may be defined by one sentence,--the hell in which men love.
+
+  If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl
+  thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and
+  write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of
+  degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one
+  of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?
+  Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within
+  you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,
+  alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too
+  much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
+  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,
+  tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.
+
+  But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you
+  have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious
+  ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet
+  of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what
+  every pure young girl should be,--a good woman, the virtuous
+  mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can
+  make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound
+  a woman's proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no
+  experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before
+  she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,
+  to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such
+  qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.
+
+  Hear the whole truth,--do I not owe it to you in return for your
+  intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great
+  renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man
+  to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore
+  poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He
+  becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we
+  say: "I thought her far more lovely." She has not warranted the
+  portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter,--the
+  fairy whose name is Imagination.
+
+  Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a
+  sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the
+  burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears
+  them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now
+  when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will
+  suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a
+  distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining
+  summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world
+  of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once
+  admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.
+
+  I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised
+  entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can
+  take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing
+  from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an
+  unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.
+
+  Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all
+  women, even those who are disguised and masked.
+
+So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset
+above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had
+postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household
+slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an
+imagination on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by
+anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one,--fancying
+all things, except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous
+forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves
+life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her
+candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep?
+
+All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently
+got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air.
+The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness
+of the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like
+a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. "Ah, there is the
+poet!" thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter
+reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the
+quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied
+the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing
+the wheezing voice of the outer world.
+
+"He is right, and I am wrong," she said to herself. "But who could
+ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find
+nothing but one of Moliere's old men?"
+
+When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, "flagrante delicto,"
+she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the
+object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed
+and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire
+to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some
+fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this
+child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been
+misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows, and
+more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was
+suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She
+had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of
+Doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight
+to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a
+letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates
+in the hearts of young girls.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VIII
+
+                           BLADE TO BLADE
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  Monsieur,--You are certainly a great poet, and you are something
+  more,--an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a
+  young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you
+  enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following
+  question?
+
+  Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine,
+  --would your ideas, your language have been the same,--had some
+  one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.
+  d'Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a
+  master?
+
+  Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with
+  yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing
+  that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your
+  confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an
+  answer to your first letter.
+
+  Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do
+  homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to
+  remain always,
+
+Your humble servant,
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some
+little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like
+a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of
+the compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have
+settled the matter in a single phrase, "The girl is a little hussy."
+But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put
+him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to
+awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor,
+Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several
+ways energetically.
+
+"Ah, my dear Ernest," said Truth, "you never would have read that
+lesson to a rich heiress. No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste
+to Havre to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have
+been very unhappy indeed at her preference for genius; and if you
+could have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her
+affections, Mademoiselle d'Este would have been a divinity."
+
+"What?" cried Justice, "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you
+penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom
+you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism
+of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never
+marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl.
+What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who
+revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet
+replies with a blow at her heart!"
+
+"Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she
+has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of
+self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an
+answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the
+honest expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart
+and purge it of its meannesses. What would Moliere's Alceste say?"
+
+And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked
+so slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an
+hour in reaching the boulevard des Capucines. Then he followed the
+quays, which led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time
+close to the Saint-Chapelle. Instead of beginning on the accounts as
+he should have done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities.
+
+"One thing is evident," he said to himself; "she hasn't six millions;
+but that's not the point--"
+
+Six days later, Modeste received the following letter:
+
+  Mademoiselle,--You are not a D'Este. The name is a feigned one to
+  conceal your own. Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a
+  person who is untruthful about herself? Question for question: Are
+  you of an illustrious family? or a noble family? or a middle-class
+  family? Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change; they are
+  one: but obligations vary in the different states of life. Just as
+  the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which
+  we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position.
+  The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in a general, and
+  vice-versa. Observances are not alike in all cases. They are not
+  the same for the gleaner in the field, for the girl who sews at
+  fifteen sous a day, for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for
+  the young bourgoise, for the child of a rich merchant, for the
+  heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Este. A
+  king must not stoop to pick up a piece of gold, but a laborer
+  ought to retrace his steps to find ten sous; though both are
+  equally bound to obey the laws of economy. A daughter of Este, who
+  is worth six millions, has the right to wear a broad-brimmed hat
+  and plume, to flourish her whip, press the flanks of her barb, and
+  ride like an amazon decked in gold lace, with a lackey behind her,
+  into the presence of a poet and say: "I love poetry; and I would
+  fain expiate Leonora's cruelty to Tasso!" but a daughter of the
+  people would cover herself with ridicule by imitating her. To what
+  class do you belong? Answer sincerely, and I will answer the
+  question you have put to me.
+
+  As I have not the honor of knowing you personally, and yet am
+  bound to you, in a measure, by the ties of poetic communion, I am
+  unwilling to offer any commonplace compliments. Perhaps you have
+  already won a malicious victory by thus embarrassing a maker of
+  books.
+
+The young man was certainly not wanting in the sort of shrewdness
+which is permissible to a man of honor. By return courier he received
+an answer:--
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--You grow more and more sensible, my dear
+  poet. My father is a count. The chief glory of our house was a
+  cardinal, in the days when cardinals walked the earth by the side
+  of kings. I am the last of our family, which ends in me; but I
+  have the necessary quarterings to make my entry into any court or
+  chapter-house in Europe. We are quite the equals of the Canalis.
+  You will be so kind as to excuse me from sending you our arms.
+
+  Endeavor to answer me as truthfully as I have now answered you. I
+  await your response to know if I can then sign myself as I do now,
+
+Your servant,       O. d'Este M.
+
+
+"The little mischief! how she abuses her privileges," cried La Briere;
+"but isn't she frank!"
+
+No young man can be four years private secretary to a cabinet
+minister, and live in Paris and observe the carrying on of many
+intrigues, with perfect impunity; in fact, the purest soul is more or
+less intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of the imperial city. Happy
+in the thought that he was not Canalis, our young secretary engaged a
+place in the mail-coach for Havre, after writing a letter in which he
+announced that the promised answer would be sent a few days later,
+--excusing the delay on the ground of the importance of the confession
+and the pressure of his duties at the ministry.
+
+He took care to get from the director-general of the post-office a
+note to the postmaster at Havre, requesting secrecy and attention to
+his wishes. Ernest was thus enabled to see Francoise Cochet when she
+came for the letters, and to follow her without exciting observation.
+Guided by her, he reached Ingouville and saw Modeste Mignon at the
+window of the Chalet.
+
+"Well, Francoise?" he heard the young girl say, to which the maid
+responded,--
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle, I have one."
+
+Struck by the girl's great beauty, Ernest retraced his steps and asked
+a man on the street the name of the owner of that magnificent estate.
+
+"That?" said the man, nodding to the villa.
+
+"Yes, my friend."
+
+"Oh, that belongs to Monsieur Vilquin, the richest shipping merchant
+in Havre, so rich he doesn't know what he is worth."
+
+"There is no Cardinal Vilquin that I know of in history," thought
+Ernest, as he walked back to Havre for the night mail to Paris.
+Naturally he questioned the postmaster about the Vilquin family, and
+learned that it possessed an enormous fortune. Monsieur Vilquin had a
+son and two daughters, one of whom was married to Monsieur Althor,
+junior. Prudence kept La Briere from seeming anxious about the
+Vilquins; the postmaster was already looking at him slyly.
+
+"Is there there any one staying with them at the present moment," he
+asked, "besides the family?"
+
+"The d'Herouville family is there just now. They do talk of a marriage
+between the young duke and the remaining Mademoiselle Vilquin."
+
+"Ha!" thought Ernest; "there was a celebrated Cardinal d'Herouville
+under the Valois, and a terrible marshal whom they made a duke in the
+time of Henri IV."
+
+Ernest returned to Paris having seen enough of Modeste to dream of
+her, and to think that, whether she were rich or whether she were
+poor, if she had a noble soul he would like to make her Madame de La
+Briere; and so thinking, he resolved to continue the correspondence.
+
+Ah! you poor women of France, try to remain hidden if you can; try to
+weave the least little romance about your lives in the midst of a
+civilization which posts in the public streets the hours when the
+coaches arrive and depart; which counts all letters and stamps them
+twice over, first with the hour when they are thrown into the boxes,
+and next with that of their delivery; which numbers the houses, prints
+the tax of every tenant on a metal register at the doors (after
+verifying its particulars), and will soon possess one vast register of
+every inch of its territory down to the smallest parcel of land, and
+the most insignificant features of it,--a giant work ordained by a
+giant. Try, imprudent young ladies, to escape not only the eye of the
+police, but the incessant chatter which takes place in a country town
+about the veriest trifles,--how many dishes the prefect has at his
+dessert, how many slices of melon are left at the door of some small
+householder,--which strains its ear to catch the chink of the gold a
+thrifty man lays by, and spends its evenings in calculating the
+incomes of the village and the town and the department. It was mere
+chance that enabled Modeste to escape discovery through Ernest's
+reconnoitring expedition,--a step which he already regretted; but what
+Parisian can allow himself to be the dupe of a little country girl?
+Incapable of being duped! that horrid maxim is the dissolvent of all
+noble sentiments in man.
+
+We can readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest
+young fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited,
+in which every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will
+be found to have left its trace.
+
+This is what Modeste read a few days later, as she sat by her window
+on a fine summer's day:--
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Without hypocrisy or evasion, _yes_, if I had been
+  certain that you possessed an immense fortune I should have acted
+  differently. Why? I have searched for the reason; here it is. We
+  have within us an inborn feeling, inordinately developed by social
+  life, which drives us to the pursuit and to the possession of
+  happiness. Most men confound happiness with the means that lead to
+  it; money in their eyes is the chief element of happiness. I
+  should, therefore, have endeavored to win you, prompted by that
+  social sentiment which has in all ages made wealth a religion. At
+  least, I think I should. It is not to be expected of a man still
+  young that he can have the wisdom to substitute sound sense for
+  the pleasure of the senses; within sight of a prey the brutal
+  instincts hidden in the heart of man drive him on. Instead of that
+  lesson, I should have sent you compliments and flatteries. Should
+  I have kept my own esteem in so doing? I doubt it. Mademoiselle,
+  in such a case success brings absolution; but happiness? That is
+  another thing. Should I have distrusted my wife had I won her in
+  that way? Most assuredly I should. Your advance on me would sooner
+  or later have come between us. Your husband, however grand your
+  fancy may make him, would have ended by reproaching you for having
+  abased him. You, yourself, might have come, sooner or later, to
+  despise him. The strong man forgives, but the poet whines. Such,
+  mademoiselle, is the answer which my honesty compels me to make to
+  you.
+
+  And now, listen to me. You have the triumph of forcing me to
+  reflect deeply,--first on you, whom I do not sufficiently know;
+  next, on myself, of whom I knew too little. You have had the power
+  to stir up many of the evil thoughts which crouched in my heart,
+  as in all hearts; but from them something good and generous has
+  come forth, and I salute you with my most fervent benedictions,
+  just as at sea we salute the lighthouse which shows the rocks on
+  which we were about to perish. Here is my confession, for I would
+  not lose your esteem nor my own for all the treasures of earth.
+
+  I wished to know who you are. I have just returned from Havre,
+  where I saw Francoise Cochet, and followed her to Ingouville. You
+  are as beautiful as the woman of a poet's dream; but I do not know
+  if you are Mademoiselle Vilquin concealed under Mademoiselle
+  d'Herouville, or Mademoiselle d'Herouville hidden under
+  Mademoiselle Vilquin. Though all is fair in war, I blushed at such
+  spying and stopped short in my inquiries. You have roused my
+  curiosity; forgive me for being somewhat of a woman; it is, I
+  believe, the privilege of a poet.
+
+  Now that I have laid bare my heart and allowed you to read it, you
+  will believe in the sincerity of what I am about to add. Though
+  the glimpse I had of you was all too rapid, it has sufficed to
+  modify my opinion of your conduct. You are a poet and a poem, even
+  more than you are a woman. Yes, there is in you something more
+  precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of
+  fancy. The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary
+  young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect
+  if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you. Among the
+  crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet
+  to make up a generation there are exceptional souls. If your
+  letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which
+  conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a
+  lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life
+  of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that
+  you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations
+  of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus
+  the ordinary trammels of your sex,--then, assuredly, you are an
+  exception. The law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd
+  is too limited for you. But in that case, the remark in my first
+  letter returns in greater force,--you have done too much or not
+  enough.
+
+  Accept once more my thanks for the service you have rendered me,
+  that of compelling me to sound my heart. You have corrected in me
+  the false idea, only too common in France, that marriage should be
+  a means of fortune. While I struggled with my conscience a sacred
+  voice spoke to me. I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself, and
+  not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my
+  life. I have also reproached myself for the blamable curiosity you
+  have excited in me. You have not six millions. There is no
+  concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such
+  a fortune; you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds
+  of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses,
+  and who have already sent one, the grand equerry, the young duke,
+  among the Vilquins. Therefore, believe me, the sentiments I have
+  now expressed are fixed in my mind as a rule of life, from which I
+  have abstracted all influences of romance or of actual fact. Prove
+  to me, therefore, that you have one of those souls which may be
+  forgiven for its disobedience to the common law, by perceiving and
+  comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my
+  first letter. If you are destined to a middle-class life, obey the
+  iron law which holds society together. Lifted in mind above other
+  women, I admire you; but if you seek to obey an impulse which you
+  ought to repress, I pity you. The all-wise moral of that great
+  domestic epic "Clarissa Harlowe" is that legitimate and honorable
+  love led the poor victim to her ruin because it was conceived,
+  developed, and pursued beyond the boundaries of family restraint.
+  The family, however cruel and even foolish it may be, is in the
+  right against the Lovelaces. The family is Society. Believe me,
+  the glory of a young girl, of a woman, must always be that of
+  repressing her most ardent impulses within the narrow sphere of
+  conventions. If I had a daughter able to become a Madame de Stael
+  I should wish her dead at fifteen. Can you imagine a daughter of
+  yours flaunting on the stage of fame, exhibiting herself to win
+  the plaudits of a crowd, and not suffer anguish at the thought? No
+  matter to what heights a woman can rise by the inward poetry of
+  her soul, she must sacrifice the outer signs of superiority on the
+  altar of her home. Her impulse, her genius, her aspirations toward
+  Good, the whole poem of a young girl's being, should belong to the
+  man she accepts and the children whom she brings into the world. I
+  think I perceive in you a secret desire to widen the narrow circle
+  of the life to which all women are condemned, and to put love and
+  passion into marriage. Ah! it is a lovely dream! it is not
+  impossible; it is difficult, but if realized, may it not be to the
+  despair of souls--forgive me the hackneyed word--"incompris"?
+
+  If you seek a platonic friendship it will be to your sorrow in
+  after years. If your letter was a jest, discontinue it. Perhaps
+  this little romance is to end here--is it? It has not been without
+  fruit. My sense of duty is aroused, and you, on your side, will
+  have learned something of Society. Turn your thoughts to real
+  life; throw the enthusiasms you have culled from literature into
+  the virtues of your sex.
+
+  Adieu, mademoiselle. Do me the honor to grant me your esteem.
+  Having seen you, or one whom I believe to be you, I have known
+  that your letter was simply natural; a flower so lovely turns to
+  the sun--of poetry. Yes, love poetry as you love flowers, music,
+  the grandeur of the sea, the beauties of nature; love them as an
+  adornment of the soul, but remember what I have had the honor of
+  telling you as to the nature of poets. Be cautious not to marry,
+  as you say, a dunce, but seek the partner whom God has made for
+  you. There are souls, believe me, who are fit to appreciate you,
+  and to make you happy. If I were rich, if you were poor, I would
+  lay my heart and my fortunes at your feet; for I believe your soul
+  to be full of riches and of loyalty; to you I could confide my
+  life and my honor in absolute security.
+
+  Once more, adieu, adieu, fairest daughter of Eve the fair.
+
+The reading of this letter, swallowed like a drop of water in the
+desert, lifted the mountain which weighed heavily on Modeste's heart:
+then she saw the mistake she had made in arranging her plan, and
+repaired it by giving Francoise some envelopes directed to herself, in
+which the maid could put the letters which came from Paris and drop
+them again into the box. Modeste resolved to receive the postman
+herself on the steps of the Chalet at the hour when he made his
+delivery.
+
+As to the feelings that this reply, in which the noble heart of poor
+La Briere beat beneath the brilliant phantom of Canalis, excited in
+Modeste, they were as multifarious and confused as the waves which
+rushed to die along the shore while with her eyes fixed on the wide
+ocean she gave herself up to the joy of having (if we dare say so)
+harpooned an angelic soul in the Parisian Gulf, of having divined that
+hearts of price might still be found in harmony with genius, and,
+above all, for having followed the magic voice of intuition.
+
+A vast interest was now about to animate her life. The wires of her
+cage were broken: the bolts and bars of the pretty Chalet--where were
+they? Her thoughts took wings.
+
+"Oh, father!" she cried, looking out to the horizon. "Come back and
+make us rich and happy."
+
+The answer which Ernest de La Briere received some five days later
+will tell the reader more than any elaborate disquisition of ours.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                      THE POWER OF THE UNSEEN
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  My friend,--Suffer me to give you that name,--you have delighted
+  me; I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the
+  first--oh, may it not be the last! Who but a poet could have
+  excused and understood a young girl so delicately?
+
+  I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines
+  of your letter. And first, let me say that most fortunately you do
+  not know me. I can joyfully assure you than I am neither that
+  hideous Mademoiselle Vilquin nor the very noble and withered
+  Mademoiselle d'Herouville who floats between twenty and forty
+  years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The
+  Cardinal d'Herouville flourished in the history of the Church at
+  least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only
+  family glory,--for I take no account of lieutenant-generals, and
+  abbes who write trumpery little verses.
+
+  Moreover, I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is
+  not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that
+  chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from
+  Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a
+  Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am
+  noble on my father's and on my mother's side. On my mother's I
+  derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short, my
+  precautions are well taken. It is not in any man's power, nor even
+  in the power of the law, to unmask my incognito. I shall remain
+  veiled, unknown.
+
+  As to my person and as to my "belongings," as the Normans say,
+  make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl
+  (ignorantly happy) on whom your eyes chanced to light during your
+  visit to Havre; and I do not call myself poverty-stricken,
+  although ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks. I
+  have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her
+  millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even on
+  a wager, to reach me. Alas! though free as air, I am watched and
+  guarded,--by myself, in the first place, and secondly, by people
+  of nerve and courage who would not hesitate to put a knife in your
+  heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat. I do not say this to
+  excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity; I believe I have
+  no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me.
+
+  I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged, of
+  your first sermon.
+
+  Will you have a confession? I said to myself when I saw you so
+  distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations
+  bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had
+  already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged
+  you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh!
+  you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but
+  I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are,
+  and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered
+  with the "Flowers of my Heart" in one or more volumes. And,
+  finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word "Come!"
+  you will not find--you know it now--an old maid, no, nor a poor
+  and ugly one.
+
+  Ah! my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to
+  Havre! You have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God
+  alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough,
+  and trusting enough, and perspicacious enough to come--having
+  faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the
+  depths of my heart--to come to our first meeting with the
+  simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the
+  innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my
+  treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,
+  there is always a man within a poet.
+
+  Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who
+  cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and
+  wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d'Este received
+  your pedantic lesson she said to herself: "No, dear poet, my first
+  letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the
+  highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a
+  net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock
+  above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught."
+
+  All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval.
+  The man who is able to please me, and of whom I believe myself
+  worthy, will have my heart and my life,--with the consent of my
+  parents, for I will neither grieve them, nor take them unawares:
+  happily, I am certain of reigning over them; and, besides, they
+  are wholly without prejudice. Indeed, in every way, I feel myself
+  protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the
+  fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the
+  boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a
+  treasure,--not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if
+  need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with
+  armor of proof on which is engraved the word "Disdain." I have the
+  deepest horror of all that is calculating,--of all that is not
+  pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,
+  the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart
+  of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various
+  things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about
+  Society and social life.
+
+  For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why
+  seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,
+  but your mind, your heart I _know_; they please me, and I feel an
+  infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius
+  for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be
+  wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a
+  precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You
+  will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl's
+  thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering
+  to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good
+  fortune of the soul,--the honest confidences of an honest girl.
+  Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in
+  her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters
+  warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await
+  you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the
+  castle, the palace--I don't know yet what sort of bower it will
+  be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be
+  possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and
+  that Mademoiselle d'Este has a complying disposition. Has she not
+  left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the
+  salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high
+  emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
+  No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me
+  when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
+  have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear
+  friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have
+  known through the experience of another all the horrors and the
+  delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can
+  contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have
+  no illusions; but I have something better, something real,--I have
+  beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
+
+  Whoever I marry--provided I choose him for myself--may sleep in
+  peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his
+  return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
+  and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he
+  has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
+  follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
+  divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
+  should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
+  life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
+  woman be who thwarts the man she loves?--an illness, a disease,
+  not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
+  a pleasure.
+
+  But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
+  Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
+  expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
+  life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
+  possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
+  women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
+  no longer a chimera.
+
+  Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
+  reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
+  fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"--ah! with
+  what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
+  your secret soul.
+
+  Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
+  that you are her solitary thought,--without a rival except in her
+  father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
+  these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
+  yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
+  that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will
+  suffice for the happiness of your
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary,
+when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more
+than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is
+writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a
+woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?"
+
+Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen
+is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that
+sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with
+fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an
+adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain
+torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this
+charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the
+blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much
+mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere
+allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent;
+and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and
+carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal
+itself through pique.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in
+  the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him
+  if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless
+  regrets,--showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it
+  only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
+  I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you
+  have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
+  can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
+  such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
+  so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
+  first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
+  my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
+  the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
+  little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
+  remonstrances.
+
+  Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
+  true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
+  insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the
+  expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
+  general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful
+  as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
+  could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
+  intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
+  heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
+  to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
+  at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
+  harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
+  in passing, is very rare.
+
+  The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
+  which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
+  flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
+  every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
+  literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
+  But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
+  your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
+  genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
+  not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social
+  woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like
+  circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt
+  only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,--sickly,
+  irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold
+  more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of
+  character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In
+  exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The
+  dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The
+  compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your
+  projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,
+  like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the
+  rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her
+  religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
+  Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship
+  with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was
+  the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was
+  younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us
+  admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a
+  man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously
+  worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched
+  by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,
+  when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away
+  from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,--let us admit, I
+  say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the
+  glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of
+  our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the
+  picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of
+  poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed
+  verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
+  disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am
+  still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
+  The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me
+  sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very
+  ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other
+  empty-headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not
+  roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days,
+  of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do
+  I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil
+  uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are
+  worth far more than I,--D'Arthez, for instance.
+
+  Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to
+  these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the
+  happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been
+  to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine
+  for  a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode
+  of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might
+  conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which
+  light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their
+  duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end
+  our tale in the common vulgar way,--marriage, a household,
+  children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!--could it be?
+  Therefore, adieu.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER X
+
+                       THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  My Friend,--Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But
+  perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to
+  each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and
+  asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the
+  answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of
+  Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not
+  remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most
+  lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that
+  of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,--happy to old age. Ah!
+  friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist
+  as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating
+  with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in
+  himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to
+  find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go
+  into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in
+  Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has
+  deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has
+  inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is
+  something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian
+  coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called
+  men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with
+  the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to
+  cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle
+  fragrance can never fail,--it is eternal.
+
+  Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or
+  commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude,
+  I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of
+  Lord Byron's many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
+  You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you
+  shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of
+  which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the
+  roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak,
+  and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and
+  see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty,
+  intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the
+  vulgarities of life! it is yours--yours, before any eye has
+  blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my
+  thoughts,--all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my
+  heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If
+  you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can
+  live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your
+  sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your
+  friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
+  have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my
+  future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks
+  not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a
+  poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of
+  his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden--so
+  devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you--is Friendship,
+  pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who
+  listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of
+  the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked
+  with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not
+  find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile
+  alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be
+  any the worse if Mademoiselle d'Este does not give it two or three
+  sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As
+  for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a
+  mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in
+  the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my
+  thoughts and all my earthly efforts.
+
+  I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
+  am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never
+  belong to any ninny just because he is the son of a peer of
+  France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day,
+  nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the
+  household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty
+  times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My
+  father adores my wishes; he will never oppose them. If I please my
+  poet, and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall
+  be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune.
+  I am an eaglet; and you will see it in my eyes.
+
+  I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I will put its
+  substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to
+  you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by
+  love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. Ah!
+  my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to
+  us through the first exercise of my will: listen to its
+  argument:--
+
+  A young girl with a lively imagination, locked up in a tower, is
+  weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only
+  are allowed to rove. She invents a way to loosen her bars; she
+  jumps from the casement; she scales the park wall; she frolics
+  along the neighbor's sward--it is the Everlasting comedy. Well,
+  that young girl is my soul, the neighbor's park is your genius. Is
+  it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not
+  complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to
+  my poet to answer.
+
+  But does the lofty reasoner after the fashion of Moliere want
+  still better reasons? Well, here they are. My dear Geronte,
+  marriages are usually made in defiance of common-sense. Parents
+  make inquiries about a young man. If the Leander--who is supplied
+  by some friend, or caught in a ball-room--is not a thief, and has
+  no visible rent in his reputation, if he has the necessary
+  fortune, if he comes from a college or a law-school and so fulfils
+  the popular ideas of education, and if he wears his clothes with a
+  gentlemanly air, he is allowed to meet the young lady, whose
+  mother has ordered her to guard her tongue, to let no sign of her
+  heart or soul appear on her face, which must wear the smile of a
+  danseuse finishing a pirouette. These commands are coupled with
+  instructions as to the danger of revealing her real character, and
+  the additional advice of not seeming alarmingly well educated. If
+  the settlements have all been agreed upon, the parents are
+  good-natured enough to let the pair see each other for a few
+  moments; they are allowed to talk or walk together, but always
+  without the slightest freedom, and knowing that they are bound by
+  rigid rules. The man is as much dressed up in soul as he is in body,
+  and so is the young girl. This pitiable comedy, mixed with bouquets,
+  jewels, and theatre-parties is called "paying your addresses." It
+  revolts me: I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a
+  previous and long marriage of souls. A young girl, a woman, has
+  throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second
+  sight, and experience are necessary to her. She plays her liberty,
+  her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice; she risks
+  her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator. I have the right,
+  the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as
+  did my mother, who, won by beauty and led by instinct, married the
+  most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men. I know
+  that you are free, a poet, and noble-looking. Be sure that I
+  should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo who was
+  already married. If my mother was won by beauty, which is perhaps
+  the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit
+  and the form united? Shall I not know you better by studying you
+  in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience
+  of "receiving your addresses"? This is the question, as Hamlet
+  says.
+
+  But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not
+  binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and
+  every illusion its to-morrow. That is why there are so many
+  partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of
+  love lies in two things,--suffering and happiness. When, after
+  passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown
+  each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when
+  they have really observed each other's character, then they may go
+  to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that
+  our little drama thus begun was to have no future? In any case
+  shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence?
+
+  I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart,
+
+Your handmaiden,
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+  To Mademoiselle O. d'Este M.,--You are a witch, a spirit, and I
+  love you! Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls?
+  Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with
+  the follies which are you able to make a poet commit. If so, you
+  have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit
+  of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a
+  Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future
+  depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of
+  an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will
+  touch you,--if you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety
+  enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can
+  personally please you. If your reply is favorable I change my
+  life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the
+  folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown,
+  is what you dream it to be,--a fusion of feelings, a perfect
+  accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God
+  does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round
+  of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of
+  heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say
+  that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good,
+  the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the
+  entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble
+  intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to
+  fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar?--for
+  to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly
+  on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.
+
+  I cannot speak to you any more of myself; not of my past life, nor
+  of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side,
+  filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed--an
+  effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word
+  "sacrifice." You have already rendered me forgetful, if not
+  ungrateful; does that satisfy you? Oh, speak! Say to me one word,
+  and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de
+  Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully.
+  Our life will be, for me at least, that "felicity untroubled"
+  which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,--a poem far
+  superior to his Inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in
+  the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of
+  a dreamed existence; it is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the
+  power to love, and to love endlessly,--to march to the grave with
+  gentle slowness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and
+  with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls. Yes, I dare to
+  face our mutual old age, to see ourselves with whitening heads,
+  like the venerable historian of Italy, inspired always with the
+  same affection but transformed in soul by our life's seasons. Hear
+  me, I can no longer be your friend only. Though Chrysale, Geronte,
+  and Argante re-live, you say, in me, I am not yet old enough to
+  drink from the cup held to my lips by the sweet hands of a veiled
+  woman without a passionate desire to tear off the domino and the
+  mask and see the face. Either write me no more, or give me hope.
+  Let me see you, or let me go. Must I bid you adieu? Will you
+  permit me to sign myself,
+
+Your Friend?
+
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--What flattery! with what rapidity is the
+  grave Anselme transformed into a handsome Leander! To what must I
+  attribute such a change? to this black which I put upon this
+  white? to these ideas which are to the flowers of my soul what a
+  rose drawn in charcoal is to the roses in the garden? Or is it to
+  a recollection of the young girl whom you took for me, and who is
+  personally as like me as a waiting-woman is like her mistress?
+  Have we changed roles? Have I the sense? have you the fancy? But a
+  truce with jesting.
+
+  Your letter has made me know the elating pleasures of the soul;
+  the first that I have known outside of my family affections. What,
+  says a poet, are the ties of blood which are so strong in ordinary
+  minds, compared to those divinely forged within us by mysterious
+  sympathies? Let me thank you--no, we must not thank each other for
+  such things--but God bless you for the happiness you have given
+  me; be happy in the joy you have shed into my soul. You explain to
+  me some of the apparent injustices in social life. There is
+  something, I know not what, so dazzling, so virile in glory, that
+  it belongs only to man; God forbids us women to wear its halo, but
+  he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes
+  the brow scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and
+  you have now confirmed it.
+
+  Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of
+  inexpressible sweetness; a sort of peace, tender and divine, gives
+  me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction.
+  I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to
+  my Southern sunsets, full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fetes
+  and ardent poems. Well, after reading your letter, so full of
+  feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my
+  celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature,
+  and fancy that I am destined to die for one I love. One of your
+  poems, "The Maiden's Song," paints these delicious moments, when
+  gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need; it is one of my
+  favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one?--well
+  then, I think you worthy to be _me_!
+
+  Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I
+  have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity,
+  your projects; but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy
+  your wishes. Hear me, dear; the mystery in which I am shrouded
+  allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my
+  heart. Hear me: if we once meet, adieu to our mutual
+  comprehension! Will you make a compact with me? Was the first
+  disadvantageous to you? But remember it won you my esteem, and it
+  is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lined throughout
+  with esteem. Here is the compact: write me your life in a few
+  words; then tell me what you do in Paris, day by day, with no
+  reservations, and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well,
+  having done that, I will take a step myself--I will see you, I
+  promise you that. And it is a great deal.
+
+  This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure; no gallantry, as you men
+  say, can come of it, I warn you frankly. It involves my life, and
+  more than that,--something that causes me remorse for the many
+  thoughts that fly to you in flocks--it involves my father's and my
+  mother's life. I adore them, and my choice must please them; they
+  must find a son in you.
+
+  Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to
+  whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding
+  their amiability,--how far can they bend under a family yoke, and
+  put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated
+  upon. Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!
+  Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way;
+  and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor
+  the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my
+  long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you
+  have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which
+  they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in
+  their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions
+  of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself,
+  "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit
+  for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you
+  tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were
+  the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared
+  a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you
+  perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to
+  escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for
+  the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither
+  Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any
+  inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And
+  this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their
+  blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The
+  visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their
+  results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who
+  has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to
+  his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates
+  all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not
+  perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is
+  so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to
+  bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what
+  sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the
+  life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering
+  his personal life, Moliere's comedy is horrible.
+
+  The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you
+  in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found
+  self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my
+  best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I
+  should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was
+  sixteen. What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that
+  fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in
+  my heart was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do
+  you know what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the
+  recesses of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said,
+  "Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,--marry
+  me to whom you please." And the man might have been a notary,
+  banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as
+  the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without
+  two ideas,--he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in
+  me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded
+  in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have
+  revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of
+  the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting
+  lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
+  See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia,
+  breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a
+  curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have
+  taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight
+  of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a
+  bureau-drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor
+  girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,--but ah! I have _you_, I
+  believe in _you_, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts
+  and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes--see how far
+  my frankness leads me--I wish I were in the middle of the book we
+  are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments,
+  such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by
+  reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,--if
+  indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.
+
+  If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
+  fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the
+  dreadful word "folly!" might escape you, and I should be cruelly
+  punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring
+  of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years
+  that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by
+  charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
+  the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
+  into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
+  with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
+  outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
+  take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for
+  a few weeks.
+
+  Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
+  mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
+  little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
+  hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
+  departed for the Crusades, "God wills it."
+
+  Ah! but you will cry out, "What a chatterbox!" All the people
+  round me say, on the contrary, "Mademoiselle is very taciturn."
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+                    WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE
+
+The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom
+the author of the "Comedy of Human Life" obtained them; but their
+interest in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may
+not be shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the
+battle. The respect due to the majority in every nation under a
+constitutional government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven
+other letters exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of
+September. If, later on, some flattering majority should arise to
+claim them, let us hope that we can then find means to insert them in
+their proper place.
+
+Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable,
+the truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves
+free play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more
+beautiful than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by
+a sense of the communion of two free souls. Ernest's whole life was
+now wrapped up in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what
+banknotes are to a miser; while in Modeste's soul a deep love took the
+place of her delight in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite
+of distance, its mainspring. Ernest's heart was the complement of
+Canalis's glory. Alas! it often takes two men to make a perfect lover,
+just as in literature we compose a type by collecting the
+peculiarities of several similar characters. How many a time a woman
+has been heard to say in her own salon after close and intimate
+conversations:--
+
+"Such a one is my ideal as to soul, and I love the other who is only a
+dream of the senses."
+
+The last letter written by Modeste, which here follows, gives us a
+glimpse of the enchanted isle to which the meanderings of this
+correspondence had led the two lovers.
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Be at Havre next Sunday; go to church;
+  after the morning service, walk once or twice round the nave, and
+  go out without speaking to any one; but wear a white rose in your
+  button-hole. Then return to Paris, where you shall receive an
+  answer. I warn you that this answer will not be what you wish;
+  for, as I told you, the future is not yet mine. But should I not
+  indeed be mad and foolish to say yes without having seen you? When
+  I have seen you I can say no without wounding you; I can make sure
+  that you shall not see me.
+
+This letter had been sent off the evening before the day when the
+abortive struggle between Dumay and Modeste had taken place. The happy
+girl was impatiently awaiting Sunday, when her eyes were to vindicate
+or condemn her heart and her actions,--a solemn moment in the life of
+any woman, and which three months of close communion of souls now
+rendered as romantic as the most imaginative maiden could have wished.
+Every one, except the mother, had taken this torpor of expectation for
+the calm of innocence. No matter how firmly family laws and religious
+precepts may bind, there will always be the Clarissas and the Julies,
+whose souls like flowing cups o'erlap the brim under some spiritual
+pressure. Modeste was glorious in the savage energy with which she
+repressed her exuberant youthful happiness and remained demurely
+quiet. Let us say frankly that the memory of her sister was more
+potent upon her than any social conventions; her will was iron in the
+resolve to bring no grief upon her father and her mother. But what
+tumultuous heavings were within her breast! no wonder that a mother
+guessed them.
+
+On the following day Modeste and Madame Dumay took Madame Mignon about
+mid-day to a seat in the sun among the flowers. The blind woman turned
+her wan and blighted face toward the ocean; she inhaled the odors of
+the sea and took the hand of her daughter who remained beside her. The
+mother hesitated between forgiveness and remonstrance ere she put the
+important question; for she comprehended the girl's love and
+recognized, as the pretended Canalis had done, that Modeste was
+exceptional in nature.
+
+"God grant that your father return in time! If he delays much longer
+he will find none but you to love him. Modeste, promise me once more
+never to leave him," she said in a fond maternal tone.
+
+Modeste lifted her mother's hands to her lips and kissed them gently,
+replying: "Need I say it again?"
+
+"Ah, my child! I did this thing myself. I left my father to follow my
+husband; and yet my father was all alone; I was all the child he had.
+Is that why God has so punished me? What I ask of you is to marry as
+your father wishes, to cherish him in your heart, not to sacrifice him
+to your own happiness, but to make him the centre of your home. Before
+losing my sight, I wrote him all my wishes, and I know he will execute
+them. I enjoined him to keep his property intact and in his own hands;
+not that I distrust you, my Modeste, for a moment, but who can be sure
+of a son-in-law? Ah! my daughter, look at me; was I reasonable? One
+glance of the eye decided my life. Beauty, so often deceitful, in my
+case spoke true; but even were it the same with you, my poor child,
+swear to me that you will let your father inquire into the character,
+the habits, the heart, and the previous life of the man you
+distinguish with your love--if, by chance, there is such a man."
+
+"I will never marry without the consent of my father," answered
+Modeste.
+
+"You see, my darling," said Madame Mignon after a long pause, "that if
+I am dying by inches through Bettina's wrong-doing, your father would
+not survive yours, no, not for a moment. I know him; he would put a
+pistol to his head,--there could be no life, no happiness on earth for
+him."
+
+Modeste walked a few steps away from her mother, but immediately came
+back.
+
+"Why did you leave me?" demanded Madame Mignon.
+
+"You made me cry, mamma," answered Modeste.
+
+"Ah, my little darling, kiss me. You love no one here? you have no
+lover, have you?" she asked, holding Modeste on her lap, heart to
+heart.
+
+"No, my dear mamma," said the little Jesuit.
+
+"Can you swear it?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Modeste.
+
+Madame Mignon said no more; but she still doubted.
+
+"At least, if you do choose your husband, you will tell your father?"
+she resumed.
+
+"I promised that to my sister, and to you, mother. What evil do you
+think I could commit while I wear that ring upon my finger and read
+those words: 'Think of Bettina?' Poor sister!"
+
+At these words a truce of silence came between the pair; the mother's
+blighted eyes rained tears which Modeste could not check, though she
+threw herself upon her knees, and cried: "Forgive me! oh, forgive me,
+mother!"
+
+At this instant the excellent Dumay was coming up the hill of
+Ingouville on the double-quick,--a fact quite abnormal in the present
+life of the cashier.
+
+Three letters had brought ruin to the Mignons; a single letter now
+restored their fortunes. Dumay had received from a sea-captain just
+arrived from the China Seas the following letter containing the first
+news of his patron and friend, Charles Mignon:--
+
+  To Monsieur Jean Dumay:
+
+  My Dear Dumay,--I shall quickly follow, barring the chances of the
+  voyage, the vessel which carries this letter. In fact, I should
+  have taken it, but I did not wish to leave my own ship to which I
+  am accustomed.
+
+  I told you that no new was to be good news. But the first words of
+  this letter ought to make you a happy man. I have made seven
+  millions at the least. I am bringing back a large part of it in
+  indigo, one third in safe London securities, and another third in
+  good solid gold. Your remittances helped me to make the sum I had
+  settled in my own mind much sooner than I expected. I wanted two
+  millions for my daughters and a competence for myself.
+
+  I have been engaged in the opium trade with the largest houses in
+  Canton, all ten times richer than ever I was. You have no idea, in
+  Europe, what these rich East India merchants are. I went to Asia
+  Minor and purchased opium at low prices, and from thence to Canton
+  where I delivered my cargoes to the companies who control the
+  trade. My last expedition was to the Philippine Islands where I
+  exchanged opium for indigo of the first quality. In fact, I may
+  have half a million more than I stated, for I reckoned the indigo
+  at what it cost me. I have always been well in health; not the
+  slightest illness. That is the result of working for one's
+  children. Since the second year I have owned a pretty little brig
+  of seven hundred tons, called the "Mignon." She is built of oak,
+  double-planked, and copper-fastened; and all the interior fittings
+  were done to suit me. She is, in fact, an additional piece of
+  property.
+
+  A sea-life and the active habits required by my business have kept
+  me in good health. To tell you all this is the same as telling it
+  to my two daughters and my dear wife. I trust that the wretched
+  man who took away my Bettina deserted her when he heard of my
+  ruin; and that I shall find the poor lost lamb at the Chalet. My
+  three dear women and my Dumay! All four of you have been ever
+  present in my thoughts for the last three years. You are a rich
+  man, now, Dumay. Your share, outside of my own fortune, amounts to
+  five hundred and sixty thousand francs, for which I send you
+  herewith a check, which can only be paid to you in person by the
+  Mongenods, who have been duly advised from New York.
+
+  A few short months, and I shall see you all again, and all well, I
+  trust. My dear Dumay, if I write this letter to you it is because
+  I am anxious to keep my fortune a secret for the present. I
+  therefore leave to you the happiness of preparing my dear angels
+  for my return. I have had enough of commerce; and I am resolved to
+  leave Havre. My intention is to buy back the estate of La Bastie,
+  and to entail it, so as to establish an estate yielding at least a
+  hundred thousand francs a year, and then to ask the king to grant
+  that one of my sons-in-law may succeed to my name and title. You
+  know, my poor Dumay, what a terrible misfortune overtook us
+  through the fatal reputation of a large fortune,--my daughter's
+  honor was lost. I have therefore resolved that the amount of my
+  present fortune shall not be known. I shall not disembark at
+  Havre, but at Marseilles. I shall sell my indigo, and negotiate
+  for the purchase of La Bastie through the house of Mongenod in
+  Paris. I shall put my funds in the Bank of France and return to
+  the Chalet giving out that I have a considerable fortune in
+  merchandise. My daughters will be supposed to have two or three
+  hundred thousand francs. To choose which of my sons-in-law is
+  worthy to succeed to my title and estates and to live with us, is
+  now the object of my life; but both of them must be, like you and
+  me, honest, loyal, and firm men, and absolutely honorable.
+
+  My dear old fellow, I have never doubted you for a moment. We have
+  gone through wars and commerce together and now we will undertake
+  agriculture; you shall be my bailiff. You will like that, will you
+  not? And so, old friend, I leave it to your discretion to tell
+  what you think best to my wife and daughters; I rely upon your
+  prudence. In four years great changes may have taken place in
+  their characters.
+
+  Adieu, my old Dumay. Say to my daughters and to my wife that I
+  have never failed to kiss them in my thoughts morning and evening
+  since I left them. The second check for forty thousand francs
+  herewith enclosed is for my wife and children.
+
+  Till we meet.--Your colonel and friend,
+
+Charles Mignon.
+
+
+"Your father is coming," said Madame Mignon to her daughter.
+
+"What makes you think so, mamma?" asked Modeste.
+
+"Nothing else could make Dumay hurry himself."
+
+"Victory! victory!" cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the
+garden gate. "Madame, the colonel has not been ill a moment; he is
+coming back--coming back on the 'Mignon,' a fine ship of his own,
+which together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine
+hundred thousand francs. But he requires secrecy from all of us; his
+heart is still wrung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl."
+
+"He has still to learn her death," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right, to the rapacity
+of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the
+lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to
+any one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle,"
+he whispered in Modeste's ear, "write to your father and tell him of
+his loss and also the terrible results on your mother's health and
+eyesight; prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to
+get the letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will
+have to pass through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter; you
+have plenty of time. I will take the letter on Monday; Monday I shall
+probably go to Paris."
+
+Modeste was so afraid that Canalis and Dumay would meet that she
+started hastily for the house to write to her poet and put off the
+rendezvous.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Dumay, in a very humble manner and barring
+Modeste's way, "may your father find his daughter with no other
+feelings in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother
+before he was obliged to leave her."
+
+"I have sworn to myself, to my sister, and to my mother to be the joy,
+the consolation, and the glory of my father, and _I shall keep my
+oath_!" replied Modeste with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumay.
+"Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father's return with
+insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl's heart from beating
+--you don't want me to be a mummy, do you?" she said. "My hand belongs
+to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my father and
+my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, monsieur?"
+
+"Thank you, mademoiselle; you restore me to life," said Dumay, "but
+you might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!"
+
+"Swear to me," said her mother, "that you have not engaged a word or a
+look with any young man."
+
+"I can swear that, my dear mother," said Modeste, laughing, and
+looking at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a
+mischievous girl.
+
+"She must be false indeed if you are right," cried Dumay, when Modeste
+had left them and gone into the house.
+
+"My daughter Modeste may have faults," said her mother, "but falsehood
+is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true."
+
+"Well! then let us feel easy," continued Dumay, "and believe that
+misfortune has closed his account with us."
+
+"God grant it!" answered Madame Mignon. "You will see _him_, Dumay; but
+I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy."
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XII
+
+                A DECLARATION OF LOVE,--SET TO MUSIC
+
+At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father,
+was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing
+her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much
+larger fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her
+new-found ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the
+six millions she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated
+by her two joys and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she
+seated herself at the piano, that confidant of so many young girls,
+who tell out their wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing
+them by the notes and tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his
+wife in the garden under the windows, telling her the secret of their
+own wealth, and questioning her as to her desires and her intentions.
+Madame Dumay had, like her husband, no other family than the Mignons.
+Husband and wife agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the
+Comte de La Bastie really meant to live in Provence, and to leave
+their money to whichever of Modeste's children might need it most.
+
+"Listen to Modeste," said Madame Mignon, addressing them. "None but a
+girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music."
+
+Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant
+lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a
+maiden's love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming
+acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently
+eat through the globe, if nothing stops it.
+
+Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting
+to music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here--albeit
+they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had
+mentioned--because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the
+inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste
+had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the
+admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too
+precise, of his measures.
+
+  THE MAIDEN'S SONG
+
+  Hear, arise! the lark is shaking
+    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
+  Sleep no more; the violet, waking,
+    Wafts her incense to the skies.
+
+  Flowers revived, their eyes unclosing,
+    See themselves in drops of dew
+  In each calyx-cup reposing,
+    Pearls of a day their mirror true.
+
+  Breeze divine, the god of roses,
+    Passed by night to bless their bloom;
+  See! for him each bud uncloses,
+    Glows, and yields its rich perfume.
+
+  Then arise! the lark is shaking
+    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
+  Nought is sleeping--Heart, awaking,
+    Lift thine incense to the skies.
+
+"It is very pretty," said Madame Dumay. "Modeste is a musician, and
+that's the whole of it."
+
+"The devil is in her!" cried the cashier, into whose heart the
+suspicion of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.
+
+"She loves," persisted Madame Mignon.
+
+By succeeding, through the undeniable testimony of the song, in making
+the cashier a sharer in her belief as to the state of Modeste's heart,
+Madame Mignon destroyed the happiness the return and the prosperity of
+his master had brought him. The poor Breton went down the hill to
+Havre and to his desk in Gobenheim's counting-room with a heavy heart;
+then, before returning to dinner, he went to see Latournelle, to tell
+his fears, and beg once more for the notary's advice and assistance.
+
+"Yes, my dear friend," said Dumay, when they parted on the steps of
+the notary's door, "I now agree with madame; she loves,--yes, I am
+sure of it; and the devil knows the rest. I am dishonored."
+
+"Don't make yourself unhappy, Dumay," answered the little notary.
+"Among us all we can surely get the better of the little puss; sooner
+or later, every girl in love betrays herself,--you may be sure of
+that. But we will talk about it this evening."
+
+Thus it happened that all those devoted to the Mignon family were
+fully as disquieted and uncertain as they were before the old soldier
+tried the experiment which he expected would be so decisive. The
+ill-success of his past efforts so stimulated Dumay's sense of duty,
+that he determined not to go to Paris to see after his own fortune as
+announced by his patron, until he had guessed the riddle of Modeste's
+heart. These friends, to whom feelings were more precious than
+interests, well knew that unless the daughter were pure and innocent,
+the father would die of grief when he came to know the death of
+Bettina and the blindness of his wife. The distress of poor Dumay made
+such an impression on the Latournelles that they even forgot their
+parting with Exupere, whom they had sent off that morning to Paris.
+During dinner, while the three were alone, Monsieur and Madame
+Latournelle and Butscha turned the problem over and over in their
+minds, and discussed every aspect of it.
+
+"If Modeste loved any one in Havre she would have shown some fear
+yesterday," said Madame Latournelle; "her lover, therefore, lives
+somewhere else."
+
+"She swore to her mother this morning," said the notary, "in presence
+of Dumay, that she had not exchanged a look or a word with any living
+soul."
+
+"Then she loves after my fashion!" exclaimed Butscha.
+
+"And how is that, my poor lad?" asked Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Madame," said the little cripple, "I love alone and afar--oh! as far
+as from here to the stars."
+
+"How do you manage it, you silly fellow?" said Madame Latournelle,
+laughing.
+
+"Ah, madame!" said Butscha, "what you call my hump is the socket of my
+wings."
+
+"So that is the explanation of your seal, is it?" cried the notary.
+
+Butscha's seal was a star, and under it the words "Fulgens, sequar,"
+--"Shining One, I follow thee,"--the motto of the house of
+Chastillonest.
+
+"A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest," said
+Butscha, as if speaking to himself; "Modeste is clever enough to fear
+she may be loved only for her beauty."
+
+Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for,
+according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish.
+The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these
+outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the
+nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal
+conditions,--where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to
+say, in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being. From this,
+forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism,
+though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the
+spiritual world. It is rare to find a deformed person who is not
+gifted with some special faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety
+perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness. Like
+instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings,
+highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as
+Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently
+concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced
+to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive. This explains
+many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs,
+deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them,
+containing elixirs and precious balms.
+
+Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With
+all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to
+die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia,
+who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to
+capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking,
+he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of
+care upon his brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all
+these watchful eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which
+he should entrap his lady. It would have to be, he thought, by some
+intercepted glance, some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon
+lays his finger on a hidden sore. That evening Gobenheim did not
+appear, and Butscha was Dumay's partner against Monsieur and Madame
+Latournelle. During the few moment's of Modeste's absence, about nine
+o'clock, to prepare for her mother's bedtime, Madame Mignon and her
+friends spoke openly to one another; but the poor clerk, depressed by
+the conviction of Modeste's love, which had now seized upon him as
+upon the rest, seemed as remote from the discussion as Gobenheim had
+been the night before.
+
+"Well, what's the matter with you, Butscha?" cried Madame Latournelle;
+"one would really think you hadn't a friend in the world."
+
+Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a
+Swedish sailor, and whose mother was dead.
+
+"I have no one in the world but you," he answered with a troubled
+voice; "and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I
+can never lose it--and I will never deserve to lose it."
+
+This answer struck the sensitive chord of true delicacy in the minds
+of all present.
+
+"We love you, Monsieur Butscha," said Madame Mignon, with much feeling
+in her voice.
+
+"I've six hundred thousand francs of my own, this day," cried Dumay,
+"and you shall be a notary and the successor of Latournelle."
+
+The American wife took the hand of the poor hunchback and pressed it.
+
+"What! you have six hundred thousand francs!" exclaimed Latournelle,
+pricking up his ears as Dumay let fall the words; "and you allow these
+ladies to live as they do! Modeste ought to have a fine horse; and why
+doesn't she continue to take lessons in music, and painting, and--"
+
+"Why, he has only had the money a few hours!" cried the little wife.
+
+"Hush!" murmured Madame Mignon.
+
+While these words were exchanged, Butscha's august mistress turned
+towards him, preparing to make a speech:--
+
+"My son," she said, "you are so surrounded by true affection that I
+never thought how my thoughtless use of that familiar phrase might be
+construed; but you must thank me for my little blunder, because it has
+served to show you what friends your noble qualities have won."
+
+"Then you must have news from Monsieur Mignon," resumed the notary.
+
+"He is on his way home," said Madame Mignon; "but let us keep the
+secret to ourselves. When my husband learns how faithful Butscha has
+been to us, how he has shown us the warmest and the most disinterested
+friendship when others have given us the cold shoulder, he will not
+let you alone provide for him, Dumay. And so, my friend," she added,
+turning her blind face toward Butscha; "you can begin at once to
+negotiate with Latournelle."
+
+"He's of legal age, twenty-five and a half years. As for me, it will
+be paying a debt, my boy, to make the purchase easy for you," said the
+notary.
+
+Butscha was kissing Madame Mignon's hand, and his face was wet with
+tears as Modeste opened the door of the salon.
+
+"What are you doing to my Black Dwarf?" she demanded. "Who is making
+him unhappy?"
+
+"Ah! Mademoiselle Mignon, do we luckless fellows, cradled in
+misfortune, ever weep for grief? They have just shown me as much
+affection as I could feel for them if they were indeed my own
+relations. I'm to be a notary; I shall be rich. Ha! ha! the poor
+Butscha may become the rich Butscha. You don't know what audacity
+there is in this abortion," he cried.
+
+With that he gave himself a resounding blow on the cavity of his chest
+and took up a position before the fireplace, after casting a glance at
+Modeste, which slipped like a ray of light between his heavy
+half-closed eyelids. He perceived, in this unexpected incident, a
+chance of interrogating the heart of his sovereign. Dumay thought for
+a moment that the clerk dared to aspire to Modeste, and he exchanged a
+rapid glance with the others, who understood him, and began to eye the
+little man with a species of terror mingled with curiosity.
+
+"I, too, have my dreams," said Butscha, not taking his eyes from
+Modeste.
+
+The young girl lowered her eyelids with a movement that was a
+revelation to the young man.
+
+"You love romance," he said, addressing her. "Let me, in this moment
+of happiness, tell you mine; and you shall tell me in return whether
+the conclusion of the tale I have invented for my life is possible. To
+me wealth would bring greater happiness than to other men; for the
+highest happiness I can imagine would be to enrich the one I loved.
+You, mademoiselle, who know so many things, tell me if it is possible
+for a man to make himself beloved independently of his person, be it
+handsome or ugly, and for his spirit only?"
+
+Modeste raised her eyes and looked at Butscha. It was a piercing and
+questioning glance; for she shared Dumay's suspicion of Butscha's
+motive.
+
+"Let me be rich, and I will seek some beautiful poor girl, abandoned
+like myself, who has suffered, who knows what misery is. I will write
+to her and console her, and be her guardian spirit; she shall read my
+heart, my soul; she shall possess by double wealth, my two wealths,
+--my gold, delicately offered, and my thought robed in all the
+splendor which the accident of birth has denied to my grotesque body.
+But I myself shall remain hidden like the cause that science seeks.
+God himself may not be glorious to the eye. Well, naturally, the
+maiden will be curious; she will wish to see me; but I shall tell her
+that I am a monster of ugliness; I shall picture myself hideous."
+
+At these words Modeste gave Butscha a glance that looked him through
+and through. If she had said aloud, "What do you know of my love?" she
+could not have been more explicit.
+
+"If I have the honor of being loved for the poem of my heart, if some
+day such love may make a woman think me only slightly deformed, I ask
+you, mademoiselle, shall I not be happier than the handsomest of men,
+--as happy as a man of genius beloved by some celestial being like
+yourself."
+
+The color which suffused the young girl's face told the cripple nearly
+all he sought to know.
+
+"Well, if that be so," he went on, "if we enrich the one we love, if
+we please the spirit and withdraw the body, is not that the way to
+make one's self beloved? At any rate it is the dream of your poor
+dwarf,--a dream of yesterday; for to-day your mother gives me the key
+to future wealth by promising me the means of buying a practice. But
+before I become another Gobenheim, I seek to know whether this dream
+could be really carried out. What do you say, mademoiselle, _you_?"
+
+Modeste was so astonished that she did not notice the question. The
+trap of the lover was much better baited than that of the soldier, for
+the poor girl was rendered speechless.
+
+"Poor Butscha!" whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband. "Do you
+think he is going mad?"
+
+"You want to realize the story of Beauty and the Beast," said Modeste
+at length; "but you forget that the Beast turned into Prince
+Charming."
+
+"Do you think so?" said the dwarf. "Now I have always thought that
+that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible,
+obliterating the form under the light of the spirit. If I were not
+loved I should stay hidden, that is all. You and yours, madame," he
+continued, addressing his mistress, "instead of having a dwarf at your
+service, will now have a life and a fortune."
+
+So saying, Butscha resumed his seat, remarking to the three
+whist-players with an assumption of calmness, "Whose deal is it?" but
+within his soul he whispered sadly to himself: "She wants to be loved
+for herself; she corresponds with some pretended great man; how far
+has it gone?"
+
+"Dear mamma, it is nearly ten o'clock," said Modeste.
+
+Madame Mignon said good-night to her friends, and went to bed.
+
+They who wish to love in secret may have Pyrenean hounds, mothers,
+Dumays, and Latournelles to spy upon them, and yet not be in any
+danger; but when it comes to a lover!--ah! that is diamond cut
+diamond, flame against flame, mind to mind, an equation whose terms
+are mutual.
+
+On Sunday morning Butscha arrived at the Chalet before Madame
+Latournelle, who always came to take Modeste to church, and he
+proceeded to blockade the house in expectation of the postman.
+
+"Have you a letter for Mademoiselle Mignon?" he said to that humble
+functionary when he appeared.
+
+"No, monsieur, none."
+
+"This house has been a good customer to the post of late," remarked
+the clerk.
+
+"You may well say that," replied the man.
+
+Modeste both heard and saw the little colloquy from her chamber
+window, where she always posted herself behind the blinds at this
+particular hour to watch for the postman. She ran downstairs, went
+into the little garden, and called in an imperative voice:--
+
+"Monsieur Butscha!"
+
+"Here am I, mademoiselle," said the cripple, reaching the gate as
+Modeste herself opened it.
+
+"Will you be good enough to tell me whether among your various titles
+to a woman's affection you count that of the shameless spying in which
+you are now engaged?" demanded the girl, endeavoring to crush her
+slave with the glance and gesture of a queen.
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle," he answered proudly. "Ah! I never expected," he
+continued in a low tone, "that the grub could be of service to a star,
+--but so it is. Would you rather that your mother and Monsieur Dumay
+and Madame Latournelle had guessed your secret than one, excluded as
+it were from life, who seeks to be to you one of those flowers that
+you cut and wear for a moment? They all know you love; but I, I alone,
+_know how_. Use me as you would a vigilant watch-dog; I will obey you,
+protect you, and never bark; neither will I condemn you. I ask only to
+be of service to you. Your father has made Dumay keeper of the
+hen-roost, take Butscha to watch outside,--poor Butscha, who doesn't
+ask for anything, not so much as a bone."
+
+"Well, I've give you a trial," said Modeste, whose strongest desire
+was to get rid of so clever a watcher. "Please go at once to all the
+hotels in Graville and in Havre, and ask if a gentleman has arrived
+from England named Monsieur Arthur--"
+
+"Listen to me, mademoiselle," said Butscha, interrupting Modeste
+respectfully. "I will go and take a walk on the seashore, for you
+don't want me to go to church to-day; that's what it is."
+
+Modeste looked at her dwarf with a perfectly stupid astonishment.
+
+"Mademoiselle, you have wrapped your face in cotton-wool and a silk
+handkerchief, but there's nothing the matter with you; and you have
+put that thick veil on your bonnet to see some one yourself without
+being seen."
+
+"Where did you acquire all that perspicacity?" cried Modeste,
+blushing.
+
+"Moreover, mademoiselle, you have not put on your corset; a cold in
+the head wouldn't oblige you to disfigure your waist and wear half a
+dozen petticoats, nor hide your hands in these old gloves, and your
+pretty feet in those hideous shoes, nor dress yourself like a
+beggar-woman, nor--"
+
+"That's enough," she said. "How am I to be certain that you will obey
+me?"
+
+"My master is obliged to go to Sainte-Adresse. He does not like it,
+but he is so truly good he won't deprive me of my Sunday; I will offer
+to go for him."
+
+"Go, and I will trust you."
+
+"You are sure I can do nothing for you in Havre?"
+
+"Nothing. Hear me, mysterious dwarf,--look," she continued, pointing
+to the cloudless sky; "can you see a single trace of that bird that
+flew by just now? No; well then, my actions are pure as the air is
+pure, and leave no stain behind them. You may reassure Dumay and the
+Latournelles, and my mother. That hand," she said, holding up a pretty
+delicate hand, with the points of the rosy fingers, through which the
+light shone, slightly turning back, "will never be given, it will
+never even be kissed by what people call a lover until my father has
+returned."
+
+"Why don't you want me in the church to-day?"
+
+"Do you venture to question me after all I have done you the honor to
+say, and to ask of you?"
+
+Butscha bowed without another word, and departed to find his master,
+in all the rapture of being taken into the service of his goddess.
+
+Half an hour later, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle came to fetch
+Modeste, who complained of a horrible toothache.
+
+"I really have not had the courage to dress myself," she said.
+
+"Well then," replied the worthy chaperone, "stay at home."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Modeste. "I would rather not. I have bundled myself up,
+and I don't think it will do me any harm to go out."
+
+And Mademoiselle Mignon marched off beside Latournelle, refusing to
+take his arm lest she should be questioned about the outward trembling
+which betrayed her inward agitation at the thought of at last seeing
+her great poet. One look, the first,--was it not about to decide her
+fate?
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XIII
+
+          A FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF MONSIEUR DE LA BRIERE
+
+Is there in the life of man a more delightful moment than that of a
+first rendezvous? Are the sensations then hidden at the bottom of our
+hearts and finding their first expression ever renewed? Can we feel
+again the nameless pleasures that we felt when, like Ernest de La
+Briere, we looked up our sharpest razors, our finest shirt, an
+irreproachable collar, and our best clothes? We deify the garments
+associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic
+fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either
+party guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away. Are not
+such things like the flower of wild fruits, bitter-sweet, grown in the
+heart of a forest, the joy of the scant sun-rays, the joy, as Canalis
+says in the "Maiden's Song," of the plant itself whose eyes unclosing
+see its own image within its breast?
+
+Such emotions, now taking place in La Briere, tend to show that, like
+other poor fellows for whom life begins in toil and care, he had never
+yet been loved. Arriving at Havre overnight, he had gone to bed at
+once, like a true coquette, to obliterate all traces of fatigue; and
+now, after taking his bath, he had put himself into a costume
+carefully adapted to show him off to the best advantage. This is,
+perhaps, the right moment to exhibit a full-length portrait of him, if
+only to justify the last letter that Modeste was still to write to
+him.
+
+Born of a good family in Toulouse, and allied by marriage to the
+minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air
+of good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and
+the habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness
+which was not pedantic,--though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of
+premature gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon
+all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the
+flesh-tints, though without color, and relieved by a small moustache
+and imperial a la Mazarin. Without this evidence of virility he might
+have resembled a young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of
+his face and the cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of
+a set of teeth, regular enough to have seemed artificial. Add to these
+womanly points a habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the
+face; as gentle, too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and
+you will readily understand how it was that the minister occasionally
+called his young secretary Mademoiselle de La Briere. The full, clear
+forehead, well framed by abundant black hair, was dreamy, and did not
+contradict the character of the face, which was altogether melancholy.
+The prominent arch of the upper eyelid, though very beautifully cut,
+overshadowed the glance of the eye, and added a physical sadness,--if
+we may so call it,--produced by the droop of the lid over the eyeball.
+This inward doubt or eclipse--which is put into language by the word
+modesty--was expressed in his whole person. Perhaps we shall be able
+to make his appearance better understood if we say that the logic of
+design required greater length in the oval of his head, more space
+between the chin, which ended abruptly, and the forehead, which was
+reduced in height by the way in which the hair grew. The face had, in
+short, a rather compressed appearance. Hard work had already drawn
+furrows between the eyebrows, which were somewhat too thick and too
+near together, like those of a jealous nature. Though La Briere was
+then slight, he belonged to the class of temperaments which begin,
+after they are thirty, to take on an unexpected amount of flesh.
+
+The young man would have seemed to a student of French history a very
+fair representative of the royal and almost inconceivable figure of
+Louis XIII.,--that historical figure of melancholy modesty without
+known cause; pallid beneath the crown; loving the dangers of war and
+the fatigues of hunting, but hating work; timid with his mistress to
+the extent of keeping away from her; so indifferent as to allow the
+head of his friend to be cut off,--a figure that nothing can explain
+but his remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a
+Catholic Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the
+undying worm which gnawed at the king's vitals was in Ernest's case
+simply distrust of himself,--the timidity of a man to whom no woman
+had ever said, "Ah, how I love thee!" and, above all, the spirit of
+self-devotion without an object. After hearing the knell of the
+monarchy in the fall of his patron's ministry, the poor fellow had
+next fallen upon a rock covered with exquisite mosses, named Canalis;
+he was, therefore, still seeking a power to love, and this
+spaniel-like search for a master gave him outwardly the air of a king
+who has met with his. This play of feeling, and a general tone of
+suffering in the young man's face made it more really beautiful than
+he was himself aware of; for he had always been annoyed to find himself
+classed by women among the "handsome disconsolate,"--a class which has
+passed out of fashion in these days, when every man seeks to blow his
+own trumpet and put himself in the advance.
+
+The self-distrustful Ernest now rested his immediate hopes on the
+fashionable clothes he intended to wear. He put on, for this sacred
+interview, where everything depended on a first impression, a pair of
+black trousers and carefully polished boots, a sulphur-colored
+waistcoat, which left to sight an exquisitely fine shirt with opal
+buttons, a black cravat, and a small blue surtout coat which seemed
+glued to his back and shoulders by some newly-invented process. The
+ribbon of the Legion of honor was in his buttonhole. He wore a
+well-fitting pair of kid gloves of the Florentine bronze color, and
+carried his cane and hat in the left hand with a gesture and air that
+was worthy of the Grand Monarch, and enabled him to show, as the
+sacred precincts required, his bare head with the light falling on his
+carefully arranged hair. He stationed himself before the service began
+in the church porch, from whence he could examine the church, and the
+Christians--more particularly the female Christians--who dipped their
+fingers in the holy water.
+
+An inward voice cried to Modeste as she entered, "It is he!" That
+surtout, and indeed the whole bearing of the young man were
+essentially Parisian; the ribbon, the gloves, the cane, the very
+perfume of his hair were not of Havre. So when La Briere turned about
+to examine the tall and imposing Madame Latournelle, the notary, and
+the bundled-up (expression sacred to women) figure of Modeste, the
+poor child, though she had carefully tutored herself for the event,
+received a violent blow on her heart when her eyes rested on this
+poetic figure, illuminated by the full light of day as it streamed
+through the open door. She could not be mistaken; a small white rose
+nearly hid the ribbon of the Legion. Would he recognize his unknown
+mistress muffled in an old bonnet with a double veil? Modeste was so
+in fear of love's clairvoyance that she began to stoop in her walk
+like an old woman.
+
+"Wife," said little Latournelle as they took their seats, "that
+gentleman does not belong to Havre."
+
+"So many strangers come here," answered his wife.
+
+"But," said the notary, "strangers never come to look at a church like
+ours, which is less than two centuries old."
+
+Ernest remained in the porch throughout the service without seeing any
+woman who realized his hopes. Modeste, on her part, could not control
+the trembling of her limbs until Mass was nearly over. She was in the
+grasp of a joy that none but she herself could depict. At last she
+heard the foot-fall of a gentleman on the pavement of the aisle. The
+service over, La Briere was making a circuit of the church, where no
+one now remained but the punctiliously pious, whom he proceeded to
+subject to a shrewd and keen analysis. Ernest noticed that a
+prayer-book shook violently in the hands of a veiled woman as he passed
+her; as she alone kept her face hidden his suspicions were aroused, and
+then confirmed by Modeste's dress, which the lover's eye now scanned
+and noted. He left the church with the Latournelles and followed them
+at a distance to the rue Royale, where he saw them enter a house
+accompanied by Modeste, whose custom it was to stay with her friends
+till the hour of vespers. After examining the little house, which was
+ornamented with scutcheons, he asked the name of the owner, and was
+told that he was Monsieur Latournelle, the chief notary in Havre. As
+Ernest lounged along the rue Royale hoping for a glimpse into the
+house, Modeste caught sight of him, and thereupon declared herself too
+ill to go to vespers. Poor Ernest thus had his trouble for his pains.
+He dared not wander about Ingouville; moreover, he made it a point of
+honor to obey orders, and he therefore went back to Paris, previously
+writing a letter which Francoise Cochet duly delivered on the morrow
+with the Havre postmark.
+
+It was the custom of Monsieur and Madame Latournelle to dine at the
+Chalet every Sunday when they brought back Modeste after vespers. So,
+as soon as the invalid felt a little better, they started for
+Ingouville, accompanied by Butscha. Once at home, the happy Modeste
+forgot her pretended illness and her disguise, and dressed herself
+charmingly, humming as she came down to dinner,--
+
+  "Nought is sleeping--Heart! awaking,
+  Lift thine incense to the skies."
+
+Butscha shuddered slightly when he caught sight of her, so changed did
+she seem to him. The wings of love were fastened to her shoulders; she
+had the air of a nymph, a Psyche; her cheeks glowed with the divine
+color of happiness.
+
+"Who wrote the words to which you have put that pretty music?" asked
+her mother.
+
+"Canalis, mamma," she answered, flushing rosy red from her throat to
+her forehead.
+
+"Canalis!" cried the dwarf, to whom the inflections of the girl's
+voice and her blush told the only thing of which he was still
+ignorant. "He, that great poet, does he write songs?"
+
+"They are only simple verses," she said, "which I have ventured to set
+to German airs."
+
+"No, no," interrupted Madame Mignon, "the music is your own, my
+daughter."
+
+Modeste, feeling that she grew more and more crimson, went off into
+the garden, calling Butscha after her.
+
+"You can do me a great service," she said. "Dumay is keeping a secret
+from my mother and me as to the fortune which my father is bringing
+back with him; and I want to know what it is. Did not Dumay send papa
+when he first went away over five hundred thousand francs? Yes. Well,
+papa is not the kind of man to stay away four years and only double
+his capital. It seems he is coming back on a ship of his own, and
+Dumay's share amounts to almost six hundred thousand francs."
+
+"There is no need to question Dumay," said Butscha. "Your father lost,
+as you know, about four millions when he went away, and he has
+doubtless recovered them. He would of course give Dumay ten per cent
+of his profits; the worthy man admitted the other day how much it was,
+and my master and I think that in that case the colonel's fortune must
+amount to six or seven millions--"
+
+"Oh, papa!" cried Modeste, crossing her hands on her breast and
+looking up to heaven, "twice you have given me life!"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle!" said Butscha, "you love a poet. That kind of man
+is more or less of a Narcissus. Will he know how to love you? A
+phrase-maker, always busy in fitting words together, must be a bore.
+Mademoiselle, a poet is no more poetry than a seed is a flower."
+
+"Butscha, I never saw so handsome a man."
+
+"Beauty is a veil which often serves to hide imperfections."
+
+"He has the most angelic heart of heaven--"
+
+"I pray God you may be right," said the dwarf, clasping his hands,
+"--and happy! That man shall have, as you have, a servant in Jean
+Butscha. I will not be notary; I shall give that up; I shall study the
+sciences."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, to train up your children, if you will deign to
+make me their tutor. But, oh! if you would only listen to some advice.
+Let me take up this matter; let me look into the life and habits of
+this man,--find out if he is kind, or bad-tempered, or gentle, if he
+commands the respect which you merit in a husband, if he is able to
+love utterly, preferring you to everything, even his own talent--"
+
+"What does that signify if I love him?"
+
+"Ah, true!" cried the dwarf.
+
+At that instant Madame Mignon was saying to her friends,--
+
+"My daughter saw the man she loves this morning."
+
+"Then it must have been that sulphur waistcoat which puzzled you so,
+Latournelle," said his wife. "The young man had a pretty white rose in
+his buttonhole."
+
+"Ah!" sighed the mother, "the sign of recognition."
+
+"And he also wore the ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor. He
+is a charming young man. But we are all deceiving ourselves; Modeste
+never raised her veil, and her clothes were huddled on like a
+beggar-woman's--"
+
+"And she said she was ill," cried the notary; "but she has taken off
+her mufflings and is just as well as she ever was."
+
+"It is incomprehensible!" said Dumay.
+
+"Not at all," said the notary; "it is now as clear as day."
+
+"My child," said Madame Mignon to Modeste, as she came into the room,
+followed by Butscha, "did you see a well-dressed young man at church
+this morning, with a white rose in his button-hole?"
+
+"I saw him," said Butscha quickly, perceiving by everybody's strained
+attention that Modeste was likely to fall into a trap. "It was
+Grindot, the famous architect, with whom the town is in treaty for the
+restoration of the church. He has just come from Paris, and I met him
+this morning examining the exterior as I was on my way to
+Sainte-Adresse."
+
+"Oh, an architect, was he? he puzzled me," said Modeste, for whom
+Butscha had thus gained time to recover herself.
+
+Dumay looked askance at Butscha. Modeste, fully warned, recovered her
+impenetrable composure. Dumay's distrust was now thoroughly aroused,
+and he resolved to go the mayor's office early in the morning and
+ascertain if the architect had really been in Havre the previous day.
+Butscha, on the other hand, was equally determined to go to Paris and
+find out something about Canalis.
+
+Gobenheim came to play whist, and by his presence subdued and
+compressed all this fermentation of feelings. Modeste awaited her
+mother's bedtime with impatience. She intended to write, but never did
+so except at night. Here is the letter which love dictated to her
+while all the world was sleeping:--
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Ah! my friend, my well-beloved! What
+  atrocious falsehoods those portraits in the shop-windows are! And
+  I, who made that horrible lithograph my joy!--I am humbled at the
+  thought of loving one so handsome. No; it is impossible that those
+  Parisian women are so stupid as not to have seen their dreams
+  fulfilled in you. You neglected! you unloved! I do not believe a
+  word of all that you have written me about your lonely and obscure
+  life, your hunger for an idol,--sought in vain until now. You have
+  been too well loved, monsieur; your brow, white and smooth as a
+  magnolia leaf, reveals it; and it is I who must be neglected,--for
+  who am I? Ah! why have you called me to life? I felt for a moment
+  as though the heavy burden of the flesh was leaving me; my soul
+  had broken the crystal which held it captive; it pervaded my whole
+  being; the cold silence of material things had ceased; all things
+  in nature had a voice and spoke to me. The old church was
+  luminous. It's arched roof, brilliant with gold and azure like
+  those of an Italian cathedral, sparkled above my head. Melodies
+  such as the angels sang to martyrs, quieting their pains, sounded
+  from the organ. The rough pavements of Havre seemed to my feet a
+  flowery mead; the sea spoke to me with a voice of sympathy, like
+  an old friend whom I had never truly understood. I saw clearly how
+  the roses in my garden had long adored me and bidden me love; they
+  lifted their heads and smiled as I came back from church. I heard
+  your name, "Melchior," chiming in the flower-bells; I saw it
+  written on the clouds. Yes, yes, I live, I am living, thanks to
+  thee,--my poet, more beautiful than that cold, conventional Lord
+  Byron, with a face as dull as the English climate. One glance of
+  thine, thine Orient glance, pierced through my double veil and
+  sent thy blood to my heart, and from thence to my head and feet.
+  Ah! that is not the life our mother gave us. A hurt to thee would
+  hurt me too at the very instant it was given,--my life exists by
+  thy thought only. I know now the purpose of the divine faculty of
+  music; the angels invented it to utter love. Ah, my Melchior, to
+  have genius and to have beauty is too much; a man should be made
+  to choose between them at his birth.
+
+  When I think of the treasures of tenderness and affection which
+  you have given me, and more especially for the last month, I ask
+  myself if I dream. No, but you hide some mystery; what woman can
+  yield you up to me and not die? Ah! jealousy has entered my heart
+  with love,--love in which I could not have believed. How could I
+  have imagined so mighty a conflagration? And now--strange and
+  inconceivable revulsion!--I would rather you were ugly.
+
+  What follies I committed after I came home! The yellow dahlias
+  reminded me of your waistcoat, the white roses were my loving
+  friends; I bowed to them with a look that belonged to you, like
+  all that is of me. The very color of the gloves, moulded to hands
+  of a gentleman, your step along the nave,--all, all, is so printed
+  on my memory that sixty years hence I shall see the veriest
+  trifles of this day of days,--the color of the atmosphere, the ray
+  of sunshine that flickered on a certain pillar; I shall hear the
+  prayer your step interrupted; I shall inhale the incense of the
+  altar; forever I shall feel above our heads the priestly hands
+  that blessed us both as you passed by me at the closing
+  benediction. The good Abbe Marcelin married us then! The
+  happiness, above that of earth, which I feel in this new world of
+  unexpected emotions can only be equalled by the joy of telling it
+  to you, of sending it back to him who poured it into my heart with
+  the lavishness of the sun itself. No more veils, no more
+  disguises, my beloved. Come back to me, oh, come back soon. With
+  joy I now unmask.
+
+  You have no doubt heard of the house of Mignon in Havre? Well, I
+  am, through an irreparable misfortune, its sole heiress. But you
+  are not to look down upon us, descendant of an Auvergne knight;
+  the arms of the Mignon de La Bastie will do no dishonor to those
+  of Canalis. We bear gules, on a bend sable four bezants or;
+  quarterly four crosses patriarchal or; a cardinal's hat as crest,
+  and the fiocchi for supports. Dear, I will be faithful to our
+  motto: "Una fides, unus Dominus!"--the true faith, and one only
+  Master.
+
+  Perhaps, my friend, you will find some irony in my name, after all
+  that I have done, and all that I herein avow. I am named Modeste.
+  Therefore I have not deceived you by signing "O. d'Este M."
+  Neither have I misled you about our fortune; it will amount, I
+  believe, to the sum which rendered you so virtuous. I know that to
+  you money is a consideration of small importance; therefore I
+  speak of it without reserve. Let me tell you how happy it makes me
+  to give freedom of action to our happiness,--to be able to say,
+  when the fancy for travel takes us, "Come, let us go in a
+  comfortable carriage, sitting side by side, without a thought of
+  money"--happy, in short, to tell the king, "I have the fortune
+  which you require in your peers." Thus Modeste Mignon can be of
+  service to you, and her gold will have the noblest of uses.
+
+  As to your servant herself,--you did see her once, at her window.
+  Yes, "the fairest daughter of Eve the fair" was indeed your
+  unknown damozel; but how little the Modeste of to-day resembles
+  her of that long past era! That one was in her shroud, this one
+  --have I made you know it?--has received from you the life of life.
+  Love, pure, and sanctioned, the love my father, now returning
+  rich and prosperous, will authorize, has raised me with its
+  powerful yet childlike hand from the grave in which I slept. You
+  have wakened me as the sun wakens the flowers. The eyes of your
+  beloved are no longer those of the little Modeste so daring in her
+  ignorance,--no, they are dimmed with the sight of happiness, and
+  the lids close over them. To-day I tremble lest I can never
+  deserve my fate. The king has come in his glory; my lord has now a
+  subject who asks pardon for the liberties she has taken, like the
+  gambler with loaded dice after cheating Monsieur de Grammont.
+
+  My cherished poet! I will be thy Mignon--happier far than the
+  Mignon of Goethe, for thou wilt leave me in mine own land,--in thy
+  heart. Just as I write this pledge of our betrothal a nightingale
+  in the Vilquin park answers for thee. Ah, tell me quick that his
+  note, so pure, so clear, so full, which fills my heart with joy
+  and love like an Annunciation, does not lie to me.
+
+  My father will pass through Paris on his way from Marseilles; the
+  house of Mongenod, with whom he corresponds, will know his
+  address. Go to him, my Melchior, tell him that you love me; but do
+  not try to tell him how I love you,--let that be forever between
+  ourselves and God. I, my dear one, am about to tell everything to
+  my mother. Her heart will justify my conduct; she will rejoice in
+  our secret poem, so romantic, human and divine in one.
+
+  You have the confession of the daughter; you must now obtain the
+  consent of the Comte de La Bastie, father of your
+
+Modeste.
+
+
+  P.S.--Above all, do not come to Havre without having first
+  obtained my father's consent. If you love me you will not fail to
+  find him on his way through Paris.
+
+
+"What are you doing, up at this hour, Mademoiselle Modeste?" said the
+voice of Dumay at her door.
+
+"Writing to my father," she answered; "did you not tell me you should
+start in the morning?"
+
+Dumay had nothing to say to that, and he went to bed, while Modeste
+wrote another long letter, this time to her father.
+
+On the morrow, Francois Cochet, terrified at seeing the Havre postmark
+on the envelope which Ernest had mailed the night before, brought her
+young mistress the following letter and took away the one which
+Modeste had written:--
+
+  To Mademoiselle O. d'Este M.,--My heart tells me that you were the
+  woman so carefully veiled and disguised, and seated between
+  Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, who have but one child, a son.
+  Ah, my love, if you have only a modest station, without
+  distinction, without importance, without money even, you do not
+  know how happy that would make me. You ought to understand me by
+  this time; why will you not tell me the truth? I am no poet,
+  --except in heart, through love, through you. Oh! what power of
+  affection there is in me to keep me here in this hotel, instead of
+  mounting to Ingouville which I can see from my windows. Will you
+  ever love me as I love you? To leave Havre in such uncertainty! Am
+  I not punished for loving you as if I had committed a crime? But I
+  obey you blindly. Let me have a letter quickly, for if you have
+  been mysterious, I have returned you mystery for mystery, and I
+  must at last throw off my disguise, show you the poet that I am,
+  and abdicate my borrowed glory.
+
+This letter made Modeste terribly uneasy. She could not get back the
+one which Francoise had carried away before she came to the last
+words, whose meaning she now sought by reading them again and again;
+but she went to her own room and wrote an answer in which she demanded
+an immediate explanation.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XIV
+
+                     MATTERS GROWN COMPLICATED
+
+During these little events other little events were going on in Havre,
+which caused Modeste to forget her present uneasiness. Dumay went down
+to Havre early in the morning, and soon discovered that no architect
+had been in town the day before. Furious at Butscha's lie, which
+revealed a conspiracy of which he was resolved to know the meaning, he
+rushed from the mayor's office to his friend Latournelle.
+
+"Where's your Master Butscha?" he demanded of the notary, when he saw
+that the clerk was not in his place.
+
+"Butscha, my dear fellow, has gone to Paris. He heard some news of his
+father this morning on the quays, from a Swedish sailor. It seems the
+father went to the Indies and served a prince, or something, and he is
+now in Paris."
+
+"Lies! it's all a trick! infamous! I'll find that damned cripple if
+I've got to go express to Paris for him," cried Dumay. "Butscha is
+deceiving us; he knows something about Modeste, and hasn't told us. If
+he meddles in this thing he shall never be a notary. I'll roll him in
+the mud from which he came, I'll--"
+
+"Come, come, my friend; never hang a man before you try him," said
+Latournelle, frightened at Dumay's rage.
+
+After stating the facts on which his suspicions were founded, Dumay
+begged Madame Latournelle to go and stay at the Chalet during his
+absence.
+
+"You will find the colonel in Paris," said the notary. "In the
+shipping news quoted this morning in the Journal of Commerce, I found
+under the head of Marseilles--here, see for yourself," he said,
+offering the paper. "'The Bettina Mignon, Captain Mignon, arrived
+October 6'; it is now the 17th, and the colonel is sure to be in
+Paris."
+
+Dumay requested Gobenheim to do without him in future, and then went
+back to the Chalet, which he reached just as Modeste was sealing her
+two letters, to her father and Canalis. Except for the address the
+letters were precisely alike both in weight and appearance. Modeste
+thought she had laid that to her father over that to her Melchior, but
+had, in fact, done exactly the reverse. This mistake, so often made in
+the little things of life, occasioned the discovery of her secret by
+Dumay and her mother. The former was talking vehemently to Madame
+Mignon in the salon, and revealing to her his fresh fears caused by
+Modeste's duplicity and Butscha's connivance.
+
+"Madame," he cried, "he is a serpent whom we have warmed in our
+bosoms; there's no place in his contorted little body for a soul!"
+
+Modeste put the letter for her father into the pocket of her apron,
+supposing it to be that for Canalis, and came downstairs with the
+letter for her lover in her hand, to see Dumay before he started for
+Paris.
+
+"What has happened to my Black Dwarf? why are you talking so loud!"
+she said, appearing at the door.
+
+"Mademoiselle, Butscha has gone to Paris, and you, no doubt, know why,
+--to carry on that affair of the little architect with the sulphur
+waistcoat, who, unluckily for the hunchback's lies, has never been
+here."
+
+Modeste was struck dumb; feeling sure that the dwarf had departed on a
+mission of inquiry as to her poet's morals, she turned pale, and sat
+down.
+
+"I'm going after him; I shall find him," continued Dumay. "Is that the
+letter for your father, mademoiselle?" he added, holding out his hand.
+"I will take it to the Mongenods. God grant the colonel and I may not
+pass each other on the road."
+
+Modeste gave him the letter. Dumay looked mechanically at the address.
+
+"'Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, No. 29'!"
+he cried out; "what does that mean?"
+
+"Ah, my daughter! that is the man you love," exclaimed Madame Mignon;
+"the stanzas you set to music were his--"
+
+"And that's his portrait that you have in a frame upstairs," added
+Dumay.
+
+"Give me back that letter, Monsieur Dumay," said Modeste, erecting
+herself like a lioness defending her cubs.
+
+"There it is, mademoiselle," he replied.
+
+Modeste put it into the bosom of her dress, and gave Dumay the one
+intended for her father.
+
+"I know what you are capable of, Dumay," she said; "and if you take
+one step against Monsieur de Canalis, I shall take another out of this
+house, to which I will never return."
+
+"You will kill your mother, mademoiselle," replied Dumay, who left the
+room and called his wife.
+
+The poor mother was indeed half-fainting,--struck to the heart by
+Modeste's words.
+
+"Good-bye, wife," said the Breton, kissing the American. "Take care of
+the mother; I go to save the daughter."
+
+He made his preparations for the journey in a few minutes, and started
+for Havre. An hour later he was travelling post to Paris, with the
+haste that nothing but passion or speculation can get out of wheels.
+
+Recovering herself under Modeste's tender care, Madame Mignon went up
+to her bedroom leaning on the arm of her daughter, to whom she said,
+as her sole reproach, when they were alone:--
+
+"My unfortunate child, see what you have done! Why did you conceal
+anything from me? Am I so harsh?"
+
+"Oh! I was just going to tell it to you comfortably," sobbed Modeste.
+
+She thereupon related everything to her mother, read her the letters
+and their answers, and shed the rose of her poem petal by petal into
+the heart of the kind German woman. When this confidence, which took
+half the day, was over, when she saw something that was almost a smile
+on the lips of the too indulgent mother, Modeste fell upon her breast
+in tears.
+
+"Oh, mother!" she said amid her sobs, "you, whose heart, all gold and
+poetry, is a chosen vessel, chosen of God to hold a sacred love, a
+single and celestial love that endures for life; you, whom I wish to
+imitate by loving no one but my husband,--you will surely understand
+what bitter tears I am now shedding. This butterfly, this Psyche of my
+thoughts, this dual soul which I have nurtured with maternal care, my
+love, my sacred love, this living mystery of mysteries--it is about to
+fall into vulgar hands, and they will tear its diaphanous wings and
+rend its veil under the miserable pretext of enlightening me, of
+discovering whether genius is as prudent as a banker, whether my
+Melchior has saved his money, or whether he has some entanglement to
+shake off; they want to find out if he is guilty to bourgeois eyes of
+youthful indiscretions,--which to the sun of our love are like the
+clouds of the dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See!
+feel my hand, it burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it."
+
+And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed,
+causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and
+Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the
+lieutenant to Paris,--to which city the logic of events compels us to
+transport our drama for a moment.
+
+Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially
+those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither
+loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the
+young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste's letter. Could
+it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his
+artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This
+flattery is the flattery supreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the
+signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it
+is the divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to
+create it by the power of an inward look,--is not that the highest
+reach of love? And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture
+of an applauded author, "At last I am beloved!" When a woman, be she
+maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, "Thou art
+handsome," the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull
+to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an
+everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived
+judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual
+testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince.
+Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter,
+full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to
+criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to
+him, "Modeste is right." He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw
+his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his
+ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:--
+
+"She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!"
+
+Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the
+peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the
+pavement.
+
+"Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes," he cried;
+"what a maddening situation I have put myself in!"
+
+La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his
+heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of
+honor. He at once resolved to find Modeste's father, if he were in
+Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious
+results of their Parisian jest. To a sensitive nature like his,
+Modeste's large fortune was in itself a determining reason. He could
+not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the
+correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a
+"dot." Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue
+Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business
+connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed
+his start in life.
+
+At the hour when La Briere was inquiring about the father of his
+beloved from the head of the house of Mongenod, and getting
+information that might be useful to him in his strange position, a
+scene was taking place in Canalis's study which the ex-lieutenant's
+hasty departure from Havre may have led the reader to foresee.
+
+Like a true soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood
+had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick
+of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,--a buffoon addicted to
+choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white
+at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and
+linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink
+than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he had tumbled from
+the moon, except when scribbling at a desk, like Butscha. But the
+seething of the Breton's heart and brain received a violent
+application of cold water when he entered the courtyard of the pretty
+house occupied by the poet and saw a groom washing a carriage, and
+also, through the windows of a handsome dining-room, a valet dressed
+like a banker, to whom the groom referred him, and who answered,
+looking the stranger over from head to foot, that Monsieur le baron
+was not visible. "There is," added the man, "a meeting of the council
+of state to-day, at which Monsieur le baron is obliged to be present."
+
+"Is this really the house of Monsieur Canalis," said Dumay, "a writer
+of poetry?"
+
+"Monsieur le baron de Canalis," replied the valet, "is the great poet
+of whom you speak; but he is also the president of the court of Claims
+attached to the ministry of foreign affairs."
+
+Dumay, who had come to box the ears of a scribbling nobody, found
+himself confronted by a high functionary of the state. The salon where
+he was told to wait offered, as a topic for his meditations, the
+insignia of the Legion of honor glittering on a black coat which the
+valet had left upon a chair. Presently his eyes were attracted by the
+beauty and brilliancy of a silver-gilt cup bearing the words "Given by
+_Madame_." Then he beheld before him, on a pedestal, a Sevres vase on
+which was engraved, "The gift of Madame la _Dauphine_."
+
+These mute admonitions brought Dumay to his senses while the valet
+went to ask his master if he would receive a person who had come from
+Havre expressly to see him,--a stranger named Dumay.
+
+"What sort of a man?" asked Canalis.
+
+"He is well-dressed, and wears the ribbon of the Legion of honor."
+
+Canalis made a sign of assent, and the valet retreated, and then
+returned and announced, "Monsieur Dumay."
+
+When he heard himself announced, when he was actually in presence of
+Canalis, in a study as gorgeous as it was elegant, with his feet on a
+carpet far handsomer than any in the house of Mignon, and when he met
+the studied glance of the poet who was playing with the tassels of a
+sumptuous dressing-gown, Dumay was so completely taken aback that he
+allowed the great poet to have the first word.
+
+"To what do I owe the honor of your visit, monsieur?"
+
+"Monsieur," began Dumay, who remained standing.
+
+"If you have a good deal to say," interrupted Canalis, "I must ask you
+to be seated."
+
+And Canalis himself plunged into an armchair a la Voltaire, crossed
+his legs, raised the upper one to the level of his eye and looked
+fixedly at Dumay, who became, to use his own martial slang,
+"bayonetted."
+
+"I am listening, monsieur," said the poet; "my time is precious,--the
+ministers are expecting me."
+
+"Monsieur," said Dumay, "I shall be brief. You have seduced--how, I do
+not know--a young lady in Havre, young, beautiful, and rich; the last
+and only hope of two noble families; and I have come to ask your
+intentions."
+
+Canalis, who had been busy during the last three months with serious
+matters of his own, and was trying to get himself made commander of
+the Legion of honor and minister to a German court, had completely
+forgotten Modeste's letter."
+
+"I!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You!" repeated Dumay.
+
+"Monsieur," answered Canalis, smiling; "I know no more of what you are
+talking about than if you had said it in Hebrew. I seduce a young
+girl! I, who--" and a superb smile crossed his features. "Come, come,
+monsieur, I'm not such a child as to steal fruit over the hedges when
+I have orchards and gardens of my own where the finest peaches ripen.
+All Paris knows where my affections are set. Very likely there may be
+some young girl in Havre full of enthusiasm for my verses,--of which
+they are not worthy; that would not surprise me at all; nothing is
+more common. See! look at that lovely coffer of ebony inlaid with
+mother-of-pearl, and edged with that iron-work as fine as lace. That
+coffer belonged to Pope Leo X., and was given to me by the Duchesse de
+Chaulieu, who received it from the king of Spain. I use it to hold the
+letters I receive from ladies and young girls living in every quarter
+of Europe. Oh! I assure you I feel the utmost respect for these
+flowers of the soul, cut and sent in moments of enthusiasm that are
+worthy of all reverence. Yes, to me the impulse of a heart is a noble
+and sublime thing! Others--scoffers--light their cigars with such
+letters, or give them to their wives for curl-papers; but I, who am a
+bachelor, monsieur, I have too much delicacy not to preserve these
+artless offerings--so fresh, so disinterested--in a tabernacle of
+their own. In fact, I guard them with a species of veneration, and at
+my death they will be burned before my eyes. People may call that
+ridiculous, but I do not care. I am grateful; these proofs of devotion
+enable me to bear the criticisms and annoyances of a literary life.
+When I receive a shot in the back from some enemy lurking under cover
+of a daily paper, I look at that casket and think,--here and there in
+this wide world there are hearts whose wounds have been healed, or
+soothed, or dressed by me!"
+
+This bit of poetry, declaimed with all the talent of a great actor,
+petrified the lieutenant, whose eyes opened to their utmost extent,
+and whose astonishment delighted the poet.
+
+"I will permit you," continued the peacock, spreading his tail, "out
+of respect for your position, which I fully appreciate, to open that
+coffer and look for the letter of your young lady. Though I know I am
+right, I remember names, and I assure you you are mistaken in
+thinking--"
+
+"And this is what a poor child comes to in this gulf of Paris!" cried
+Dumay,--"the darling of her parents, the joy of her friends, the hope
+of all, petted by all, the pride of a family, who has six persons so
+devoted to her that they would willingly make a rampart of their lives
+and fortunes between her and sorrow. Monsieur," Dumay remarked after a
+pause, "you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier. For
+fifteen years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of
+many a bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner
+there; the Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I
+suffered. I have seen thousands of my comrades die,--but you, you have
+given me a chill to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt
+before."
+
+Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only
+flattered him,--a thing which at this period of his life had become
+almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the
+first perfumed phial that praise had broken over his head.
+
+"Ah, my soldier!" he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay's
+shoulder, and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier
+of the empire tremble, "this young girl may be all in all to you, but
+to society at large what is she? nothing. At this moment the greatest
+mandarin in China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the
+universe in mourning, and what is that to you? The English are killing
+thousands of people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this
+very moment while I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being
+burned alive,--did that make you care less for your cup of coffee this
+morning at breakfast? Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in
+rags does not cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever
+finds it; and yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost
+five louis, and I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy,
+exclaiming, 'Divine! delicious! charming! food for the soul!' Social
+nature, like Nature herself, is a great forgetter. You will be quite
+surprised ten years hence at what you have done to-day. You are here
+in a city where people die, where they marry, where they adore each
+other at an assignation, where young girls suffocate themselves, where
+the man of genius with his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane
+beneficence goes to the bottom,--all side by side, sometimes under the
+same roof, and yet ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent.
+And here you come among us and ask us to expire with grief at this
+commonplace affair."
+
+"You call yourself a poet!" cried Dumay, "but don't you feel what you
+write?"
+
+"Good heavens! if we endured the joys or the woes we sing we should be
+as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet,
+smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see
+Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis
+had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet:
+Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that
+his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a
+treasure which is his alone, it is--"
+
+"Forgive me for interrupting you," said Dumay, who was gazing at the
+poet with horror, "but did you ever come to Havre?"
+
+"I was there for a day and a night in the spring of 1824 on my way to
+London."
+
+"You are a man of honor," continued Dumay; "will you give me your word
+that you do not know Mademoiselle Modeste Mignon?"
+
+"This is the first time that name ever struck my ear," replied
+Canalis.
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" said Dumay, "into what dark intrigue am I about to
+plunge? Can I count upon you to help me in my inquiries?--for I am
+certain that some one has been using your name. You ought to have had
+a letter yesterday from Havre."
+
+"I received none. Be sure, monsieur, that I will help you," said
+Canalis, "so far as I have the opportunity of doing so."
+
+Dumay withdrew, his heart torn with anxiety, believing that the
+wretched Butscha had worn the skin of the poet to deceive Modeste;
+whereas Butscha himself, keen-witted as a prince seeking revenge, and
+far cleverer than any paid spy, was ferretting out the life and
+actions of Canalis, escaping notice by his insignificance, like an
+insect that bores its way into the sap of a tree.
+
+The Breton had scarcely left the poet's house when La Briere entered
+his friend's study. Naturally, Canalis told him of the visit of the
+man from Havre.
+
+"Ha!" said Ernest, "Modeste Mignon; that is just what I have come to
+speak of."
+
+"Ah, bah!" cried Canalis; "have I had a triumph by proxy?"
+
+"Yes; and here is the key to it. My friend, I am loved by the sweetest
+girl in all the world,--beautiful enough to shine beside the greatest
+beauties in Paris, with a heart and mind worthy of Clarissa. She has
+seen me; I have pleased her, and she thinks me the great Canalis. But
+that is not all. Modeste Mignon is of high birth, and Mongenod has
+just told me that her father, the Comte de La Bastie, has something
+like six millions. The father is here now, and I have asked him
+through Mongenod for an interview at two o'clock. Mongenod is to give
+him a hint, just a word, that it concerns the happiness of his
+daughter. But you will readily understand that before seeing the
+father I feel I ought to make a clean breast of it to you."
+
+"Among the plants whose flowers bloom in the sunshine of fame," said
+Canalis, impressively, "there is one, and the most magnificent, which
+bears like the orange-tree a golden fruit amid the mingled perfumes of
+beauty and of mind; a lovely plant, a true tenderness, a perfect
+bliss, and--it eludes me." Canalis looked at the carpet that Ernest
+might not read his eyes. "Could I," he continued after a pause to
+regain his self-possession, "how could I have divined that flower from
+a pretty sheet of perfumed paper, that true heart, that young girl,
+that woman in whom love wears the livery of flattery, who loves us for
+ourselves, who offers us felicity? It needed but an angel or a demon
+to perceive her; and what am I but the ambitious head of a Court of
+Claims! Ah, my friend, fame makes us the target of a thousand arrows.
+One of us owes his rich marriage to an hydraulic piece of poetry,
+while I, more seductive, more a woman's man than he, have missed mine,
+--for, do you love her, poor girl?" he said, looking up at La Briere.
+
+"Oh!" ejaculated the young man.
+
+"Well then," said the poet, taking his secretary's arm and leaning
+heavily upon it, "be happy, Ernest. By a mere accident I have been not
+ungrateful to you. You are richly rewarded for your devotion, and I
+will generously further your happiness."
+
+Canalis was furious; but he could not behave otherwise than with
+propriety, and he made the best of his disappointment by mounting it
+as a pedestal.
+
+"Ah, Canalis, I have never really known you till this moment."
+
+"Did you expect to? It takes some time to go round the world," replied
+the poet with his pompous irony.
+
+"But think," said La Briere, "of this enormous fortune."
+
+"Ah, my friend, is it not well invested in you?" cried Canalis,
+accompanying the words with a charming gesture.
+
+"Melchior," said La Briere, "I am yours for life and death."
+
+He wrung the poet's hand and left him abruptly, for he was in haste to
+meet Monsieur Mignon.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XV
+
+                         A FATHER STEPS IN
+
+The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows
+which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his
+daughter's letter of Bettina's death and of his wife's infirmity, and
+Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to
+Modeste's love affairs.
+
+"Leave me to myself," he said to his faithful friend.
+
+As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on
+a sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears
+which suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon
+dried, yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn.
+
+"To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to
+have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?" he cried, springing up
+with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. "To be a
+father is to give one's self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I
+meet that D'Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives
+her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to
+whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If
+it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a
+lover!--I will strangle him with my two hands," he cried, making an
+involuntary gesture of furious determination. "And what then? suppose
+my Modeste were to die of grief?"
+
+He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and
+then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of
+six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had
+encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles
+Mignon's head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now
+bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an
+air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.
+
+"Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to
+ask me for my daughter," he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest
+de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La
+Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.
+
+"You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?" he said.
+
+"Yes," replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as
+sombre as Othello's. "My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the
+family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during
+his term of office. On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the
+Court of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly
+succeed as chief--"
+
+"And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked the
+count.
+
+"Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being
+loved by her. Hear me, monsieur," cried Ernest, checking a violent
+movement on the part of the angry father. "I have the strangest
+confession to make to you, a shameful one for a man of honor; but the
+worst punishment of my conduct, natural enough in itself, is not the
+telling of it to you; no, I fear the daughter even more than the
+father."
+
+Ernest then related simply, and with the nobleness that comes of
+sincerity, all the facts of his little drama, not omitting the twenty
+or more letters, which he had brought with him, nor the interview
+which he had just had with Canalis. When Monsieur Mignon had finished
+reading the letters, the unfortunate lover, pale and suppliant,
+actually trembled under the fiery glance of the Provencal.
+
+"Monsieur," said the latter, "in this whole matter there is but one
+error, but that is cardinal. My daughter will not have six millions;
+at the utmost, she will have a marriage portion of two hundred
+thousand francs, and very doubtful expectations."
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" cried Ernest, rising and grasping Monsieur Mignon's
+hand; "you take a load from my breast. Nothing can now hinder my
+happiness. I have friends, influence; I shall certainly be chief of
+the Court of Claims. Had Mademoiselle Mignon no more than ten thousand
+francs, if I had even to make a settlement on her, she should still be
+my wife; and to make her happy as you, monsieur, have made your wife
+happy, to be to you a real son (for I have no father), are the deepest
+desires of my heart."
+
+Charles Mignon stepped back three paces and fixed upon La Briere a
+look which entered the eyes of the young man as a dagger enters its
+sheath; he stood silent a moment, recognizing the absolute candor, the
+pure truthfulness of that open nature in the light of the young man's
+inspired eyes. "Is fate at last weary of pursuing me?" he asked
+himself. "Am I to find in this young man the pearl of sons-in-law?" He
+walked up and down the room in strong agitation.
+
+"Monsieur," he said at last, "you are bound to submit wholly to the
+judgment which you have come here to seek, otherwise you are now
+playing a farce."
+
+"Oh, monsieur!"
+
+"Listen to me," said the father, nailing La Briere where he stood with
+a glance. "I shall be neither harsh, nor hard, nor unjust. You shall
+have the advantages and the disadvantages of the false position in
+which you have placed yourself. My daughter believes that she loves
+one of the great poets of the day, whose fame is really that which has
+attracted her. Well, I, her father, intend to give her the opportunity
+to choose between the celebrity which has been a beacon to her, and
+the poor reality which the irony of fate has flung at her feet. Ought
+she not to choose between Canalis and yourself? I rely upon your honor
+not to repeat what I have told you as to the state of my affairs. You
+may each come, I mean you and your friend the Baron de Canalis, to
+Havre for the last two weeks of October. My house will be open to both
+of you, and my daughter must have an opportunity to study you. You
+must yourself bring your rival, and not disabuse him as to the foolish
+tales he will hear about the wealth of the Comte de La Bastie. I go to
+Havre to-morrow, and I shall expect you three days later. Adieu,
+monsieur."
+
+Poor La Briere went back to Canalis with a dragging step. The poet,
+meantime, left to himself, had given way to a current of thought out
+of which had come that secondary impulse which Monsieur de Talleyrand
+valued so much. The first impulse is the voice of nature, the second
+that of society.
+
+"A girl worth six millions," he thought to himself, "and my eyes were
+not able to see that gold shining in the darkness! With such a fortune
+I could be peer of France, count, marquis, ambassador. I've replied to
+middle-class women and silly women, and crafty creatures who wanted
+autographs; I've tired myself to death with masked-ball intrigues,--at
+the very moment when God was sending me a soul of price, an angel with
+golden wings! Bah! I'll make a poem on it, and perhaps the chance will
+come again. Heavens! the luck of that little La Briere,--strutting
+about in my lustre--plagiarism! I'm the cast and he's to be the
+statue, is he? It is the old fable of Bertrand and Raton. Six
+millions, a beauty, a Mignon de La Bastie, an aristocratic divinity
+loving poetry and the poet! And I, who showed my muscle as man of the
+world, who did those Alcide exercises to silence by moral force the
+champion of physical force, that old soldier with a heart, that friend
+of this very young girl, whom he'll now go and tell that I have a
+heart of iron!--I, to play Napoleon when I ought to have been
+seraphic! Good heavens! True, I shall have my friend. Friendship is a
+beautiful thing. I have kept him, but at what a price! Six millions,
+that's the cost of it; we can't have many friends if we pay all that
+for them."
+
+La Briere entered the room as Canalis reached this point in his
+meditations. He was gloom personified.
+
+"Well, what's the matter?" said Canalis.
+
+"The father exacts that his daughter shall choose between the two
+Canalis--"
+
+"Poor boy!" cried the poet, laughing, "he's a clever fellow, that
+father."
+
+"I have pledged my honor that I will take you to Havre," said La
+Briere, piteously.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Canalis, "if it is a question of your honor you
+may count on me. I'll ask for leave of absence for a month."
+
+"Modeste is so beautiful!" exclaimed La Briere, in a despairing tone.
+"You will crush me out of sight. I wondered all along that fate should
+be so kind to me; I knew it was all a mistake."
+
+"Bah! we will see about that," said Canalis with inhuman gaiety.
+
+That evening, after dinner, Charles Mignon and Dumay, were flying, by
+virtue of three francs to each postilion, from Paris to Havre. The
+father had eased the watch-dog's mind as to Modeste and her love
+affairs; the guard was relieved, and Butscha's innocence established.
+
+"It is all for the best, my old Dumay," said the count, who had been
+making certain inquiries of Mongenod respecting Canalis and La Briere.
+"We are going to have two actors for one part!" he cried gaily.
+
+Nevertheless, he requested his old comrade to be absolutely silent
+about the comedy which was now to be played at the Chalet,--a comedy
+it might be, but also a gentle punishment, or, if you prefer it, a
+lesson given by the father to the daughter.
+
+The two friends kept up a long conversation all the way from Paris to
+Havre, which put the colonel in possession of the facts relating to
+his family during the past four years, and informing Dumay that
+Desplein, the great surgeon, was coming to Havre at the end of the
+present month to examine the cataract on Madame Mignon's eyes, and
+decide if it were possible to restore her sight.
+
+A few moments before the breakfast-hour at the Chalet, the clacking of
+a postilion's whip apprised the family that the two soldiers were
+arriving; only a father's joy at returning after long absence could be
+heralded with such clatter, and it brought all the women to the garden
+gate. There is many a father and many a child--perhaps more fathers
+than children--who will understand the delights of such an arrival,
+and that happy fact shows that literature has no need to depict it.
+Perhaps all gentle and tender emotions are beyond the range of
+literature.
+
+Not a word that could trouble the peace of the family was uttered on
+this joyful day. Truce was tacitly established between father, mother,
+and child as to the so-called mysterious love which had paled
+Modeste's cheeks,--for this was the first day she had left her bed
+since Dumay's departure for Paris. The colonel, with the charming
+delicacy of a true soldier, never left his wife's side nor released
+her hand; but he watched Modeste with delight, and was never weary of
+noting her refined, elegant, and poetic beauty. Is it not by such
+seeming trifles that we recognize a man of feeling? Modeste, who
+feared to interrupt the subdued joy of the husband and wife kept at a
+little distance, coming from time to time to kiss her father's
+forehead, and when she kissed it overmuch she seemed to mean that she
+was kissing it for two,--for Bettina and herself.
+
+"Oh, my darling, I understand you," said the colonel, pressing her
+hand as she assailed him with kisses.
+
+"Hush!" whispered the young girl, glancing at her mother.
+
+Dumay's rather sly and pregnant silence made Modeste somewhat uneasy
+as to the upshot of his journey to Paris. She looked at him furtively
+every now and then, without being able to get beneath his epidermis.
+The colonel, like a prudent father, wanted to study the character of
+his only daughter, and above all consult his wife, before entering on
+a conference upon which the happiness of the whole family depended.
+
+"To-morrow, my precious child," he said as they parted for the night,
+"get up early, and we will go and take a walk on the seashore. We have
+to talk about your poems, Mademoiselle de La Bastie."
+
+His last words, accompanied by a smile, which reappeared like an echo
+on Dumay's lips, were all that gave Modeste any clew to what was
+coming; but it was enough to calm her uneasiness and keep her awake
+far into the night with her head full of suppositions; this, however,
+did not prevent her from being dressed and ready in the morning long
+before the colonel.
+
+"You know all, my kind papa?" she said as soon as they were on the
+road to the beach.
+
+"I know all, and a good deal more than you do," he replied.
+
+After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.
+
+"Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother
+idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a
+stranger without consulting her."
+
+"Oh, papa! because mamma would never have allowed it."
+
+"And do you think, my daughter, that that was proper? Though you have
+been educating your mind in this fatal way, how is it that your good
+sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and
+show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a
+man's head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should
+lack pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two
+hours in hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has
+been the same as Bettina's without the excuse of a heart's seduction;
+you were a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is
+head-love, the worst vice of French women."
+
+"I, without pride!" said Modeste, weeping; "but _he_ has not yet seen
+me."
+
+"_He_ knows your name."
+
+"I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the
+correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had
+spoken to each other."
+
+"Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason
+with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your
+family."
+
+"But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity,"
+she said, pouting.
+
+"Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?"
+
+"A temerity that my mother practised before me," she retorted quickly.
+
+"Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her
+father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me.
+Be honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily
+conceived, I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad
+action of writing to a stranger?"
+
+"A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose
+character and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to
+detraction, to calumny,--a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear
+father, I was a mere literary and dramatic personage, one of
+Shakespeare's women, until the moment when I wished to know if the man
+himself were as beautiful as his soul."
+
+"Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But
+if, from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of
+their families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke
+of parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the
+misfortunes that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and
+which you are therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them.
+Poetry is indeed one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life
+itself."
+
+"Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the
+struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of
+family."
+
+"Alas for the child that finds her happiness in resisting them," said
+the colonel, gravely. "In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis
+d'Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and
+the pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl
+took for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage."
+
+"My poet has told me all that," she answered. "He played Orgon for
+some time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of
+poets."
+
+"I have read your letters," said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a
+malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, "and I
+ought to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any
+woman, even a Julie d'Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!"
+
+"We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or
+not; I think it is better to read them. There are not so many
+adventures in these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV.,
+and so they publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those
+letters, you must know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the
+most sternly upright man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen
+that we love one another at least as much as you and mamma love each
+other. Well, I admit that it was not all exactly conventional; I did,
+if you _will_ have me say so, wrong--"
+
+"I have read your letters," said her father, interrupting her, "and I
+know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a
+proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood
+life, and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young
+girl of twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing."
+
+"Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded
+Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to
+the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways
+to act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering,
+or we must go to him frankly. Isn't the last way grand and noble? We
+French girls are delivered over by our families like so much
+merchandise, at sixty days' sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle
+Vilquin; but in England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow
+very much the plan I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to
+that? Am I not half German?"
+
+"Child!" cried the colonel, looking at her; "the supremacy of France
+comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble
+language constrains her mind. France is the reason of the whole world.
+England and Germany are romantic in their marriage customs,--though
+even there noble families follow our customs. You certainly do not
+mean to deny that your parents, who know life, who are responsible for
+your soul and for your happiness, have no right to guard you from the
+stumbling-blocks that are in your way? Good heavens!" he continued,
+speaking half to himself, "is it their fault, or is it ours? Ought we
+to hold our children under an iron yoke? Must we be punished for the
+tenderness that leads us to make them happy, and teaches our hearts
+how to do so?"
+
+Modeste watched her father out of the corner of her eye as she
+listened to this species of invocation, uttered in a broken voice.
+
+"Was it wrong," she said, "in a girl whose heart was free, to choose
+for her husband not only a charming companion, but a man of noble
+genius, born to an honorable position, a gentleman; the equal of
+myself, a gentlewoman?"
+
+"You love him?" asked her father.
+
+"Father!" she said, laying her head upon his breast, "would you see me
+die?"
+
+"Enough!" said the old soldier. "I see your love is inextinguishable."
+
+"Yes, inextinguishable."
+
+"Can nothing change it?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"No circumstances, no treachery, no betrayal? You mean that you will
+love him in spite of everything, because of his personal attractions?
+Even though he proved a D'Estourny, would you love him still?"
+
+"Oh, my father! you do not know your daughter. Could I love a coward,
+a man without honor, without faith?"
+
+"But suppose he had deceived you?"
+
+"He? that honest, candid soul, half melancholy? You are joking,
+father, or else you have never met him."
+
+"But you see now that your love is not inextinguishable, as you chose
+to call it. I have already made you admit that circumstances could
+alter your poem; don't you now see that fathers are good for
+something?"
+
+"You want to give me a lecture, papa; it is positively l'Ami des
+Enfants over again."
+
+"Poor deceived girl," said her father, sternly; "it is no lecture of
+mine, I count for nothing in it; indeed, I am only trying to soften
+the blow."
+
+"Father, don't play tricks with my life," exclaimed Modeste, turning
+pale.
+
+"Then, my daughter, summon all your courage. It is you who have been
+playing tricks with your life, and life is now tricking you."
+
+Modeste looked at her father in stupid amazement.
+
+"Suppose that young man whom you love, whom you saw four days ago at
+church in Havre, was a deceiver?"
+
+"Never!" she cried; "that noble head, that pale face full of poetry--"
+
+"--was a lie," said the colonel interrupting her. "He was no more
+Monsieur de Canalis than I am that sailor over there putting out to
+sea."
+
+"Do you know what you are killing in me?" she said in a low voice.
+
+"Comfort yourself, my child; though accident has put the punishment of
+your fault into the fault itself, the harm done is not irreparable.
+The young man whom you have seen, and with whom you exchanged hearts
+by correspondence, is a loyal and honorable fellow; he came to me and
+confided everything. He loves you, and I have no objection to him as a
+son-in-law."
+
+"If he is not Canalis, who is he then?" said Modeste in a changed
+voice.
+
+"The secretary; his name is Ernest de La Briere. He is not a nobleman;
+but he is one of those plain men with fixed principles and sound
+morality who satisfy parents. However, that is not the point; you have
+seen him and nothing can change your heart; you have chosen him,
+comprehend his soul, it is as beautiful as he himself."
+
+The count was interrupted by a heavy sigh from Modeste. The poor girl
+sat with her eyes fixed on the sea, pale and rigid as death, as if a
+pistol shot had struck her in those fatal words, _a plain man, with
+fixed principles and sound morality_.
+
+"Deceived!" she said at last.
+
+"Like your poor sister, but less fatally."
+
+"Let us go home, father," she said, rising from the hillock on which
+they were sitting. "Papa, hear me, I swear before God to obey your
+wishes, whatever they may be, in the _affair_ of my marriage."
+
+"Then you don't love him any longer?" asked her father.
+
+"I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as
+yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the
+paint of another man's glory on his cheeks."
+
+"You said nothing could change you"; remarked the colonel, ironically.
+
+"Ah, do not trifle with me!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands and
+looking at her father in distressful anxiety; "don't you see that you
+are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes."
+
+"God forbid! I have told you the exact truth."
+
+"You are very kind, father," she said after a pause, and with a sort
+of solemnity.
+
+"He has kept your letters," resumed the colonel; "now suppose the rash
+caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets
+who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?"
+
+"Oh!--you are going too far."
+
+"Canalis told him so."
+
+"Has Dumay seen Canalis?"
+
+"Yes," answered her father.
+
+The two walked along in silence.
+
+"So that is why that _gentleman_," resumed Modeste, "told me so much
+harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said-- Why,"
+she added, interrupting herself, "his virtues, his noble qualities,
+his fine sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who
+steals glory and a name may very likely--"
+
+"--break locks, steal purses, and cut people's throats on the
+highway," cried the colonel. "Ah, you young girls, that's just like
+you,--with your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man
+who once deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he
+ought to die."
+
+This ridicule stopped Modeste's effervescence for a moment and least,
+and again there was silence.
+
+"My child," said the colonel, presently, "men in society, as in nature
+everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must defend
+themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise?
+Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was
+yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman;
+it is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences,
+short of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he
+does deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her
+wanting in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a
+queen, an actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems
+to him a queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame--and
+for a young girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given
+her that is sacred and lovely and noble,--no matter with what grace or
+what poetry or what precautions she surrounds her fault."
+
+"To seek the master and find the servant!" she said bitterly, "oh! I
+can never recover from it!"
+
+"Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the
+equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet
+minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a
+heart, and he adores you, but--he _does not write verses_. No, I admit,
+he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry.
+At any rate, my dear girl," added her father, as Modeste made a
+gesture of disgust, "you are to see both of them, the sham and the
+true Canalis--"
+
+"Oh, papa!--"
+
+"Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the
+_affair_ of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two
+you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall
+finish with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character
+of these gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing
+excursions."
+
+Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to
+what he said but replying only in monosyllables.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XVI
+
+                            DISENCHANTED
+
+The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in
+search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to
+use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the
+soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality,
+Imagination--which in that delicate bosom united the whole of
+womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to
+the passionate desires of the sex--had led her into enchanted gardens
+where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not
+the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the
+black mandragora." Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from
+the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with
+ditches,--in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent,
+aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall?
+Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste
+who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two
+hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the
+boards. She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to
+see. The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no
+longer spoke to her. Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes,
+she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion. She fought against
+reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and
+conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing. She
+would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and
+tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the
+utmost.
+
+"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.
+
+The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time
+and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality. Sadness,
+when caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,--sometimes a
+fatal one. It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in
+what ways and by what means Thought produces the same internal
+disorganization as poison; and how it is that despair affects the
+appetite, destroys the pylorus, and changes all the physical
+conditions of the strongest life. Such was the case with Modeste. In
+three short days she became the image of morbid melancholy; she did
+not sing, she could not be made to smile. Charles Mignon, becoming
+uneasy at the non-arrival of the two friends, thought of going to
+fetch them, when, on the evening of the fifth day, he received news of
+their movements through Latournelle.
+
+Canalis, excessively delighted at the idea of a rich marriage, was
+determined to neglect nothing that might help him to cut out La
+Briere, without, however, giving La Briere a chance to reproach him
+for having violated the laws of friendship. The poet felt that nothing
+would lower a lover so much in the eyes of a young girl as to exhibit
+him in a subordinate position; and he therefore proposed to La Briere,
+in the most natural manner, to take a little country-house at
+Ingouville for a month, and live there together on pretence of
+requiring sea-air. As soon as La Briere, who at first saw nothing
+amiss in the proposal, had consented, Canalis declared that he should
+pay all expenses, and he sent his valet to Havre, telling him to see
+Monsieur Latournelle and get his assistance in choosing the house,
+--well aware that the notary would repeat all particulars to the
+Mignons. Ernest and Canalis had, as may well be supposed, talked over
+all the aspects of the affair, and the rather prolix Ernest had given
+a good many useful hints to his rival. The valet, understanding his
+master's wishes, fulfilled them to the letter; he trumpeted the
+arrival of the great poet, for whom the doctors advised sea-air to
+restore his health, injured as it was by the double toils of
+literature and politics. This important personage wanted a house,
+which must have at least such and such a number of rooms, as he would
+bring with him a secretary, cook, two servants, and a coachman, not
+counting himself, Germain Bonnet, the valet. The carriage, selected
+and hired for a month by Canalis, was a pretty one; and Germain set
+about finding a pair of fine horses which would also answer as
+saddle-horses,--for, as he said, monsieur le baron and his secretary
+took horseback exercise. Under the eyes of little Latournelle, who went
+with him to various houses, Germain made a good deal of talk about the
+secretary, rejecting two or three because there was no suitable room
+for Monsieur de La Briere.
+
+"Monsieur le baron," he said to the notary, "makes his secretary quite
+his best friend. Ah! I should be well scolded if Monsieur de La Briere
+was not as well treated as monsieur le baron himself; and after all,
+you know, Monsieur de La Briere is a lawyer in my master's court."
+
+Germain never appeared in public unless punctiliously dressed in
+black, with spotless gloves, well-polished boots, and otherwise as
+well apparelled as a lawyer. Imagine the effect he produced in Havre,
+and the idea people took of the great poet from this sample of him!
+The valet of a man of wit and intellect ends by getting a little wit
+and intellect himself which has rubbed off from his master. Germain
+did not overplay his part; he was simple and good-humored, as Canalis
+had instructed him to be. Poor La Briere was in blissful ignorance of
+the harm Germain was doing to his prospects, and the depreciation his
+consent to the arrangement had brought upon him; it is, however, true
+that some inkling of the state of things rose to Modeste's ears from
+these lower regions.
+
+Canalis had arranged to bring his secretary in his own carriage, and
+Ernest's unsuspicious nature did not perceive that he was putting
+himself in a false position until too late to remedy it. The delay in
+the arrival of the pair which had troubled Charles Mignon was caused
+by the painting of the Canalis arms on the panels of the carriage, and
+by certain orders given to a tailor; for the poet neglected none of
+the innumerable details which might, even the smallest of them,
+influence a young girl.
+
+"It is all right," said Latournelle to Mignon on the sixth day. "The
+baron's valet has hired Madame Amaury's villa at Sanvic, all
+furnished, for seven hundred francs; he has written to his master that
+he may start, and that all will be ready on his arrival. So the two
+gentlemen will be here Sunday. I have also had a letter from Butscha;
+here it is; it's not long: 'My dear master,--I cannot get back till
+Sunday. Between now and then I have some very important inquiries to
+make which concern the happiness of a person in whom you take an
+interest.'"
+
+The announcement of this arrival did not rouse Modeste from her gloom;
+the sense of her fall and the bewilderment of her mind were still too
+great, and she was not nearly as much of a coquette as her father
+thought her to be. There is, in truth, a charming and permissible
+coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness.
+Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish
+between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,--the
+thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true
+colonel of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read,
+only the young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but
+in the letters which we were forced to lack of space to suppress, a
+better judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve
+which Modeste had substituted for the rather aggressive and
+light-minded tone of her first letters. The father, however, was only
+too cruelly right on one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have
+read, had indeed spoken as though the marriage were a settled fact,
+and the remembrance of that letter filled her with shame; she thought
+her father very harsh and cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy
+of her, yet to whom her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She
+questioned Dumay about his interview with the poet, she inveigled him
+into relating its every detail, and she did not think Canalis as
+barbarous as the lieutenant had declared him. The thought of the
+beautiful casket which held the letters of the thousand and one women
+of this literary Don Juan made her smile, and she was strongly tempted
+to say to her father: "I am not the only one to write to him; the
+elite of my sex send their leaves for the laurel wreath of the poet."
+
+During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation. The
+catastrophe--and it was a great one to her poetic nature--roused a
+faculty of discernment and also the malice latent in her girlish
+heart, in which her suitors were about to encounter a formidable
+adversary. It is a fact that when a young woman's heart is chilled her
+head becomes clear; she observes with great rapidity of judgment, and
+with a tinge of pleasantry which Shakespeare's Beatrice so admirably
+represents in "Much Ado about Nothing." Modeste was seized with a deep
+disgust for men, now that the most distinguished among them had
+betrayed her hopes. When a woman loves, what she takes for disgust is
+simply the ability to see clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is
+never, especially if she is a young girl, in a condition to see
+clearly. If she cannot admire, she despises. And so, after passing
+through terrible struggles of the soul, Modeste necessarily put on the
+armor on which, as she had once declared, the word "Disdain" was
+engraved. After reaching that point she was able, in the character of
+uninterested spectator, to take part in what she was pleased to call
+the "farce of the suitors," a performance in which she herself was
+about to play the role of heroine. She particularly set before her
+mind the satisfaction of humiliating Monsieur de La Briere.
+
+"Modeste is saved," said Madame Mignon to her husband; "she wants to
+revenge herself on the false Canalis by trying to love the real one."
+
+Such in truth was Modeste's plan. It was so utterly commonplace that
+her mother, to whom she confided her griefs, advised her on the
+contrary to treat Monsieur de La Briere with extreme politeness.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XVII
+
+                           A THIRD SUITOR
+
+"Those two young men," said Madame Latournelle, on the Saturday
+evening, "have no idea how many spies they have on their tracks. We
+are eight in all, on the watch."
+
+"Don't say two young men, wife; say three!" cried little Latournelle,
+looking round him. "Gobenheim is not here, so I can speak out."
+
+Modeste raised her head, and everybody, imitating Modeste, raised
+theirs and looked at the notary.
+
+"Yes, a third lover--and he is something like a lover--offers himself
+as a candidate."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed the colonel.
+
+"I speak of no less a person," said Latournelle, pompously, "than
+Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, Marquis de Saint-Sever, Duc de Nivron,
+Comte de Bayeux, Vicomte d'Essigny, grand equerry and peer of France,
+knight of the Spur and the Golden Fleece, grandee of Spain, and son of
+the last governor of Normandy. He saw Mademoiselle Modeste at the time
+when he was staying with the Vilquins, and he regretted then--as his
+notary, who came from Bayeux yesterday, tells me--that she was not
+rich enough for him; for his father recovered nothing but the estate
+of Herouville on his return to France, and that is saddled with a
+sister. The young duke is thirty-three years old. I am definitively
+charged to lay these proposals before you, Monsieur le comte," added
+the notary, turning respectfully to the colonel.
+
+"Ask Modeste if she wants another bird in her cage," replied the
+count; "as far as I am concerned, I am willing that my lord the grand
+equerry shall pay her attention."
+
+Notwithstanding the care with which Charles Mignon avoided seeing
+people, and though he stayed in the Chalet and never went out without
+Modeste, Gobenheim had reported Dumay's wealth; for Dumay had said to
+him when giving up his position as cashier: "I am to be bailiff for my
+colonel, and all my fortune, except what my wife needs, is to go to
+the children of our little Modeste." Every one in Havre had therefore
+propounded the same question that the notary had already put to
+himself: "If Dumay's share in the profits is six hundred thousand
+francs, and he is going to be Monsieur Mignon's bailiff, then Monsieur
+Mignon must certainly have a colossal fortune. He arrived at
+Marseilles on a ship of his own, loaded with indigo; and they say at
+the Bourse that the cargo, not counting the ship, is worth more than
+he gives out as his whole fortune."
+
+The colonel was unwilling to dismiss the servants he had brought back
+with him, whom he had chosen with care during his travels; and he
+therefore hired a house for them in the lower part of Ingouville,
+where he installed his valet, cook, and coachman, all Negroes, and
+three mulattos on whose fidelity he could rely. The coachman was told
+to search for saddle-horses for Mademoiselle and for his master, and
+for carriage-horses for the caleche in which the colonel and the
+lieutenant had returned to Havre. That carriage, bought in Paris, was
+of the latest fashion, and bore the arms of La Bastie, surmounted by a
+count's coronet. These things, insignificant in the eyes of a man who
+for four years had been accustomed to the unbridled luxury of the
+Indies and of the English merchants at Canton, were the subject of
+much comment among the business men of Havre and the inhabitants of
+Ingouville and Graville. Before five days had elapsed the rumor of
+them ran from one end of Normandy to the other like a train of
+gunpowder touched by fire.
+
+"Monsieur Mignon has come back from China with millions," some one
+said in Rouen; "and it seems he was made a count in mid-ocean."
+
+"But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution," answered
+another.
+
+"So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon
+for twenty-five years! What are we coming to?" said a third.
+
+Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her
+parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes
+began once more to see her merits. The aunt and sister of the Duc
+d'Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur
+Charles Mignon's right to the title and arms of count, derived from
+Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal's hat and tassels were added as
+a crest. They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were
+staying at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished
+head of their house now became active.
+
+"If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,"
+said the aunt of the young duke, "she is the best match in the
+province. _She_ at least is noble."
+
+The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been
+able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in
+that bourgeois household.
+
+Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle
+and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our
+story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this late
+arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own
+diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more space here than
+he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, offspring of
+the matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born
+during the emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of
+the present duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819,
+before he was able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast
+chateau of Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which
+he had bought back with some difficulty; all of which returned a
+rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the
+post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the
+usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the
+pauper peers of France. But what were these twenty-seven thousand
+francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family? In
+Paris, of course, the young duke used the king's coaches, and had a
+mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the
+royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his
+twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy. If this
+noble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his
+aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables. Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the
+spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them
+up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French nobility,
+who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under the new
+law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc
+d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses;
+but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these
+people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration,
+from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d'Herouville, though in quest of
+millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker,
+with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.
+
+At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her
+nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering
+whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or
+whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen,
+who wished to make her daughter a duchess. The king, anxious to
+restore the d'Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought
+about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew
+ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When
+great things disappear they leave crumbs, "frusteaux," Rabelais would
+say, behind them; and the French nobility of this century has left us
+too many such fragments. Neither the clergy nor the nobility have
+anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs.
+Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well
+represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of
+historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the
+present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already
+done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The
+Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very
+nobleness of the nobility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it
+be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud
+house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation,
+cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis
+XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That
+is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris
+when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the
+entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing
+the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature
+in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a
+past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies
+of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete
+generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished
+qualities,--forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have
+preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish
+may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched
+result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.
+
+The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face,
+was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized
+figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins
+and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The
+house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the
+deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical
+Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the
+member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty.
+The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and
+respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his
+ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused
+him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy
+virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons,
+or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such
+habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes
+turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed
+upon him,--very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of
+wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed
+itself when he felt at ease. Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was
+supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him "a sound
+wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews." The
+beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only
+worship, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was
+repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious
+sayings.
+
+"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine
+workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."
+
+Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of grand
+equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh,
+--although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the
+matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood
+and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his
+fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed
+through her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the
+circumstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the
+courtship of the Duc d'Herouville would save her from being at the
+mercy of either Canalis.
+
+"I see no reason," she said to Latournelle, "why the Duc d'Herouville
+should not be received. I have passed, in spite of our indigence," she
+continued, with a mischievous look at her father, "to the condition of
+heiress. Haven't you observed Gobenheim's glances? They have quite
+changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being
+able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my
+charms."
+
+"Hush, my darling!" cried Madame Latournelle, "here he comes."
+
+"Old Althor is in despair," said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he
+entered.
+
+"Why?" asked the count.
+
+"Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several
+millions. What ill-luck for his son!"
+
+"No one knows," said Charles Mignon, coldly, "what my liabilities in
+India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence
+as to my private affairs. Dumay," he whispered to his friend, "if
+Vilquin is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what
+he gave for it."
+
+Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on
+Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in
+advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc
+d'Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following
+Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at
+Graville. This assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse
+remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at
+Ingouville. "If this goes on, she will have a hospital here," said the
+younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a duchess.
+
+The everlasting comedy of "The Heiress," about to be played at the
+Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste's frame of mind,
+"The Designs of a Young Girl"; for since the overthrow of her
+illusions she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man
+whose qualifications did not fully satisfy her.
+
+The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first
+visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their
+arrival. They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and
+arranging Madame Amaury's house for a month's stay. The poet, always
+calculating effects, wished to make the most of the probable
+excitement which his arrival would case in Havre, and which would of
+course echo up to the Mignons. Therefore, in his role of a man needing
+rest, he did not leave the house. La Briere went twice to walk past
+the Chalet, though always with a sense of despair, for he feared to
+displease Modeste, and the future seemed to him dark with clouds. The
+two friends came down to dinner on Monday dressed for the momentous
+visit. La Briere wore the same clothes he had so carefully selected
+for the famous Sunday; but he now felt like the satellite of planet,
+and resigned himself to the uncertainties of his situation. Canalis,
+on the other hand, had carefully attended to his black coat, his
+orders, and all those little drawing-room elegancies, which his
+intimacy with the Duchesse de Chaulieu and the fashionable world of
+the faubourg had brought to perfection. He had gone into the minutiae
+of dandyism, while poor La Briere was about to present himself with
+the negligence of a man without hope. Germain, as he waited at dinner
+could not help smiling to himself at the contrast. After the second
+course, however, the valet came in with a diplomatic, that is to say,
+uneasy air.
+
+"Does Monsieur le baron know," he said to Canalis in a low voice,
+"that Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of
+the same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur
+le baron to the sea-shore?"
+
+"What, the little Duc d'Herouville?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Is he coming for Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked La Briere,
+coloring.
+
+"So it appears, monsieur."
+
+"We are cheated!" cried Canalis looking at La Briere.
+
+"Ah!" retorted Ernest quickly, "that is the first time you have said,
+'we' since we left Paris: it has been 'I' all along."
+
+"You understood me," cried Canalis, with a burst of laughter. "But we
+are not in a position to struggle against a ducal coronet, nor the
+duke's title, nor against the waste lands which the Council of State
+have just granted, on my report, to the house of Herouville."
+
+"His grace," said La Briere, with a spice of malice that was
+nevertheless serious, "will furnish you with compensation in the
+person of his sister."
+
+At this instant, the Comte de La Bastie was announced; the two young
+men rose at once, and La Briere hastened forward to present Canalis.
+
+"I wished to return the visit that you paid me in Paris," said the
+count to the young lawyer, "and I knew that by coming here I should
+have the double pleasure of greeting one of our great living poets."
+
+"Great!--Monsieur," replied the poet, smiling, "no one can be great in
+a century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of
+would-be great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius
+nowadays, and renders real distinction impossible."
+
+"Is that the reason why you have thrown yourself into politics?" asked
+the count.
+
+"It is the same thing in that sphere," said the poet; "there are no
+statesmen in these days, only men who handle events more or less. Look
+at it, monsieur; under the system of government that we derive from
+the Charter, which makes a tax-list of more importance than a
+coat-of-arms, there is absolutely nothing solid except that which you
+went to seek in China,--wealth."
+
+Satisfied with himself and with the impression he was making on the
+prospective father-in-law, Canalis turned to Germain.
+
+"Serve the coffee in the salon," he said, inviting Monsieur de La
+Bastie to leave the dining-room.
+
+"I thank you for this visit, monsieur le comte," said La Briere; "it
+saves me from the embarrassment of presenting my friend to you in your
+own house. You have a heart, and you have also a quick mind."
+
+"Bah! the ready wit of Provence, that is all," said Charles Mignon.
+
+"Ah, do you come from Provence?" cried Canalis.
+
+"You must pardon my friend," said La Briere; "he has not studied, as I
+have, the history of La Bastie."
+
+At the word _friend_ Canalis threw a searching glance at Ernest.
+
+"If your health will allow," said the count to the poet, "I shall hope
+to receive you this evening under my roof; it will be a day to mark,
+as the old writer said 'albo notanda lapillo.' Though we cannot duly
+receive so great a fame in our little house, yet your visit will
+gratify my daughter, whose admiration for your poems has even led her
+to set them to music."
+
+"You have something better than fame in your house," said Canalis;
+"you have beauty, if I am to believe Ernest."
+
+"Yes, a good daughter; but you will find her rather countrified," said
+Charles Mignon.
+
+"A country girl sought by the Duc d'Herouville," remarked Canalis,
+dryly.
+
+"Oh!" replied Monsieur Mignon, with the perfidious good-humor of a
+Southerner, "I leave my daughter free. Dukes, princes, commoners,
+--they are all the same to me, even men of genius. I shall make no
+pledges, and whoever my Modeste chooses will be my son-in-law, or
+rather my son," he added, looking at La Briere. "It could not be
+otherwise. Madame de La Bastie is German. She has never adopted our
+etiquette, and I let my two women lead me their own way. I have always
+preferred to sit in the carriage rather than on the box. I can make a
+joke of all this at present, for we have not yet seen the Duc
+d'Herouville, and I do not believe in marriages arranged by proxy, any
+more than I believe in choosing my daughter's husband."
+
+"That declaration is equally encouraging and discouraging to two young
+men who are searching for the philosopher's stone of happiness in
+marriage," said Canalis.
+
+"Don't you consider it useful, necessary, and even politic to
+stipulate for perfect freedom of action for parents, daughters, and
+suitors?" asked Charles Mignon.
+
+Canalis, at a sign from La Briere, kept silence. The conversation
+presently became unimportant, and after a few turns round the garden
+the count retired, urging the visit of the two friends.
+
+"That's our dismissal," cried Canalis; "you saw it as plainly as I
+did. Well, in his place, I should not hesitate between the grand
+equerry and either of us, charming as we are."
+
+"I don't think so," said La Briere. "I believe that frank soldier came
+here to satisfy his desire to see you, and to warn us of his
+neutrality while receiving us in his house. Modeste, in love with your
+fame, and misled by my person, stands, as it were, between the real
+and the ideal, between poetry and prose. I am, unfortunately, the
+prose."
+
+"Germain," said Canalis to the valet, who came to take away the
+coffee, "order the carriage in half an hour. We will take a drive
+before we go to the Chalet."
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XVIII
+
+                    A SPLENDID FIRST APPEARANCE
+
+The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere
+dreaded the interview, while Canalis approached it with the confidence
+of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the
+father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the
+ex-merchant, showed Canalis his own maladroitness, and determined him
+to select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend
+indifference, though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to
+appear to disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love.
+Trained by the handsome Duchesse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be
+worthy of his reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he
+did not know them at all,--which is often the case with those who are
+the happy victims of an exclusive passion. While poor Ernest, gloomily
+ensconced in his corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of
+genuine love, and foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and
+disdain of an injured and offended young girl, Canalis was preparing
+himself, not less silently, like an actor making ready for an
+important part in a new play; certainly neither of them presented the
+appearance of a happy man. Important interests were involved for
+Canalis. The mere suggestion of his desire to marry would bring about
+a rupture of the tie which had bound him for the last ten years to the
+Duchesse de Chaulieu. Though he had covered the purpose of his journey
+with the vulgar pretext of needing rest,--in which, by the bye, women
+never believe, even when it is true,--his conscience troubled him
+somewhat; but the word "conscience" seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere
+that he shrugged his shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.
+
+"Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than
+a dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real
+advantages and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de
+Chaulieu; for, if you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would
+renounce without the slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a
+passion that has been mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If
+you simply mean that you are afraid of displeasing your protectress,
+should she find out the object of your stay here, I believe you. To
+renounce the duchess and yet not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a
+risk. You take the anxiety of this alternative for remorse."
+
+"You have no comprehension of feelings," said the poet, irritably,
+like a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.
+
+"That is what a bigamist should tell the jury," retorted La Briere,
+laughing.
+
+This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Canalis. He began
+to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.
+
+The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Canalis
+livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors
+were expected, and all the personages of this history were assembled
+to receive them, except the duke and Butscha.
+
+"Which is the poet?" asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the
+embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she
+heard the wheels.
+
+"The one who walks like a drum-major," answered the lieutenant.
+
+"Ah!" said the notary's wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his
+body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with
+the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,--as all
+women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them;
+Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a
+certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his
+defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is
+never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to
+which the man is accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine
+manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by
+the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by
+telling himself that they pleased that "grande dame," whose taste was
+law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is
+improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance,
+Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and
+much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which
+neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people
+say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he
+bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to
+himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis "dragged the time."
+He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself
+into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of
+demeanor which actors call "balancoires,"--the picturesque phrase of
+an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the
+head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting
+slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview
+with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow
+suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing
+attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his
+discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up.
+He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a
+practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager,
+that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at
+his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.
+
+These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of
+flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior
+himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as
+exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by
+which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon
+him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always
+handsome,--without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas!
+neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn
+them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale,
+when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the
+expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and
+the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews
+its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything
+else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have
+hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a
+shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it,
+without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in
+meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was
+perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments,
+charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more
+delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its
+cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a
+courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who
+made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber
+as minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!"
+Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the
+administration of non-success in little doses.
+
+These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg
+Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of
+absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech
+and affected diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so
+--are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which
+are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed
+in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different
+type. Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not
+change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould
+into which the duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly
+Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed
+that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it
+is in France. Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt
+ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our
+own character,--as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True
+grace is elastic; it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony
+with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the
+streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and
+flounces of middle-class vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman
+who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the
+law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He
+believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went,--an error
+shared by several of the great men of Paris.
+
+While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of
+the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no
+account.
+
+"Ha! do I see my soldier?" said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after
+addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other
+women. "Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?" he said, offering
+his hand effusively; "I comprehend them to their fullest extent after
+seeing mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of
+angels."
+
+All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this
+speech.
+
+"I shall always consider it a triumph," resumed the poet, observing
+that everybody wished for an explanation, "to have stirred to mention
+on of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the
+supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal to
+be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this
+triumph--why should I be proud of it?--I count for nothing. It was the
+triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay,
+your heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form
+in which Napoleon's idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what
+remains? The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go
+without revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian,
+the writer, futurity would have no knowledge of those heroic days.
+Therefore your fifteen years of war are now ideas and nothing more;
+that which preserves the Empire forever is the poem that the poets
+make of them. A nation that can win such battles must know how to sing
+them."
+
+Canalis paused, to gather by a glance that ran round the circle the
+tribute of amazement which he expected of provincials.
+
+"You must be aware, monsieur, of the regret I feel at not seeing you,"
+said Madame Mignon, "since you compensate me with the pleasure of
+hearing you."
+
+Modeste, determined to think Canalis sublime, sat motionless with
+amazement; the embroidery slipped from her fingers, which held it only
+by the needleful of thread.
+
+"Modeste, this is Monsieur Ernest de La Briere. Monsieur Ernest, my
+daughter," said the count, thinking the secretary too much in the
+background.
+
+The young girl bowed coldly, giving Ernest a glance that was meant to
+prove to every one present that she saw him for the first time.
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur," she said without blushing; "the great
+admiration I feel for the greatest of our poets is, in the eyes of my
+friends, a sufficient excuse for seeing only him."
+
+The pure, fresh voice, with accents like that of Mademoiselle Mars,
+charmed the poor secretary, already dazzled by Modeste's beauty, and
+in his sudden surprise he answered by a phrase that would have been
+sublime, had it been true.
+
+"He is my friend," he said.
+
+"Ah, then you do pardon me," she replied.
+
+"He is more than a friend," cried Canalis taking Ernest by the
+shoulder and leaning upon it like Alexander on Hephaestion, "we love
+each other as though we were brothers--"
+
+Madame Latournelle cut short the poet's speech by pointing to Ernest
+and saying aloud to her husband, "Surely that is the gentleman we saw
+at church."
+
+"Why not?" said Charles Mignon, quickly, observing that Ernest
+reddened.
+
+Modeste coldly took up her embroidery.
+
+"Madame may be right; I have been twice in Havre lately," replied La
+Briere, sitting down by Dumay.
+
+Canalis, charmed with Modeste's beauty, mistook the admiration she
+expressed, and flattered himself he had succeeded in producing his
+desired effects.
+
+"I should think a man without heart, if he had no devoted friend near
+him," said Modeste, to pick up the conversation interrupted by Madame
+Latournelle's awkwardness.
+
+"Mademoiselle, Ernest's devotion makes me almost think myself worth
+something," said Canalis; "for my dear Pylades is full of talent; he
+was the right hand of the greatest minister we have had since the
+peace. Though he holds a fine position, he is good enough to be my
+tutor in the science of politics; he teaches me to conduct affairs and
+feeds me with his experience, when all the while he might aspire to a
+much better situation. Oh! he is worth far more than I." At a gesture
+from Modeste he continued gracefully: "Yes, the poetry that I express
+he carries in his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is
+because he has the modesty of a nun."
+
+"Enough, oh, enough!" cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to
+look. "My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to
+marry off her daughter."
+
+"How is it, monsieur," said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, "that
+you can even think of becoming a political character?"
+
+"It is abdication," said Modeste, "for a poet; politics are the
+resource of matter-of-fact men."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the
+world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the
+meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the
+rallying-point of courage."
+
+Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on
+political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day
+the orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A
+poet may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever
+cease to be himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he
+would one day be greater on the political side than on the literary.
+"The forum of France was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles
+supplanted fields of battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer
+than any Austerlitz, and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals;
+they spent their lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as
+those who went to war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal
+outlets of the vital fluid that man had ever known," etc.
+
+This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases
+and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de
+Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made
+a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame
+Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at
+the theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,--very much
+like that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all
+these high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as
+it were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with
+her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had
+created as he read her letters and answered them.
+
+This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful
+not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an
+invitation to dinner on the following Monday.
+
+"We shall not be at the Chalet," said the Comte de La Bastie. "Dumay
+will have sole possession of it. I return to the villa, having bought
+it back under a deed of redemption within six months, which I have
+to-day signed with Monsieur Vilquin."
+
+"I hope," said Dumay, "that Vilquin will not be able to return to you
+the sum you have just lent him, and that the villa will remain yours."
+
+"It is an abode in keeping with your fortune," said Canalis.
+
+"You mean the fortune that I am supposed to have," replied Charles
+Mignon, hastily.
+
+"It would be too sad," said Canalis, turning to Modeste with a
+charming little bow, "if this Madonna were not framed in a manner
+worthy of her divine perfections."
+
+That was the only thing Canalis said to Modeste. He affected not to
+look at her, and behaved like a man to whom all idea of marriage was
+interdicted.
+
+"Ah! my dear Madame Mignon," cried the notary's wife, as soon as the
+gravel was heard to grit under the feet of the Parisians, "what an
+intellect!"
+
+"Is he rich?--that is the question," said Gobenheim.
+
+Modeste was at the window, not losing a single movement of the great
+poet, and paying no attention to his companion. When Monsieur Mignon
+returned to the salon, and Modeste, having received a last bow from
+the two friends as the carriage turned, went back to her seat, a
+weighty discussion took place, such as provincials invariably hold
+over Parisians after a first interview. Gobenheim repeated his phrase,
+"Is he rich?" as a chorus to the songs of praise sung by Madame
+Latournelle, Modeste, and her mother.
+
+"Rich!" exclaimed Modeste; "what can that signify! Do you not see that
+Monsieur de Canalis is one of those men who are destined for the
+highest places in the State. He has more than fortune; he possesses
+that which gives fortune."
+
+"He will be minister or ambassador," said Monsieur Mignon.
+
+"That won't hinder tax-payers from having to pay the costs of his
+funeral," remarked the notary.
+
+"How so?" asked Charles Mignon.
+
+"He strikes me as a man who will waste all the fortunes with whose
+gifts Mademoiselle Modeste so liberally endows him," answered
+Latournelle.
+
+"Modeste can't avoid being liberal to a poet who called her a
+Madonna," said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with
+which Canalis had originally inspired him.
+
+Gobenheim arranged the whist-table with all the more persistency
+because, since the return of Monsieur Mignon, Latournelle and Dumay
+had allowed themselves to play for ten sous points.
+
+"Well, my little darling," said the father to the daughter in the
+embrasure of a window. "Admit that papa thinks of everything. If you
+send your orders this evening to your former dressmaker in Paris, and
+all your other furnishing people, you shall show yourself eight days
+hence in all the splendor of an heiress. Meantime we will install
+ourselves in the villa. You already have a pretty horse, now order a
+habit; you owe that amount of civility to the grand equerry."
+
+"All the more because there will be a number of us to ride," said
+Modeste, who was recovering the colors of health.
+
+"The secretary did not say much," remarked Madame Mignon.
+
+"A little fool," said Madame Latournelle; "the poet has an attentive
+word for everybody. He thanked Monsieur Latournelle for his help in
+choosing the house; and said he must have taken counsel with a woman
+of good taste. But the other looked as gloomy as a Spaniard, and kept
+his eyes fixed on Modeste as though he would like to swallow her
+whole. If he had even looked at me I should have been afraid of him."
+
+"He had a pleasant voice," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"No doubt he came to Havre to inquire about the Mignons in the
+interests of his friend the poet," said Modeste, looking furtively at
+her father. "It was certainly he whom we saw in church."
+
+Madame Dumay and Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, accepted this as the
+natural explanation of Ernest's journey.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XIX
+
+               OF WHICH THE AUTHOR THINKS A GOOD DEAL
+
+"Do you know, Ernest," cried Canalis, when they had driven a short
+distance from the house, "I don't see any marriageable woman in
+society in Paris who compares with that adorable girl."
+
+"Ah, that ends it!" replied Ernest. "She loves you, or she will love
+you if you desire it. Your fame won half the battle. Well, you may now
+have it all your own way. You shall go there alone in future. Modeste
+despises me; she is right to do so; and I don't see any reason why I
+should condemn myself to see, to love, desire, and adore that which I
+can never possess."
+
+After a few consoling remarks, dashed with his own satisfaction at
+having made a new version of Caesar's phrase, Canalis divulged a
+desire to break with the Duchesse de Chaulieu. La Briere, totally
+unable to keep up the conversation, made the beauty of the night an
+excuse to be set down, and then rushed like one possessed to the
+seashore, where he stayed till past ten, in a half-demented state,
+walking hurriedly up and down, talking aloud in broken sentences,
+sometimes standing still or sitting down, without noticing the
+uneasiness of two custom-house officers who were on the watch. After
+loving Modeste's wit and intellect and her aggressive frankness, he
+now joined adoration of her beauty--that is to say, love without
+reason, love inexplicable--to all the other reasons which had drawn
+him ten days earlier, to the church in Havre.
+
+He returned to the Chalet, where the Pyrenees hounds barked at him
+till he was forced to relinquish the pleasure of gazing at Modeste's
+windows. In love, such things are of no more account to the lover than
+the work which is covered by the last layer of color is to an artist;
+yet they make up the whole of love, just as the hidden toil is the
+whole of art. Out of them arise the great painter and the true lover
+whom the woman and the public end, sometimes too late, by adoring.
+
+"Well then!" he cried aloud, "I will stay, I will suffer, I will love
+her for myself only, in solitude. Modeste shall be my sun, my life; I
+will breathe with her breath, rejoice in her joys and bear her griefs,
+be she even the wife of that egoist, Canalis."
+
+"That's what I call loving, monsieur," said a voice which came from a
+shrub by the side of the road. "Ha, ha, so all the world is in love
+with Mademoiselle de La Bastie?"
+
+And Butscha suddenly appeared and looked at La Briere. La Briere
+checked his anger when, by the light of the moon, he saw the dwarf,
+and he made a few steps without replying.
+
+"Soldiers who serve in the same company ought to be good comrades,"
+remarked Butscha. "You don't love Canalis; neither do I."
+
+"He is my friend," replied Ernest.
+
+"Ha, you are the little secretary?"
+
+"You are to know, monsieur, that I am no man's secretary. I have the
+honor to be of counsel to a supreme court of this kingdom."
+
+"I have the honor to salute Monsieur de La Briere," said Butscha. "I
+myself have the honor to be head clerk to Latournelle, chief
+councillor of Havre, and my position is a better one than yours. Yes,
+I have had the happiness of seeing Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie
+nearly every evening for the last four years, and I expect to live
+near her, as a king's servant lives in the Tuileries. If they offered
+me the throne of Russia I should answer, 'I love the sun too well.'
+Isn't that telling you, monsieur, that I care more for her than for
+myself? I am looking after her interests with the most honorable
+intentions. Do you believe that the proud Duchesse de Chaulieu would
+cast a favorable eye on the happiness of Madame de Canalis if her
+waiting-woman, who is in love with Monsieur Germain, not liking that
+charming valet's absence in Havre, were to say to her mistress while
+brushing her hair--"
+
+"Who do you know about all this?" said La Briere, interrupting
+Butscha.
+
+"In the first place, I am clerk to a notary," answered Butscha. "But
+haven't you seen my hump? It is full of resources, monsieur. I have
+made myself cousin to Mademoiselle Philoxene Jacmin, born at Honfleur,
+where my mother was born, a Jacmin,--there are eight branches of the
+Jacmins at Honfleur. So my cousin Philoxene, enticed by the bait of a
+highly improbable fortune, has told me a good many things."
+
+"The duchess is vindictive?" said La Briere.
+
+"Vindictive as a queen, Philoxene says; she has never yet forgiven the
+duke for being nothing more than her husband," replied Butscha. "She
+hates as she loves. I know all about her character, her tastes, her
+toilette, her religion, and her manners; for Philoxene stripped her
+for me, soul and corset. I went to the opera expressly to see her, and
+I didn't grudge the ten francs it cost me--I don't mean the play. If
+my imaginary cousin had not told me the duchess had seen her fifty
+summers, I should have thought I was over-generous in giving her
+thirty; she has never known a winter, that duchess!"
+
+"Yes," said La Briere, "she is a cameo--preserved because it is stone.
+Canalis would be in a bad way if the duchess were to find out what he
+is doing here; and I hope, monsieur, that you will go no further in
+this business of spying, which is unworthy of an honest man."
+
+"Monsieur," said Butscha, proudly; "for me Modeste is my country. I do
+not spy; I foresee, I take precautions. The duchess will come here if
+it is desirable, or she will stay tranquilly where she is, according
+to what I judge best."
+
+"You?"
+
+"I."
+
+"And how, pray?"
+
+"Ha, that's it!" said the little hunchback, plucking a blade of grass.
+"See here! this herb believes that men build palaces for it to grow
+in; it wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble, and brings
+them down, just as the masses forced into the edifice of feudality
+have brought it to the ground. The power of the feeble life that can
+creep everywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their
+cannons. I am one of three who have sworn that Modeste shall be happy,
+and we would sell our honor for her. Adieu, monsieur. If you truly
+love Mademoiselle de La Bastie, forget this conversation and shake
+hands with me, for I think you've got a heart. I longed to see the
+Chalet, and I got here just as SHE was putting out her light. I saw
+the dogs rush at you, and I overheard your words, and that is why I
+take the liberty of saying we serve in the same regiment--that of
+loyal devotion."
+
+"Monsieur," said La Briere, wringing the hunchback's hand, "would you
+have the friendliness to tell me if Mademoiselle Modeste ever loved
+any one WITH LOVE before she wrote to Canalis?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Butscha in an altered voice; "that thought is an
+insult. And even now, who knows if she really loves? does she know
+herself? She is enamored of genius, of the soul and intellect of that
+seller of verses, that literary quack; but she will study him, we
+shall all study him; and I know how to make the man's real character
+peep out from under that turtle-shell of fine manners,--we'll soon see
+the petty little head of his ambition and his vanity!" cried Butscha,
+rubbing his hands. "So, unless mademoiselle is desperately taken with
+him--"
+
+"Oh! she was seized with admiration when she saw him, as if he were
+something marvellous," exclaimed La Briere, letting the secret of his
+jealousy escape him.
+
+"If he is a loyal, honest fellow, and loves her; if he is worthy of
+her; if he renounces his duchess," said Butscha,--"then I'll manage
+the duchess! Here, my dear sir, take this road, and you will get home
+in ten minutes."
+
+But as they parted, Butscha turned back and hailed poor Ernest, who,
+as a true lover, would gladly have stayed there all night talking of
+Modeste.
+
+"Monsieur," said Butscha, "I have not yet had the honor of seeing our
+great poet. I am very curious to observe that magnificent phenomenon
+in the exercise of his functions. Do me the favor to bring him to the
+Chalet to-morrow evening, and stay as long as possible; for it takes
+more than an hour for a man to show himself for what he is. I shall be
+the first to see if he loves, if he can love, or if he ever will love
+Mademoiselle Modeste."
+
+"You are very young to--"
+
+"--to be a professor," said Butscha, cutting short La Briere. "Ha,
+monsieur, deformed folks are born a hundred years old. And besides, a
+sick man who has long been sick, knows more than his doctor; he knows
+the disease, and that is more than can be said for the best of
+doctors. Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart
+when the woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his
+deformity; he ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes
+seductive, just as the sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone
+is incurable. I have had neither father nor mother since I was six
+years old; I am now twenty-five. Public charity has been my mother,
+the procureur du roi my father. Oh! don't be troubled," he added,
+seeing Ernest's gesture; "I am much more lively than my situation.
+Well, for the last six years, ever since a woman's eye first told me I
+had no right to love, I do love, and I study women. I began with the
+ugly ones, for it is best to take the bull by the horns. So I took my
+master's wife, who has certainly been an angel to me, for my first
+study. Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn't help it. I passed her
+through my alembic and what did I find? this thought, crouching at the
+bottom of her heart, 'I am not so ugly as they think me'; and if a man
+were to work upon that thought he could bring her to the edge of the
+abyss, pious as she is."
+
+"And have you studied Modeste?"
+
+"I thought I told you," replied Butscha, "that my life belongs to her,
+just as France belongs to the king. Do you now understand what you
+called my spying in Paris? No one but me really knows what nobility,
+what pride, what devotion, what mysterious grace, what unwearying
+kindness, what true religion, gaiety, wit, delicacy, knowledge, and
+courtesy there are in the soul and in the heart of that adorable
+creature!"
+
+Butscha drew out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and La Briere
+pressed his hand for a long time.
+
+"I live in the sunbeam of her existence; it comes from her, it is
+absorbed in me; that is how we are united,--as nature is to God, by
+the Light and by the Word. Adieu, monsieur; never in my life have I
+talked in this way; but seeing you beneath her windows, I felt in my
+heart that you loved her as I love her."
+
+Without waiting for an answer Butscha quitted the poor lover, into
+whose heart his words had put an inexpressible balm. Ernest resolved
+to make a friend of him, not suspecting that the chief object of the
+clerk's loquacity was to gain communication with some one connected
+with Canalis. Ernest was rocked to sleep that night by the ebb and
+flow of thoughts and resolutions and plans for his future conduct,
+whereas Canalis slept the sleep of the conqueror, which is the
+sweetest of slumbers after that of the just.
+
+At breakfast next morning, the friends agreed to spend the evening of
+the following day at the Chalet and initiate themselves into the
+delights of provincial whist. To get rid of the day they ordered their
+horses, purchased by Germain at a large price, and started on a voyage
+of discovery round the country, which was quite as unknown to them as
+China; for the most foreign thing to Frenchmen in France is France
+itself.
+
+By dint of reflecting on his position as an unfortunate and despised
+lover, Ernest went through something of the same process as Modeste's
+first letter had forced upon him. Though sorrow is said to develop
+virtue, it only develops it in virtuous persons; that cleaning-out of
+the conscience takes place only in persons who are by nature clean. La
+Briere vowed to endure his sufferings in Spartan silence, to act
+worthily, and give way to no baseness; while Canalis, fascinated by
+the enormous "dot," was telling himself to take every means of
+captivating the heiress. Selfishness and devotion, the key-notes of
+the two characters, therefore took, by the action of a moral law which
+is often very odd in its effects, certain measures that were contrary
+to their respective natures. The selfish man put on self-abnegation;
+the man who thought chiefly of others took refuge on the Aventinus of
+pride. That phenomenon is often seen in political life. Men frequently
+turn their characters wrong side out, and it sometimes happens that
+the public is unable to tell which is the right side.
+
+After dinner the two friends heard of the arrival of the grand
+equerry, who was presented at the Chalet the same evening by
+Latournelle. Mademoiselle d'Herouville had contrived to wound that
+worthy man by sending a footmen to tell him to come to her, instead of
+sending her nephew in person; thus depriving the notary of a
+distinguished visit he would certainly have talked about for the rest
+of his natural life. So Latournelle curtly informed the grand equerry,
+when he proposed to drive him to the Chalet, that he was engaged to
+take Madame Latournelle. Guessing from the little man's sulky manner
+that there was some blunder to repair, the duke said graciously:--
+
+"Then I shall have the pleasure, if you will allow me, of taking
+Madame Latournelle also."
+
+Disregarding Mademoiselle d'Herouville's haughty shrug, the duke left
+the room with the notary. Madame Latournelle, half-crazed with joy at
+seeing the gorgeous carriage at her door, with footmen in royal livery
+letting down the steps, was too agitated on hearing that the grand
+equerry had called for her, to find her gloves, her parasol, her
+absurdity, or her usual air of pompous dignity. Once in the carriage,
+however, and while expressing confused thanks and civilities to the
+little duke, she suddenly exclaimed, from a thought in her kind
+heart,--
+
+"But Butscha, where is he?"
+
+"Let us take Butscha," said the duke, smiling.
+
+When the people on the quays, attracted in groups by the splendor of
+the royal equipage, saw the funny spectacle, the three little men with
+the spare gigantic woman, they looked at one another and laughed.
+
+"If you melt all three together, they might make one man fit to mate
+with that big cod-fish," said a sailor from Bordeaux.
+
+"Is there any other thing you would like to take with you, madame?"
+asked the duke, jestingly, while the footman awaited his orders.
+
+"No, monseigneur," she replied, turning scarlet and looking at her
+husband as much as to say, "What did I do wrong?"
+
+"Monsieur le duc honors me by considering that I am a thing," said
+Butscha; "a poor clerk is usually thought to be a nonentity."
+
+Though this was said with a laugh, the duke colored and did not
+answer. Great people are to blame for joking with their social
+inferiors. Jesting is a game, and games presuppose equality; it is to
+obviate any inconvenient results of this temporary equality that
+players have the right, after the game is over, not to recognize each
+other.
+
+The visit of the grand equerry had the ostensible excuse of an
+important piece of business; namely, the retrieval of an immense tract
+of waste land left by the sea between the mouths of the two rivers,
+which tract had just been adjudged by the Council of State to the
+house of Herouville. The matter was nothing less than putting
+flood-gates with double bridges, draining three or four hundred acres,
+cutting canals, and laying out roadways. When the duke had explained
+the condition of the land, Charles Mignon remarked that time must be
+allowed for the soil, which was still moving, to settle and grow solid
+in a natural way.
+
+"Time, which has providentially enriched your house, Monsieur le duc,
+can alone complete the work," he said, in conclusion. "It would be
+prudent to let fifty years elapse before you reclaim the land."
+
+"Do not let that be your final word, Monsieur le comte," said the
+duke. "Come to Herouville and see things for yourself."
+
+Charles Mignon replied that every capitalist should take time to
+examine into such matters with a cool head, thus giving the duke a
+pretext for his visits to the Chalet. The sight of Modeste made a
+lively impression on the young man, and he asked the favor of
+receiving her at Herouville with her father, saying that his sister
+and his aunt had heard much of her, and wished to make her
+acquaintance. On this the count proposed to present his daughter to
+those ladies himself, and invited the whole party to dinner on the day
+of his return to the villa. The duke accepted the invitation. The blue
+ribbon, the title, and above all, the ecstatic glances of the noble
+gentleman had an effect upon Modeste; but she appeared to great
+advantage in carriage, dignity, and conversation. The duke withdrew
+reluctantly, carrying with him an invitation to visit the Chalet every
+evening,--an invitation based on the impossibility of a courtier of
+Charles X. existing for a single evening without his rubber.
+
+The following evening, therefore, Modeste was to see all three of her
+lovers. No matter what young girls may say, and though the logic of
+the heart may lead them to sacrifice everything to preference, it is
+extremely flattering to their self-love to see a number of rival
+adorers around them,--distinguished or celebrated men, or men of
+ancient lineage,--all endeavoring to shine and to please. Suffer as
+Modeste may in general estimation, it must be told she subsequently
+admitted that the sentiments expressed in her letters paled before the
+pleasure of seeing three such different minds at war with one another,
+--three men who, taken separately, would each have done honor to the
+most exacting family. Yet this luxury of self-love was checked by a
+misanthropical spitefulness, resulting from the terrible wound she had
+received,--although by this time she was beginning to think of that
+wound as a disappointment only. So when her father said to her,
+laughing, "Well, Modeste, do you want to be a duchess?" she answered,
+with a mocking curtsey,--
+
+"Sorrows have made me philosophical."
+
+"Do you mean to be only a baroness?" asked Butscha.
+
+"Or a viscountess?" said her father.
+
+"How could that be?" she asked quickly.
+
+"If you accept Monsieur de La Briere, he has enough merit and
+influence to obtain permission from the king to bear my titles and
+arms."
+
+"Oh, if it comes to disguising himself, _he_ will not make any
+difficulty," said Modeste, scornfully.
+
+Butscha did not understand this epigram, whose meaning could only be
+guessed by Monsieur and Madame Mignon and Dumay.
+
+"When it is a question of marriage, all men disguise themselves,"
+remarked Latournelle, "and women set them the example. I've heard it
+said ever since I came into the world that 'Monsieur this or
+Mademoiselle that has made a good marriage,'--meaning that the other
+side had made a bad one."
+
+"Marriage," said Butscha, "is like a lawsuit; there's always one side
+discontented. If one dupes the other, certainly half the husbands in
+the world are playing a comedy at the expense of the other half."
+
+"From which you conclude, Sieur Butscha?" inquired Modeste.
+
+"To pay the utmost attention to the manoeuvres of the enemy," answered
+the clerk.
+
+"What did I tell you, my darling?" said Charles Mignon, alluding to
+their conversation on the seashore.
+
+"Men play as many parts to get married as mothers make their daughters
+play to get rid of them," said Latournelle.
+
+"Then you approve of stratagems?" said Modeste.
+
+"On both sides," cried Gobenheim, "and that brings it even."
+
+This conversation was carried on by fits and starts, as they say, in
+the intervals of cutting and dealing the cards; and it soon turned
+chiefly on the merits of the Duc d'Herouville, who was thought very
+good-looking by little Latournelle, little Dumay, and little Butscha.
+Without the foregoing discussion on the lawfulness of matrimonial
+tricks, the reader might possibly find the forthcoming account of the
+evening so impatiently awaited by Butscha, somewhat too long.
+
+Desplein, the famous surgeon, arrived the next morning, and stayed
+only long enough to send to Havre for fresh horses and have them
+put-to, which took about an hour. After examining Madame Mignon's eyes,
+he decided that she could recover her sight, and fixed a suitable time,
+a month later, to perform the operation. This important consultation
+took place before the assembled members of the Chalet, who stood
+trembling and expectant to hear the verdict of the prince of science.
+That illustrious member of the Academy of Sciences put about a dozen
+brief questions to the blind woman as he examined her eyes in the
+strong light from a window. Modeste was amazed at the value which a
+man so celebrated attached to time, when she saw the
+travelling-carriage piled with books which the great surgeon proposed
+to read during the journey; for he had left Paris the evening before,
+and had spent the night in sleeping and travelling. The rapidity and
+clearness of Desplein's judgment on each answer made by Madame Mignon,
+his succinct tone, his decisive manner, gave Modeste her first real
+idea of a man of genius. She perceived the enormous difference between
+a second-rate man, like Canalis, and Desplein, who was even more than
+a superior man. A man of genius finds in the consciousness of his
+talent and in the solidity of his fame an arena of his own, where his
+legitimate pride can expand and exercise itself without interfering
+with others. Moreover, his perpetual struggle with men and things
+leave them no time for the coxcombry of fashionable genius, which
+makes haste to gather in the harvests of a fugitive season, and whose
+vanity and self-love are as petty and exacting as a custom-house which
+levies tithes on all that comes in its way.
+
+Modeste was the more enchanted by this great practical genius, because
+he was evidently charmed with the exquisite beauty of Modeste,--he,
+through whose hands so many women had passed, and who had long since
+examined the sex, as it were, with magnifier and scalpel.
+
+"It would be a sad pity," he said, with an air of gallantry which he
+occasionally put on, and which contrasted with his assumed
+brusqueness, "if a mother were deprived of the sight of so charming a
+daughter."
+
+Modeste insisted on serving the simple breakfast which was all the
+great surgeon would accept. She accompanied her father and Dumay to
+the carriage stationed at the garden-gate, and said to Desplein at
+parting, her eyes shining with hope,--
+
+"And will my dear mamma really see me?"
+
+"Yes, my little sprite, I'll promise you that," he answered, smiling;
+"and I am incapable of deceiving you, for I, too, have a daughter."
+
+The horses started and carried him off as he uttered the last words
+with unexpected grace and feeling. Nothing is more charming than the
+peculiar unexpectedness of persons of talent.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XX
+
+                    THE POET DOES HIS EXERCISES
+
+This visit of the great surgeon was the event of the day, and it left
+a luminous trace in Modeste's soul. The young enthusiast ardently
+admired the man whose life belonged to others, and in whom the habit
+of studying physical suffering had destroyed the manifestations of
+egoism. That evening, when Gobenheim, the Latournelles, and Butscha,
+Canalis, Ernest, and the Duc d'Herouville were gathered in the salon,
+they all congratulated the Mignon family on the hopes which Desplein
+encouraged. The conversation, in which the Modeste of her letters was
+once more in the ascendant, turned naturally on the man whose genius,
+unfortunately for his fame, was appreciable only by the faculty and
+men of science. Gobenheim contributed a phrase which is the sacred
+chrism of genius as interpreted in these days by public economists and
+bankers,--
+
+"He makes a mint of money."
+
+"They say he is very grasping," added Canalis.
+
+The praises which Modeste showered on Desplein had annoyed the poet.
+Vanity acts like a woman,--they both think they are defrauded when
+love or praise is bestowed on others. Voltaire was jealous of the wit
+of a roue whom Paris admired for two days; and even a duchess takes
+offence at a look bestowed upon her maid. The avarice excited by these
+two sentiments is such that a fraction of them given to the poor is
+thought robbery.
+
+"Do you think, monsieur," said Modeste, smiling, "that we should judge
+genius by ordinary standards?"
+
+"Perhaps we ought first of all to define the man of genius," replied
+Canalis. "One of the conditions of genius is invention,--invention of
+a form, a system, a force. Napoleon was an inventor, apart from his
+other conditions of genius. He invented his method of making war.
+Walter Scott is an inventor, Linnaeus is an inventor, Geoffrey
+Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier are inventors. Such men are men of genius of
+the first rank. They renew, increase, or modify both science and art.
+But Desplein is merely a man whose vast talent consists in properly
+applying laws already known; in observing, by means of a natural gift,
+the limits laid down for each temperament, and the time appointed by
+Nature for an operation. He has not founded, like Hippocrates, the
+science itself. He has invented no system, as did Galen, Broussais,
+and Rasori. He is merely an executive genius, like Moscheles on the
+piano, Paganini on the violin, or Farinelli on his own larynx,--men
+who have developed enormous faculties, but who have not created music.
+You must permit me to discriminate between Beethoven and la Catalani:
+to one belongs the immortal crown of genius and of martyrdom, to the
+other innumerable five-franc pieces; one we can pay in coin, but the
+world remains throughout all time a debtor to the other. Each day
+increases our debt to Moliere, but Baron's comedies have been
+overpaid."
+
+"I think you make the prerogative of ideas too exclusive," said Ernest
+de La Briere, in a quiet and melodious voice, which formed a sudden
+contrast to the peremptory tones of the poet, whose flexible organ had
+abandoned its caressing notes for the strident and magisterial voice
+of the rostrum. "Genius must be estimated according to its utility;
+and Parmentier, who brought potatoes into general use, Jacquart, the
+inventor of silk looms; Papin, who first discovered the elastic
+quality of steam, are men of genius, to whom statues will some day be
+erected. They have changed, or they will change in a certain sense,
+the face of the State. It is in that sense that Desplein will always
+be considered a man of genius by thinkers; they see him attended by a
+generation of sufferers whose pains are stifled by his hand."
+
+That Ernest should give utterance to this opinion was enough to make
+Modeste oppose it.
+
+"If that be so, monsieur," she said, "then the man who could discover
+a way to mow wheat without injuring the straw, by a machine that could
+do the work of ten men, would be a man of genius."
+
+"Yes, my daughter," said Madame Mignon; "and the poor would bless him
+for cheaper bread,--he that is blessed by the poor is blessed of God."
+
+"That is putting utility above art," said Modeste, shaking her head.
+
+"Without utility what would become of art?" said Charles Mignon. "What
+would it rest on? what would it live on? Where would you lodge, and
+how would you pay the poet?"
+
+"Oh! my dear papa, such opinions are fearfully flat and antediluvian!
+I am not surprised that Gobenheim and Monsieur de La Briere, who are
+interested in the solution of social problems should think so; but
+you, whose life has been the most useless poetry of the century,
+--useless because the blood you shed all over Europe, and the horrible
+sufferings exacted by your colossus, did not prevent France from
+losing ten departments acquired under the Revolution,--how can _you_
+give in to such excessively pig-tail notions, as the idealists say? It
+is plain you've just come from China."
+
+The impertinence of Modeste's speech was heightened by a little air of
+contemptuous disdain which she purposely put on, and which fairly
+astounded Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle, and Dumay. As for Madame
+Latournelle, she opened her eyes so wide she no longer saw anything.
+Butscha, whose alert attention was comparable to that of a spy, looked
+at Monsieur Mignon, expecting to see him flush with sudden and violent
+indignation.
+
+"A little more, young lady, and you will be wanting in respect for
+your father," said the colonel, smiling, and noticing Butscha's look.
+"See what it is to spoil one's children!"
+
+"I am your only child," she said saucily.
+
+"Child, indeed," remarked the notary, significantly.
+
+"Monsieur," said Modeste, turning upon him, "my father is delighted to
+have me for his governess; he gave me life and I give him knowledge;
+he will soon owe me something."
+
+"There seems occasion for it," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"But mademoiselle is right," said Canalis, rising and standing before
+the fireplace in one of the finest attitudes of his collection. "God,
+in his providence, has given food and clothing to man, but he has not
+directly given him art. He says to man: 'To live, thou must bow
+thyself to earth; to think, thou shalt lift thyself to Me.' We have as
+much need of the life of the soul as of the life of the body,--hence,
+there are two utilities. It is true we cannot be shod by books or
+clothed by poems. An epic song is not, if you take the utilitarian
+view, as useful as the broth of a charity kitchen. The noblest ideas
+will not sail a vessel in place of canvas. It is quite true that the
+cotton-gin gives us calicoes for thirty sous a yard less than we ever
+paid before; but that machine and all other industrial perfections
+will not breathe the breath of life into a people, will not tell
+futurity of a civilization that once existed. Art, on the contrary,
+Egyptian, Mexican, Grecian, Roman art, with their masterpieces--now
+called useless!--reveal the existence of races back in the vague
+immense of time, beyond where the great intermediary nations, denuded
+of men of genius, have disappeared, leaving not a line nor a trace
+behind them! The works of genius are the 'summum' of civilization, and
+presuppose utility. Surely a pair of boots are not as agreeable to
+your eyes as a fine play at the theatre; and you don't prefer a
+windmill to the church of Saint-Ouen, do you? Well then, nations are
+imbued with the same feelings as the individual man, and the man's
+cherished desire is to survive himself morally just as he propagates
+himself physically. The survival of a people is the work of its men of
+genius. At this very moment France is proving, energetically, the
+truth of that theory. She is, undoubtedly, excelled by England in
+commerce, industry, and navigation, and yet she is, I believe, at the
+head of the world,--by reason of her artists, her men of talent, and
+the good taste of her products. There is no artist and no superior
+intellect that does not come to Paris for a diploma. There is no
+school of painting at this moment but that of France; and we shall
+reign far longer and perhaps more securely by our books than by our
+swords. In La Briere's system, on the other hand, all that is glorious
+and lovely must be suppressed,--woman's beauty, music, painting,
+poetry. Society will not be overthrown, that is true, but, I ask you,
+who would willingly accept such a life? All useful things are ugly and
+forbidding. A kitchen is indispensable, but you take care not to sit
+there; you live in the salon, which you adorn, like this, with
+superfluous things. Of what _use_, let me ask you, are these charming
+wall-paintings, this carved wood-work? There is nothing beautiful but
+that which seems to us useless. We called the sixteenth century the
+Renascence with admirable truth of language. That century was the dawn
+of a new era. Men will continue to speak of it when all remembrance of
+anterior centuries had passed away,--their only merit being that they
+once existed, like the million beings who count as the rubbish of a
+generation."
+
+"Rubbish! yes, that may be, but my rubbish is dear to me," said the
+Duc d'Herouville, laughing, during the silent pause which followed the
+poet's pompous oration.
+
+"Let me ask," said Butscha, attacking Canalis, "does art, the sphere
+in which, according to you, genius is required to evolve itself, exist
+at all? Is it not a splendid lie, a delusion, of the social man? Do I
+want a landscape scene of Normandy in my bedroom when I can look out
+and see a better one done by God himself? Our dreams make poems more
+glorious than Iliads. For an insignificant sum of money I can find at
+Valogne, at Carentan, in Provence, at Arles, many a Venus as beautiful
+as those of Titian. The police gazette publishes tales, differing
+somewhat from those of Walter Scott, but ending tragically with blood,
+not ink. Happiness and virtue exist above and beyond both art and
+genius."
+
+"Bravo, Butscha!" cried Madame Latournelle.
+
+"What did he say?" asked Canalis of La Briere, failing to gather from
+the eyes and attitude of Mademoiselle Mignon the usual signs of
+artless admiration.
+
+The contemptuous indifference which Modeste had exhibited toward La
+Briere, and above all, her disrespectful speeches to her father, so
+depressed the young man that he made no answer to Canalis; his eyes,
+fixed sorrowfully on Modeste, were full of deep meditation. The Duc
+d'Herouville took up Butscha's argument and reproduced it with much
+intelligence, saying finally that the ecstasies of Saint-Theresa were
+far superior to the creations of Lord Byron.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur le duc," exclaimed Modeste, "hers was a purely personal
+poetry, whereas the genius of Lord Byron and Moliere benefit the
+world."
+
+"How do you square that opinion with those of Monsieur le baron?"
+cried Charles Mignon, quickly. "Now you are insisting that genius must
+be useful, and benefit the world as though it were cotton,--but
+perhaps you think logic as antediluvian as your poor old father."
+
+Butscha, La Briere, and Madame Latournelle exchanged glances that were
+more than half derisive, and drove Modeste to a pitch of irritation
+that kept her silent for a moment.
+
+"Mademoiselle, do not mind them," said Canalis, smiling upon her, "we
+are neither beaten, nor caught in a contradiction. Every work of art,
+let it be in literature, music, painting, sculpture, or architecture,
+implies a positive social utility, equal to that of all other
+commercial products. Art is pre-eminently commerce; presupposes it, in
+short. An author pockets ten thousand francs for his book; the making
+of books means the manufactory of paper, a foundry, a printing-office,
+a bookseller,--in other words, the employment of thousands of men. The
+execution of a symphony of Beethoven or an opera by Rossini requires
+human arms and machinery and manufactures. The cost of a monument is
+an almost brutal case in point. In short, I may say that the works of
+genius have an extremely costly basis and are, necessarily, useful to
+the workingman."
+
+Astride of that theme, Canalis spoke for some minutes with a fine
+luxury of metaphor, and much inward complacency as to his phrases; but
+it happened with him, as with many another great speaker, that he
+found himself at last at the point from which the conversation
+started, and in full agreement with La Briere without perceiving it.
+
+"I see with much pleasure, my dear baron," said the little duke,
+slyly, "that you will make an admirable constitutional minister."
+
+"Oh!" said Canalis, with the gesture of a great man, "what is the use
+of all these discussions? What do they prove?--the eternal verity of
+one axiom: All things are true, all things are false. Moral truths as
+well as human beings change their aspect according to their
+surroundings, to the point of being actually unrecognizable."
+
+"Society exists through settled opinions," said the Duc d'Herouville.
+
+"What laxity!" whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband.
+
+"He is a poet," said Gobenheim, who overheard her.
+
+Canalis, who was ten leagues above the heads of his audience, and who
+may have been right in his last philosophical remark, took the sort of
+coldness which now overspread the surrounding faces of a symptom of
+provincial ignorance; but seeing that Modeste understood him, he was
+content, being wholly unaware that monologue is particularly
+disagreeable to country-folk, whose principal desire it is to exhibit
+the manner of life and the wit and wisdom of the provinces to
+Parisians.
+
+"It is long since you have seen the Duchesse de Chaulieu?" asked the
+duke, addressing Canalis, as if to change the conversation.
+
+"I left her about six days ago."
+
+"Is she well?" persisted the duke.
+
+"Perfectly well."
+
+"Have the kindness to remember me to her when you write."
+
+"They say she is charming," remarked Modeste, addressing the duke.
+
+"Monsieur le baron can speak more confidently than I," replied the
+grand equerry.
+
+"More than charming," said Canalis, making the best of the duke's
+perfidy; "but I am partial, mademoiselle; she has been a friend to me
+for the last ten years; I owe all that is good in me to her; she has
+saved me from the dangers of the world. Moreover, Monsieur le Duc de
+Chaulieu launched me in my present career. Without the influence of
+that family the king and the princesses would have forgotten a poor
+poet like me; therefore my affection for the duchess must always be
+full of gratitude."
+
+His voice quivered.
+
+"We ought to love the woman who has led you to write those sublime
+poems, and who inspires you with such noble feelings," said Modeste,
+quite affected. "Who can think of a poet without a muse!"
+
+"He would be without a heart," replied Canalis. "He would write barren
+verses like Voltaire, who never loved any one but Voltaire."
+
+"I thought you did me the honor to say, in Paris," interrupted Dumay,
+"that you never felt the sentiments you expressed."
+
+"The shoe fits, my soldier," replied the poet, smiling; "but let me
+tell you that it is quite possible to have a great deal of feeling
+both in the intellectual life and in real life. My good friend here,
+La Briere, is madly in love," continued Canalis, with a fine show of
+generosity, looking at Modeste. "I, who certainly love as much as he,
+--that is, I think so unless I delude myself,--well, I can give to my
+love a literary form in harmony with its character. But I dare not
+say, mademoiselle," he added, turning to Modeste with too studied a
+grace, "that to-morrow I may not be without inspiration."
+
+Thus the poet triumphed over all obstacles. In honor of his love he
+rode a-tilt at the hindrances that were thrown in his way, and Modeste
+remained wonder-struck at the Parisian wit that scintillated in his
+declamatory discourse, of which she had hitherto known little or
+nothing.
+
+"What an acrobat!" whispered Butscha to Latournelle, after listening
+to a magnificent tirade on the Catholic religion and the happiness of
+having a pious wife,--served up in response to a remark by Madame
+Mignon.
+
+Modeste's eyes were blindfolded as it were; Canalis's elocution and
+the close attention which she was predetermined to pay to him
+prevented her from seeing that Butscha was carefully noting the
+declamation, the want of simplicity, the emphasis that took the place
+of feeling, and the curious incoherencies in the poet's speech which
+led the dwarf to make his rather cruel comment. At certain points of
+Canalis's discourse, when Monsieur Mignon, Dumay, Butscha, and
+Latournelle wondered at the man's utter want of logic, Modeste admired
+his suppleness, and said to herself, as she dragged him after her
+through the labyrinth of fancy, "He loves me!" Butscha, in common with
+the other spectators of what we must call a stage scene, was struck
+with the radiant defect of all egoists, which Canalis, like many men
+accustomed to perorate, allowed to be too plainly seen. Whether he
+understood beforehand what the person he was speaking to meant to say,
+whether he was not listening, or whether he had the faculty of
+listening when he was thinking of something else, it is certain that
+Melchior's face wore an absent-minded look in conversation, which
+disconcerted the ideas of others and wounded their vanity. Not to
+listen is not merely a want of politeness, it is a mark of disrespect.
+Canalis pushed this habit too far; for he often forgot to answer a
+speech which required an answer, and passed, without the ordinary
+transitions of courtesy, to the subject, whatever it was, that
+preoccupied him. Though such impertinence is accepted without protest
+from a man of marked distinction, it stirs a leaven of hatred and
+vengeance in many hearts; in those of equals it even goes so far as to
+destroy a friendship. If by chance Melchior was forced to listen, he
+fell into another fault; he merely lent his attention, and never gave
+it. Though this may not be so mortifying, it shows a kind of
+semi-concession which is almost as unsatisfactory to the hearer and
+leaves him dissatisfied. Nothing brings more profit in the commerce of
+society than the small change of attention. He that heareth let him
+hear, is not only a gospel precept, it is an excellent speculation;
+follow it, and all will be forgiven you, even vice. Canalis took a
+great deal of trouble in his anxiety to please Modeste; but though he
+was compliant enough with her, he fell back into his natural self with
+the others.
+
+Modeste, pitiless for the ten martyrs she was making, begged Canalis
+to read some of his poems; she wanted, she said, a specimen of his
+gift for reading, of which she had heard so much. Canalis took the
+volume which she gave him, and cooed (for that is the proper word) a
+poem which is generally considered his finest,--an imitation of
+Moore's "Loves of the Angels," entitled "Vitalis," which Monsieur and
+Madame Dumay, Madame Latournelle, and Gobenheim welcomed with a few
+yawns.
+
+"If you are a good whist-player, monsieur," said Gobenheim,
+flourishing five cards held like a fan, "I must say I have never met a
+man as accomplished as you."
+
+The remark raised a laugh, for it was the translation of everybody's
+thought.
+
+"I play it sufficiently well to live in the provinces for the rest of
+my days," replied Canalis. "That, I think, is enough, and more than
+enough literature and conversation for whist-players," he added,
+throwing the volume impatiently on a table.
+
+This little incident serves to show what dangers environ a
+drawing-room hero when he steps, like Canalis, out of his sphere; he is
+like the favorite actor of a second-rate audience, whose talent is lost
+when he leaves his own boards and steps upon those of an upper-class
+theatre.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXI
+
+                       MODESTE PLAYS HER PART
+
+The game opened with the baron and the duke, Gobenheim and Latournelle
+as partners. Modeste took a seat near the poet, to Ernest's deep
+disappointment; he watched the face of the wayward girl, and marked
+the progress of the fascination which Canalis exerted over her. La
+Briere had not the gift of seduction which Melchior possessed. Nature
+frequently denies it to true hearts, who are, as a rule, timid. This
+gift demands fearlessness, an alacrity of ways and means that might be
+called the trapeze of the mind; a little mimicry goes with it; in fact
+there is always, morally speaking, something of the comedian in a
+poet. There is a vast difference between expressing sentiments we do
+not feel, though we may imagine all their variations, and feigning to
+feel them when bidding for success on the theatre of private life. And
+yet, though the necessary hypocrisy of a man of the world may have
+gangrened a poet, he ends by carrying the faculties of his talent into
+the expression of any required sentiment, just as a great man doomed
+to solitude ends by infusing his heart into his mind.
+
+"He is after the millions," thought La Briere, sadly; "and he can play
+passion so well that Modeste will believe him."
+
+Instead of endeavoring to appear more amiable and wittier than his
+rival, Ernest imitated the Duc d'Herouville, and was gloomy, anxious,
+and watchful; but whereas the courier studied the freaks of the young
+heiress, Ernest simply fell a prey to the pains of dark and
+concentrated jealousy. He had not yet been able to obtain a glance
+from his idol. After a while he left the room with Butscha.
+
+"It is all over!" he said; "she is caught by him; I am more
+disagreeable to her, and moreover, she is right. Canalis is charming;
+there's intellect in his silence, passion in his eyes, poetry in his
+rhodomontades."
+
+"Is he an honest man?" asked Butscha.
+
+"Oh, yes," replied La Briere. "He is loyal and chivalrous, and capable
+of getting rid, under Modeste's influence, of those affectations which
+Madame de Chaulieu has taught him."
+
+"You are a fine fellow," said the hunchback; "but is he capable of
+loving,--will he love her?"
+
+"I don't know," answered La Briere. "Has she said anything about me?"
+he asked after a moment's silence.
+
+"Yes," said Butscha, and he repeated Modeste's speech about disguises.
+
+Poor Ernest flung himself upon a bench and held his head in his hands.
+He could not keep back his tears, and he did not wish Butscha to see
+them; but the dwarf was the very man to guess his emotion.
+
+"What troubles you?" he asked.
+
+"She is right!" cried Ernest, springing up; "I am a wretch."
+
+And he related the deception into which Canalis had led him when
+Modeste's first letter was received, carefully pointing out to Butscha
+that he had wished to undeceive the young girl before she herself took
+off the mask, and apostrophizing, in rather juvenile fashion, his
+luckless destiny. Butscha sympathetically understood the love in the
+flavor and vigor of his simple language, and in his deep and genuine
+anxiety.
+
+"But why don't you show yourself to Mademoiselle Modeste for what you
+are?" he said; "why do you let your rival do his exercises?"
+
+"Have you never felt your throat tighten when you wished to speak to
+her?" cried La Briere; "is there never a strange feeling in the roots
+of your hair and on the surface of your skin when she looks at you,
+--even if she is thinking of something else?"
+
+"But you had sufficient judgment to show displeasure when she as good
+as told her excellent father that he was a dolt."
+
+"Monsieur, I love her too well not to have felt a knife in my heart
+when I heard her contradicting her own perfections."
+
+"Canalis supported her."
+
+"If she had more self-love than heart there would be nothing for a man
+to regret in losing her," answered La Briere.
+
+At this moment, Modeste, followed by Canalis, who had lost the rubber,
+came out with her father and Madame Dumay to breathe the fresh air of
+the starry night. While his daughter walked about with the poet,
+Charles Mignon left her and came up to La Briere.
+
+"Your friend, monsieur, ought to have been a lawyer," he said, smiling
+and looking attentively at the young man.
+
+"You must not judge a poet as you would an ordinary man,--as you would
+me, for example, Monsieur le comte," said La Briere. "A poet has a
+mission. He is obliged by his nature to see the poetry of questions,
+just as he expresses that of things. When you think him inconsistent
+with himself he is really faithful to his vocation. He is a painter
+copying with equal truth a Madonna and a courtesan. Moliere is as true
+to nature in his old men as in his young ones, and Moliere's judgment
+was assuredly a sound and healthy one. These witty paradoxes might be
+dangerous for second-rate minds, but they have no real influence on
+the character of great men."
+
+Charles Mignon pressed La Briere's hand.
+
+"That adaptability, however, leads a man to excuse himself in his own
+eyes for actions that are diametrically opposed to each other; above
+all, in politics."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle," Canalis was at this moment saying, in a caressing
+voice, replying to a roguish remark of Modeste, "do not think that a
+multiplicity of emotions can in any way lessen the strength of
+feelings. Poets, even more than other men, must needs love with
+constancy and faith. You must not be jealous of what is called the
+Muse. Happy is the wife of a man whose days are occupied. If you heard
+the complaints of women who have to endure the burden of an idle
+husband, either a man without duties, or one so rich as to have
+nothing to do, you would know that the highest happiness of a Parisian
+wife is freedom,--the right to rule in her own home. Now we writers
+and men of functions and occupations, we leave the sceptre to our
+wives; we cannot descend to the tyranny of little minds; we have
+something better to do. If I ever marry,--which I assure you is a
+catastrophe very remote at the present moment,--I should wish my wife
+to enjoy the same moral freedom that a mistress enjoys, and which is
+perhaps the real source of her attraction."
+
+Canalis talked on, displaying the warmth of his fancy and all his
+graces, for Modeste's benefit, as he spoke of love, marriage, and the
+adoration of women, until Monsieur Mignon, who had rejoined them,
+seized the opportunity of a slight pause to take his daughter's arm
+and lead her up to Ernest de La Briere, whom he had been advising to
+seek an open explanation with her.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Ernest, in a voice that was scarcely his own, "it
+is impossible for me to remain any longer under the weight of your
+displeasure. I do not defend myself; I do not seek to justify my
+conduct; I desire only to make you see that _before_ reading your most
+flattering letter, addressed to the individual and no longer to the
+poet,--the last which you sent to me,--I wished, and I told you in my
+note written at Havre that I wished, to correct the error under which
+you were acting. All the feelings that I have had the happiness to
+express to you are sincere. A hope dawned on me in Paris when your
+father told me he was comparatively poor,--but now that all is lost,
+now that nothing is left for me but endless regrets, why should I stay
+here where all is torture? Let me carry away with me one smile to live
+forever in my heart."
+
+"Monsieur," answered Modeste, who seemed cold and absent-minded, "I am
+not the mistress of this house; but I certainly should deeply regret
+to retain any one where he finds neither pleasure nor happiness."
+
+She left La Briere and took Madame Dumay's arm to re-enter the house.
+A few moments later all the actors in this domestic scene reassembled
+in the salon, and were a good deal surprised to see Modeste sitting
+beside the Duc d'Herouville and coquetting with him like an
+accomplished Parisian woman. She watched his play, gave him the advice
+he wanted, and found occasion to say flattering things by ranking the
+merits of noble birth with those of genius and beauty. Canalis thought
+he knew the reason of this change; he had tried to pique Modeste by
+calling marriage a catastrophe, and showing that he was aloof from it;
+but like others who play with fire, he had burned his fingers.
+Modeste's pride and her present disdain frightened him, and he
+endeavored to recover his ground, exhibiting a jealousy which was all
+the more visible because it was artificial. Modeste, implacable as an
+angel, tasted the sweets of power, and, naturally enough, abused it.
+The Duc d'Herouville had never known such a happy evening; a woman
+smiled on him! At eleven o'clock, an unheard-of hour at the Chalet,
+the three suitors took their leave,--the duke thinking Modeste
+charming, Canalis believing her excessively coquettish, and La Briere
+heart-broken by her cruelty.
+
+For eight days the heiress continued to be to her three lovers very
+much what she had been during that evening; so that the poet appeared
+to carry the day against his rivals, in spite of certain freaks and
+caprices which from time to time gave the Duc d'Herouville a little
+hope. The disrespect she showed to her father, and the great liberties
+she took with him; her impatience with her blind mother, to whom she
+seemed to grudge the little services which had once been the delight
+of her filial piety,--seemed the result of a capricious nature and a
+heedless gaiety indulged from childhood. When Modeste went too far,
+she turned round and openly took herself to task, ascribing her
+impertinence and levity to a spirit of independence. She acknowledged
+to the duke and Canalis her distaste for obedience, and professed to
+regard it as an obstacle to her marriage; thus investigating the
+nature of her suitors, after the manner of those who dig into the
+earth in search of metals, coal, tufa, or water.
+
+"I shall never," she said, the evening before the day on which the
+family were to move into the villa, "find a husband who will put up
+with my caprices as my father does; his kindness never flags. I am
+sure no one will ever be as indulgent to me as my precious mother."
+
+"They know that you love them, mademoiselle," said La Briere.
+
+"You may be very sure, mademoiselle, that your husband will know the
+full value of his treasure," added the duke.
+
+"You have spirit and resolution enough to discipline a husband," cried
+Canalis, laughing.
+
+Modeste smiled as Henri IV. must have smiled after drawing out the
+characters of his three principal ministers, for the benefit of a
+foreign ambassador, by means of three answers to an insidious
+question.
+
+On the day of the dinner, Modeste, led away by the preference she
+bestowed on Canalis, walked alone with him up and down the gravelled
+space which lay between the house and the lawn with its flower-beds.
+From the gestures of the poet, and the air and manner of the young
+heiress, it was easy to see that she was listening favorably to him.
+The two demoiselles d'Herouville hastened to interrupt the scandalous
+tete-a-tete; and with the natural cleverness of women under such
+circumstances, they turned the conversation on the court, and the
+distinction of an appointment under the crown,--pointing out the
+difference that existed between appointments in the household of the
+king and those of the crown. They tried to intoxicate Modeste's mind
+by appealing to her pride, and describing one of the highest stations
+to which a woman could aspire.
+
+"To have a duke for a son," said the elder lady, "is an actual
+advantage. The title is a fortune that we secure to our children
+without the possibility of loss."
+
+"How is it, then," said Canalis, displeased at his tete-a-tete being
+thus broken in upon, "that Monsieur le duc has had so little success
+in a matter where his title would seem to be of special service to
+him?"
+
+The two ladies cast a look at Canalis as full of venom as the tooth of
+a snake, and they were so disconcerted by Modeste's amused smile that
+they were actually unable to reply.
+
+"Monsieur le duc has never blamed you," she said to Canalis, "for the
+humility with which you bear your fame; why should you attack him for
+his modesty?"
+
+"Besides, we have never yet met a woman worthy of my nephew's rank,"
+said Mademoiselle d'Herouville. "Some had only the wealth of the
+position; others, without fortune, had the wit and birth. I must admit
+that we have done well to wait till God granted us an opportunity to
+meet one in whom we find the noble blood, the mind, and fortune of a
+Duchesse d'Herouville."
+
+"My dear Modeste," said Helene d'Herouville, leading her new friend
+apart, "there are a thousand barons in the kingdom, just as there are
+a hundred poets in Paris, who are worth as much as he; he is so little
+of a great man that even I, a poor girl forced to take the veil for
+want of a 'dot,' I would not take him. You don't know what a young man
+is who has been for ten years in the hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu.
+None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments
+of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,--a habit in
+Louis XIV. that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance. It is true
+the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have
+him always about her."
+
+Then, practising a well-known manoeuvre peculiar to her sex, Helene
+d'Herouville repeated in a low voice all the calumnies which women
+jealous of the Duchesse de Chaulieu were in the habit of spreading
+about the poet. This little incident, common as it is in the
+intercourse of women, will serve to show with what fury the hounds
+were after Modeste's wealth.
+
+Ten days saw a great change in the opinions at the Chalet as to the
+three suitors for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand. This change, which
+was much to the disadvantage of Canalis, came about through
+considerations of a nature which ought to make the holders of any kind
+of fame pause, and reflect. No one can deny, if we remember the
+passion with which people seek for autographs, that public curiosity
+is greatly excited by celebrity. Evidently most provincials never form
+an exact idea in their own minds of how illustrious Parisians put on
+their cravats, walk on the boulevards, stand gaping at nothing, or eat
+a cutlet; because, no sooner do they perceive a man clothed in the
+sunbeams of fashion or resplendent with some dignity that is more or
+less fugitive (though always envied), than they cry out, "Look at
+that!" "How queer!" and other depreciatory exclamations. In a word,
+the mysterious charm that attaches to every kind of fame, even that
+which is most justly due, never lasts. It is, and especially with
+superficial people who are envious or sarcastic, a sensation which
+passes off with the rapidity of lightning, and never returns. It would
+seem as though fame, like the sun, hot and luminous at a distance, is
+cold as the summit of an alp when you approach it. Perhaps man is only
+really great to his peers; perhaps the defects inherent in his
+constitution disappear sooner to the eyes of his equals than to those
+of vulgar admirers. A poet, if he would please in ordinary life, must
+put on the fictitious graces of those who are able to make their
+insignificances forgotten by charming manners and complying speeches.
+The poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, who did not choose to bow
+before this social dictum, was made before long to feel that an
+insulting provincial indifference had succeeded to the dazed
+fascination of the earlier evenings. The prodigality of his wit and
+wisdom had produced upon these worthy souls somewhat the effect which
+a shopful of glass-ware produces on the eye; in other words, the fire
+and brilliancy of Canalis's eloquence soon wearied people who, to use
+their own words, "cared more for the solid."
+
+Forced after a while to behave like an ordinary man, the poet found an
+unexpected stumbling-block on ground where La Briere had already won
+the suffrage of the worthy people who at first had thought him sulky.
+They felt the need of compensating themselves for Canalis's reputation
+by preferring his friend. The best of men are influenced by such
+feelings as these. The simple and straightforward young fellow jarred
+no one's self-love; coming to know him better they discovered his
+heart, his modesty, his silent and sure discretion, and his excellent
+bearing. The Duc d'Herouville considered him, as a political element,
+far above Canalis. The poet, ill-balanced, ambitious, and restless as
+Tasso, loved luxury, grandeur, and ran into debt; while the young
+lawyer, whose character was equable and well-balanced, lived soberly,
+was useful without proclaiming it, awaited rewards without begging for
+them, and laid by his money.
+
+Canalis had moreover laid himself open in a special way to the
+bourgeois eyes that were watching him. For two or three days he had
+shown signs of impatience; he had given way to depression, to states
+of melancholy without apparent reason, to those capricious changes of
+temper which are the natural results of the nervous temperament of
+poets. These originalities (we use the provincial word) came from the
+uneasiness that his conduct toward the Duchesse de Chaulieu which grew
+daily less explainable, caused him. He knew he ought to write to her,
+but could not resolve on doing so. All these fluctuations were
+carefully remarked and commented on by the gentle American, and the
+excellent Madame Latournelle, and they formed the topic of many a
+discussion between these two ladies and Madame Mignon. Canalis felt
+the effects of these discussions without being able to explain them.
+The attention paid to him was not the same, the faces surrounding him
+no longer wore the entranced look of the earlier days; while at the
+same time Ernest was evidently gaining ground.
+
+For the last two days the poet had endeavored to fascinate Modeste
+only, and he took advantage of every moment when he found himself
+alone with her, to weave the web of passionate language around his
+love. Modeste's blush, as she listened to him on the occasion we have
+just mentioned, showed the demoiselles d'Herouville the pleasure with
+which she was listening to sweet conceits that were sweetly said; and
+they, horribly uneasy at the sight, had immediate recourse to the
+"ultima ratio" of women in such cases, namely, those calumnies which
+seldom miss their object. Accordingly, when the party met at the
+dinner-table the poet saw a cloud on the brow of his idol; he knew
+that Mademoiselle d'Herouville's malignity allowed him to lose no
+time, and he resolved to offer himself as a husband at the first
+moment when he could find himself alone with Modeste.
+
+Overhearing a few acid though polite remarks exchanged between the
+poet and the two noble ladies, Gobenheim nudged Butscha with his
+elbow, and said in an undertone, motioning towards the poet and the
+grand equerry,--
+
+"They'll demolish one another!"
+
+"Canalis has genius enough to demolish himself all alone," answered
+the dwarf.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXII
+
+                          A RIDDLE GUESSED
+
+During the dinner, which was magnificent and admirably well served,
+the duke obtained a signal advantage over Canalis. Modeste, who had
+received her habit and other equestrian equipments the night before,
+spoke of taking rides about the country. A turn of the conversation
+led her to express the wish to see a hunt with hounds, a pleasure she
+had never yet enjoyed. The duke at once proposed to arrange a hunt in
+one of the crown forests, which lay a few leagues from Havre. Thanks
+to his intimacy with the Prince de Cadignan, Master of the Hunt, he
+saw his chance of displaying an almost regal pomp before Modeste's
+eyes, and alluring her with a glimpse of court fascinations, to which
+she could be introduced by marriage. Glances were exchanged between
+the duke and the two demoiselles d'Herouville, which plainly said,
+"The heiress is ours!" and the poet, who detected them, and who had
+nothing but his personal splendors to depend on, determined all the
+more firmly to obtain some pledge of affection at once. Modeste, on
+the other hand, half-frightened at being thus pushed beyond her
+intentions by the d'Herouvilles, walked rather markedly apart with
+Melchior, when the company adjourned to the park after dinner. With
+the pardonable curiosity of a young girl, she let him suspect the
+calumnies which Helene had poured into her ears; but on Canalis's
+exclamation of anger, she begged him to keep silence about them, which
+he promised.
+
+"These stabs of the tongue," he said, "are considered fair in the
+great world. They shock your upright nature; but as for me, I laugh at
+them; I am even pleased. These ladies must feel that the duke's
+interests are in great peril, when they have recourse to such
+warfare."
+
+Making the most of the advantage Modeste had thus given him, Canalis
+entered upon his defence with such warmth, such eagerness, and with a
+passion so exquisitely expressed, as he thanked her for a confidence
+in which he could venture to see the dawn of love, that she found
+herself suddenly as much compromised with the poet as she feared to be
+with the grand equerry. Canalis, feeling the necessity of prompt
+action, declared himself plainly. He uttered vows and protestations in
+which his poetry shone like a moon, invoked for the occasion, and
+illuminating his allusions to the beauty of his mistress and the
+charms of her evening dress. This counterfeit enthusiasm, in which the
+night, the foliage, the heavens and the earth, and Nature herself
+played a part, carried the eager lover beyond all bounds; for he dwelt
+on his disinterestedness, and revamped in his own charming style,
+Diderot's famous apostrophe to "Sophie and fifteen hundred francs!"
+and the well-worn "love in a cottage" of every lover who knows
+perfectly well the length of the father-in-law's purse.
+
+"Monsieur," said Modeste, after listening with delight to the melody
+of this concerto; "the freedom granted to me by my parents has allowed
+me to listen to you; but it is to them that you must address
+yourself."
+
+"But," exclaimed Canalis, "tell me that if I obtain their consent, you
+will ask nothing better than to obey them."
+
+"I know beforehand," she replied, "that my father has certain fancies
+which may wound the proper pride of an old family like yours. He
+wishes to have his own title and name borne by his grandsons."
+
+"Ah! dear Modeste, what sacrifices would I not make to commit my life
+to the guardian care of an angel like you."
+
+"You will permit me not to decide in a moment the fate of my whole
+life," she said, turning to rejoin the demoiselles d'Herouville.
+
+Those noble ladies were just then engaged in flattering the vanity of
+little Latournelle, intending to win him over to their interests.
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville, to whom we shall in future confine the
+family name, to distinguish her from her niece Helene, was giving the
+notary to understand that the post of judge of the Supreme Court in
+Havre, which Charles X. would bestow as she desired, was an office
+worthy of his legal talent and his well-known probity. Butscha,
+meanwhile, who had been walking about with La Briere, was greatly
+alarmed at the progress Canalis was evidently making, and he waylaid
+Modeste at the lower step of the portico when the whole party returned
+to the house to endure the torments of their inevitable whist.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, in a low whisper, "I do hope you don't call
+him Melchior."
+
+"I'm very near it, my Black Dwarf," she said, with a smile that might
+have made an angel swear.
+
+"Good God!" exclaimed Butscha, letting fall his hands, which struck
+the marble steps.
+
+"Well! and isn't he worth more than that spiteful and gloomy secretary
+in whom you take such an interest?" she retorted, assuming, at the
+mere thought of Ernest, the haughty manner whose secret belongs
+exclusively to young girls,--as if their virginity lent them wings to
+fly to heaven. "Pray, would your little La Briere accept me without a
+fortune?" she said, after a pause.
+
+"Ask your father," replied Butscha, who walked a few steps from the
+house, to get Modeste at a safe distance from the windows. "Listen to
+me, mademoiselle. You know that he who speaks to you is ready to give
+not only his life but his honor for you, at any moment, and at all
+times. Therefore you may believe in him; you can confide to him that
+which you may not, perhaps, be willing to say to your father. Tell me,
+has that sublime Canalis been making you the disinterested offer that
+you now fling as a reproach at poor Ernest?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"That question, my manikin," she replied, giving him one of the ten or
+a dozen nicknames she had invented for him, "strikes me as
+undervaluing the strength of my self-love."
+
+"Ah, you are laughing, my dear Mademoiselle Modeste; then there's no
+danger: I hope you are only making a fool of him."
+
+"Pray what would you think of me, Monsieur Butscha, if I allowed
+myself to make fun of those who do me the honor to wish to marry me?
+You ought to know, master Jean, that even if a girl affects to despise
+the most despicable attentions, she is flattered by them."
+
+"Then I flatter you?" said the young man, looking up at her with a
+face that was illuminated like a city for a festival.
+
+"You?" she said; "you give me the most precious of all friendships,--a
+feeling as disinterested as that of a mother for her child. Compare
+yourself to no one; for even my father is obliged to be devoted to
+me." She paused. "I cannot say that I love you, in the sense which men
+give to that word, but what I do give you is eternal and can know no
+change."
+
+"Then," said Butscha, stooping to pick up a pebble that he might kiss
+the hem of her garment, "suffer me to watch over you as a dragon
+guards a treasure. The poet was covering you just now with the
+lace-work of his precious phrases, the tinsel of his promises; he
+chanted his love on the best strings of his lyre, I know he did. If,
+as soon as this noble lover finds out how small your fortune is, he
+makes a sudden change in his behavior, and is cold and embarrassed,
+will you still marry him? shall you still esteem him?"
+
+"He would be another Francisque Althor," she said, with a gesture of
+bitter disgust.
+
+"Let me have the pleasure of producing that change of scene," said
+Butscha. "Not only shall it be sudden, but I believe I can change it
+back and make your poet as loving as before,--nay, it is possible to
+make him blow alternately hot and cold upon your heart, just as
+gracefully as he has talked on both sides of an argument in one
+evening without ever finding it out."
+
+"If you are right," she said, "who can be trusted?"
+
+"One who truly loves you."
+
+"The little duke?"
+
+Butscha looked at Modeste. The pair walked some distance in silence;
+the girl was impenetrable and not an eyelash quivered.
+
+"Mademoiselle, permit me to be the exponent of the thoughts that are
+lying at the bottom of your heart like sea-mosses under the waves, and
+which you do not choose to gather up."
+
+"Eh!" said Modeste, "so my intimate friend and counsellor thinks
+himself a mirror, does he?"
+
+"No, an echo," he answered, with a gesture of sublime humility. "The
+duke loves you, but he loves you too much. If I, a dwarf, have
+understood the infinite delicacy of your heart, it would be repugnant
+to you to be worshipped like a saint in her shrine. You are eminently
+a woman; you neither want a man perpetually at your feet of whom you
+are eternally sure, nor a selfish egoist like Canalis, who will always
+prefer himself to you. Why? ah, that I don't know. But I will make
+myself a woman, an old woman, and find out the meaning of the plan
+which I have read in your eyes, and which perhaps is in the heart of
+every girl. Nevertheless, in your great soul you feel the need of
+worshipping. When a man is at your knees, you cannot put yourself at
+his. You can't advance in that way, as Voltaire might say. The little
+duke has too many genuflections in his moral being and the poet has
+too few,--indeed, I might say, none at all. Ha, I have guessed the
+mischief in your smiles when you talk to the grand equerry, and when
+he talks to you and you answer him. You would never be unhappy with
+the duke, and everybody will approve your choice, if you do choose
+him; but you will never love him. The ice of egotism, and the burning
+heat of ecstasy both produce indifference in the heart of every woman.
+It is evident to my mind that no such perpetual worship will give you
+the infinite delights which you are dreaming of in marriage,--in some
+marriage where obedience will be your pride, where noble little
+sacrifices can be made and hidden, where the heart is full of
+anxieties without a cause, and successes are awaited with eager hope,
+where each new chance for magnanimity is hailed with joy, where souls
+are comprehended to their inmost recesses, and where the woman
+protects with her love the man who protects her."
+
+"You are a sorcerer!" exclaimed Modeste.
+
+"Neither will you find that sweet equality of feeling, that continual
+sharing of each other's life, that certainty of pleasing which makes
+marriage tolerable, if you take Canalis,--a man who thinks of himself
+only, whose 'I' is the one string to his lute, whose mind is so fixed
+on himself that he has hitherto taken no notice of your father or the
+duke,--a man of second-rate ambitions, to whom your dignity and your
+devotion will matter nothing, who will make you a mere appendage to
+his household, and who already insults you by his indifference to your
+behavior; yes, if you permitted yourself to go so far as to box your
+mother's ears Canalis would shut his eyes to it, and deny your crime
+even to himself, because he thirsts for your money. And so,
+mademoiselle, when I spoke of the man who truly loves you I was not
+thinking of the great poet who is nothing but a little comedian, nor
+of the duke, who might be a good marriage for you, but never a
+husband--"
+
+"Butscha, my heart is a blank page on which you are yourself writing
+all that you read there," cried Modeste, interrupting him. "You are
+carried away by your provincial hatred for everything that obliges you
+to look higher than your own head. You can't forgive a poet for being
+a statesman, for possessing the gift of speech, for having a noble
+future before him,--and you calumniate his intentions."
+
+"His!--mademoiselle, he will turn his back upon you with the baseness
+of an Althor."
+
+"Make him play that pretty little comedy, and--"
+
+"That I will! he shall play it through and through within three days,
+--on Wednesday,--recollect, Wednesday! Until then, mademoiselle, amuse
+yourself by listening to the little tunes of the lyre, so that the
+discords and the false notes may come out all the more distinctly."
+
+Modeste ran gaily back to the salon, where La Briere, who was sitting
+by the window, where he had doubtless been watching his idol, rose to
+his feet as if a groom of the chambers had suddenly announced, "The
+Queen." It was a movement of spontaneous respect, full of that living
+eloquence that lies in gesture even more than in speech. Spoken love
+cannot compare with acts of love; and every young girl of twenty has
+the wisdom of fifty in applying the axiom. In it lies the great secret
+of attraction. Instead of looking Modeste in the face, as Canalis who
+paid her public homage would have done, the neglected lover followed
+her with a furtive look between his eyelids, humble after the manner
+of Butscha, and almost timid. The young heiress observed it, as she
+took her place by Canalis, to whose game she proceeded to pay
+attention. During a conversation which ensued, La Briere heard Modeste
+say to her father that she should ride out for the first time on the
+following Wednesday; and she also reminded him that she had no whip in
+keeping with her new equipments. The young man flung a lightning
+glance at the dwarf, and a few minutes later the two were pacing the
+terrace.
+
+"It is nine o'clock," cried Ernest. "I shall start for Paris at full
+gallop; I can get there to-morrow morning by ten. My dear Butscha,
+from you she will accept anything, for she is attached to you; let me
+give her a riding-whip in your name. If you will do me this immense
+kindness, you shall have not only my friendship but my devotion."
+
+"Ah, you are very happy," said Butscha, ruefully; "you have money,
+you!"
+
+"Tell Canalis not to expect me, and that he must find some pretext to
+account for my absence."
+
+An hour later Ernest had ridden out of Havre. He reached Paris in
+twelve hours, where his first act was to secure a place in the
+mail-coach for Havre on the following evening. Then he went to three
+of the chief jewellers in Paris and compared all the whip-handles
+that they could offer; he was in search of some artistic treasure
+that was regally superb. He found one at last, made by Stidmann for
+a Russian, who was unable to pay for it when finished,--a fox-head
+in gold, with a ruby of exorbitant value; all his savings went into
+the purchase, the cost of which was seven thousand francs. Ernest
+gave a drawing of the arms of La Bastie, and allowed the shop-people
+twenty hours to engrave them. The handle, a masterpiece of delicate
+workmanship, was fitted to an india-rubber whip and put into a morocco
+case lined with velvet, on which two M.'s interlaced were stamped in
+gold.
+
+La Briere got back to Havre by the mail-coach Wednesday morning in
+time to breakfast with Canalis. The poet had concealed his secretary's
+absence by declaring that he was busy with some work sent from Paris.
+Butscha, who met La Briere at the coach-door, took the box containing
+the precious work of art to Francoise Cochet, with instructions to
+place it on Modeste's dressing-table.
+
+"Of course you will accompany Mademoiselle Modeste on her ride
+to-day?" said Butscha, who went to Canalis's house to let La Briere
+know by a wink that the whip had gone to its destination.
+
+"I?" answered Ernest; "no, I am going to bed."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Canalis, looking at him. "I don't know what to make
+of you."
+
+Breakfast was then served, and the poet naturally invited their
+visitor to stay and take it. Butscha complied, having seen in the
+expression of the valet's face the success of a trick in which we
+shall see the first fruits of his promise to Modeste.
+
+"Monsieur is very right to detain the clerk of Monsieur Latournelle,"
+whispered Germain in his master's ear.
+
+Canalis and Germain went into the salon on a sign that passed between
+them.
+
+"I went out this morning to see the men fish, monsieur," said the
+valet,--"an excursion proposed to me by the captain of a smack, whose
+acquaintance I have made."
+
+Germain did not acknowledge that he had the bad taste to play
+billiards in a cafe,--a fact of which Butscha had taken advantage to
+surround him with friends of his own and manage him as he pleased.
+
+"Well?" said Canalis, "to the point,--quick!"
+
+"Monsieur le baron, I heard a conversation about Monsieur Mignon,
+which I encouraged as far as I could; for no one, of course, knew that
+I belong to you. Ah! monsieur, judging by the talk of the quays, you
+are running your head into a noose. The fortune of Mademoiselle de La
+Bastie is, like her name, modest. The vessel on which the father
+returned does not belong to him, but to rich China merchants to whom
+he renders an account. They even say things that are not at all
+flattering to Monsieur Mignon's honor. Having heard that you and
+Monsieur le duc were rivals for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand, I
+have taken the liberty to warn you; of the two, wouldn't it be better
+that his lordship should gobble her? As I came home I walked round the
+quays, and into that theatre-hall where the merchants meet; I slipped
+boldly in and out among them. Seeing a well-dressed stranger, those
+worthy fellows began to talk to me of Havre, and I got them, little by
+little, to speak of Colonel Mignon. What they said only confirms the
+stories the fishermen told me; and I feel that I should fail in my
+duty if I keep silence. That is why I did not get home in time to
+dress monsieur this morning."
+
+"What am I to do?" cried Canalis, who remembered his proposals to
+Modeste the night before, and did not see how he could get out of
+them.
+
+"Monsieur knows my attachment to him," said Germain, perceiving that
+the poet was quite thrown off his balance; "he will not be surprised
+if I give him a word of advice. There is that clerk; try to get the
+truth out of him. Perhaps he'll unbutton after a bottle or two of
+champagne, or at any rate a third. It would be strange indeed if
+monsieur, who will one day be ambassador, as Philoxene has heard
+Madame la duchesse say time and time again, couldn't turn a little
+notary's clerk inside out."
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                   BUTSCHA DISTINGUISHES HIMSELF
+
+At this instant Butscha, the hidden prompter of the fishing part, was
+requesting the secretary to say nothing about his trip to Paris, and
+not to interfere in any way with what he, Butscha, might do. The dwarf
+had already made use of an unfavorable feeling lately roused against
+Monsieur Mignon in Havre in consequence of his reserve and his
+determination to keep silence as to the amount of his fortune. The
+persons who were most bitter against him even declared calumniously
+that he had made over a large amount of property to Dumay to save it
+from the just demands of his associates in China. Butscha took
+advantage of this state of feeling. He asked the fishermen, who owed
+him many a good turn, to keep the secret and lend him their tongues.
+They served him well. The captain of the fishing-smack told Germain
+that one of his cousins, a sailor, had just returned from Marseilles,
+where he had been paid off from the brig in which Monsieur Mignon
+returned to France. The brig had been sold to the account of some
+other person than Monsieur Mignon, and the cargo was only worth three
+or four hundred thousand francs at the utmost.
+
+"Germain," said Canalis, as the valet was leaving the room, "serve
+champagne and claret. A member of the legal fraternity of Havre must
+carry away with him proper ideas of a poet's hospitality. Besides, he
+has got a wit that is equal to Figaro's," added Canalis, laying his
+hand on the dwarf's shoulder, "and we must make it foam and sparkle
+with champagne; you and I, Ernest, will not spare the bottle either.
+Faith, it is over two years since I've been drunk," he added, looking
+at La Briere.
+
+"Not drunk with wine, you mean," said Butscha, looking keenly at him,
+"yes, I can believe that. You get drunk every day on yourself, you
+drink in so much praise. Ha, you are handsome, you are a poet, you are
+famous in your lifetime, you have the gift of an eloquence that is
+equal to your genius, and you please all women,--even my master's
+wife. Admired by the finest sultana-valide that I ever saw in my life
+(and I never saw but her) you can, if you choose, marry Mademoiselle
+de La Bastie. Goodness! the mere inventory of your present advantages,
+not to speak of the future (a noble title, peerage, embassy!), is
+enough to make me drunk already,--like the men who bottle other men's
+wine."
+
+"All such social distinctions," said Canalis, "are of little use
+without the one thing that gives them value,--wealth. Here we can talk
+as men with men; fine sentiments only do in verse."
+
+"That depends on circumstances," said the dwarf, with a knowing
+gesture.
+
+"Ah! you writer of conveyances," said the poet, smiling at the
+interruption, "you know as well as I do that 'cottage' rhymes with
+'pottage,'--and who would like to live on that for the rest of his
+days?"
+
+At table Butscha played the part of Trigaudin, in the "Maison en
+loterie," in a way that alarmed Ernest, who did not know the waggery
+of a lawyer's office, which is quite equal to that of an atelier.
+Butscha poured forth the scandalous gossip of Havre, the private
+history of fortune and boudoirs, and the crimes committed code in
+hand, which are called in Normandy, "getting out of a thing as best
+you can." He spared no one; and his liveliness increased with the
+torrents of wine which poured down his throat like rain through a
+gutter.
+
+"Do you know, La Briere," said Canalis, filling Butscha's glass, "that
+this fellow would make a capital secretary to the embassy?"
+
+"And oust his chief!" cried the dwarf flinging a look at Canalis whose
+insolence was lost in the gurgling of carbonic acid gas. "I've little
+enough gratitude and quite enough scheming to get astride of your
+shoulders. Ha, ha, a poet carrying a hunchback! that's been seen,
+often seen--on book-shelves. Come, don't look at me as if I were
+swallowing swords. My dear great genius, you're a superior man; you
+know that gratitude is the word of fools; they stick it in the
+dictionary, but it isn't in the human heart; pledges are worth
+nothing, except on a certain mount that is neither Pindus nor
+Parnassus. You think I owe a great deal to my master's wife, who
+brought me up. Bless you, the whole town has paid her for that in
+praises, respect, and admiration,--the very best of coin. I don't
+recognize any service that is only the capital of self-love. Men make
+a commerce of their services, and gratitude goes down on the debit
+side,--that's all. As to schemes, they are my divinity. What?" he
+exclaimed, at a gesture of Canalis, "don't you admire the faculty
+which enables a wily man to get the better of a man of genius? it
+takes the closest observation of his vices, and his weaknesses, and
+the wit to seize the happy moment. Ask diplomacy if its greatest
+triumphs are not those of craft over force? If I were your secretary,
+Monsieur le baron, you'd soon be prime-minister, because it would be
+my interest to have you so. Do you want a specimen of my talents in
+that line? Well then, listen; you love Mademoiselle Modeste
+distractedly, and you've good reason to do so. The girl has my fullest
+esteem; she is a true Parisian. Sometimes we get a few real Parisians
+born down here in the provinces. Well, Modeste is just the woman to
+help a man's career. She's got _that_ in her," he cried, with a turn of
+his wrist in the air. "But you've a dangerous competitor in the duke;
+what will you give me to get him out of Havre within three days?"
+
+"Finish this bottle," said the poet, refilling Butscha's glass.
+
+"You'll make me drunk," said the dwarf, tossing off his ninth glass of
+champagne. "Have you a bed where I could sleep it off? My master is as
+sober as the camel that he is, and Madame Latournelle too. They are
+brutal enough, both of them, to scold me; and they'd have the rights
+of it too--there are those deeds I ought to be drawing!--" Then,
+suddenly returning to his previous ideas, after the fashion of a
+drunken man, he exclaimed, "and I've such a memory; it is on a par
+with my gratitude."
+
+"Butscha!" cried the poet, "you said just now you had no gratitude;
+you contradict yourself."
+
+"Not at all," he replied. "To forget a thing means almost always
+recollecting it. Come, come, do you want me to get rid of the duke?
+I'm cut out for a secretary."
+
+"How could you manage it?" said Canalis, delighted to find the
+conversation taking this turn of its own accord.
+
+"That's none of your business," said the dwarf, with a portentous
+hiccough.
+
+Butscha's head rolled between his shoulders, and his eyes turned from
+Germain to La Briere, and from La Briere to Canalis, after the manner
+of men who, knowing they are tipsy, wish to see what other men are
+thinking of them; for in the shipwreck of drunkenness it is noticeable
+that self-love is the last thing that goes to the bottom.
+
+"Ha! my great poet, you're a pretty good trickster yourself; but you
+are not deep enough. What do you mean by taking me for one of your own
+readers,--you who sent your friend to Paris, full gallop, to inquire
+into the property of the Mignon family? Ha, ha! I hoax, thou hoaxest,
+we hoax--Good! But do me the honor to believe that I'm deep enough to
+keep the secrets of my own business. As the head-clerk of a notary, my
+heart is a locked box, padlocked! My mouth never opens to let out
+anything about a client. I know all, and I know nothing. Besides, my
+passion is well known. I love Modeste; she is my pupil, and she must
+make a good marriage. I'll fool the duke, if need be; and you shall
+marry--"
+
+"Germain, coffee and liqueurs," said Canalis.
+
+"Liqueurs!" repeated Butscha with a wave of his hand, and the air of a
+sham virgin repelling seduction; "Ah, those poor deeds! one of 'em was
+a marriage contract; and that second clerk of mine is as stupid as--as
+--an epithalamium, and he's capable of digging his penknife right
+through the bride's paraphernalia; he thinks he's a handsome man
+because he's five feet six,--idiot!"
+
+"Here is some creme de the, a liqueur of the West Indies," said
+Canalis. "You, whom Mademoiselle Modeste consults--"
+
+"Yes, she consults me."
+
+"Well, do you think she loves me?" asked the poet.
+
+"Loves you? yes, more than she loves the duke," answered the dwarf,
+rousing himself from a stupor which was admirably played. "She loves
+you for your disinterestedness. She told me she was ready to make the
+greatest sacrifices for your sake; to give up dress and spend as
+little as possible on herself, and devote her life to showing you that
+in marrying her you hadn't done so" (hiccough) "bad a thing for
+yourself. She's as right as a trivet,--yes, and well informed. She
+knows everything, that girl."
+
+"And she has three hundred thousand francs?"
+
+"There may be quite as much as that," cried the dwarf,
+enthusiastically. "Papa Mignon,--mignon by name, mignon by nature, and
+that's why I respect him,--well, he would rob himself of everything to
+marry his daughter. Your Restoration" (hiccough) "has taught him how
+to live on half-pay; he'd be quite content to live with Dumay on next
+to nothing, if he could rake and scrape enough together to give the
+little one three hundred thousand francs. But don't let's forget that
+Dumay is going to leave all his money to Modeste. Dumay, you know, is
+a Breton, and that fact clinches the matter; he won't go back from his
+word, and his fortune is equal to the colonel's. But I don't approve
+of Monsieur Mignon's taking back that villa, and, as they often ask my
+advice, I told them so. 'You sink too much in it,' I said; 'if Vilquin
+does not buy it back there's two hundred thousand francs which won't
+bring you a penny; it only leaves you a hundred thousand to get along
+with, and it isn't enough.' The colonel and Dumay are consulting about
+it now. But nevertheless, between you and me, Modeste is sure to be
+rich. I hear talk on the quays against it; but that's all nonsense;
+people are jealous. Why, there's no such 'dot' in Havre," cried
+Butscha, beginning to count on his fingers. "Two to three hundred
+thousand in ready money," bending back the thumb of his left hand with
+the forefinger of his right, "that's one item; the reversion of the
+villa Mignon, that's another; 'tertio,' Dumay's property!" doubling
+down his middle finger. "Ha! little Modeste may count upon her six
+hundred thousand francs as soon as the two old soldiers have got their
+marching orders for eternity."
+
+This coarse and candid statement, intermingled with a variety of
+liqueurs, sobered Canalis as much as it appeared to befuddle Butscha.
+To the latter, a young provincial, such a fortune must of course seem
+colossal. He let his head fall into the palm of his right hand, and
+putting his elbows majestically on the table, blinked his eyes and
+continued talking to himself:--
+
+"In twenty years, thanks to that Code, which pillages fortunes under
+what they call 'Successions,' an heiress worth a million will be as
+rare as generosity in a money-lender. Suppose Modeste does want to
+spend all the interest of her own money,--well, she is so pretty, so
+sweet and pretty; why she's--you poets are always after metaphors
+--she's a weasel as tricky as a monkey."
+
+"How came you to tell me she had six millions?" said Canalis to La
+Briere, in a low voice.
+
+"My friend," said Ernest, "I do assure you that I was bound to silence
+by an oath; perhaps, even now, I ought not to say as much as that."
+
+"Bound! to whom?"
+
+"To Monsieur Mignon."
+
+"Ernest! you who know how essential fortune is to me--"
+
+Butscha snored.
+
+"--who know my situation, and all that I shall lose in the Duchesse de
+Chaulieu, by this attempt at marrying, YOU could coldly let me plunge
+into such a thing as this?" exclaimed Canalis, turning pale. "It was a
+question of friendship; and ours was a compact entered into long
+before you ever saw that crafty Mignon."
+
+"My dear fellow," said Ernest, "I love Modeste too well to--"
+
+"Fool! then take her," cried the poet, "and break your oath."
+
+"Will you promise me on your word of honor to forget what I now tell
+you, and to behave to me as though this confidence had never been
+made, whatever happens?"
+
+"I'll swear that, by my mother's memory."
+
+"Well then," said La Briere, "Monsieur Mignon told me in Paris that he
+was very far from having the colossal fortune which the Mongenods told
+me about and which I mentioned to you. The colonel intends to give two
+hundred thousand francs to his daughter. And now, Melchior, I ask you,
+was the father really distrustful of us, as you thought; or was he
+sincere? It is not for me to answer those questions. If Modeste
+without a fortune deigns to choose me, she will be my wife."
+
+"A blue-stocking! educated till she is a terror! a girl who has read
+everything, who knows everything,--in theory," cried Canalis, hastily,
+noticing La Briere's gesture, "a spoiled child, brought up in luxury
+in her childhood, and weaned of it for five years. Ah! my poor friend,
+take care what you are about."
+
+"Ode and Code," said Butscha, waking up, "you do the ode and I the
+code; there's only a C's difference between us. Well, now, code comes
+from 'coda,' a tail,--mark that word! See here! a bit of good advice
+is worth your wine and your cream of tea. Father Mignon--he's cream,
+too; the cream of honest men--he is going with his daughter on this
+riding party; do you go up frankly and talk 'dot' to him. He'll answer
+plainly, and you'll get at the truth, just as surely as I'm drunk, and
+you're a great poet,--but no matter for that; we are to leave Havre
+together, that's settled, isn't it? I'm to be your secretary in place
+of that little fellow who sits there grinning at me and thinking I'm
+drunk. Come, let's go, and leave him to marry the girl."
+
+Canalis rose to leave the room to dress for the excursion.
+
+"Hush, not a word,--he is going to commit suicide," whispered Butscha,
+sober as a judge, to La Briere as he made the gesture of a street boy
+at Canalis's back. "Adieu, my chief!" he shouted, in stentorian tones,
+"will you allow me to take a snooze in that kiosk down in the garden?"
+
+"Make yourself at home," answered the poet.
+
+Butscha, pursued by the laughter of the three servants of the
+establishment, gained the kiosk by walking over the flower-beds and
+round the vases with the perverse grace of an insect describing its
+interminable zig-zags as it tries to get out of a closed window. When
+he had clambered into the kiosk, and the servants had retired, he sat
+down on a wooden bench and wallowed in the delights of his triumph. He
+had completely fooled a great man; he had not only torn off his mask,
+but he had made him untie the strings himself; and he laughed like an
+author over his own play,--that is to say, with a true sense of the
+immense value of his "vis comica."
+
+"Men are tops!" he cried, "you've only to find the twine to wind 'em
+up with. But I'm like my fellows," he added, presently. "I should
+faint away if any one came and said to me 'Mademoiselle Modeste has
+been thrown from her horse, and has broken her leg.'"
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XXIV
+
+              THE POET FEELS THAT HE IS LOVED TOO WELL
+
+An hour later, Modeste, charmingly equipped in a bottle-green
+cassimere habit, a small hat with a green veil, buckskin gloves, and
+velvet boots which met the lace frills of her drawers, and mounted on
+an elegantly caparisoned little horse, was exhibiting to her father
+and the Duc d'Herouville the beautiful present she had just received;
+she was evidently delighted with an attention of a kind that
+particularly flatters women.
+
+"Did it come from you, Monsieur le duc?" she said, holding the
+sparkling handle toward him. "There was a card with it, saying, 'Guess
+if you can,' and some asterisks. Francoise and Dumay credit Butscha
+with this charming surprise; but my dear Butscha is not rich enough to
+buy such rubies. And as for papa (to whom I said, as I remember, on
+Sunday evening, that I had no whip), he sent to Rouen for this one,"
+--pointing to a whip in her father's hand, with a top like a cone of
+turquoise, a fashion then in vogue which has since become vulgar.
+
+"I would give ten years of my old age, mademoiselle, to have the right
+to offer you that beautiful jewel," said the duke, courteously.
+
+"Ah, here comes the audacious giver!" cried Modeste, as Canalis rode
+up. "It is only a poet who knows where to find such choice things.
+Monsieur," she said to Melchior, "my father will scold you, and say
+that you justify those who accuse you of extravagance."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Canalis, with apparent simplicity, "so that is why La
+Briere rode at full gallop from Havre to Paris?"
+
+"Does your secretary take such liberties?" said Modeste, turning pale,
+and throwing the whip to Francoise with an impetuosity that expressed
+scorn. "Give me your whip, papa."
+
+"Poor Ernest, who lies there on his bed half-dead with fatigue!" said
+Canalis, overtaking the girl, who had already started at a gallop.
+"You are pitiless, mademoiselle. 'I have' (the poor fellow said to me)
+'only this one chance to remain in her memory.'"
+
+"And should you think well of a woman who could take presents from
+half the parish?" said Modeste.
+
+She was surprised to receive no answer to this inquiry, and attributed
+the poet's inattention to the noise of the horse's feet.
+
+"How you delight in tormenting those who love you," said the duke.
+"Your nobility of soul and your pride are so inconsistent with your
+faults that I begin to suspect you calumniate yourself, and do those
+naughty things on purpose."
+
+"Ah! have you only just found that out, Monsieur le duc?" she
+exclaimed, laughing. "You have the sagacity of a husband."
+
+They rode half a mile in silence. Modeste was a good deal astonished
+not to receive the fire of the poet's eyes. The evening before, as she
+was pointing out to him an admirable effect of setting sunlight across
+the water, she had said, remarking his inattention, "Well, don't you
+see it?"--to which he replied, "I can see only your hand"; but now his
+admiration for the beauties of nature seemed a little too intense to
+be natural.
+
+"Does Monsieur de La Briere know how to ride?" she asked, for the
+purpose of teasing him.
+
+"Not very well, but he gets along," answered the poet, cold as
+Gobenheim before the colonel's return.
+
+At a cross-road, which Monsieur Mignon made them take through a lovely
+valley to reach a height overlooking the Seine, Canalis let Modeste
+and the duke pass him, and then reined up to join the colonel.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," he said, "you are an open-hearted soldier, and I
+know you will regard my frankness as a title to your esteem. When
+proposals of marriage, with all their brutal,--or, if you please, too
+civilized--discussions, are carried on by third parties, it is an
+injury to all. We are both gentlemen, and both discreet; and you, like
+myself, have passed beyond the age of surprises. Let us therefore
+speak as intimates. I will set you the example. I am twenty-nine years
+old, without landed estates, and full of ambition. Mademoiselle
+Modeste, as you must have perceived, pleases me extremely. Now, in
+spite of the little defects which your dear girl likes to assume--"
+
+"--not counting those she really possesses," said the colonel,
+smiling,--
+
+"--I should gladly make her my wife, and I believe I could render her
+happy. The question of money is of the utmost importance to my future,
+which hangs to-day in the balance. All young girls expect to be loved
+_whether or no_--fortune or no fortune. But you are not the man to marry
+your dear Modeste without a 'dot,' and my situation does not allow me
+to make a marriage of what is called love unless with a woman who has
+a fortune at least equal to mine. I have, from my emoluments and
+sinecures, from the Academy and from my works, about thirty thousand
+francs a year, a large income for a bachelor. If my wife brought me as
+much more, I should still be in about the same condition that I am
+now. Shall you give Mademoiselle a million?"
+
+"Ah, monsieur, we have not reached that point as yet," said the
+colonel, Jesuitically.
+
+"Then suppose," said Canalis, quickly, "that we go no further; we will
+let the matter drop. You shall have no cause to complain of me,
+Monsieur le comte; the world shall consider me among the unfortunate
+suitors of your charming daughter. Give me your word of honor to say
+nothing on the subject to any one, not even to Mademoiselle Modeste,
+because," he added, throwing a word of promise to the ear, "my
+circumstances may so change that I can ask you for her without 'dot.'"
+
+"I promise you that," said the colonel. "You know, monsieur, with what
+assurance the public, both in Paris and the provinces, talk of
+fortunes that they make and unmake. People exaggerate both happiness
+and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as
+people say we are. There is nothing sure and certain in business
+except investments in land. I am awaiting the accounts of my agents
+with very great impatience. The sale of my merchandise and my ship,
+and the settlement of my affairs in China, are not yet concluded; and
+I cannot know the full amount of my fortune for at least six months. I
+did, however, say to Monsieur de La Briere in Paris that I would
+guarantee a 'dot' of two hundred thousand francs in ready money. I
+wish to entail my estates, and enable my grandchildren to inherit my
+arms and title."
+
+Canalis did not listen to this statement after the opening sentence.
+The four riders, having now reached a wider road, went abreast and
+soon reached a stretch of table-land, from which the eye took in on
+one side the rich valley of the Seine toward Rouen, and on the other
+an horizon bounded only by the sea.
+
+"Butscha was right, God is the greatest of all landscape painters,"
+said Canalis, contemplating the view, which is unique among the many
+fine scenes that have made the shores of the Seine so justly
+celebrated.
+
+"Above all do we feel that, my dear baron," said the duke, "on
+hunting-days, when nature has a voice, and a lively tumult breaks the
+silence; at such times the landscape, changing rapidly as we ride
+through it, seems really sublime."
+
+"The sun is the inexhaustible palette," said Modeste, looking at the
+poet in a species of bewilderment.
+
+A remark that she presently made on his absence of mind gave him an
+opportunity of saying that he was just then absorbed in his own
+thoughts,--an excuse that authors have more reason for giving than
+other men.
+
+"Are we really made happy by carrying our lives into the midst of the
+world, and swelling them with all sorts of fictitious wants and
+over-excited vanities?" said Modeste, moved by the aspect of the
+fertile and billowy country to long for a philosophically tranquil
+life.
+
+"That is a bucolic, mademoiselle, which is only written on tablets of
+gold," said the poet.
+
+"And sometimes under garret-roofs," remarked the colonel.
+
+Modeste threw a piercing glance at Canalis, which he was unable to
+sustain; she was conscious of a ringing in her ears, darkness seemed
+to spread before her, and then she suddenly exclaimed in icy tones:--
+
+"Ah! it is Wednesday!"
+
+"I do not say this to flatter your passing caprice, mademoiselle,"
+said the duke, to whom the little scene, so tragical for Modeste, had
+left time for thought; "but I declare I am so profoundly disgusted
+with the world and the Court and Paris that had I a Duchesse
+d'Herouville, gifted with the wit and graces of mademoiselle, I would
+gladly bind myself to live like a philosopher at my chateau, doing
+good around me, draining my marshes, educating my children--"
+
+"That, Monsieur le duc, will be set to the account of your great
+goodness," said Modeste, letting her eyes rest steadily on the noble
+gentleman. "You flatter me in not thinking me frivolous, and in
+believing that I have enough resources within myself to be able to
+live in solitude. It is perhaps my lot," she added, glancing at
+Canalis, with an expression of pity.
+
+"It is the lot of all insignificant fortunes," said the poet. "Paris
+demands Babylonian splendor. Sometimes I ask myself how I have ever
+managed to keep it up."
+
+"The king does that for both of us," said the duke, candidly; "we live
+on his Majesty's bounty. If my family had not been allowed, after the
+death of Monsieur le Grand, as they call Cinq-Mars, to keep his office
+among us, we should have been obliged to sell Herouville to the Black
+Brethren. Ah, believe me, mademoiselle, it is a bitter humiliation to
+me to have to think of money in marrying."
+
+The simple honesty of this confession came from his heart, and the
+regret was so sincere that it touched Modeste.
+
+"In these days," said the poet, "no man in France, Monsieur le duc, is
+rich enough to marry a woman for herself, her personal worth, her
+grace, or her beauty--"
+
+The colonel looked at Canalis with a curious eye, after first watching
+Modeste, whose face no longer expressed the slightest astonishment.
+
+"For persons of high honor," he said slowly, "it is a noble employment
+of wealth to repair the ravages of time and destiny, and restore the
+old historic families."
+
+"Yes, papa," said Modeste, gravely.
+
+The colonel invited the duke and Canalis to dine with him sociably in
+their riding-dress, promising them to make no change himself. When
+Modeste went to her room to make her toilette, she looked at the
+jewelled whip she had disdained in the morning.
+
+"What workmanship they put into such things nowadays!" she said to
+Francoise Cochet, who had become her waiting-maid.
+
+"That poor young man, mademoiselle, who has got a fever--"
+
+"Who told you that?"
+
+"Monsieur Butscha. He came here this afternoon and asked me to say to
+you that he hoped you would notice he had kept his word on the
+appointed day."
+
+Modeste came down into the salon dressed with royal simplicity.
+
+"My dear father," she said aloud, taking the colonel by the arm,
+"please go and ask after Monsieur de La Briere's health, and take him
+back his present. You can say that my small means, as well as my
+natural tastes, forbid my wearing ornaments which are only fit for
+queens or courtesans. Besides, I can only accept gifts from a
+bridegroom. Beg him to keep the whip until you know whether you are
+rich enough to buy it back."
+
+"My little girl has plenty of good sense," said the colonel, kissing
+his daughter on the forehead.
+
+Canalis took advantage of a conversation which began between the duke
+and Madame Mignon to escape to the terrace, where Modeste joined him,
+influenced by curiosity, though the poet believed her desire to become
+Madame de Canalis had brought her there. Rather alarmed at the
+indecency with which he had just executed what soldiers call a
+"volte-face," and which, according to the laws of ambition, every man
+in his position would have executed quite as brutally, he now
+endeavored, as the unfortunate Modeste approached him, to find
+plausible excuses for his conduct.
+
+"Dear Modeste," he began, in a coaxing tone, "considering the terms on
+which we stand to each other, shall I displease you if I say that your
+replies to the Duc d'Herouville were very painful to a man in love,
+--above all, to a poet whose soul is feminine, nervous, full of the
+jealousies of true passion. I should make a poor diplomatist indeed if
+I had not perceived that your first coquetries, your little
+premeditated inconsistencies, were only assumed for the purpose of
+studying our characters--"
+
+Modeste raised her head with the rapid, intelligent, half-coquettish
+motion of a wild animal, in whom instinct produces such miracles of
+grace.
+
+"--and therefore when I returned home and thought them over, they
+never misled me. I only marvelled at a cleverness so in harmony with
+your character and your countenance. Do not be uneasy, I never doubted
+that your assumed duplicity covered an angelic candor. No, your mind,
+your education, have in no way lessened the precious innocence which
+we demand in a wife. You are indeed a wife for a poet, a diplomatist,
+a thinker, a man destined to endure the chances and changes of life;
+and my admiration is equalled only by the attachment I feel to you. I
+now entreat you--if yesterday you were not playing a little comedy
+when you accepted the love of a man whose vanity will change to pride
+if you accept him, one whose defects will become virtues under your
+divine influence--I entreat you do not excite a passion which, in him,
+amounts to vice. Jealousy is a noxious element in my soul, and you
+have revealed to me its strength; it is awful, it destroys everything
+--Oh! I do not mean the jealousy of an Othello," he continued,
+noticing Modeste's gesture. "No, no; my thoughts were of myself: I
+have been so indulged on that point. You know the affection to which I
+owe all the happiness I have ever enjoyed,--very little at the best"
+(he sadly shook his head). "Love is symbolized among all nations as a
+child, because it fancies the world belongs to it, and it cannot
+conceive otherwise. Well, Nature herself set the limit to that
+sentiment. It was still-born. A tender, maternal soul guessed and
+calmed the painful constriction of my heart,--for a woman who feels,
+who knows, that she is past the joys of love becomes angelic in her
+treatment of others. The duchess has never made me suffer in my
+sensibilities. For ten years not a word, not a look, that could wound
+me! I attach more value to words, to thoughts, to looks, than ordinary
+men. If a look is to me a treasure beyond all price, the slightest
+doubt is deadly poison; it acts instantaneously, my love dies. I
+believe--contrary to the mass of men, who delight in trembling,
+hoping, expecting--that love can only exist in perfect, infantile, and
+infinite security. The exquisite purgatory, where women delight to
+send us by their coquetry, is a base happiness to which I will not
+submit: to me, love is either heaven or hell. If it is hell, I will
+have none of it. I feel an affinity with the azure skies of Paradise
+within my soul. I can give myself without reserve, without secrets,
+doubts or deceptions, in the life to come; and I demand reciprocity.
+Perhaps I offend you by these doubts. Remember, however, that I am
+only talking of myself--"
+
+"--a good deal, but never too much," said Modeste, offended in every
+hole and corner of her pride by this discourse, in which the Duchesse
+de Chaulieu served as a dagger. "I am so accustomed to admire you, my
+dear poet."
+
+"Well, then, can you promise me the same canine fidelity which I offer
+to you? Is it not beautiful? Is it not just what you have longed for?"
+
+"But why, dear poet, do you not marry a deaf-mute, and one who is also
+something of an idiot? I ask nothing better than to please my husband.
+But you threaten to take away from a girl the very happiness you so
+kindly arrange for her; you are tearing away every gesture, every
+word, every look; you cut the wings of your bird, and then expect it
+to hover about you. I know poets are accused of inconsistency--oh!
+very unjustly," she added, as Canalis made a gesture of denial; "that
+alleged defect which comes from the brilliant activity of their minds
+which commonplace people cannot take into account. I do not believe,
+however, that a man of genius can invent such irreconcilable
+conditions and call his invention life. You are requiring the
+impossible solely for the pleasure of putting me in the wrong,--like
+the enchanters in fairy-tales, who set tasks to persecuted young girls
+whom the good fairies come and deliver."
+
+"In this case the good fairy would be true love," said Canalis in a
+curt tone, aware that his elaborate excuse for a rupture was seen
+through by the keen and delicate mind which Butscha had piloted so
+well.
+
+"My dear poet, you remind me of those fathers who inquire into a
+girl's 'dot' before they are willing to name that of their son. You
+are quarrelling with me without knowing whether you have the slightest
+right to do so. Love is not gained by such dry arguments as yours. The
+poor duke on the contrary abandons himself to it like my Uncle Toby;
+with this difference, that I am not the Widow Wadman,--though widow
+indeed of many illusions as to poetry at the present moment. Ah, yes,
+we young girls will not believe in anything that disturbs our world of
+fancy! I was warned of all this beforehand. My dear poet, you are
+attempting to get up a quarrel which is unworthy of you. I no longer
+recognize the Melchior of yesterday."
+
+"Because Melchior has discovered a spirit of ambition in you which--"
+
+Modeste looked at him from head to foot with an imperial eye.
+
+"But I shall be peer of France and ambassador as well as he," added
+Canalis.
+
+"Do you take me for a bourgeois," she said, beginning to mount the
+steps of the portico; but she instantly turned back and added, "That
+is less impertinent than to take me for a fool. The change in your
+conduct comes from certain silly rumors which you have heard in Havre,
+and which my maid Francoise has repeated to me."
+
+"Ah, Modeste, how can you think it?" said Canalis, striking a dramatic
+attitude. "Do you think me capable of marrying you only for your
+money?"
+
+"If I do you that wrong after your edifying remarks on the banks of
+the Seine can you easily undeceive me," she said, annihilating him
+with her scorn.
+
+"Ah!" thought the poet, as he followed her into the house, "if you
+think, my little girl, that I'm to be caught in that net, you take me
+to be younger than I am. Dear, dear, what a fuss about an artful
+little thing whose esteem I value about as much as that of the king of
+Borneo. But she has given me a good reason for the rupture by accusing
+me of such unworthy sentiments. Isn't she sly? La Briere will get a
+burden on his back--idiot that he is! And five years hence it will be
+a good joke to see them together."
+
+The coldness which this altercation produced between Modeste and
+Canalis was visible to all eyes that evening. The poet went off early,
+on the ground of La Briere's illness, leaving the field to the grand
+equerry. About eleven o'clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with
+Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste's ear, "Was I right?"
+
+"Alas, yes," she said.
+
+"But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come
+back; we agreed upon that, you know."
+
+"Anger got the better of me," said Modeste. "Such meanness sent the
+blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him."
+
+"Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can't
+speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love
+and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself."
+
+"Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a
+man of intellect."
+
+"Your father's eight millions are more to him than all that."
+
+"Eight millions!" exclaimed Modeste.
+
+"My master, who has sold his practice, is going to Provence to attend
+to the purchase of lands which your father's agent has suggested to
+him. The sum that is to be paid for the estate of La Bastie is four
+millions; your father has agreed to it. You are to have a 'dot' of two
+millions and another million for an establishment in Paris, a hotel
+and furniture. Now, count up."
+
+"Ah! then I can be Duchesse d'Herouville!" cried Modeste, glancing at
+Butscha.
+
+"If it hadn't been for that comedian of a Canalis you would have kept
+HIS whip, thinking it came from me," said the dwarf, indirectly
+pleading La Briere's cause.
+
+"Monsieur Butscha, may I ask if I am to marry to please you?" said
+Modeste, laughing.
+
+"That fine fellow loves you as well as I do,--and you loved him for
+eight days," retorted Butscha; "and HE has got a heart."
+
+"Can he compete, pray, with an office under the Crown? There are but
+six, grand almoner, chancellor, grand chamberlain, grand master, high
+constable, grand admiral,--but they don't appoint high constables any
+longer."
+
+"In six months, mademoiselle, the masses--who are made up of wicked
+Butschas--could send all those grand dignities to the winds. Besides,
+what signifies nobility in these days? There are not a thousand real
+noblemen in France. The d'Herouvilles are descended from a tipstaff in
+the time of Robert of Normandy. You will have to put up with many a
+vexation from the old aunt with the furrowed face. Look here,--as you
+are so anxious for the title of duchess,--you belong to the Comtat,
+and the Pope will certainly think as much of you as he does of all
+those merchants down there; he'll sell you a duchy with some name
+ending in 'ia' or 'agno.' Don't play away your happiness for an office
+under the Crown."
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXV
+
+                        A DIPLOMATIC LETTER
+
+The poet's reflections during the night were thoroughly matter of
+fact. He sincerely saw nothing worse in life than the situation of a
+married man without money. Still trembling at the danger he had been
+led into by his vanity, his desire to get the better of the duke, and
+his belief in the Mignon millions, he began to ask himself what the
+duchess must be thinking of his stay in Havre, aggravated by the fact
+that he had not written to her for fourteen days, whereas in Paris
+they exchanged four or five letters a week.
+
+"And that poor woman is working hard to get me appointed commander of
+the Legion and ambassador to the Court of Baden!" he cried.
+
+Thereupon, with that promptitude of decision which results--in poets
+as well as in speculators--from a lively intuition of the future, he
+sat down and composed the following letter:--
+
+  To Madame la Duchesse de Chaulieu:
+
+  My dear Eleonore,--You have doubtless been surprised at not
+  hearing from me; but the stay I am making in this place is not
+  altogether on account of my health. I have been trying to do a
+  good turn to our little friend La Briere. The poor fellow has
+  fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie, a
+  rather pale, insignificant, and thread-papery little thing, who,
+  by the way, has the vice of liking literature, and calls herself a
+  poet to excuse the caprices and humors of a rather sullen nature.
+  You know Ernest,--he is so easy to catch that I have been afraid
+  to leave him to himself. Mademoiselle de La Bastie was inclined to
+  coquet with your Melchior, and was only too ready to become your
+  rival, though her arms are thin, and she has no more bust than
+  most girls; moreover, her hair is as dead and colorless as that of
+  Madame de Rochefide, and her eyes small, gray, and very
+  suspicious. I put a stop--perhaps rather brutally--to the
+  attentions of Mademoiselle Immodeste; but love, such as mine for
+  you, demanded it. What care I for all the women on earth,
+  --compared to you, what are they?
+
+  The people with whom I pass my time, and who form the circle round
+  the heiress, are so thoroughly bourgeois that they almost turn my
+  stomach. Pity me; imagine! I pass my evenings with notaries,
+  notaresses, cashiers, provincial money-lenders--ah! what a change
+  from my evenings in the rue de Grenelle. The alleged fortune of
+  the father, lately returned from China, has brought to Havre that
+  indefatigable suitor, the grand equerry, hungry after the
+  millions, which he wants, they say, to drain his marshes. The king
+  does not know what a fatal present he made the duke in those waste
+  lands. His Grace, who has not yet found out that the lady had only
+  a small fortune, is jealous of _me_; for La Briere is quietly making
+  progress with his idol under cover of his friend, who serves as a
+  blind.
+
+  Notwithstanding Ernest's romantic ecstasies, I myself, a poet,
+  think chiefly of the essential thing, and I have been making some
+  inquiries which darken the prospects of our friend. If my angel
+  would like absolution for some of our little sins, she will try to
+  find out the facts of the case by sending for Mongenod, the
+  banker, and questioning him, with the dexterity that characterizes
+  her, as to the father's fortune? Monsieur Mignon, formerly colonel
+  of cavalry in the Imperial guard, has been for the last seven
+  years a correspondent of the Mongenods. It is said that he gives
+  his daughter a "dot" of two hundred thousand francs, and before I
+  make the offer on Ernest's behalf I am anxious to get the rights
+  of the story. As soon as the affair is arranged I shall return to
+  Paris. I know a way to settle everything to the advantage of our
+  young lover,--simply by the transmission of the father-in-law's
+  title, and no one, I think, can more readily obtain that favor
+  than Ernest, both on account of his own services and the influence
+  which you and I and the duke can exert for him. With his tastes,
+  Ernest, who of course will step into my office when I go to Baden,
+  will be perfectly happy in Paris with twenty-five thousand francs
+  a year, a permanent place, and a wife--luckless fellow!
+
+  Ah, dearest, how I long for the rue de Grenelle! Fifteen days of
+  absence! when they do not kill love, they revive all the ardor of
+  its earlier days, and you know, better than I, perhaps, the
+  reasons that make my love eternal,--my bones will love thee in the
+  grave! Ah! I cannot bear this separation. If I am forced to stay
+  here another ten days, I shall make a flying visit of a few hours
+  to Paris.
+
+  Has the duke obtained for me the thing we wanted; and shall you,
+  my dearest life, be ordered to drink the Baden waters next year?
+  The billing and cooing of the "handsome disconsolate," compared
+  with the accents of our happy love--so true and changeless for now
+  ten years!--have given me a great contempt for marriage. I had
+  never seen the thing so near. Ah, dearest! what the world calls a
+  "false step" brings two beings nearer together than the law--does
+  it not?
+
+The concluding idea served as a text for two pages of reminiscences
+and aspirations a little too confidential for publication.
+
+The evening before the day on which Canalis put the above epistle into
+the post, Butscha, under the name of Jean Jacmin, had received a
+letter from his fictitious cousin, Philoxene, and had mailed his
+answer, which thus preceded the letter of the poet by about twelve
+hours. Terribly anxious for the last two weeks, and wounded by
+Melchior's silence, the duchess herself dictated Philoxene's letter to
+her cousin, and the moment she had read the answer, rather too
+explicit for her quinquagenary vanity, she sent for the banker and
+made close inquiries as to the exact fortune of Monsieur Mignon.
+Finding herself betrayed and abandoned for the millions, Eleonore gave
+way to a paroxysm of anger, hatred, and cold vindictiveness. Philoxene
+knocked at the door of the sumptuous room, and entering found her
+mistress with her eyes full of tears,--so unprecedented a phenomenon
+in the fifteen years she had waited upon her that the woman stopped
+short stupefied.
+
+"We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes," she heard the
+duchess say.
+
+"A letter from Havre, madame."
+
+Eleonore read the poet's prose without noticing the presence of
+Philoxene, whose amazement became still greater when she saw the dawn
+of fresh serenity on the duchess's face as she read further and
+further into the letter. Hold out a pole no thicker than a
+walking-stick to a drowning man, and he will think it a high-road of
+safety. The happy Eleonore believed in Canalis's good faith when she
+had read through the four pages in which love and business, falsehood
+and truth, jostled each other. She who, a few moments earlier, had
+sent for her husband to prevent Melchior's appointment while there was
+still time, was now seized with a spirit of generosity that amounted
+almost to the sublime.
+
+"Poor fellow!" she thought; "he has not had one faithless thought; he
+loves me as he did on the first day; he tells me all--Philoxene!" she
+cried, noticing her maid, who was standing near and pretending to
+arrange the toilet-table.
+
+"Madame la duchesse?"
+
+"A mirror, child!"
+
+Eleonore looked at herself, saw the fine razor-like lines traced on
+her brow, which disappeared at a little distance; she sighed, and in
+that sigh she felt she bade adieu to love. A brave thought came into
+her mind, a manly thought, outside of all the pettiness of women,--a
+thought which intoxicates for a moment, and which explains, perhaps,
+the clemency of the Semiramis of Russia when she married her young and
+beautiful rival to Momonoff.
+
+"Since he has not been faithless, he shall have the girl and her
+millions," she thought,--"provided Mademoiselle Mignon is as ugly as
+he says she is."
+
+Three raps, circumspectly given, announced the duke, and his wife went
+herself to the door to let him in.
+
+"Ah! I see you are better, my dear," he cried, with the counterfeit
+joy that courtiers assume so readily, and by which fools are so
+readily taken in.
+
+"My dear Henri," she answered, "why is it you have not yet obtained
+that appointment for Melchior,--you who sacrificed so much to the king
+in taking a ministry which you knew could only last one year."
+
+The duke glanced at Philoxene, who showed him by an almost
+imperceptible sign the letter from Havre on the dressing-table.
+
+"You would be terribly bored at Baden and come back at daggers drawn
+with Melchior," said the duke.
+
+"Pray why?"
+
+"Why, you would always be together," said the former diplomat, with
+comic good-humor.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "I am going to marry him."
+
+"If we can believe d'Herouville, our dear Canalis stands in no need of
+your help in that direction," said the duke, smiling. "Yesterday
+Grandlieu read me some passages from a letter the grand equerry had
+written him. No doubt they were dictated by the aunt for the express
+purpose of their reaching you, for Mademoiselle d'Herouville, always
+on the scent of a 'dot,' knows that Grandlieu and I play whist nearly
+every evening. That good little d'Herouville wants the Prince de
+Cadignan to go down and give a royal hunt in Normandy, and endeavor to
+persuade the king to be present, so as to turn the head of the damozel
+when she sees herself the object of such a grand affair. In short, two
+words from Charles X. would settle the matter. D'Herouville says the
+girl has incomparable beauty--"
+
+"Henri, let us go to Havre!" cried the duchess, interrupting him.
+
+"Under what pretext?" said her husband, gravely; he was one of the
+confidants of Louis XVIII.
+
+"I never saw a hunt."
+
+"It would be all very well if the king went; but it is a terrible bore
+to go so far, and he will not do it; I have just been speaking with
+him about it."
+
+"Perhaps _Madame_ would go?"
+
+"That would be better," returned the duke, "I dare say the Duchesse de
+Maufrigneuse would help you to persuade her from Rosny. If she goes
+the king will not be displeased at the use of his hunting equipage.
+Don't go to Havre, my dear," added the duke, paternally, "that would
+be giving yourself away. Come, here's a better plan, I think.
+Gaspard's chateau of Rosembray is on the other side of the forest of
+Brotonne; why not give him a hint to invite the whole party?"
+
+"He invite them?" said Eleonore.
+
+"I mean, of course, the duchess; she is always engaged in pious works
+with Mademoiselle d'Herouville; give that old maid a hint, and get her
+to speak to Gaspard."
+
+"You are a love of a man," cried Eleonore; "I'll write to the old maid
+and to Diane at once, for we must get hunting things made,--a riding
+hat is so becoming. Did you win last night at the English embassy?"
+
+"Yes," said the duke; "I cleared myself."
+
+"Henri, above all things, stop proceedings about Melchior's two
+appointments."
+
+After writing half a dozen lines to the beautiful Diane de
+Maufrigneuse, and a short hint to Mademoiselle d'Herouville, Eleonore
+sent the following answer like the lash of a whip through the poet's
+lies.
+
+  To Monsieur le Baron de Canalis:--
+
+  My dear poet,--Mademoiselle de La Bastie is very beautiful;
+  Mongenod has proved to me that her father has millions. I did
+  think of marrying you to her; I am therefore much displeased at
+  your want of confidence. If you had any intention of marrying La
+  Briere when you went to Havre it is surprising that you said
+  nothing to me about it before you started. And why have you
+  omitted writing to a friend who is so easily made anxious as I?
+  Your letter arrived a trifle late; I had already seen the banker.
+  You are a child, Melchior, and you are playing tricks with us. It
+  is not right. The duke himself is quite indignant at your
+  proceedings; he thinks you less than a gentleman, which casts some
+  reflections on your mother's honor.
+
+  Now, I intend to see things for myself. I shall, I believe, have
+  the honor of accompanying _Madame_ to the hunt which the Duc
+  d'Herouville proposes to give for Mademoiselle de La Bastie. I
+  will manage to have you invited to Rosembray, for the meet will
+  probably take place in Duc de Verneuil's park.
+
+  Pray believe, my dear poet, that I am none the less, for life,
+
+
+Your friend,      Eleonore de M.
+
+
+"There, Ernest, just look at that!" cried Canalis, tossing the letter
+at Ernest's nose across the breakfast-table; "that's the two
+thousandth love-letter I have had from that woman, and there isn't
+even a 'thou' in it. The illustrious Eleonore has never compromised
+herself more than she does there. Marry, and try your luck! The worst
+marriage in the world is better than this sort of halter. Ah, I am the
+greatest Nicodemus that ever tumbled out of the moon! Modeste has
+millions, and I've lost her; for we can't get back from the poles,
+where we are to-day, to the tropics, where we were three days ago!
+Well, I am all the more anxious for your triumph over the grand
+equerry, because I told the duchess I came here only for your sake;
+and so I shall do my best for you."
+
+"Alas, Melchior, Modeste must needs have so noble, so grand, so
+well-balanced a nature to resist the glories of the Court, and all
+these splendors cleverly displayed for her honor and glory by the duke,
+that I cannot believe in the existence of such perfection,--and yet,
+if she is still the Modeste of her letters, there might be hope!"
+
+"Well, well, you are a happy fellow, you young Boniface, to see the
+world and your mistress through green spectacles!" cried Canalis,
+marching off to pace up and down the garden.
+
+Caught between two lies, the poet was at a loss what to do.
+
+"Play by rule, and you lose!" he cried presently, sitting down in the
+kiosk. "Every man of sense would have acted as I did four days ago,
+and got himself out of the net in which I saw myself. At such times
+people don't disentangle nets, they break through them! Come, let us
+be calm, cold, dignified, affronted. Honor requires it; English
+stiffness is the only way to win her back. After all, if I have to
+retire finally, I can always fall back on my old happiness; a fidelity
+of ten years can't go unrewarded. Eleonore will arrange me some good
+marriage."
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XXVI
+
+                            TRUE LOVE
+
+The hunt was destined to be not only a meet of the hounds, but a
+meeting of all the passions excited by the colonel's millions and
+Modeste's beauty; and while it was in prospect there was truce between
+the adversaries. During the days required for the arrangement of this
+forestrial solemnity, the salon of the villa Mignon presented the
+tranquil picture of a united family. Canalis, cut short in his role of
+injured love by Modeste's quick perceptions, wished to appear
+courteous; he laid aside his pretensions, gave no further specimens of
+his oratory, and became, what all men of intellect can be when they
+renounce affectation, perfectly charming. He talked finances with
+Gobenheim, and war with the colonel, Germany with Madame Mignon, and
+housekeeping with Madame Latournelle,--endeavoring to bias them all in
+favor of La Briere. The Duc d'Herouville left the field to his rivals,
+for he was obliged to go to Rosembray to consult with the Duc de
+Verneuil, and see that the orders of the Royal Huntsman, the Prince de
+Cadignan, were carried out. And yet the comic element was not
+altogether wanting. Modeste found herself between the depreciatory
+hints of Canalis as to the gallantry of the grand equerry, and the
+exaggerations of the two Mesdemoiselles d'Herouville, who passed every
+evening at the villa. Canalis made Modeste take notice that, instead
+of being the heroine of the hunt, she would be scarcely noticed.
+_Madame_ would be attended by the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse,
+daughter-in-law of the Prince de Cadignan, by the Duchesse de Chaulieu,
+and other great ladies of the Court, among whom she could produce no
+sensation; no doubt the officers in garrison at Rouen would be invited,
+etc. Helene, on the other hand, was incessantly telling her new friend,
+whom she already looked upon as a sister-in-law, that she was to be
+presented to _Madame_; undoubtedly the Duc de Verneuil would invite her
+father and herself to stay at Rosembray; if the colonel wished to
+obtain a favor of the king,--a peerage, for instance,--the opportunity
+was unique, for there was hope of the king himself being present on
+the third day; she would be delighted with the charming welcome with
+which the beauties of the Court, the Duchesses de Chaulieu, de
+Maufrigneuse, de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and other ladies, were prepared
+to meet her. It was in fact an excessively amusing little warfare,
+with its marches and countermarches and stratagems,--all of which were
+keenly enjoyed by the Dumays, the Latournelles, Gobenheim, and
+Butscha, who, in conclave assembled, said horrible things of these
+noble personages, cruelly noting and intelligently studying all their
+little meannesses.
+
+The promises on the d'Herouville side were, however, confirmed by the
+arrival of an invitation, couched in flattering terms, from the Duc de
+Verneuil and the Master of the Hunt to Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie
+and his daughter, to stay at Rosembray and be present at a grand hunt
+on the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, of November following.
+
+La Briere, full of dark presentiments, craved the presence of Modeste
+with an eagerness whose bitter joys are known only to lovers who feel
+that they are parted, and parted fatally from those they love. Flashes
+of joy came to him intermingled with melancholy meditations on the one
+theme, "I have lost her," and made him all the more interesting to
+those who watched him, because his face and his whole person were in
+keeping with his profound feeling. There is nothing more poetic than a
+living elegy, animated by a pair of eyes, walking about, and sighing
+without rhymes.
+
+The Duc d'Herouville arrived at last to arrange for Modeste's
+departure; after crossing the Seine she was to be conveyed in the
+duke's caleche, accompanied by the Demoiselles d'Herouville. The duke
+was charmingly courteous, he begged Canalis and La Briere to be of the
+party, assuring them, as he did the colonel, that he had taken
+particular care that hunters should be provided for them. The colonel
+invited the three lovers to breakfast on the morning of the start.
+Canalis then began to put into execution a plan that he had been
+maturing in his own mind for the last few days; namely, to quietly
+reconquer Modeste, and throw over the duchess, La Briere, and the
+duke. A graduate of diplomacy could hardly remain stuck in the
+position in which he found himself. On the other hand La Briere had
+come to the resolution of bidding Modeste an eternal farewell. Each
+suitor was therefore on the watch to slip in a last word, like the
+defendant's counsel to the court before judgment is pronounced; for
+all felt that the three weeks' struggle was approaching its
+conclusion. After dinner on the evening before the start was to be
+made, the colonel had taken his daughter by the arm and made her feel
+the necessity of deciding.
+
+"Our position with the d'Herouville family will be quite intolerable
+at Rosembray," he said to her. "Do you mean to be a duchess?"
+
+"No, father," she answered.
+
+"Then do you love Canalis?"
+
+"No, papa, a thousand times no!" she exclaimed with the impatience of
+a child.
+
+The colonel looked at her with a sort of joy.
+
+"Ah, I have not influenced you," cried the true father, "and I will
+now confess that I chose my son-in-law in Paris when, having made him
+believe that I had but little fortune, he grasped my hand and told me
+I took a weight from his mind--"
+
+"Who is it you mean?" asked Modeste, coloring.
+
+"_The man of fixed principles and sound moralities_," said her father,
+slyly, repeating the words which had dissolved poor Modeste's dream on
+the day after his return.
+
+"I was not even thinking of him, papa. Please leave me at liberty to
+refuse the duke myself; I understand him, and I know how to soothe
+him."
+
+"Then your choice is not made?"
+
+"Not yet; there is another syllable or two in the charade of my
+destiny still to be guessed; but after I have had a glimpse of court
+life at Rosembray I will tell you my secret."
+
+"Ah! Monsieur de La Briere," cried the colonel, as the young man
+approached them along the garden path in which they were walking, "I
+hope you are going to this hunt?"
+
+"No, colonel," answered Ernest. "I have come to take leave of you and
+of mademoiselle; I return to Paris--"
+
+"You have no curiosity," said Modeste, interrupting, and looking at
+him.
+
+"A wish--that I cannot expect--would suffice to keep me," he replied.
+
+"If that is all, you must stay to please me; I wish it," said the
+colonel, going forward to meet Canalis, and leaving his daughter and
+La Briere together for a moment.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said the young man, raising his eyes to hers with the
+boldness of a man without hope, "I have an entreaty to make to you."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"Let me carry away with me your forgiveness. My life can never be
+happy; it must be full of remorse for having lost my happiness--no
+doubt by my own fault; but, at least,--"
+
+"Before we part forever," said Modeste, interrupting a la Canalis, and
+speaking in a voice of some emotion, "I wish to ask you one thing; and
+though you once disguised yourself, I think you cannot be so base as
+to deceive me now."
+
+The taunt made him turn pale, and he cried out, "Oh, you are
+pitiless!"
+
+"Will you be frank?"
+
+"You have the right to ask me that degrading question," he said, in a
+voice weakened by the violent palpitation of his heart.
+
+"Well, then, did you read my letters to Monsieur de Canalis?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle; and I allowed your father to read them it was to
+justify my love by showing him how it was born, and how sincere my
+efforts were to cure you of your fancy."
+
+"But how came the idea of that unworthy masquerade ever to arise?" she
+said, with a sort of impatience.
+
+La Briere related truthfully the scene in the poet's study which
+Modeste's first letter had occasioned, and the sort of challenge that
+resulted from his expressing a favorable opinion of a young girl thus
+led toward a poet's fame, as a plant seeks its share of the sun.
+
+"You have said enough," said Modeste, restraining some emotion. "If
+you have not my heart, monsieur, you have at least my esteem."
+
+These simple words gave the young man a violent shock; feeling himself
+stagger, he leaned against a tree, like a man deprived for a moment of
+reason. Modest, who had left him, turned her head and came hastily
+back.
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked, taking his hand to prevent him from
+falling.
+
+"Forgive me--I thought you despised me."
+
+"But," she answered, with a distant and disdainful manner, "I did not
+say that I loved you."
+
+And she left him again. But this time, in spite of her harshness, La
+Briere thought he walked on air; the earth softened under his feet,
+the trees bore flowers; the skies were rosy, the air cerulean, as they
+are in the temples of Hymen in those fairy pantomimes which finish
+happily. In such situations every woman is a Janus, and sees behind
+her without turning round; and thus Modeste perceived on the face of
+her lover the indubitable symptoms of a love like Butscha's,--surely
+the "ne plus ultra" of a woman's hope. Moreover, the great value which
+La Briere attached to her opinion filled Modeste with an emotion that
+was inestimably sweet.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Canalis, leaving the colonel and waylaying
+Modeste, "in spite of the little value you attach to my sentiments, my
+honor is concerned in effacing a stain under which I have suffered too
+long. Here is a letter which I received from the Duchesse de Chaulieu
+five days after my arrival in Havre."
+
+He let Modeste read the first lines of the letter we have seen, which
+the duchess began by saying that she had seen Mongenod, and now wished
+to marry her poet to Modeste; then he tore that passage from the body
+of the letter, and placed the fragment in her hand.
+
+"I cannot let you read the rest," he said, putting the paper in his
+pocket; "but I confide these few lines to your discretion, so that you
+may verify the writing. A young girl who could accuse me of ignoble
+sentiments is quite capable of suspecting some collusion, some
+trickery. Ah, Modeste," he said, with tears in his voice, "your poet,
+the poet of Madame de Chaulieu, has no less poetry in his heart than
+in his mind. You are about to see the duchess; suspend your judgment
+of me till then."
+
+He left Modeste half bewildered.
+
+"Oh, dear!" she said to herself; "it seems they are all angels--and
+not marriageable; the duke is the only one that belongs to humanity."
+
+"Mademoiselle Modeste," said Butscha, appearing with a parcel under
+his arm, "this hunt makes me very uneasy. I dreamed your horse ran
+away with you, and I have been to Rouen to see if I could get a
+Spanish bit which, they tell me, a horse can't take between his teeth.
+I entreat you to use it. I have shown it to the colonel, and he has
+thanked me more than there is any occasion for."
+
+"Poor, dear Butscha!" cried Modeste, moved to tears by this maternal
+care.
+
+Butscha went skipping off like a man who has just heard of the death
+of a rich uncle.
+
+"My dear father," said Modeste, returning to the salon; "I should like
+to have that beautiful whip,--suppose you were to ask Monsieur de La
+Briere to exchange it for your picture by Van Ostade."
+
+Modeste looked furtively at Ernest, while the colonel made him this
+proposition, standing before the picture which was the sole thing he
+possessed in memory of his campaigns, having bought it of a burgher at
+Rabiston; and she said to herself as La Briere left the room
+precipitately, "He will be at the hunt."
+
+A curious thing happened. Modeste's three lovers each and all went to
+Rosembray with their hearts full of hope, and captivated by her many
+perfections.
+
+Rosembray,--an estate lately purchased by the Duc de Verneuil, with
+the money which fell to him as his share of the thousand millions
+voted as indemnity for the sale of the lands of the emigres,--is
+remarkable for its chateau, whose magnificence compares only with that
+of Mesniere or of Balleroy. This imposing and noble edifice is
+approached by a wide avenue of four rows of venerable elms, from which
+the visitor enters an immense rising court-yard, like that at
+Versailles, with magnificent iron railings and two lodges, and adorned
+with rows of large orange-trees in their tubs. Facing this court-yard,
+the chateau presents, between two fronts of the main building which
+retreat on either side of this projection, a double row of nineteen
+tall windows, with carved arches and diamond panes, divided from each
+other by a series of fluted pilasters surmounted by an entablature
+which hides an Italian roof, from which rise several stone chimneys
+masked by carved trophies of arms. Rosembray was built, under Louis
+XIV., by a "fermier-general" named Cottin. The facade toward the park
+differs from that on the court-yard by having a narrower projection in
+the centre, with columns between five windows, above which rises a
+magnificent pediment. The family of Marigny, to whom the estates of
+this Cottin were brought in marriage by Mademoiselle Cottin, her
+father's sole heiress, ordered a sunrise to be carved on this pediment
+by Coysevox. Beneath it are two angels unwinding a scroll, on which is
+cut this motto in honor of the Grand Monarch, "Sol nobis benignus."
+
+From the portico, reached by two grand circular and balustraded
+flights of steps, the view extends over an immense fish-pond, as long
+and wide as the grand canal at Versailles, beginning at the foot of a
+grass-plot which compares well with the finest English lawns, and
+bordered with beds and baskets now filled with the brilliant flowers
+of autumn. On either side of the piece of water two gardens, laid out
+in the French style, display their squares and long straight paths,
+like brilliant pages written in the ciphers of Lenotre. These gardens
+are backed to their whole length by a border of nearly thirty acres of
+woodland. From the terrace the view is bounded by a forest belonging
+to Rosembray and contiguous to two other forests, one of which belongs
+to the Crown, the other to the State. It would be difficult to find a
+nobler landscape.
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXVII
+
+                         A GIRL'S REVENGE
+
+Modeste's arrival at Rosembray made a certain sensation in the avenue
+when the carriage with the liveries of France came in sight,
+accompanied by the grand equerry, the colonel, Canalis, and La Briere
+on horseback, preceded by an outrider in full dress, and followed by
+six servants,--among whom were the Negroes and the mulatto,--and the
+britzka of the colonel for the two waiting-women and the luggage. The
+carriage was drawn by four horses, ridden by postilions dressed with
+an elegance specially commanded by the grand equerry, who was often
+better served than the king himself. As Modeste, dazzled by the
+magnificence of the great lords, entered and beheld this lesser
+Versailles, she suddenly remembered her approaching interview with the
+celebrated duchesses, and began to fear that she might seem awkward,
+or provincial, or parvenue; in fact, she lost her self-possession, and
+heartily repented having wished for a hunt.
+
+Fortunately, however, as the carriage drew up, Modeste saw an old man,
+in a blond wig frizzed into little curls, whose calm, plump, smooth
+face wore a fatherly smile and an expression of monastic cheerfulness
+which the half-veiled glance of the eye rendered almost noble. This
+was the Duc de Verneuil, master of Rosembray. The duchess, a woman of
+extreme piety, the only daughter of a rich and deceased chief-justice,
+spare and erect, and the mother of four children, resembled Madame
+Latournelle,--if the imagination can go so far as to adorn the
+notary's wife with the graces of a bearing that was truly abbatial.
+
+"Ah, good morning, dear Hortense!" said Mademoiselle d'Herouville,
+kissing the duchess with the sympathy that united their haughty
+natures; "let me present to you and to the dear duke our little angel,
+Mademoiselle de La Bastie."
+
+"We have heard so much of you, mademoiselle," said the duchess, "that
+we were in haste to receive you."
+
+"And regret the time lost," added the Duc de Verneuil, with courteous
+admiration.
+
+"Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie," said the grand equerry, taking the
+colonel by the arm and presenting him to the duke and duchess, with an
+air of respect in his tone and gesture.
+
+"I am glad to welcome you, Monsieur le comte!" said Monsieur de
+Verneuil. "You possess more than one treasure," he added, looking at
+Modeste.
+
+The duchess took Modeste under her arm and led her into an immense
+salon, where a dozen or more women were grouped about the fireplace.
+The men of the party remained with the duke on the terrace, except
+Canalis, who respectfully made his way to the superb Eleonore. The
+Duchesse de Chaulieu, seated at an embroidery-frame, was showing
+Mademoiselle de Verneuil how to shade a flower.
+
+If Modeste had run a needle through her finger when handling a
+pin-cushion she could not have felt a sharper prick than she received
+from the cold and haughty and contemptuous stare with which Madame de
+Chaulieu favored her. For an instant she saw nothing but that one
+woman, and she saw through her. To understand the depths of cruelty to
+which these charming creatures, whom our passions deify, can go, we
+must see women with each other. Modeste would have disarmed almost any
+other than Eleonore by the perfectly stupid and involuntary admiration
+which her face betrayed. Had she not known the duchess's age she would
+have thought her a woman of thirty-six; but other and greater
+astonishments awaited her.
+
+The poet had run plump against a great lady's anger. Such anger is the
+worst of sphinxes; the face is radiant, all the rest menacing. Kings
+themselves cannot make the exquisite politeness of a mistress's cold
+anger capitulate when she guards it with steel armor. Canalis tried to
+cling to the steel, but his fingers slipped on the polished surface,
+like his words on the heart; and the gracious face, the gracious
+words, the gracious bearing of the duchess hid the steel of her wrath,
+now fallen to twenty-five below zero, from all observers. The
+appearance of Modeste in her sublime beauty, and dressed as well as
+Diane de Maufrigneuse herself, had fired the train of gunpowder which
+reflection had been laying in Eleonore's mind.
+
+All the women had gone to the windows to see the new wonder get out of
+the royal carriage, attended by her three suitors.
+
+"Do not let us seem so curious," Madame de Chaulieu had said, cut to
+the heart by Diane's exclamation,--"She is divine! where in the world
+does she come from?"--and with that the bevy flew back to their seats,
+resuming their composure, though Eleonore's heart was full of hungry
+vipers all clamorous for a meal.
+
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville said in a low voice and with much meaning to
+the Duchesse de Verneuil, "Eleonore receives her Melchior very
+ungraciously."
+
+"The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse thinks there is a coolness between
+them," said Laure de Verneuil, with simplicity.
+
+Charming phrase! so often used in the world of society,--how the north
+wind blows through it.
+
+"Why so?" asked Modeste of the pretty young girl who had lately left
+the Sacre-Coeur.
+
+"The great poet," said the pious duchess--making a sign to her
+daughter to be silent--"left Madame de Chaulieu without a letter for
+more than two weeks after he went to Havre, having told her that he
+went there for his health--"
+
+Modeste made a hasty movement, which caught the attention of Laure,
+Helene, and Mademoiselle d'Herouville.
+
+"--and during that time," continued the devout duchess, "she was
+endeavoring to have him appointed commander of the Legion of honor,
+and minister at Baden."
+
+"Oh, that was shameful in Canalis; he owes everything to her,"
+exclaimed Mademoiselle d'Herouville.
+
+"Why did not Madame de Chaulieu come to Havre?" asked Modeste of
+Helene, innocently.
+
+"My dear," said the Duchesse de Verneuil, "she would let herself be
+cut in little pieces without saying a word. Look at her,--she is
+regal; her head would smile, like Mary Stuart's, after it was cut off;
+in fact, she has some of that blood in her veins."
+
+"Did she not write to him?" asked Modeste.
+
+"Diane tells me," answered the duchess, prompted by a nudge from
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville, "that in answer to Canalis's first letter
+she made a cutting reply a few days ago."
+
+This explanation made Modeste blush with shame for the man before her;
+she longed, not to crush him under her feet, but to revenge herself by
+one of those malicious acts that are sharper than a dagger's thrust.
+She looked haughtily at the Duchesse de Chaulieu--
+
+"Monsieur Melchior!" she said.
+
+All the women snuffed the air and looked alternately at the duchess,
+who was talking in an undertone to Canalis over the embroidery-frame,
+and then at the young girl so ill brought up as to disturb a lovers'
+meeting,--a think not permissible in any society. Diane de
+Maufrigneuse nodded, however, as much as to say, "The child is in the
+right of it." All the women ended by smiling at each other; they were
+enraged with a woman who was fifty-six years old and still handsome
+enough to put her fingers into the treasury and steal the dues of
+youth. Melchior looked at Modeste with feverish impatience, and made
+the gesture of a master to a valet, while the duchess lowered her head
+with the movement of a lioness disturbed at a meal; her eyes, fastened
+on the canvas, emitted red flames in the direction of the poet, which
+stabbed like epigrams, for each word revealed to her a triple insult.
+
+"Monsieur Melchior!" said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its
+right to be heard.
+
+"What, mademoiselle?" demanded the poet.
+
+Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery
+frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was
+seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa. What bitter
+reflections came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from
+Eleonore. If he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between
+himself and his protectress. Not to obey her was to avow his slavery,
+to lose the chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and
+to disregard the plainest laws of decency and civility. The greater
+the folly, the more imperatively the duchess exacted it. Modeste's
+beauty and money thus pitted against Eleonore's rights and influence
+made this hesitation between the man and his honor as terrible to
+witness as the peril of a matador in the arena. A man seldom feels
+such palpitations as those which now came near causing Canalis an
+aneurism, except, perhaps, before the green table, where his fortune
+or his ruin is about to be decided.
+
+"Mademoiselle d'Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left
+behind me," said Modeste to Canalis, "my handkerchief--"
+
+Canalis shrugged his shoulders significantly.
+
+"And," continued Modeste, taking no notice of his gesture, "I had tied
+into one corner of it the key of a desk which contains the fragment of
+an important letter; have the kindness, Monsieur Melchior, to get it
+for me."
+
+Between an angel and a tiger equally enraged Canalis, who had turned
+livid, no longer hesitated,--the tiger seemed to him the least
+dangerous of the two; and he was about to do as he was told, and
+commit himself irretrievably, when La Briere appeared at the door of
+the salon, seeming to his anguished mind like the archangel Gabriel
+tumbling from heaven.
+
+"Ernest, here, Mademoiselle de La Bastie wants you," said the poet,
+hastily returning to his chair by the embroidery frame.
+
+Ernest rushed to Modeste without bowing to any one; he saw only her,
+took his commission with undisguised joy, and darted from the room,
+with the secret approbation of every woman present.
+
+"What an occupation for a poet!" said Modeste to Helene d'Herouville,
+glancing toward the embroidery at which the duchess was now working
+savagely.
+
+"If you speak to her, if you ever look at her, all is over between
+us," said the duchess to the poet in a low voice, not at all satisfied
+with the very doubtful termination which Ernest's arrival had put to
+the scene; "and remember, if I am not present, I leave behind me eyes
+that will watch you."
+
+So saying, the duchess, a woman of medium height, but a little too
+stout, like all women over fifty who retain their beauty, rose and
+walked toward the group which surrounded Diane de Maufrigneuse,
+stepping daintily on little feet that were as slender and nervous as a
+deer's. Beneath her plumpness could be seen the exquisite delicacy of
+such women, which comes from the vigor of their nervous systems
+controlling and vitalizing the development of flesh. There is no other
+way to explain the lightness of her step, and the incomparable
+nobility of her bearing. None but the women whose quarterings begin
+with Noah know, as Eleonore did, how to be majestic in spite of a
+buxom tendency. A philosopher might have pitied Philoxene, while
+admiring the graceful lines of the bust and the minute care bestowed
+upon a morning dress, which was worn with the elegance of a queen and
+the easy grace of a young girl. Her abundant hair, still undyed, was
+simply wound about her head in plaits; she bared her snowy throat and
+shoulders, exquisitely modelled, and her celebrated hand and arm, with
+pardonable pride. Modeste, together with all other antagonists of the
+duchess, recognized in her a woman of whom they were forced to say,
+"She eclipses us." In fact, Eleonore was one of the "grandes dames"
+now so rare. To endeavor to explain what august quality there was in
+the carriage of the head, what refinement and delicacy in the curve of
+the throat, what harmony in her movements, and nobility in her
+bearing, what grandeur in the perfect accord of details with the whole
+being, and in the arts, now a second nature, which render a woman
+grand and even sacred,--to explain all these things would simply be to
+attempt to analyze the sublime. People enjoy such poetry as they enjoy
+that of Paganini; they do not explain to themselves the medium, they
+know the cause is in the spirit that remains invisible.
+
+Madame de Chaulieu bowed her head in salutation of Helene and her
+aunt; then, saying to Diane, in a pure and equable tone of voice,
+without a trace of emotion, "Is it not time to dress, duchess?" she
+made her exit, accompanied by her daughter-in-law and Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville. As she left the room she spoke in an undertone to the
+old maid, who pressed her arm, saying, "You are charming,"--which
+meant, "I am all gratitude for the service you have just done us."
+After that, Mademoiselle d'Herouville returned to the salon to play
+her part of spy, and her first glance apprised Canalis that the
+duchess had made him no empty threat. That apprentice in diplomacy
+became aware that his science was not sufficient for a struggle of
+this kind, and his wit served him to take a more honest position, if
+not a worthier one. When Ernest returned, bringing Modeste's
+handkerchief, the poet seized his arm and took him out on the terrace.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "I am not only the most unfortunate man in
+the world, but I am also the most ridiculous; and I come to you to get
+me out of the hornet's nest into which I have run myself. Modeste is a
+demon; she sees my difficulty and she laughs at it; she has just
+spoken to me of a fragment of a letter of Madame de Chaulieu, which I
+had the folly to give her; if she shows it I can never make my peace
+with Eleonore. Therefore, will you at once ask Modeste to send me back
+that paper, and tell her, from me, that I make no pretensions to her
+hand. Say I count upon her delicacy, upon her propriety as a young
+girl, to behave to me as if we had never known each other. I beg her
+not to speak to me; I implore her to treat me harshly,--though I
+hardly dare ask her to feign a jealous anger, which would help my
+interests amazingly. Go, I will wait here for an answer."
+
+
+
+                          CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+                    MODESTE BEHAVES WITH DIGNITY
+
+On re-entering the salon Ernest de La Briere found a young officer of
+the company of the guard d'Havre, the Vicomte de Serizy, who had just
+arrived from Rosny to announce that _Madame_ was obliged to be present
+at the opening of the Chambers. We know the importance then attached
+to this constitutional solemnity, at which Charles X. delivered his
+speech, surrounded by the royal family,--Madame la Dauphine and _Madame_
+being present in their gallery. The choice of the emissary charged
+with the duty of expressing the princess's regrets was an attention to
+Diane, who was then an object of adoration to this charming young man,
+son of a minister of state, gentleman in ordinary of the chamber, only
+son and heir to an immense fortune. The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
+permitted his attentions solely for the purpose of attracting notice
+to the age of his mother, Madame de Serizy, who was said, in those
+chronicles that are whispered behind the fans, to have deprived her of
+the heart of the handsome Lucien de Rubempre.
+
+"You will do us the pleasure, I hope, to remain at Rosembray," said
+the severe duchess to the young officer.
+
+While giving ear to every scandal, the devout lady shut her eyes to
+the derelictions of her guests who had been carefully selected by the
+duke; indeed, it is surprising how much these excellent women will
+tolerate under pretence of bringing the lost sheep back to the fold by
+their indulgence.
+
+"We reckoned without our constitutional government," said the grand
+equerry; "and Rosembray, Madame la duchesse, will lose a great honor."
+
+"We shall be more at our ease," said a tall thin old man, about
+seventy-five years of age, dressed in blue cloth, and wearing his
+hunting-cap by permission of the ladies. This personage, who closely
+resembled the Duc de Bourbon, was no less than the Prince de Cadignan,
+Master of the Hunt, and one of the last of the great French lords.
+Just as La Briere was endeavoring to slip behind the sofa and obtain a
+moment's intercourse with Modeste, a man of thirty-eight, short, fat,
+and very common in appearance, entered the room.
+
+"My son, the Prince de Loudon," said the Duchesse de Verneuil to
+Modeste, who could not restrain the expression of amazement that
+overspread her young face on seeing the man who bore the historical
+name that the hero of La Vendee had rendered famous by his bravery and
+the martyrdom of his death.
+
+"Gaspard," said the duchess, calling her son to her. The young prince
+came at once, and his mother continued, motioning to Modeste,
+"Mademoiselle de La Bastie, my friend."
+
+The heir presumptive, whose marriage with Desplein's only daughter had
+lately been arranged, bowed to the young girl without seeming struck,
+as his father had been, with her beauty. Modeste was thus enabled to
+compare the youth of to-day with the old age of a past epoch; for the
+old Prince de Cadignan had already said a few words which made her
+feel that he rendered as true a homage to womanhood as to royalty. The
+Duc de Rhetore, the eldest son of the Duchesse de Chaulieu, chiefly
+remarkable for manners that were equally impertinent and free and
+easy, bowed to Modeste rather cavalierly. The reason of this contrast
+between the fathers and the sons is to be found, probably, in the fact
+that young men no longer feel themselves great beings, as their
+forefathers did, and they dispense with the duties of greatness,
+knowing well that they are now but the shadow of it. The fathers
+retain the inherent politeness of their vanished grandeur, like the
+mountain-tops still gilded by the sun when all is twilight in the
+valley.
+
+Ernest was at last able to slip a word into Modeste's ear, and she
+rose immediately.
+
+"My dear," said the duchesse, thinking she was going to dress, and
+pulling a bell-rope, "they shall show you your apartment."
+
+Ernest accompanied Modeste to the foot of the grand staircase,
+presenting the request of the luckless poet, and endeavoring to touch
+her feelings by describing Melchior's agony.
+
+"You see, he loves--he is a captive who thought he could break his
+chain."
+
+"Love in such a rapid seeker after fortune!" retorted Modeste.
+
+"Mademoiselle, you are at the entrance of life; you do not know its
+defiles. The inconsistencies of a man who falls under the dominion of
+a woman much older than himself should be forgiven, for he is really
+not accountable. Think how many sacrifices Canalis has made to her. He
+has sown too much seed of that kind to resign the harvest; the duchess
+represents to him ten years of devotion and happiness. You made him
+forget all that, and unfortunately, he has more vanity than pride; he
+did not reflect on what he was losing until he met Madame Chaulieu
+here to-day. If you really understood him, you would help him. He is a
+child, always mismanaging his life. You call him a seeker after
+fortune, but he seeks very badly; like all poets, he is a victim of
+sensations; he is childish, easily dazzled like a child by anything
+that shines, and pursuing its glitter. He used to love horses and
+pictures, and he craved fame,--well, he sold his pictures to buy armor
+and old furniture of the Renaissance and Louis XV.; just now he is
+seeking political power. Admit that his hobbies are noble things."
+
+"You have said enough," replied Modeste; "come," she added, seeing her
+father, whom she called with a motion of her head to give her his arm;
+"come with me, and I will give you that scrap of paper; you shall
+carry it to the great man and assure him of my condescension to his
+wishes, but on one condition,--you must thank him in my name for the
+pleasure I have taken in seeing one of the finest of the German plays
+performed in my honor. I have learned that Goethe's masterpiece is
+neither Faust nor Egmont--" and then, as Ernest looked at the
+malicious girl with a puzzled air, she added: "It is Torquato Tasso!
+Tell Monsieur de Canalis to re-read it," she added smiling; "I
+particularly desire that you will repeat to your friend word for word
+what I say; for it is not an epigram, it is the justification of his
+conduct,--with this trifling difference, that he will, I trust, become
+more and more reasonable, thanks to the folly of his Eleonore."
+
+The duchess's head-woman conducted Modeste and her father to their
+apartment, where Francoise Cochet had already put everything in order,
+and the choice elegance of which astounded the colonel, more
+especially after he heard from Francoise that there were thirty other
+apartments in the chateau decorated with the same taste.
+
+"This is what I call a proper country-house," said Modeste.
+
+"The Comte de La Bastie must build you one like it," replied her
+father.
+
+"Here, monsieur," said Modeste, giving the bit of paper to Ernest;
+"carry it to our friend and put him out of his misery."
+
+The word _our_ friend struck the young man's heart. He looked at Modeste
+to see if there was anything real in the community of interests which
+she seemed to admit, and she, understanding perfectly what his look
+meant, added, "Come, go at once, your friend is waiting."
+
+La Briere colored excessively, and left the room in a state of doubt
+and anxiety less endurable than despair. The path that approaches
+happiness is, to the true lover, like the narrow way which Catholic
+poetry has called the entrance to Paradise,--expressing thus a dark
+and gloomy passage, echoing with the last cries of earthly anguish.
+
+An hour later this illustrious company were all assembled in the
+salon; some were playing whist, others conversing; the women had their
+embroideries in hand, and all were waiting the announcement of dinner.
+The Prince de Cadignan was drawing Monsieur Mignon out upon China, and
+his campaigns under the empire, and making him talk about the
+Portendueres, the L'Estorades, and the Maucombes, Provencal families;
+he blamed him for not seeking service, and assured him that nothing
+would be easier than to restore him to his rank as colonel of the
+Guard.
+
+"A man of your birth and your fortune ought not to belong to the
+present Opposition," said the prince, smiling.
+
+This society of distinguished persons not only pleased Modeste, but it
+enabled her to acquire, during her stay, a perfection of manners which
+without this revelation she would have lacked all her life. Show a
+clock to an embryo mechanic, and you reveal to him the whole
+mechanism; he thus develops the germs of his faculty which lie dormant
+within him. In like manner Modeste had the instinct to appropriate the
+distinctive qualities of Madame de Maufrigneuse and Madame de
+Chaulieu. For her, the sight of these women was an education; whereas
+a bourgeois would merely have ridiculed their ways or made them absurd
+by clumsy imitation. A well-born, well-educated, and right-minded
+young woman like Modeste fell naturally into connection with these
+people, and saw at once the differences that separate the aristocratic
+world from the bourgeois world, the provinces from the faubourg
+Saint-Germain; she caught the almost imperceptible shadings; in short,
+she perceived the grace of the "grande dame" without doubting that she
+could herself acquire it. She noticed also that her father and La
+Briere appeared infinitely better in this Olympus than Canalis. The
+great poet, abdicating his real and incontestable power, that of the
+mind, became nothing more than a courtier seeking a ministry,
+intriguing for an order, and forced to please the whole galaxy. Ernest
+de La Briere, without ambitions, was able to be himself; while
+Melchior became, to use a vulgar expression, a mere toady, and courted
+the Prince de Loudon, the Duc de Rhetore, the Vicomte de Serizy, or
+the Duc de Maufrigneuse, like a man not free to assert himself, as did
+Colonel Mignon, who was justly proud of his campaigns, and of the
+confidence of the Emperor Napoleon. Modeste took note of the strained
+efforts of the man of real talent, seeking some witticism that should
+raise a laugh, some clever speech, some compliment with which to
+flatter these grand personages, whom it was his interest to please. In
+a word, to Modeste's eyes the peacock plucked out his tail-feathers.
+
+Toward the middle of the evening the young girl sat down with the
+grand equerry in a corner of the salon. She led him there purposely to
+end a suit which she could no longer encourage if she wished to retain
+her self-respect.
+
+"Monsieur le duc, if you really knew me," she said, "you would
+understand how deeply I am touched by your attentions. It is because
+of the profound respect I feel for your character, and the friendship
+which a soul like yours inspires in mine, that I cannot endure to
+wound your self-love. Before your arrival in Havre I loved sincerely,
+deeply, and forever, one who is worthy of being loved, and my
+affection for whom is still a secret; but I wish you to know--and in
+saying this I am more sincere than most young girls--that had I not
+already formed this voluntary attachment, you would have been my
+choice, for I recognize your noble and beautiful qualities. A few
+words which your aunt and sister have said to me as to your intentions
+lead me to make this frank avowal. If you think it desirable, a letter
+from my mother shall recall me, on pretence of her illness, to-morrow
+morning before the hunt begins. Without your consent I do not choose
+to be present at a fete which I owe to your kindness, and where, if my
+secret should escape me, you might feel hurt and defrauded. You will
+ask me why I have come here at all. I could not withstand the
+invitation. Be generous enough not to reproach me for what was almost
+a necessary curiosity. But this is not the chief, not the most
+delicate thing I have to say to you. You have firm friends in my
+father and myself,--more so than perhaps you realize; and as my
+fortune was the first cause that brought you to me, I wish to say--but
+without intending to use it as a sedative to calm the grief which
+gallantry requires you to testify--that my father has thought over the
+affair of the marshes, his friend Dumay thinks your project feasible,
+and they have already taken steps to form a company. Gobenheim, Dumay,
+and my father have subscribed fifteen hundred thousand francs, and
+undertake to get the rest from capitalists, who will feel it in their
+interest to take up the matter. If I have not the honor of becoming
+the Duchesse d'Herouville, I have almost the certainty of enabling you
+to choose her, free from all trammels in your choice, and in a higher
+sphere than mine. Oh! let me finish," she cried, at a gesture from the
+duke.
+
+"Judging by my nephew's emotion," whispered Mademoiselle d'Herouville
+to her niece, "it is easy to see you have a sister."
+
+"Monsieur le duc, all this was settled in my mind the day of our first
+ride, when I heard you deplore your situation. This is what I have
+wished to say to you. That day determined my future life. Though you
+did not make the conquest of a woman, you have at least gained
+faithful friends at Ingouville--if you will deign to accord us that
+title."
+
+This little discourse, which Modeste had carefully thought over, was
+said with so much charm of soul that the tears came to the grand
+equerry's eyes; he seized her hand and kissed it.
+
+"Stay during the hunt," he said; "my want of merit has accustomed me
+to these refusals; but while accepting your friendship and that of the
+colonel, you must let me satisfy myself by the judgment of competent
+scientific men, that the draining of those marshes will be no risk to
+the company you speak of, before I agree to the generous offer of your
+friends. You are a noble girl, and though my heart aches to think I
+can only be your friend, I will glory in that title, and prove it to
+you at all times and in all seasons."
+
+"In that case, Monsieur le duc, let us keep our secret. My choice will
+not be known, at least I think not, until after my mother's complete
+recovery. I should like our first blessing to come from her eyes."
+
+
+
+                           CHAPTER XXIX
+
+                            CONCLUSION
+
+"Ladies," said the Prince de Cadignan, as the guests were about to
+separate for the night, "I know that several of you propose to follow
+the hounds with us to-morrow, and it becomes my duty to tell you that
+if you will be Dianas you must rise, like Diana, with the dawn. The
+meet is for half-past eight o'clock. I have in the course of my life
+seen many women display greater courage than men, but for a few
+seconds only; and you will need a strong dose of resolution to keep
+you on horseback the whole day, barring a halt for breakfast, which we
+shall take, like true hunters and huntresses, on the nail. Are you
+still determined to show yourselves trained horse-women?"
+
+"Prince, it is necessary for me to do so," said Modeste, adroitly.
+
+"I answer for myself," said the Duchesse de Chaulieu.
+
+"And I for my daughter Diane; she is worthy of her name," added the
+prince. "So, then, you all persist in your intentions? However, I
+shall arrange, for the sake of Madame and Mademoiselle de Verneuil and
+others of the party who stay at home, to drive the stag to the further
+end of the pond."
+
+"Make yourself quite easy, mesdames," said the Prince de Loudon, when
+the Royal Huntsman had left the room; "that breakfast 'on the nail'
+will take place under a comfortable tent."
+
+The next day, at dawn, all signs gave promise of a glorious day. The
+skies, veiled by a slight gray vapor, showed spaces of purest blue,
+and would surely be swept clear before mid-day by the northwest wind,
+which was already playing with the fleecy cloudlets. As the hunting
+party left the chateau, the Master of the Hunt, the Duc de Rhetore,
+and the Prince de Loudon, who had no ladies to escort, rode in the
+advance, noticing the white masses of the chateau, with its rising
+chimneys relieved against the brilliant red-brown foliage which the
+trees in Normandy put on at the close of a fine autumn.
+
+"The ladies are fortunate in their weather," remarked the Duc de
+Rhetore.
+
+"Oh, in spite of all their boasting," replied the Prince de Cadignan,
+"I think they will let us hunt without them!"
+
+"So they might, if each had not a squire," said the duke.
+
+At this moment the attention of these determined huntsmen--for the
+Prince de Loudon and the Duc de Rhetore are of the race of Nimrod, and
+the best shots of the faubourg Saint-Germain--was attracted by a loud
+altercation; and they spurred their horses to an open space at the
+entrance to the forest of Rosembray, famous for its mossy turf, which
+was appointed for the meet. The cause of the quarrel was soon
+apparent. The Prince de Loudon, afflicted with anglomania, had brought
+out his own hunting establishment, which was exclusively Britannic,
+and placed it under orders of the Master of the Hunt. Now, one of his
+men, a little Englishman,--fair, pale, insolent, and phlegmatic,
+scarcely able to speak a word of French, and dressed with a neatness
+which distinguishes all Britons, even those of the lower classes,--had
+posted himself on one side of this open space. John Barry wore a short
+frock-coat, buttoned tightly at the waist, made of scarlet cloth, with
+buttons bearing the De Verneuil arms, white leather breeches,
+top-boots, a striped waistcoat, and a collar and cape of black velvet.
+He held in his hand a small hunting-whip, and hanging to his wrist by
+a silken cord was a brass horn. This man, the first whipper-in, was
+accompanied by two thorough-bred dogs,--fox-hounds, white, with liver
+spots, long in the leg, fine in the muzzle, with slender heads, and
+little ears at their crests. The huntsman--famous in the English
+county from which the Prince de Loudon had obtained him at great cost
+--was in charge of an establishment of fifteen horses and sixty
+English hounds, which cost the Duc de Verneuil, who was nothing of a
+huntsman, but chose to indulge his son in this essentially royal
+taste, an enormous sum of money to keep up.
+
+Now, when John arrived on the ground, he found himself forestalled by
+three other whippers-in, in charge of two of the royal packs of hounds
+which had been brought there in carts. They were the three best
+huntsmen of the Prince de Cadignan, and presented, both in character
+and in their distinctively French costume, a marked contrast to the
+representative of insolent Albion. These favorites of the Prince, each
+wearing full-brimmed, three-cornered hats, very flat and very
+wide-spreading, beneath which grinned their swarthy, tanned, and
+wrinkled faces, lighted by three pairs of twinkling eyes, were
+noticeably lean, sinewy, and vigorous, like men in whom sport had
+become a passion. All three were supplied with immense horns of
+Dampierre, wound with green worsted cords, leaving only the brass
+tubes visible; but they controlled their dogs by the eye and voice.
+Those noble animals were far more faithful and submissive subjects
+than the human lieges whom the king was at that moment addressing;
+all were marked with white, black, or liver spots, each having as
+distinctive a countenance as the soldiers of Napoleon, their eyes
+flashing like diamonds at the slightest noise. One of them, brought
+from Poitou, was short in the back, deep in the shoulder, low-jointed,
+and lop-eared; the other, from England, white, fine as a greyhound
+with no belly, small ears, and built for running. Both were young,
+impatient, and yelping eagerly, while the old hounds, on the contrary,
+covered with scars, lay quietly with their heads on their forepaws,
+and their ears to the earth like savages.
+
+As the Englishman came up, the royal dogs and huntsmen looked at each
+other as though they said, "If we cannot hunt by ourselves his
+Majesty's service is insulted."
+
+Beginning with jests, the quarrel presently grew fiercer between
+Monsieur Jacquin La Roulie, the old French whipper-in, and John Barry,
+the young islander. The two princes guessed from afar the subject of
+the altercation, and the Master of the Hunt, setting spurs to his
+horse, brought it to an end by saying, in a voice of authority:--
+
+"Who drew the wood?"
+
+"I, monseigneur," said the Englishman.
+
+"Very good," said the Prince de Cadignan, proceeding to take Barry's
+report.
+
+Dogs and men became silent and respectful before the Royal Huntsman,
+as though each recognized his dignity as supreme. The prince laid out
+the day's work; for it is with a hunt as it is with a battle, and the
+Master of Charles X.'s hounds was the Napoleon of forests. Thanks to
+the admirable system which he has introduced into French venery, he
+was able to turn his thoughts exclusively to the science and strategy
+of it. He now quietly assigned a special duty to the Prince de
+Loudon's establishment, that of driving the stag to water, when, as he
+expected, the royal hounds had sent it into the Crown forest which
+outlined the horizon directly in front of the chateau. The prince knew
+well how to soothe the self-love of his old huntsmen by giving them
+the most arduous part of the work, and also that of the Englishman,
+whom he employed at his own speciality, affording him a chance to show
+the fleetness of his horses and dogs in the open. The two national
+systems were thus face to face and allowed to do their best under each
+other's eyes.
+
+"Does monseigneur wish us to wait any longer?" said La Roulie,
+respectfully.
+
+"I know what you mean, old friend," said the prince. "It is late,
+but--"
+
+"Here come the ladies," said the second whipper-in.
+
+At that moment the cavalcade of sixteen riders was seen to approach at
+the head of which were the green veils of the four ladies. Modeste,
+accompanied by her father, the grand equerry, and La Briere, was in
+the advance, beside the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse whom the Vicomte de
+Serizy escorted. Behind them rode the Duchesse de Chaulieu, flanked by
+Canalis, on whom she was smiling without a trace of rancor. When they
+had reached the open space where the huntsmen with their red coats and
+brass bugles, surrounded by the hounds, made a picture worthy of Van
+der Meulen, the Duchesse de Chaulieu, who, in spite of her embonpoint,
+sat her horse admirably, rode up to Modeste, finding it more for her
+dignity not to avoid that young person, to whom the evening before she
+had not said a single word.
+
+When the Master of the Hunt finished his compliments to the ladies on
+their amazing punctuality, Eleonore deigned to observe the magnificent
+whip which sparked in Modeste's little hand, and graciously asked
+leave to look at it.
+
+"I have never seen anything of the kind more beautiful," she said,
+showing it to Diane de Maufrigneuse. "It is in keeping with its
+possessor," she added, returning it to Modeste.
+
+"You must admit, Madame la duchesse," answered Mademoiselle de La
+Bastie, with a tender and malicious glance at La Briere, "that it is a
+rather strange gift from the hand of a future husband."
+
+"I should take it," said Madame de Maufrigneuse, "as a declaration of
+my rights, in remembrance of Louis XIV."
+
+La Briere's eyes were suffused, and for a moment he dropped his reins;
+but a second glance from Modeste ordered him not to betray his
+happiness. The hunt now began.
+
+The Duc d'Herouville took occasion to say in a low voice to his
+fortunate rival; "Monsieur, I hope that you will make your wife happy;
+if I can be useful to you in any way, command my services; I should be
+only too glad to contribute to the happiness of so charming a pair."
+
+This great day, in which such vast interests of heart and fortune were
+decided, caused but one anxiety to the Master of the Hunt,--namely,
+whether or not the stag would cross the pond and be killed on the lawn
+before the house; for huntsmen of his calibre are like great
+chess-players who can predict a checkmate under certain circumstances.
+The happy old man succeeded to the height of his wishes; the run was
+magnificent, and the ladies released him from his attendance upon them
+for the hunt of the next day but one,--which, however, turned out to
+be rainy.
+
+The Duc de Verneuil's guests stayed five days at Rosembray. On the
+last day the Gazette de France announced the appointment of Monsieur
+le Baron de Canalis to the rank of commander of the Legion of honor,
+and to the post of minister at Carlsruhe.
+
+When, early in the month of December, Madame de La Bastie, operated
+upon by Desplein, recovered her sight and saw Ernest de La Briere for
+the first time, she pressed Modeste's hand and whispered in her ear,
+"I should have chosen him myself."
+
+Toward the last of February all the deeds for the estates in Provence
+were signed by Latournelle, and about that time the family of La
+Bastie obtained the marked honor of the king's signature to the
+marriage contract and to the ordinance transmitting their title and
+arms to La Briere, who henceforth took the name of La Briere-La
+Bastie. The estate of La Bastie was entailed by letters-patent issued
+about the end of April. La Briere's witnesses on the occasion of his
+marriage were Canalis and the minister whom he had served for five
+years as secretary. Those of the bride were the Duc d'Herouville and
+Desplein, whom the Mignons long held in grateful remembrance, after
+giving him magnificent and substantial proofs of their regard.
+
+Later, in the course of this long history of our manners and customs,
+we may again meet Monsieur and Madame de La Briere-La Bastie; and
+those who have the eyes to see, will then behold how sweet, how easy,
+is the marriage yoke with an educated and intelligent woman; for
+Modeste, who had the wit to avoid the follies of pedantry, is the
+pride and happiness of her husband, as she is of her family and of all
+those who surround her.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Beaupre, Fanny
+  A Start in Life
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Bixiou, Jean-Jacques
+  The Purse
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Government Clerks
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Beatrix
+  A Man of Business
+  Gaudissart II.
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Blondet, Emile
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  The Peasantry
+
+Bridau, Joseph
+  The Purse
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Start in Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  Pierre Grassou
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Cadignan, Prince de
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+
+Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Magic Skin
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Start in Life
+  Beatrix
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Chatillonest, De
+  A Woman of Thirty
+
+Chaulieu, Henri, Duc de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Thirteen
+
+Dauriat
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Desplein
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cousin Pons
+  Lost Illusions
+  The Thirteen
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+
+Estourny, Charles d'
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Man of Business
+
+Fontaine, Comte de
+  The Chouans
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Grandlieu, Duc Ferdinand de
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Thirteen
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Herouville, Duc d'
+  The Hated Son
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Cousin Betty
+
+La Bastie la Briere, Ernest de
+  The Government Clerks
+
+La Bastie la Briere, Madame Ernest de (Modeste)
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Loudon, Prince de
+  The Chouans
+
+Marsay, Henri de
+  The Thirteen
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Lily of the Valley
+  Father Goriot
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Ursule Mirouet
+  A Marriage Settlement
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
+  Father Goriot
+  The Thirteen
+  Eugenie Grandet
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Schinner, Hippolyte
+  The Purse
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Pierre Grassou
+  A Start in Life
+  Albert Savarus
+  The Government Clerks
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Serizy, Comte Hugret de
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Honorine
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Serizy, Vicomte de
+  A Start in Life
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+
+Sommervieux, Theodore de
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Stidmann
+  Beatrix
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Cousin Betty
+  Cousin Pons
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modeste Mignon, by Honore de Balzac
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac
+#45 in our series by Balzac
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+Modeste Mignon
+
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)
+
+October, 1998  [Etext #1482]
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+
+
+MODESTE MIGNON
+by HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+Translated By
+Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+  To a Polish Lady.
+
+  Daughter of an enslaved land, angel through love, witch through
+  fancy, child by faith, aged by experience, man in brain, woman in
+  heart, giant by hope, mother through sorrows, poet in thy dreams,
+  --to THEE belongs this book, in which thy love, thy fancy, thy
+  experience, thy sorrow, thy hope, thy dreams, are the warp through
+  which is shot a woof less brilliant than the poesy of thy soul,
+  whose expression, when it shines upon thy countenance, is, to
+  those who love thee, what the characters of a lost language are to
+  scholars.
+
+De Balzac.
+
+
+
+
+MODESTE MIGNON
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CHALET
+
+At the beginning of October, 1829, Monsieur Simon Babylas Latournelle,
+notary, was walking up from Havre to Ingouville, arm in arm with his
+son and accompanied by his wife, at whose side the head clerk of the
+lawyer's office, a little hunchback named Jean Butscha, trotted along
+like a page. When these four personages (two of whom came the same way
+every evening) reached the elbow of the road where it turns back upon
+itself like those called in Italy "cornice," the notary looked about
+to see if any one could overhear him either from the terrace above or
+the path beneath, and when he spoke he lowered his voice as a further
+precaution.
+
+"Exupere," he said to his son, "you must try to carry out
+intelligently a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you
+are not to ask the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I
+command you to toss it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man
+who expects to have a hand in the government of his country is bound
+to keep within him for the secrets of others. After you have paid your
+respects and compliments to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon, to
+Monsieur and Madame Dumay, and to Monsieur Gobenheim if he is at the
+Chalet, and as soon as quiet is restored, Monsieur Dumay will take you
+aside; you are then to look attentively at Mademoiselle Modeste (yes,
+I am willing to allow it) during the whole time he is speaking to you.
+My worthy friend will ask you to go out and take a walk; at the end of
+an hour, that is, about nine o'clock, you are to come back in a great
+hurry; try to puff as if you were out of breath, and whisper in
+Monsieur Dumay's ear, quite low, but so that Mademoiselle Modeste is
+sure to overhear you, these words: 'The young man has come.'"
+
+Exupere was to start the next morning for Paris to begin the study of
+law. This impending departure had induced Latournelle to propose him
+to his friend Dumay as an accomplice in the important conspiracy which
+these directions indicate.
+
+"Is Mademoiselle Modeste suspected of having a lover?" asked Butscha
+in a timid voice of Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Hush, Butscha," she replied, taking her husband's arm.
+
+Madame Latournelle, the daughter of a clerk of the supreme court,
+feels that her birth authorizes her to claim issue from a
+parliamentary family. This conviction explains why the lady, who is
+somewhat blotched as to complexion, endeavors to assume in her own
+person the majesty of a court whose decrees are recorded in her
+father's pothooks. She takes snuff, holds herself as stiff as a
+ramrod, poses for a person of consideration, and resembles nothing so
+much as a mummy brought momentarily to life by galvanism. She tries to
+give high-bred tones to her sharp voice, and succeeds no better in
+doing that than in hiding her general lack of breeding. Her social
+usefulness seems, however, incontestable when we glance at the flower-
+bedecked cap she wears, at the false front frizzling around her
+forehead, at the gowns of her choice; for how could shopkeepers
+dispose of those products if there were no Madame Latournelle? All
+these absurdities of the worthy woman, who is truly pious and
+charitable, might have passed unnoticed, if nature, amusing herself as
+she often does by turning out these ludicrous creations, had not
+endowed her with the height of a drum-major, and thus held up to view
+the comicalities of her provincial nature. She has never been out of
+Havre; she believes in the infallibility of Havre; she proclaims
+herself Norman to the very tips of her fingers; she venerates her
+father, and adores her husband.
+
+Little Latournelle was bold enough to marry this lady after she had
+attained the anti-matrimonial age of thirty-three, and what is more,
+he had a son by her. As he could have got the sixty thousand francs of
+her "dot" in several other ways, the public assigned his uncommon
+intrepidity to a desire to escape an invasion of the Minotaur, against
+whom his personal qualifications would have insufficiently protected
+him had he rashly dared his fate by bringing home a young and pretty
+wife. The fact was, however, that the notary recognized the really
+fine qualities of Mademoiselle Agnes (she was called Agnes) and
+reflected to himself that a woman's beauty is soon past and gone to a
+husband. As to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court
+bestowed in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle
+is still so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty-
+five years and seven months, that she would still provide him, if it
+were necessary, with her breast and her milk,--an hyperbole which
+alone can fully express her impassioned maternity. "How handsome he
+is, that son of mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they
+walk to church, with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is
+like you," Modeste Mignon answers, very much as she might have said,
+"What horrid weather!" This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite
+important as an accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been
+the chaperone of the young girl against whom the notary and his friend
+Dumay are now plotting to set up what we have called, in the
+"Physiologie du Mariage," a "mouse-trap."
+
+As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the
+purest honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any
+stranger would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to
+which, however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His
+eyesight, said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green
+goggles for the protection of his eyes, which were constantly
+inflamed. The arch of each eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair,
+surrounded the tortoise-shell rim of the glasses and made a couple of
+circles as it were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the
+human face the effect produced by these circumferences placed one
+within the other, and separated by a hollow space or line, you can
+hardly imagine how perplexing such a face will be to you, especially
+if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that
+of Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give to cats. This double
+resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas Latournelle. Above
+the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown, all the more crafty
+in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the
+white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across
+the forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent Norman,
+clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple
+of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men,
+would have sought, without finding it, for the reason of such physical
+misrepresentation.
+
+Jean Butscha, a natural son abandoned by his parents and taken care of
+by the clerk of the court and his daughter, and now, through sheer
+hard work, head-clerk to the notary, fed and lodged by his master, who
+gave him a salary of nine hundred francs, almost a dwarf, and with no
+semblance of youth,--Jean Butscha made Modeste his idol, and would
+willingly have given his life for hers. The poor fellow, whose eyes
+were hollowed beneath their heavy lids like the touch-holes of a
+cannon, whose head overweighted his body, with its shock of crisp
+hair, and whose face was pock-marked, had lived under pitying eyes
+from the time he was seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain
+his whole being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct,
+he went his way over that vast tract of country named on the map of
+the heart Love-without-Hope, the sublime and arid steppes of Desire.
+Modeste had christened this grotesque little being her "Black Dwarf."
+The nickname sent him to the pages of Walter Scott's novel, and he one
+day said to Modeste: "Will you accept a rose against the evil day from
+your mysterious dwarf?" Modeste instantly sent the soul of her adorer
+to its humble mud-cabin with a terrible glance, such as young girls
+bestow on the men who cannot please them. Butscha's conception of
+himself was lowly, and, like the wife of his master, he had never been
+out of Havre.
+
+Perhaps it will be well, for the sake of those who have never seen
+that city, to say a few words as to the present destination of the
+Latournelle family,--the head clerk being included in the latter term.
+Ingouville is to Havre what Montmartre is to Paris,--a high hill at
+the foot of which the city lies; with this difference, that the hill
+and the city are surrounded by the sea and the Seine, that Havre is
+helplessly circumscribed by enclosing fortifications, and, in short,
+that the mouth of the river, the harbor, and the docks present a very
+different aspect from the fifty thousand houses of Paris. At the foot
+of Montmartre an ocean of slate roofs lies in motionless blue billows;
+at Ingouville the sea is like the same roofs stirred by the wind. This
+eminence, or line of hills, which coasts the Seine from Rouen to the
+seashore, leaving a margin of valley land more or less narrow between
+itself and the river, and containing in its cities, its ravines, its
+vales, its meadows, veritable treasures of the picturesque, became of
+enormous value in and about Ingouville, after the year 1816, the
+period at which the prosperity of Havre began. This township has
+become since that time the Auteuil, the Ville-d'Avray, the
+Montmorency, in short, the suburban residence of the merchants of
+Havre. Here they build their houses on terraces around its ampitheatre
+of hills, and breathe the sea air laden with the fragrance of their
+splendid gardens. Here these bold speculators cast off the burden of
+their counting-rooms and the atmosphere of their city houses, which
+are built closely together without open spaces, often without court-
+yards,--a vice of construction with the increasing population of
+Havre, the inflexible line of the fortifications, and the enlargement
+of the docks has forced upon them. The result is, weariness of heart
+in Havre, cheerfulness and joy at Ingouville. The law of social
+development has forced up the suburb of Graville like a mushroom. It
+is to-day more extensive than Havre itself, which lies at the foot of
+its slopes like a serpent.
+
+At the crest of the hill Ingouville has but one street, and (as in all
+such situations) the houses which overlook the river have an immense
+advantage over those on the other side of the road, whose view they
+obstruct, and which present the effect of standing on tip-toe to look
+over the opposing roofs. However, there exist here, as elsewhere,
+certain servitudes. Some houses standing at the summit have a finer
+position or possess legal rights of view which compel their opposite
+neighbors to keep their buildings down to a required height. Moreover,
+the openings cut in the capricious rock by roads which follow its
+declensions and make the ampitheatre habitable, give vistas through
+which some estates can see the city, or the river, or the sea. Instead
+of rising to an actual peak, the hill ends abruptly in a cliff. At the
+end of the street which follows the line of the summit, ravines appear
+in which a few villages are clustered (Sainte-Adresse and two or three
+other Saint-somethings) together with several creeks which murmur and
+flow with the tides of the sea. These half-deserted slopes of
+Ingouville form a striking contrast to the terraces of fine villas
+which overlook the valley of the Seine. Is the wind on this side too
+strong for vegetation? Do the merchants shrink from the cost of
+terracing it? However this may be, the traveller approaching Havre on
+a steamer is surprised to find a barren coast and tangled gorges to
+the west of Ingouville, like a beggar in rags beside a perfumed and
+sumptuously apparelled rich man.
+
+In 1829 one of the last houses looking toward the sea, and which in
+all probability stands about the centre of the Ingouville to-day, was
+called, and perhaps is still called, "the Chalet." Originally it was a
+porter's lodge with a trim little garden in front of it. The owner of
+the villa to which it belonged,--a mansion with park, gardens,
+aviaries, hot-houses, and lawns--took a fancy to put the little
+dwelling more in keeping with the splendor of his own abode, and he
+reconstructed it on the model of an ornamental cottage. He divided
+this cottage from his own lawn, which was bordered and set with
+flower-beds and formed the terrace of his villa, by a low wall along
+which he planted a concealing hedge. Behind the cottage (called, in
+spite of all his efforts to prevent it, the Chalet) were the orchards
+and kitchen gardens of the villa. The Chalet, without cows or dairy,
+is separated from the roadway by a wooden fence whose palings are
+hidden under a luxuriant hedge. On the other side of the road the
+opposite house, subject to a legal privilege, has a similar hedge and
+paling, so as to leave an unobstructed view of Havre to the Chalet.
+
+This little dwelling was the torment of the present proprietor of the
+villa, Monsieur Vilquin; and here is the why and the wherefore. The
+original creator of the villa, whose sumptuous details cry aloud,
+"Behold our millions!" extended his park far into the country for the
+purpose, as he averred, of getting his gardeners out of his pockets;
+and so, when the Chalet was finished, none but a friend could be
+allowed to inhabit it. Monsieur Mignon, the next owner of the
+property, was very much attached to his cashier, Dumay, and the
+following history will prove that the attachment was mutual; to him
+therefore he offered the little dwelling. Dumay, a stickler for legal
+methods, insisted on signing a lease for three hundred francs for
+twelve years, and Monsieur Mignon willingly agreed, remarking,--
+
+"My dear Dumay, remember, you have now bound yourself to live with me
+for twelve years."
+
+In consequence of certain events which will presently be related, the
+estates of Monsieur Mignon, formerly the richest merchant in Havre,
+were sold to Vilquin, one of his business competitors. In his joy at
+getting possession of the celebrated villa Mignon, the latter forgot
+to demand the cancelling of the lease. Dumay, anxious not to hinder
+the sale, would have signed anything Vilquin required, but the sale
+once made, he held to his lease like a vengeance. And there he
+remained, in Vilquin's pocket as it were; at the heart of Vilquin's
+family life, observing Vilquin, irritating Vilquin,--in short, the
+gadfly of all the Vilquins. Every morning, when he looked out of his
+window, Vilquin felt a violent shock of annoyance as his eye lighted
+on the little gem of a building, the Chalet, which had cost sixty
+thousand francs and sparkled like a ruby in the sun. That comparison
+is very nearly exact. The architect has constructed the cottage of
+brilliant red brick pointed with white. The window-frames are painted
+of a lively green, the woodwork is brown verging on yellow. The roof
+overhangs by several feet. A pretty gallery, with open-worked
+balustrade, surmounts the lower floor and projects at the centre of
+the facade into a veranda with glass sides. The ground-floor has a
+charming salon and a dining-room, separated from each other by the
+landing of a staircase built of wood, designed and decorated with
+elegant simplicity. The kitchen is behind the dining-room, and the
+corresponding room back of the salon, formerly a study, is now the
+bedroom of Monsieur and Madame Dumay. On the upper floor the architect
+has managed to get two large bedrooms, each with a dressing-room, to
+which the veranda serves as a salon; and above this floor, under the
+eaves, which are tipped together like a couple of cards, are two
+servants' rooms with mansard roofs, each lighted by a circular window
+and tolerably spacious.
+
+Vilquin has been petty enough to build a high wall on the side toward
+the orchard and kitchen garden; and in consequence of this piece of
+spite, the few square feet which the lease secured to the Chalet
+resembled a Parisian garden. The out-buildings, painted in keeping
+with the cottage, stood with their backs to the wall of the adjoining
+property.
+
+The interior of this charming dwelling harmonized with its exterior.
+The salon, floored entirely with iron-wood, was painted in a style
+that suggested the beauties of Chinese lacquer. On black panels edged
+with gold, birds of every color, foliage of impossible greens, and
+fantastic oriental designs glowed and shimmered. The dining-room was
+entirely sheathed in Northern woods carved and cut in open-work like
+the beautiful Russian chalets. The little antechamber formed by the
+landing and the well of the staircase was painted in old oak to
+represent Gothic ornament. The bedrooms, hung with chintz, were
+charming in their costly simplicity. The study, where the cashier and
+his wife now slept, was panelled from top to bottom, on the walls and
+ceiling, like the cabin of a steamboat. These luxuries of his
+predecessor excited Vilquin's wrath. He would fain have lodged his
+daughter and her husband in the cottage. This desire, well known to
+Dumay, will presently serve to illustrate the Breton obstinacy of the
+latter.
+
+The entrance to the Chalet is by a little trellised iron door, the
+uprights of which, ending in lance-heads, show for a few inches above
+the fence and its hedge. The little garden, about as wide as the more
+pretentious lawn, was just now filled with flowers, roses, and dahlias
+of the choicest kind, and many rare products of the hot-houses, for
+(another Vilquinard grievance) the elegant little hot-house, a very
+whim of a hot-house, a hot-house representing dignity and style,
+belonged to the Chalet, and separated, or if you prefer, united it to
+the villa Vilquin. Dumay consoled himself for the toils of business in
+taking care of this hot-house, whose exotic treasures were one of
+Modeste's joys. The billiard-room of the villa Vilquin, a species of
+gallery, formerly communicated through an immense aviary with this
+hot-house. But after the building of the wall which deprived him of a
+view into the orchards, Dumay bricked up the door of communication.
+"Wall for wall!" he said.
+
+In 1827 Vilquin offered Dumay a salary of six thousand francs, and ten
+thousand more as indemnity, if he would give up the lease. The cashier
+refused; though he had but three thousand francs from Gobenheim, a
+former clerk of his master. Dumay was a Breton transplanted by fate
+into Normandy. Imagine therefore the hatred conceived for the tenants
+of the Chalet by the Norman Vilquin, a man worth three millions! What
+criminal leze-million on the part of a cashier, to hold up to the eyes
+of such a man the impotence of his wealth! Vilquin, whose desperation
+in the matter made him the talk of Havre, had just proposed to give
+Dumay a pretty house of his own, and had again been refused. Havre
+itself began to grow uneasy at the man's obstinacy, and a good many
+persons explained it by the phrase, "Dumay is a Breton." As for the
+cashier, he thought Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon would be ill-lodged
+elsewhere. His two idols now inhabited a temple worthy of them; the
+sumptuous little cottage gave them a home, where these dethroned
+royalties could keep the semblance of majesty about them,--a species
+of dignity usually denied to those who have seen better days.
+
+Perhaps as the story goes on, the reader will not regret having
+learned in advance a few particulars as to the home and the habitual
+companions of Modeste Mignon, for, at her age, people and things have
+as much influence upon the future life as a person's own character,--
+indeed, character often receives ineffaceable impressions from its
+surroundings.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A PORTRAIT FROM LIFE
+
+From the manner with which the Latournelles entered the Chalet a
+stranger would readily have guessed that they came there every
+evening.
+
+"Ah, you are here already," said the notary, perceiving the young
+banker Gobenheim, a connection of Gobenheim-Keller, the head of the
+great banking house in Paris.
+
+This young man with a livid face--a blonde of the type with black
+eyes, whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober
+in speech as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but
+nevertheless vigorously framed--visited the family of his former
+master and the house of his cashier less from affection than from
+self-interest. Here they played whist at two sous a point; a dress-
+coat was not required; he accepted no refreshment except "eau sucree,"
+and consequently had no civilities to return. This apparent devotion
+to the Mignon family allowed it to be supposed that Gobenheim had a
+heart; it also released him from the necessity of going into the
+society of Havre and incurring useless expenses, thus upsetting the
+orderly economy of his domestic life. This disciple of the golden calf
+went to bed at half-past ten o'clock and got up at five in the
+morning. Moreover, being perfectly sure of Latournelle's and Butscha's
+discretion, he could talk over difficult business matters, obtain the
+advice of the notary gratis, and get an inkling of the real truth of
+the gossip of the street. This stolid gold-glutton (the epithet is
+Butscha's) belonged by nature to the class of substances which
+chemistry terms absorbents. Ever since the catastrophe of the house of
+Mignon, where the Kellers had placed him to learn the principles of
+maritime commerce, no one at the Chalet had ever asked him to do the
+smallest thing, no matter what; his reply was too well known. The
+young fellow looked at Modeste precisely as he would have looked at a
+cheap lithograph.
+
+"He's one of the pistons of the big engine called 'Commerce,'" said
+poor Butscha, whose clever mind made itself felt occasionally by such
+little sayings timidly jerked out.
+
+The four Latournelles bowed with the most respectful deference to an
+old lady dressed in black velvet, who did not rise from the armchair
+in which she was seated, for the reason that both eyes were covered
+with the yellow film produced by cataract. Madame Mignon may be
+sketched in one sentence. Her august countenance of the mother of a
+family attracted instant notice as that of one whose irreproachable
+life defies the assaults of destiny, which nevertheless makes her the
+target of its arrows and a member of the unnumbered tribe of Niobes.
+Her blonde wig, carefully curled and well arranged upon her head,
+became the cold white face which resembled that of some burgomaster's
+wife painted by Hals or Mirevelt. The extreme neatness of her dress,
+the velvet boots, the lace collar, the shawl evenly folded and put on,
+all bore testimony to the solicitous care which Modeste bestowed upon
+her mother.
+
+When silence was, as the notary had predicted, restored in the pretty
+salon, Modeste, sitting beside her mother, for whom she was
+embroidering a kerchief, became for an instant the centre of
+observation. This curiosity, barely veiled by the commonplace
+salutations and inquiries of the visitors, would have revealed even to
+an indifferent person the existence of the domestic plot to which
+Modeste was expected to fall a victim; but Gobenheim, more than
+indifferent, noticed nothing, and proceeded to light the candles on
+the card-table. The behavior of Dumay made the whole scene terrifying
+to Butscha, to the Latournelles, and above all to Madame Dumay, who
+knew her husband to be capable of firing a pistol at Modeste's lover
+as coolly as though he were a mad dog.
+
+After dinner that day the cashier had gone to walk followed by two
+magnificent Pyrenees hounds, whom he suspected of betraying him, and
+therefore left in charge of a farmer, a former tenant of Monsieur
+Mignon. On his return, just before the arrival of the Latournelles, he
+had taken his pistols from his bed's head and placed them on the
+chimney-piece, concealing this action from Modeste. The young girl
+took no notice whatever of these preparations, singular as they were.
+
+Though short, thick-set, pockmarked, and speaking always in a low
+voice as if listening to himself, this Breton, a former lieutenant in
+the Guard, showed the evidence of such resolution, such sang-froid on
+his face that throughout life, even in the army, no one had ever
+ventured to trifle with him. His little eyes, of a calm blue, were
+like bits of steel. His ways, the look on his face, his speech, his
+carriage, were all in keeping with the short name of Dumay. His
+physical strength, well-known to every one, put him above all danger
+of attack. He was able to kill a man with a blow of his fist, and had
+performed that feat at Bautzen, where he found himself, unarmed, face
+to face with a Saxon at the rear of his company. At the present moment
+the usually firm yet gentle expression of the man's face had risen to
+a sort of tragic sublimity; his lips were pale as the rest of his
+face, indicating a tumult within him mastered by his Breton will; a
+slight sweat, which every one noticed and guessed to be cold,
+moistened his brow. The notary knew but too well that these signs
+might result in a drama before the criminal courts. In fact the
+cashier was playing a part in connection with Modeste Mignon, which
+involved to his mind sentiments of honor and loyalty of far greater
+importance than mere social laws; and his present conduct proceeded
+from one of those compacts which, in case disaster came of it, could
+be judged only in a higher court than one of earth. The majority of
+dramas lie really in the ideas which we make to ourselves about
+things. Events which seem to us dramatic are nothing more than
+subjects which our souls convert into tragedy or comedy according to
+the bent of our characters.
+
+Madame Latournelle and Madame Dumay, who were appointed to watch
+Modeste, had a certain assumed stiffness of demeanor and a quiver in
+their voices, which the suspected party did not notice, so absorbed
+was she in her embroidery. Modeste laid each thread of cotton with a
+precision that would have made an ordinary workwoman desperate. Her
+face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the
+flower she was working. The dwarf, seated between his mistress and
+Gobenheim, restrained his emotion, trying to find means to approach
+Modeste and whisper a word of warning in her ear.
+
+By taking a position in front of Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle,
+with the diabolical intelligence of conscientious duty, had isolated
+Modeste. Madame Mignon, whose blindness always made her silent, was
+even paler than usual, showing plainly that she was aware of the test
+to which her daughter was about to be subjected. Perhaps at the last
+moment she revolted from the stratagem, necessary as it might seem to
+her. Hence her silence; she was weeping inwardly. Exupere, the spring
+of the trap, was wholly ignorant of the piece in which he was to play
+a part. Gobenheim, by reason of his character, remained in a state of
+indifference equal to that displayed by Modeste. To a spectator who
+understood the situation, this contrast between the ignorance of some
+and the palpitating interest of others would have seemed quite poetic.
+Nowadays romance-writers arrange such effects; and it is quite within
+their province to do so, for nature in all ages takes the liberty to
+be stronger than they. In this instance, as you will see, nature,
+social nature, which is a second nature within nature, amused herself
+by making truth more interesting than fiction; just as mountain
+torrents describe curves which are beyond the skill of painters to
+convey, and accomplish giant deeds in displacing or smoothing stones
+which are the wonder of architects and sculptors.
+
+It was eight o'clock. At that season twilight was still shedding its
+last gleams; there was not a cloud in the sky; the balmy air caressed
+the earth, the flowers gave forth their fragrance, the steps of
+pedestrians turning homeward sounded along the gravelly road, the sea
+shone like a mirror, and there was so little wind that the wax candles
+upon the card-tables sent up a steady flame, although the windows were
+wide open. This salon, this evening, this dwelling--what a frame for
+the portrait of the young girl whom these persons were now studying
+with the profound attention of a painter in presence of the Margharita
+Doni, one of the glories of the Pitti palace. Modeste,--blossom
+enclosed, like that of Catullus,--was she worth all these precautions?
+
+You have seen the cage; behold the bird! Just twenty years of age,
+slender and delicate as the sirens which English designers invent for
+their "Books of Beauty," Modeste was, like her mother before her, the
+captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France,
+where we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German
+women is the poetry of the heart coming to the surface of the being
+and spending itself--in affectations if the owner is silly, in divine
+charms of manner if she is "spirituelle" and intelligent. Remarkable
+for her pale golden hair, Modeste belonged to the type of woman
+called, perhaps in memory of Eve, the celestial blonde; whose satiny
+skin is like a silk paper applied to the flesh, shuddering at the
+winter of a cold look, expanding in the sunshine of a loving glance,--
+teaching the hand to be jealous of the eye. Beneath her hair, which
+was soft and feathery and worn in many curls, the brow, which might
+have been traced by a compass so pure was its modelling, shone forth
+discreet, calm to placidity, and yet luminous with thought: when and
+where could another be found so transparently clear or more
+exquisitely smooth? It seemed, like a pearl, to have its orient. The
+eyes, of a blue verging on gray and limpid as the eyes of a child, had
+all the mischief, all the innocence of childhood, and they harmonized
+well with the arch of the eyebrows, faintly indicated by lines like
+those made with a brush on Chinese faces. This candor of the soul was
+still further evidenced around the eyes, in their corners, and about
+the temples, by pearly tints threaded with blue, the special privilege
+of these delicate complexions. The face, whose oval Raphael so often
+gave to his Madonnas, was remarkable for the sober and virginal tone
+of the cheeks, soft as a Bengal rose, upon which the long lashes of
+the diaphanous eyelids cast shadows that were mingled with light. The
+throat, bending as she worked, too delicate perhaps, and of milky
+whiteness, recalled those vanishing lines that Leonardo loved. A few
+little blemishes here and there, like the patches of the eighteenth
+century, proved that Modeste was indeed a child of earth, and not a
+creation dreamed of in Italy by the angelic school. Her lips, delicate
+yet full, were slightly mocking and somewhat sensuous; the waist,
+which was supple and yet not fragile, had no terrors for maternity,
+like those of girls who seek beauty by the fatal pressure of a corset.
+Steel and dimity and lacings defined but did not create the serpentine
+lines of the elegant figure, graceful as that of a young poplar
+swaying in the wind.
+
+A pearl-gray dress with crimson trimmings, made with a long waist,
+modestly outlined the bust and covered the shoulders, still rather
+thin, with a chemisette which left nothing to view but the first
+curves of the throat where it joined the shoulders. From the aspect of
+the young girl's face, at once ethereal and intelligent, where the
+delicacy of a Greek nose with its rosy nostrils and firm modelling
+marked something positive and defined; where the poetry enthroned upon
+an almost mystic brow seemed belied at times by the pleasure-loving
+expression of the mouth; where candor claimed the depths profound and
+varied of the eye, and disputed them with a spirit of irony that was
+trained and educated,--from all these signs an observer would have
+felt that this young girl, with the keen, alert ear that waked at
+every sound, with a nostril open to catch the fragrance of the
+celestial flower of the Ideal, was destined to be the battle-ground of
+a struggle between the poesies of the dawn and the labors of the day;
+between fancy and reality, the spirit and the life. Modeste was a pure
+young girl, inquisitive after knowledge, understanding her destiny,
+and filled with chastity,--the Virgin of Spain rather than the Madonna
+of Raphael.
+
+She raised her head when she heard Dumay say to Exupere, "Come here,
+young man." Seeing them together in the corner of the salon she
+supposed they were talking of some commission in Paris. Then she
+looked at the friends who surrounded her, as if surprised by their
+silence, and exclaimed in her natural manner, "Why are you not
+playing?"--with a glance at the green table which the imposing Madame
+Latournelle called the "altar."
+
+"Yes, let us play," said Dumay, having sent off Exupere.
+
+"Sit there, Butscha," said Madame Latournelle, separating the head-
+clerk from the group around Madame Mignon and her daughter by the
+whole width of the table.
+
+"And you, come over here," said Dumay to his wife, making her sit
+close by him.
+
+Madame Dumay, a little American about thirty-six years of age, wiped
+her eyes furtively; she adored Modeste, and feared a catastrophe.
+
+"You are not very lively this evening," remarked Modeste.
+
+"We are playing," said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.
+
+No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made
+still more so by explaining Dumay's position towards Modeste. If the
+brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must
+pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these
+preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating
+the main circumstances which govern all dramas.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PRELIMINARIES
+
+Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
+the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
+tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that
+the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
+pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth
+Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this
+catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to
+Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies
+were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the
+department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search
+of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own
+Provence. Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which
+gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal
+Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to
+save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of
+the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La
+Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other
+people's heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist
+disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the
+list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and
+bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was
+soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and
+all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a refuge for
+the family in the Upper Alps.
+
+Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley
+of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
+louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
+when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his
+fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches
+perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of
+Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity
+--taking it, like many another youth, for a vocation--on the red cloth
+of war. On his way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton.
+The pair became intimate, partly from the contrasts in their
+characters; they drank from the same cup at the wayside torrents,
+broke the same biscuit, and were both made sergeants at the peace
+which followed the battle of Marengo.
+
+When the war recommenced, Charles Mignon was promoted into the cavalry
+and lost sight of his comrade. In 1812 the last of the Mignon de La
+Bastie was an officer of the Legion of honor and major of a regiment
+of cavalry. Taken prisoner by the Russians he was sent, like so many
+others, to Siberia. He made the journey in company with another
+prisoner, a poor lieutenant, in whom he recognized his old friend Jean
+Dumay, brave, neglected, undecorated, unhappy, like a million of other
+woollen epaulets, rank and file--that canvas of men on which Napoleon
+painted the picture of the Empire. While in Siberia, the lieutenant-
+colonel, to kill time, taught writing and arithmetic to the Breton,
+whose early education had seemed a useless waste of time to Pere
+Scevola. Charles found in the old comrade of his marching days one of
+those rare hearts into which a man can pour his griefs while telling
+his joys.
+
+The young Provencal had met the fate which attends all handsome
+bachelors. In 1804, at Frankfort on the Main, he was adored by Bettina
+Wallenrod, only daughter of a banker, and he married her with all the
+more enthusiasm because she was rich and a noted beauty, while he was
+only a lieutenant with no prospects but the extremely problematical
+future of a soldier of fortune of that day. Old Wallenrod, a decayed
+German baron (there is always a baron in a German bank) delighted to
+know that the handsome lieutenant was the sole representative of the
+Mignon de La Bastie, approved the love of the blonde Bettina, whose
+beauty an artist (at that time there really was one in Frankfort) had
+lately painted as an ideal head of Germany. Wallenrod invested enough
+money in the French funds to give his daughter thirty thousand francs
+a year, and settled it on his anticipated grandsons, naming them
+counts of La Bastie-Wallenrod. This "dot" made only a small hole in
+his cash-box, the value of money being then very low. But the Empire,
+pursuing a policy often attempted by other debtors, rarely paid its
+dividends; and Charles was rather alarmed at this investment, having
+less faith than his father-in-law in the imperial eagle. The
+phenomenon of belief, or of admiration which is ephemeral belief, is
+not so easily maintained when in close quarters with the idol. The
+mechanic distrusts the machine which the traveller admires; and the
+officers of the army might be called the stokers of the Napoleonic
+engine,--if, indeed, they were not its fuel.
+
+However, the Baron Wallenrod-Tustall-Bartenstild promised to come if
+necessary to the help of the household. Charles loved Bettina
+Wallenrod as much as she loved him, and that is saying a good deal;
+but when a Provencal is moved to enthusiasm all his feelings and
+attachments are genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore
+that blonde beauty, escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer,
+gifted with an angelic nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The
+pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the
+time when he poured his griefs into the Breton's heart. Dumay loved
+these little ones without having seen them, solely through the
+sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the
+father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in
+1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808. The unfortunate lieutenant-
+colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings, was sent,
+at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot, accompanied
+by the lieutenant. No difference of epaulets could count between the
+two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was disembarking
+at Cannes.
+
+Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who
+had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even
+by his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of
+the Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying
+on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite
+as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had
+purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men
+during his magnificent campaign in France. "I tie in goddon," said the
+father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet
+a grief which distressed him. "I owe no mann anything--" and he died,
+still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.
+
+Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck,
+Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him
+lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of
+the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general
+after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of
+Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and
+left Tours before the disbandment of the army.
+
+In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife's property out of the
+funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending
+to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where
+persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of
+Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had
+saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the
+hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the
+anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little
+girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confidence that
+the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the
+honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as
+well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil
+capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to
+which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.
+
+While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making
+choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various
+ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the
+brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he
+listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the
+means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself
+the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He
+bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New
+York freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He
+sent Dumay on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned,
+after making a double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase
+of cottons at a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his
+family in the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the
+principles of banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of
+a native of Provence.
+
+This double operation of Dumay's was worth a fortune to the house of
+Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his
+agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
+poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
+a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
+Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand
+francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
+became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's
+books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
+sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune
+had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
+the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's
+liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
+money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never
+in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as
+this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the
+knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune
+to the richest commercial house in Havre.
+
+Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
+lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
+disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
+attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,
+or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
+Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of
+economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
+francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay
+laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
+When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added
+something to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier's
+services, until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight
+thousand francs. In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie,
+a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of
+residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins
+Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.
+
+The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by
+the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had
+taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a
+grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound
+fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying
+in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The
+exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The
+failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father,
+leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the
+fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles's return came
+near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of
+the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a
+renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of
+continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest
+in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the
+splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration
+enjoyed by her husband, his absolute affection, giving her an
+unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him,--all
+these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her
+doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the
+bright evening of her stormy life, a hidden catastrophe, buried in the
+heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention,
+came as the precursor of renewed trials.
+
+In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles
+Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris,
+and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal
+palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped
+down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the
+grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon
+his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All
+he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his
+creditors.
+
+"Havre shall never see me doing nothing," said the colonel to the
+lieutenant. "Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per
+cent."
+
+"Three, my colonel."
+
+"At nothing, then," cried Mignon, peremptorily; "you shall have your
+share in the profits of what I now undertake. The 'Modeste,' which is
+no longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my
+wife and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good
+news."
+
+Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. "I
+think," he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, "that my
+colonel has a plan laid out."
+
+The following day at dawn he accompanied his master on board the
+"Modeste" bound for Constantinople. There, on the poop of the vessel,
+the Breton said to the Provencal,--
+
+"What are your last commands, my colonel?"
+
+"That no man shall enter the Chalet," cried the father with strong
+emotion. "Dumay, guard my last child as though you were a bull-dog.
+Death to the man who seduces another daughter! Fear nothing, not even
+the scaffold--I will be with you."
+
+"My colonel, go in peace. I understand you. You shall find
+Mademoiselle Mignon on your return such as you now give her to me, or
+I shall be dead. You know me, and you know your Pyrenees hounds. No
+man shall reach your daughter. Forgive me for troubling you with
+words."
+
+The two soldiers clasped arms like men who had learned to understand
+each other in the solitudes of Siberia.
+
+On the same day the Havre "Courier" published the following terrible,
+simple, energetic, and honorable notice:--
+
+  "The house of Charles Mignon suspends payment. But the
+  undersigned, assignees of the estate, undertake to pay all
+  liabilities. On and after this date, holders of notes may obtain
+  the usual discount. The sale of the landed estates will fully
+  cover all current indebtedness.
+
+  "This notice is issued for the honor of the house, and to prevent
+  any disturbance in the money-market of this town.
+
+  "Monsieur Charles Mignon sailed this morning on the 'Modeste' for
+  Asia Minor, leaving full powers with the undersigned to sell his
+  whole property, both landed and personal.
+
+    DUMAY, assignee of the Bank accounts,
+    LATOURNELLE, notary, assignee of the city and villa property,
+    GOBENHEIM, assignee of the commercial property."
+
+Latournelle owed his prosperity to the kindness of Monsieur Mignon,
+who lent him one hundred thousand francs in 1817 to buy the finest law
+practice in Havre. The poor man, who had no pecuniary means, was
+nearly forty years of age and saw no prospect of being other than
+head-clerk for the rest of his days. He was the only man in Havre
+whose devotion could be compared with Dumay's. As for Gobenheim, he
+profited by the liquidation to get a part of Monsieur Mignon's
+business, which lifted his own little bank into prominence.
+
+While unanimous regrets for the disaster were expressed in counting-
+rooms, on the wharves, and in private houses, where praises of a man
+so irreproachable, honorable, and beneficent filled every mouth,
+Latournelle and Dumay, silent and active as ants, sold land, turned
+property into money, paid the debts, and settled up everything.
+Vilquin showed a good deal of generosity in purchasing the villa, the
+town-house, and a farm; and Latournelle made the most of his
+liberality by getting a good price out of him. Society wished to show
+civilities to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon; but they had already
+obeyed the father's last wishes and taken refuge in the Chalet, where
+they went on the very morning of his departure, the exact hour of
+which had been concealed from them. Not to be shaken in his resolution
+by his grief at parting, the brave man said farewell to his wife and
+daughter while they slept. Three hundred visiting cards were left at
+the house. A fortnight later, just as Charles had predicted, complete
+forgetfulness settled down upon the Chalet, and proved to these women
+the wisdom and dignity of his command.
+
+Dumay sent agents to represent his master in New York, Paris, and
+London, and followed up the assignments of the three banking-houses
+whose failure had caused the ruin of the Havre house, thus realizing
+five hundred thousand francs between 1826 and 1828, an eighth of
+Charles's whole fortune; then, according to the latter's directions
+given on the night of his departure, he sent that sum to New York
+through the house of Mongenod to the credit of Monsieur Charles
+Mignon. All this was done with military obedience, except in a matter
+of withholding thirty thousand francs for the personal expenses of
+Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon as the colonel had ordered him to do,
+but which Dumay did not do. The Breton sold his own little house for
+twenty thousand francs, which sum he gave to Madame Mignon, believing
+that the more capital he sent to his colonel the sooner the latter
+would return.
+
+"He might perish for the want of thirty thousand francs," Dumay
+remarked to Latournelle, who bought the little house at its full
+value, where an apartment was always kept ready for the inhabitants of
+the Chalet.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A SIMPLE STORY
+
+Such was the result to the celebrated house of Mignon at Havre of the
+crisis of 1825-26, which convulsed many of the principal business
+centres in Europe and caused the ruin of several Parisian bankers,
+among them (as those who remember that crisis will recall) the
+president of the chamber of commerce.
+
+We can now understand how this great disaster, coming suddenly at the
+close of ten years of domestic happiness, might well have been the
+death of Bettina Mignon, again separated from her husband and ignorant
+of his fate,--to her as adventurous and perilous as the exile to
+Siberia. But the grief which was dragging her to the grave was far
+other than these visible sorrows. The caustic that was slowly eating
+into her heart lay beneath a stone in the little graveyard of
+Ingouville, on which was inscribed:--
+
+BETTINA CAROLINE MIGNON
+
+Died aged twenty-two.
+
+   Pray for her.
+
+This inscription is to the young girl whom it covered what many
+another epitaph has been for the dead lying beneath them,--a table of
+contents to a hidden book. Here is the book, in its dreadful brevity;
+and it will explain the oath exacted and taken when the colonel and
+the lieutenant bade each other farewell.
+
+A young man of charming appearance, named Charles d'Estourny, came to
+Havre for the commonplace purpose of being near the sea, and there he
+saw Bettina Mignon. A "soi-disant" fashionable Parisian is never
+without introductions, and he was invited at the instance of a friend
+of the Mignons to a fete given at Ingouville. He fell in love with
+Bettina and with her fortune, and in three months he had done the work
+of seduction and enticed her away. The father of a family of daughters
+should no more allow a young man whom he does not know to enter his
+home than he should leave books and papers lying about which he has
+not read. A young girl's innocence is like milk, which a small matter
+turns sour,--a clap of thunder, an evil odor, a hot day, a mere
+breath.
+
+When Charles Mignon read his daughter's letter of farewell he
+instantly despatched Madame Dumay to Paris. The family gave out that a
+journey to another climate had suddenly been advised for Caroline by
+their physician; and the physician himself sustained the excuse,
+though unable to prevent some gossip in the society of Havre. "Such a
+vigorous young girl! with the complexion of a Spaniard, and that black
+hair!--she consumptive!" "Yes, they say she committed some
+imprudence." "Ah, ah!" cried a Vilquin. "I am told she came back
+bathed in perspiration after riding on horseback, and drank iced
+water; at least, that is what Dr. Troussenard says."
+
+By the time Madame Dumay returned to Havre the catastrophe of the
+failure had taken place, and society paid no further attention to the
+absence of Bettina or the return of the cashier's wife. At the
+beginning of 1827 the newspapers rang with the trial of Charles
+d'Estourny, who was found guilty of cheating at cards. The young
+corsair escaped into foreign parts without taking thought of
+Mademoiselle Mignon, who was of little value to him since the failure
+of the bank. Bettina heard of his infamous desertion and of her
+father's ruin almost at the same time. She returned home struck by
+death, and wasted away in a short time at the Chalet. Her death at
+least protected her reputation. The illness that Monsieur Mignon
+alleged to be the cause of her absence, and the doctor's order which
+sent her to Nice were now generally believed. Up to the last moment
+the mother hoped to save her daughter's life. Bettina was her darling
+and Modeste was the father's. There was something touching in the two
+preferences. Bettina was the image of Charles, just as Modeste was the
+reproduction of her mother. Both parents continued their love for each
+other in their children. Bettina, a daughter of Provence, inherited
+from her father the beautiful hair, black as a raven's wing, which
+distinguishes the women of the South, the brown eye, almond-shaped and
+brilliant as a star, the olive tint, the velvet skin as of some golden
+fruit, the arched instep, and the Spanish waist from which the short
+basque skirt fell crisply. Both mother and father were proud of the
+charming contrast between the sisters. "A devil and an angel!" they
+said to each other, laughing, little thinking it prophetic.
+
+After weeping for a month in the solitude of her chamber, where she
+admitted no one, the mother came forth at last with injured eyes.
+Before losing her sight altogether she persisted, against the wishes
+of her friends, in visiting her daughter's grave, on which she riveted
+her gaze in contemplation. That image remained vivid in the darkness
+which now fell upon her, just as the red spectrum of an object shines
+in our eyes when we close them in full daylight. This terrible and
+double misfortune made Dumay, not less devoted, but more anxious about
+Modeste, now the only daughter of the father who was unaware of his
+loss. Madame Dumay, idolizing Modeste, like other women deprived of
+their children, cast her motherliness about the girl,--yet without
+disregarding the commands of her husband, who distrusted female
+intimacies. Those commands were brief. "If any man, of any age, or any
+rank," Dumay said, "speaks to Modeste, ogles her, makes love to her,
+he is a dead man. I'll blow his brains out and give myself to the
+authorities; my death may save her. If you don't wish to see my head
+cut off, do you take my place in watching her when I am obliged to go
+out."
+
+For the last three years Dumay had examined his pistols every night.
+He seemed to have put half the burden of his oath upon the Pyrenean
+hounds, two animals of uncommon sagacity. One slept inside the Chalet,
+the other was stationed in a kennel which he never left, and where he
+never barked; but terrible would have been the moment had the pair
+made their teeth meet in some unknown adventurer.
+
+We can now imagine the sort of life led by mother and daughter at the
+Chalet. Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, often accompanied by
+Gobenheim, came to call and play whist with Dumay nearly every
+evening. The conversation turned on the gossip of Havre and the petty
+events of provincial life. The little company separated between nine
+and ten o'clock. Modeste put her mother to bed, and together they said
+their prayers, kept up each other's courage, and talked of the dear
+absent one, the husband and father. After kissing her mother for good-
+night, the girl went to her own room about ten o'clock. The next
+morning she prepared her mother for the day with the same care, the
+same prayers, the same prattle. To her praise be it said that from the
+day when the terrible infirmity deprived her mother of a sense,
+Modeste had been like a servant to her, displaying at all times the
+same solicitude; never wearying of the duty, never thinking it
+monotonous. Such constant devotion, combined with a tenderness rare
+among young girls, was thoroughly appreciated by those who witnessed
+it. To the Latournelle family, and to Monsieur and Madame Dumay,
+Modeste was, in soul, the pearl of price.
+
+On sunny days, between breakfast and dinner, Madame Mignon and Madame
+Dumay took a little walk toward the sea. Modeste accompanied them, for
+two arms were needed to support the blind mother. About a month before
+the scene to which this explanation is a parenthesis, Madame Mignon
+had taken counsel with her friends, Madame Latournelle, the notary,
+and Dumay, while Madame Dumay carried Modeste in another direction for
+a longer walk.
+
+"Listen to what I have to say," said the blind woman. "My daughter is
+in love. I feel it; I see it. A singular change has taken place within
+her, and I do not see how it is that none of you have perceived it."
+
+"In the name of all that's honorable--" cried the lieutenant.
+
+"Don't interrupt me, Dumay. For the last two months Modeste has taken
+as much care of her personal appearance as if she expected to meet a
+lover. She has grown extremely fastidious about her shoes; she wants
+to set off her pretty feet; she scolds Madame Gobet, the shoemaker. It
+is the same thing with her milliner. Some days my poor darling is
+absorbed in thought, evidently expectant, as if waiting for some one.
+Her voice has curt tones when she answers a question, as though she
+were interrupted in the current of her thoughts and secret
+expectations. Then, if this awaited lover has come--"
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Sit down, Dumay," said the blind woman. "Well, then Modeste is gay.
+Oh! she is not gay to your sight; you cannot catch these gradations;
+they are too delicate for eyes that see only the outside of nature.
+Her gaiety is betrayed to me by the tones of her voice, by certain
+accents which I alone can catch and understand. Modeste then, instead
+of sitting still and thoughtful, gives vent to a wild, inward activity
+by impulsive movements,--in short, she is happy. There is a grace, a
+charm in the very ideas she utters. Ah, my friends, I know happiness
+as well as I know sorrow; I know its signs. By the kiss my Modeste
+gives me I can guess what is passing within her. I know whether she
+has received what she was looking for, or whether she is uneasy or
+expectant. There are many gradations in a kiss, even in that of an
+innocent young girl, and Modeste is innocence itself; but hers is the
+innocence of knowledge, not of ignorance. I may be blind, but my
+tenderness is all-seeing, and I charge you to watch over my daughter."
+
+Dumay, now actually ferocious, the notary, in the character of a man
+bound to ferret out a mystery, Madame Latournelle, the deceived
+chaperone, and Madame Dumay, alarmed for her husband's safety, became
+at once a set of spies, and Modeste from this day forth was never left
+alone for an instant. Dumay passed nights under her window wrapped in
+his cloak like a jealous Spaniard; but with all his military sagacity
+he was unable to detect the least suspicious sign. Unless she loved
+the nightingales in the villa park, or some fairy prince, Modeste
+could have seen no one, and had neither given nor received a signal.
+Madame Dumay, who never went to bed till she knew Modeste was asleep,
+watched the road from the upper windows of the Chalet with a vigilance
+equal to her husband's. Under these eight Argus eyes the blameless
+child, whose every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the
+ordeal so fully acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four
+friends declared to each other privately that Madame Mignon was
+foolishly over-anxious. Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to
+church and brought her back again, was commissioned to tell the mother
+that she was mistaken about her daughter.
+
+"Modeste," she said, "is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
+herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
+another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
+that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was
+Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
+"she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
+I'm sure I don't know where such people" (Victor Hugo, Lamartine,
+Byron being SUCH PEOPLE to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie)
+"get their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as
+I did not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to
+try to read the thing. Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but
+it actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn't possibly finish
+it. Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint,
+and waves of war! However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we
+must expect absurdities,--though his are really inexcusable. He takes
+you to Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the
+torrents talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins!
+Did you ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the
+lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling
+along from page to page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put
+in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English.
+But I certainly sha'n't learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't
+learn it to teach Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil
+to all these English romances. I'm too good a Norman to fall in love
+with foreign things,--above all when they come from England."
+
+Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling
+at the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold. The stern
+scion of a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of
+her doctrine.
+
+"And, therefore, my dear Madame Mignon," she went on, "you have taken
+Modeste's fancies, which are nothing but the results of her reading,
+for a love-affair. Remember, she is just twenty. Girls fall in love
+with themselves at that age; they dress to see themselves well-
+dressed. I remember I used to make my little sister, now dead, put on
+a man's hat and pretend we were monsieur and madame. You see, you had
+a very happy youth in Frankfort; but let us be just,--Modeste is
+living here without the slightest amusement. Although, to be sure, her
+every wish is attended to, still she knows she is shut up and watched,
+and the life she leads would give her no pleasure at all if it were
+not for the amusement she gets out of her books. Come, don't worry
+yourself; she loves nobody but you. You ought to be very glad that she
+goes into these enthusiasms for the corsairs of Byron and the heroes
+of Walter Scott and your own Germans, Egmont, Goethe, Werther,
+Schiller, and all the other 'ers.'"
+
+"Well, madame, what do you say to that?" asked Dumay, respectfully,
+alarmed at Madame Mignon's silence.
+
+"Modeste is not only inclined to love, but she loves some man,"
+answered the mother, obstinately.
+
+"Madame, my life is at stake, and you must allow me--not for my sake,
+but for my wife, my colonel, for all of us--to probe this matter to
+the bottom, and find out whether it is the mother or the watch-dog who
+is deceived."
+
+"It is you who are deceived, Dumay. Ah! if I could but see my
+daughter!" cried the poor woman.
+
+"But whom is it possible for her to love?" asked the notary. "I'll
+answer for my Exupere."
+
+"It can't be Gobenheim," said Dumay, "for since the colonel's
+departure he has not spent nine hours a week in this house. Besides,
+he doesn't even notice Modeste--that five-franc piece of a man! His
+uncle Gobenheim-Keller is all the time writing him, 'Get rich enough
+to marry a Keller.' With that idea in his mind you may be sure he
+doesn't know which sex Modeste belongs to. No other men ever come
+here,--for of course I don't count Butscha, poor little fellow; I love
+him! He is your Dumay, madame," said the cashier to Madame
+Latournelle. "Butscha knows very well that a mere glance at Modeste
+would cost him a Breton ducking. Not a soul has any communication with
+this house. Madame Latournelle who takes Modeste to church ever since
+your--your misfortune, madame, has carefully watched her on the way
+and all through the service, and has seen nothing suspicious. In
+short, if I must confess the truth, I have myself raked all the paths
+about the house every evening for the last month, and found no trace
+of footsteps in the morning."
+
+"Rakes are neither costly nor difficult to handle," remarked the
+daughter of Germany.
+
+"But the dogs?" cried Dumay.
+
+"Lovers have philters even for dogs," answered Madame Mignon.
+
+"If you are right, my honor is lost! I may as well blow my brains
+out," exclaimed Dumay.
+
+"Why so, Dumay?" said the blind woman.
+
+"Ah, madame, I could never meet my colonel's eye if he did not find
+his daughter--now his only daughter--as pure and virtuous as she was
+when he said to me on the vessel, 'Let no fear of the scaffold hinder
+you, Dumay, if the honor of my Modeste is at stake.'"
+
+"Ah! I recognize you both," said Madame Mignon in a voice of strong
+emotion.
+
+"I'll wager my salvation that Modeste is as pure as she was in her
+cradle," exclaimed Madame Dumay.
+
+"Well, I shall make certain of it," replied her husband, "if Madame la
+Comtesse will allow me to employ certain means; for old troopers
+understand strategy."
+
+"I will allow you to do anything that shall enlighten us, provided it
+does no injury to my last child."
+
+"What are you going to do, Jean?" asked Madame Dumay; "how can you
+discover a young girl's secret if she means to hide it?"
+
+"Obey me, all!" cried the lieutenant, "I shall need every one of you."
+
+If this rapid sketch were clearly developed it would give a whole
+picture of manners and customs in which many a family could recognize
+the events of their own history; but it must suffice as it is to
+explain the importance of the few details heretofore given about
+persons and things on the memorable evening when the old soldier had
+made ready his plot against the young girl, intending to wrench from
+the recesses of her heart the secret of a love and a lover seen only
+by a blind mother.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED
+
+An hour went by in solemn stillness broken only by the cabalistic
+phrases of the whist-players: "Spades!" "Trumped!" "Cut!" "How are
+honors?" "Two to four." "Whose deal?"--phrases which represent in
+these days the higher emotions of the European aristocracy. Modeste
+continued to work, without seeming to be surprised at her mother's
+silence. Madame Mignon's handkerchief slipped from her lap to the
+floor; Butscha precipitated himself upon it, picked it up, and as he
+returned it whispered in Modeste's ear, "Take care!" Modeste raised a
+pair of wondering eyes, whose puzzled glance filled the poor cripple
+with joy unspeakable. "She is not in love!" he whispered to himself,
+rubbing his hands till the skin was nearly peeled off. At this moment
+Exupere tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon
+like an avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, "The young
+man is here!" Dumay sprang for his pistols and rushed out.
+
+"Good God! suppose he kills him!" cried Madame Dumay, bursting into
+tears.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Modeste, looking innocently at her friends
+and not betraying the slightest fear.
+
+"It is all about a young man who is hanging round the house," cried
+Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Well!" said Modeste, "why should Dumay kill him?"
+
+"Sancta simplicita!" ejaculated Butscha, looking at his master as
+proudly as Alexander is made to contemplate Babylon in Lebrun's great
+picture.
+
+"Where are you going, Modeste?" asked the mother as her daughter rose
+to leave the room.
+
+"To get ready for your bedtime, mamma," answered Modeste, in a voice
+as pure as the tones of an instrument.
+
+"You haven't paid your expenses," said the dwarf to Dumay when he
+returned.
+
+"Modeste is as pure as the Virgin on our altar," cried Madame
+Latournelle.
+
+"Good God! such excitements wear me out," said Dumay; "and yet I'm a
+strong man."
+
+"May I lose that twenty-five sous if I have the slightest idea what
+you are about," remarked Gobenheim. "You seem to me to be crazy."
+
+"And yet it is all about a treasure," said Butscha, standing on tiptoe
+to whisper in Gobenheim's ear.
+
+"Dumay, I am sorry to say that I am still almost certain of what I
+told you," persisted Madame Mignon.
+
+"The burden of proof is now on you, madame," said Dumay, calmly; "it
+is for you to prove that we are mistaken."
+
+Discovering that the matter in question was only Modeste's honor,
+Gobenheim took his hat, made his bow, and walked off, carrying his ten
+sous with him,--there being evidently no hope of another rubber.
+
+"Exupere, and you too, Butscha, may leave us," said Madame
+Latournelle. "Go back to Havre; you will get there in time for the
+last piece at the theatre. I'll pay for your tickets."
+
+When the four friends were alone with Madame Mignon, Madame
+Latournelle, after looking at Dumay, who being a Breton understood the
+mother's obstinacy, and at her husband who was fingering the cards,
+felt herself authorized to speak up.
+
+"Madame Mignon, come now, tell us what decisive thing has struck your
+mind."
+
+"Ah, my good friend, if you were a musician you would have heard, as I
+have, the language of love that Modeste speaks."
+
+The piano of the demoiselles Mignon was among the few articles of
+furniture which had been moved from the town-house to the Chalet.
+Modeste often conjured away her troubles by practising, without a
+master. Born a musician, she played to enliven her mother. She sang by
+nature, and loved the German airs which her mother taught her. From
+these lessons and these attempts at self-instruction came a phenomenon
+not uncommon to natures with a musical vocation; Modeste composed, as
+far as a person ignorant of the laws of harmony can be said to
+compose, tender little lyric melodies. Melody is to music what imagery
+and sentiment are to poetry, a flower that blossoms spontaneously.
+Consequently, nations have had melodies before harmony,--botany comes
+later than the flower. In like manner, Modeste, who knew nothing of
+the painter's art except what she had seen her sister do in the way of
+water-color, would have stood subdued and fascinated before the
+pictures of Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Durer,
+Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands.
+Lately, for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of
+nightingales, musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused
+the attention of her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness
+for composition and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.
+
+"If your suspicions have no other foundation," said Latournelle to
+Madame Mignon, "I pity your susceptibilities."
+
+"When a Breton girl sings," said Dumay gloomily, "the lover is not far
+off."
+
+"I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising," said the
+mother, "and you shall judge for yourselves--"
+
+"Poor girl!" said Madame Dumay, "If she only knew our anxiety she
+would be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially
+if she thought it would save Dumay."
+
+"My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow," said Madame
+Mignon; "perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have
+discovered by trickery."
+
+Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is
+everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies,
+these honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being
+able to ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-
+affair, or the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the
+result of a struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the
+despotism of a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the
+never-ending repetition of the first scene played by man when the
+curtain of the Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.
+
+And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right
+of it?
+
+None of the persons who were about Modeste could understand that
+maiden heart--for the soul and the face we have described were in
+harmony. The girl had transported her existence into another world, as
+much denied and disbelieved in in these days of ours as the new world
+of Christopher Columbus in the sixteenth century. Happily, she kept
+her own counsel, or they would have thought her crazy. But first we
+must explain the influence of the past upon her nature.
+
+Two events had formed the soul and developed the mind of this young
+girl. Monsieur and Madame Mignon, warned by the fate that overtook
+Bettina, had resolved, just before the failure, to marry Modeste. They
+chose the son of a rich banker, formerly of Hamburg, but established
+in Havre since 1815,--a man, moreover, who was under obligations to
+them. The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of
+Havre, blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle
+classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion,
+abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure
+that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen
+him since. Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob
+Althor, the father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I
+really don't know what you mean."
+
+This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was
+a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle
+and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardly desertion. The
+daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their
+wishes gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and
+grooms, and otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in
+possession of an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to
+kiss her hand, and take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted
+his flowers and all the little proofs of tenderness with which it is
+proper to surround the lady of our choice; she even worked him a
+purse, believing in such ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but
+cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the Vilquins, and the Althors.
+
+Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame
+Mignon and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine
+with the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot
+of the lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the
+eldest Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful,
+and of high birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of
+her engagement she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million.
+Her poverty, well known to all, became a sentinel defending the
+approaches to the Chalet fully as well as the prudence of the
+Latournelles or the vigilance of Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a
+time on Mademoiselle Mignon's position only to insult her.
+
+"Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course."
+
+"What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the
+chance to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take
+her!"
+
+"After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--"
+
+And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste's
+imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and
+the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing
+that Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of
+them as they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed
+surprise that the mother and daughter were willing to live on among
+the scenes of their former splendor. From her open window behind the
+closed blinds Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--
+
+"I am sure I can't think how they can live there," some one would say
+as he paced the villa lawn,--perhaps to assist Vilquin in getting rid
+of his tenant.
+
+"What do you suppose they live on? they haven't any means of earning
+money."
+
+"I am told the old woman has gone blind."
+
+"Is Mademoiselle Mignon still pretty? Dear me, how dashing she used to
+be! Well, she hasn't any horses now."
+
+Most young girls on hearing these spiteful and silly speeches, born of
+an envy that now rushed, peevish and drivelling, to avenge the past,
+would have felt the blood mount to their foreheads; others would have
+wept; some would have undergone spasms of anger; but Modeste smiled,
+as we smile at the theatre while watching the actors. Her pride could
+not descend so low as the level of such speeches.
+
+The other event was more serious than these mercenary meannesses.
+Bettina Caroline died in the arms of her younger sister, who had
+nursed her with the devotion of girlhood, and the curiosity of an
+untainted imagination. In the silence of long nights the sisters
+exchanged many a confidence. With what dramatic interest was poor
+Bettina invested in the eyes of the innocent Modeste? Bettina knew
+love through sorrow only, and she was dying of it. Among young girls
+every man, scoundrel though he be, is still a lover. Passion is the
+one thing absolutely real in the things of life, and it insists on its
+supremacy. Charles d'Estourny, gambler, criminal, and debauchee,
+remained in the memory of the sisters, the elegant Parisian of the
+fetes of Havre, the admired of the womenkind. Bettina believed she had
+carried him off from the coquettish Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he
+was her sister's happy lover. Such adoration in young girls is
+stronger than all social condemnations. To Bettina's thinking, justice
+had been deceived; if not, how could it have sentenced a man who had
+loved her for six months?--loved her to distraction in the hidden
+retreat to which he had taken her,--that he might, we may add, be at
+liberty to go his own way. Thus the dying girl inoculated her sister
+with love. Together they talked of the great drama which imagination
+enhances; and Bettina carried with her to the grave her sister's
+ignorance, leaving her, if not informed, at least thirsting for
+information.
+
+Nevertheless, remorse had set its fangs too sharply in Bettina's heart
+not to force her to warn her sister. In the midst of her own
+confessions she had preached duty and implicit obedience to Modeste.
+On the evening of her death she implored her to remember the tears
+that soaked her pillow, and not to imitate a conduct which even
+suffering could not expiate. Bettina accused herself of bringing a
+curse upon the family, and died in despair at being unable to obtain
+her father's pardon. Notwithstanding the consolations which the
+ministers of religion, touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she
+cried in heartrending tones with her latest breath: "Oh father!
+father!" "Never give your heart without your hand," she said to
+Modeste an hour before she died; "and above all, accept no attentions
+from any man without telling everything to papa and mamma."
+
+These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the
+hour of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had
+exacted a solemn oath. The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from
+beneath her pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid,
+Francoise Cochet, to be engraved in Havre with these words, "Think of
+Bettina, 1827," and placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to
+keep it there until she married. Thus there had been between these two
+young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless
+visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north
+wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were
+always subordinate to their horror of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die
+under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the
+baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by
+grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone
+the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends
+can take the place of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the
+dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay
+cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the
+provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and
+the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in
+the equinoctial storms,--all this monastic tranquillity did in fact
+hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the
+spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young
+girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her
+plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of
+a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it
+were to watch for the passing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the
+expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under
+the fire of Dumay's pistols.
+
+During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung
+herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in
+it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German
+quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
+learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the
+matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
+knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three
+literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
+Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great
+works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
+from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,
+from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
+three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in
+its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
+sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming
+admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event; a
+masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her
+happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her
+heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the
+beautiful illusions of its youth. But of this radiant existence not a
+gleam reached the surface of daily life; it escaped the ken of Dumay
+and his wife and the Latournelles; the ears of the blind mother alone
+caught the crackling of its flame.
+
+The profound disdain which Modeste now conceived for ordinary men gave
+to her face a look of pride, an inexpressible untamed shyness, which
+tempered her Teutonic simplicity, and accorded well with a peculiarity
+of her head. The hair growing in a point above the forehead seemed the
+continuation of a slight line which thought had already furrowed
+between the eyebrows, and made the expression of untameability perhaps
+a shade too strong. The voice of this charming child, whom her father,
+delighting in her wit, was wont to call his "little proverb of
+Solomon," had acquired a precious flexibility of organ through the
+practice of three languages. This advantage was still further enhanced
+by a natural bell-like tone both sweet and fresh, which touched the
+heart as delightfully as it did the ear. If the mother could no longer
+see the signs of a noble destiny upon her daughter's brow, she could
+study the transitions of her soul's development in the accents of that
+voice attuned to love.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A MAIDEN'S FIRST ROMANCE
+
+To this period of Modeste's eager rage for reading succeeded the
+exercise of a strange faculty given to vigorous imaginations,--the
+power, namely, of making herself an actor in a dream-existence; of
+representing to her own mind the things desired, with so vivid a
+conception that they seemed actually to attain reality; in short, to
+enjoy by thought,--to live out her years within her mind; to marry; to
+grow old; to attend her own funeral like Charles V.; to play within
+herself the comedy of life and, if need be, that of death. Modeste was
+indeed playing, but all alone, the comedy of Love. She fancied herself
+adored to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of social
+life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the
+executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or,
+like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles
+were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men
+amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress,
+exhausting in her own behalf the luck of Gil Blas, or the triumphs of
+Pasta, Malibran, and Florine. Then, weary of the horrors and
+excitements, she returned to actual life. She married a notary, she
+ate the plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a
+Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the
+trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the
+romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an
+eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star
+which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father
+returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her
+various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own
+independence); she owned a magnificent estate and castle, servants,
+horses, carriages, the choicest of everything that luxury could
+bestow, and kept her suitors uncertain until she was forty years old,
+at which age she made her choice.
+
+This edition of the Arabian Nights in a single copy lasted nearly a
+year, and taught Modeste the sense of satiety through thought. She
+held her life too often in her hand, she said to herself
+philosophically and with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too
+often, "Well, what is it, after all?" not to have plunged to her waist
+in the deep disgust which all men of genius feel when they try to
+complete by intense toil the work to which they have devoted
+themselves. Her youth and her rich nature alone kept Modeste at this
+period of her life from seeking to enter a cloister. But this sense of
+satiety cast her, saturated as she still was with Catholic
+spirituality, into the love of Good, the infinite of heaven. She
+conceived of charity, service to others, as the true occupation of
+life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of finding in it no
+food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an insect at
+the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments
+for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the
+grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card
+or drew out his last trump.
+
+Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a singular track of
+thought. She imagined that if she became sinless (speaking
+ecclesiastically) she would attain to such a condition of sanctity
+that God would hear her and accomplish her desires. "Faith," she
+thought, "can move mountains; Christ has said so. The Saviour led his
+apostle upon the waters of the lake Tiberias; and I, all I ask of God
+is a husband to love me; that is easier than walking upon the sea."
+She fasted through the next Lent, and did not commit a single sin;
+then she said to herself that on a certain day coming out of church
+she should meet a handsome young man who was worthy of her, whom her
+mother would accept, and who would fall madly in love with her. When
+the day came on which she had, as it were, summoned God to send her an
+angel, she was persistently followed by a rather disgusting beggar;
+moreover, it rained heavily, and not a single young man was in the
+streets. On another occasion she went to walk on the jetty to see the
+English travellers land; but each Englishman had an Englishwoman,
+nearly as handsome as Modeste herself, who saw no one at all
+resembling a wandering Childe Harold. Tears overcame her, as she sat
+down like Marius on the ruins of her imagination. But on the day when
+she subpoenaed God for the third time she firmly believed that the
+Elect of her dreams was within the church, hiding, perhaps out of
+delicacy, behind one of the pillars, round all of which she dragged
+Madame Latournelle on a tour of inspection. After this failure, she
+deposed the Deity from omnipotence. Many were her conversations with
+the imaginary lover, for whom she invented questions and answers,
+bestowing upon him a great deal of wit and intelligence.
+
+The high ambitions of her heart hidden within these romances were the
+real explanation of the prudent conduct which the good people who
+watched over Modeste so much admired; they might have brought her any
+number of young Althors or Vilquins, and she would never have stooped
+to such clowns. She wanted, purely and simply, a man of genius,--
+talent she cared little for; just as a lawyer is of no account to a
+girl who aims for an ambassador. Her only desire for wealth was to
+cast it at the feet of her idol. Indeed, the golden background of
+these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart,
+filled with womanly delicacy; for its dominant desire was to make some
+Tasso, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher
+Columbus happy.
+
+Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who
+longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in
+their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing
+melodies which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau.
+Or she fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively
+his contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry
+of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
+Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the
+seventeenth century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked
+herself, "loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man
+of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?" She had,
+as the reader perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the
+English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly
+admired the behavior of the young Englishwoman who offered herself to
+Crebillon, the son, who married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza
+Draper was her life and her happiness for several months. She made
+herself ideally the heroine of a like romance, and many a time she
+rehearsed in imagination the sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so
+charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes
+with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of the wittiest of
+English writers.
+
+Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the
+works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the
+author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most
+suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials,
+initiated herself into a destitution where the thoughts of genius
+brooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied
+herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to
+their own faculty. This noble compassion, this intuition of the
+struggles of toilers, this worship of genius, are among the choicest
+perceptions that flutter through the souls of women. They are, in the
+first place, a secret between the woman and God, for they are hidden;
+in them there is nothing striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity,
+--that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.
+
+Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came
+to Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of
+these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and
+the hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what
+it was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy,
+these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth
+into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to
+find its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision
+of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than
+flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge
+she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her
+father's hearth and bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and
+sentiment had lately come to a climax and taken shape. Modeste wished
+to be the friend and companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way
+superior to the crowd of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to
+give him her heart, her life, her infinite tenderness freed from the
+trammels of passion, until she had carefully and deeply studied him.
+
+She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it. Profound
+tranquillity settled down upon her soul. Her cheeks took on a soft
+color; and she became the beautiful and noble image of Germany, such
+as we have lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of
+Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double
+existence. She performed with humble, loving care all the minute
+duties of the homely life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide
+the poetry of her ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor
+methodically on material things to leave their souls the freer to
+develop in prayer. All great minds have bound themselves to some form
+of mechanical toil to obtain greater mastery of thought. Spinosa
+ground glasses for spectacles; Bayle counted the tiles on the roof;
+Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus subdued, the soul could
+spread its wings in all security.
+
+Madame Mignon, reading her daughter's soul, was therefore right.
+Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little
+understood, the first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of
+all sentiments, a very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts
+from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired
+the blue plumage of the bird that sings afar in the paradise of young
+girls, which no hand can touch, no gun can cover, as it flits across
+the sight; she loved those magic colors, like sparkling jewels
+dazzling to the eye, which youth can see, and never sees again when
+Reality, the hideous hag, appears with witnesses accompanied by the
+mayor. To live the very poetry of love and not to see the lover--ah,
+what sweet intoxication! what visionary rapture! a chimera with
+flowing man and outspread wings!
+
+The following is the puerile and even silly event which decided the
+future life of this young girl.
+
+Modeste happened to see in a bookseller's window a lithographic
+portrait of one of her favorites, Canalis. We all know what lies such
+pictures tell,--being as they are the result of a shameless
+speculation, which seizes upon the personality of celebrated
+individuals as if their faces were public property.
+
+In this instance Canalis, sketched in a Byronic pose, was offering to
+public admiration his dark locks floating in the breeze, a bare
+throat, and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess.
+Victor Hugo's forehead will make more persons shave their heads than
+the number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory of Napoleon.
+This portrait of Canalis (poetic through mercantile necessity) caught
+Modeste's eye. The day on which it caught her eye one of Arthez's best
+books happened to be published. We are compelled to admit, though it
+may be to Modeste's injury, that she hesitated long between the
+illustrious poet and the illustrious prose-writer. Which of these
+celebrated men was free?--that was the question.
+
+Modeste began by securing the co-operation of Francoise Cochet, a maid
+taken from Havre and brought back again by poor Bettina, whom Madame
+Mignon and Madame Dumay now employed by the day, and who lived in
+Havre. Modeste took her to her own room and assured her that she would
+never cause her parents any grief, never pass the bounds of a young
+girl's propriety, and that as to Francoise herself she would be well
+provided for after the return of Monsieur Mignon, on condition that
+she would do a certain service and keep it an inviolable secret. What
+was it? Why, a nothing--perfectly innocent. All that Modeste wanted of
+her accomplice was to put certain letters into the post at Havre and
+to bring some back which would be directed to herself, Francoise
+Cochet. The treaty concluded, Modeste wrote a polite note to Dauriat,
+publisher of the poems of Canalis, asking, in the interest of that
+great poet, for some particulars about him, among others if he were
+married. She requested the publisher to address his answer to
+Mademoiselle Francoise, "poste restante," Havre.
+
+Dauriat, incapable of taking the epistle seriously, wrote a reply in
+presence of four or five journalists who happened to be in his office
+at the time, each of whom added his particular stroke of wit to the
+production.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Canalis (Baron of), Constant Cys Melchior, member
+  of the French Academy, born in 1800, at Canalis (Correze), five
+  feet four inches in height, of good standing, vaccinated, spotless
+  birth, has given a substitute to the conscription, enjoys perfect
+  health, owns a small patrimonial estate in the Correze, and wishes
+  to marry, but the lady must be rich.
+
+  He beareth per pale, gules an axe or, sable three escallops
+  argent, surmounted by a baron's coronet; supporters, two larches,
+  vert. Motto: "Or et fer" (no allusion to Ophir or auriferous).
+
+  The original Canalis, who went to the Holy Land with the First
+  Crusade, is cited in the chronicles of Auvergne as being armed
+  with an axe on account of the family indigence, which to this day
+  weighs heavily on the race. This noble baron, famous for
+  discomfiting a vast number of infidels, died, without "or" or
+  "fer," as naked as a worm, near Jerusalem, on the plains of
+  Ascalon, ambulances not being then invented.
+
+  The chateau of Canalis (the domain yields a few chestnuts)
+  consists of two dismantled towers, united by a piece of wall
+  covered by a fine ivy, and is taxed at twenty-two francs.
+
+  The undersigned (publisher) calls attention to the fact that he
+  pays ten thousand francs for every volume of poetry written by
+  Monsieur de Canalis, who does not give his shells, or his nuts
+  either, for nothing.
+
+  The chanticler of the Correze lives in the rue de Paradis-
+  Poissoniere, number 29, which is a highly suitable location for a
+  poet of the angelic school. Letters must be POST-PAID.
+
+  Noble dames of the faubourg Saint-Germain are said to take the
+  path to Paradise and protect its god. The king, Charles X., thinks
+  so highly of this great poet as to believe him capable of
+  governing the country; he has lately made him officer of the
+  Legion of honor, and (what pays him better) president of the court
+  of Claims at the foreign office. These functions do not hinder
+  this great genius from drawing an annuity out of the fund for the
+  encouragement of the arts and belles letters.
+
+  The last edition of the works of Canalis, printed on vellum, royal
+  8vo, from the press of Didot, with illustrations by Bixiou, Joseph
+  Bridau, Schinner, Sommervieux, etc., is in five volumes, price,
+  nine francs post-paid.
+
+This letter fell like a cobble-stone on a tulip. A poet, secretary of
+claims, getting a stipend in a public office, drawing an annuity,
+seeking a decoration, adored by the women of the faubourg Saint-
+Germain--was that the muddy minstrel lingering along the quays, sad,
+dreamy, worn with toil, and re-entering his garret fraught with
+poetry? However, Modeste perceived the irony of the envious
+bookseller, who dared to say, "I invented Canalis; I made Nathan!"
+Besides, she re-read her hero's poems,--verses extremely seductive,
+insincere, and hypocritical, which require a word of analysis, were it
+only to explain her infatuation.
+
+Canalis may be distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the angelic
+school, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous
+sweetness, and a delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with
+his strident cry is an eagle, Canalis, rose and white, is a flamingo.
+In him women find the friend they seek, their interpreter, a being who
+understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe
+confidant. The wide margins given by Didot to the last edition were
+crowded with Modeste's pencilled sentiments, expressing her sympathy
+with this tender and dreamy spirit. Canalis does not possess the gift
+of life; he cannot breathe existence into his creations; but he knows
+how to calm vague sufferings like those which assailed Modeste. He
+speaks to young girls in their own language; he can allay the anguish
+of a bleeding wound and lull the moans, even the sobs of woe. His gift
+lies not in stirring words, nor in the remedy of strong emotions, he
+contents himself with saying in harmonious tones which compel belief,
+"I suffer with you; I understand you; come with me; let us weep
+together beside the brook, beneath the willows." And they follow him!
+They listen to his empty and sonorous poetry like infants to a nurse's
+lullaby. Canalis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness
+which is genuine in the prose writer and artificial in the poet, by
+his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his
+infantile philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early
+youth that he leads us back to the prairie-land of our illusions. We
+can be pitiless to the eagles, requiring from them the quality of the
+diamond, incorruptible perfection; but as for Canalis, we take him for
+what he is and let the rest go. He seems a good fellow; the
+affectations of the angelic school have answered his purpose and
+succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when she plays the ingenue
+cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth, innocence betrayed, in short,
+the wounded angel.
+
+Modeste, recovering her first impression, renewed her confidence in
+that soul, in that countenance as ravishing as the face of Bernadin de
+Saint-Pierre. She paid no further attention to the publisher. And so,
+about the beginning of the month of August she wrote the following
+letter to this Dorat of the sacristy, who still ranks as a star of the
+modern Pleiades.
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Many a time, monsieur, I have wished to
+  write to you; and why? Surely you guess why,--to tell you how much
+  I admire your genius. Yes, I feel the need of expressing to you
+  the admiration of a poor country girl, lonely in her little
+  corner, whose only happiness is to read your thoughts. I have read
+  Rene, and I come to you. Sadness leads to reverie. How many other
+  women are sending you the homage of their secret thoughts? What
+  chance have I for notice among so many? This paper, filled with my
+  soul,--can it be more to you than the perfumed letters which
+  already beset you. I come to you with less grace than others, for
+  I wish to remain unknown and yet to receive your entire confidence
+  --as though you had long known me.
+
+  Answer my letter and be friendly with me. I cannot promise to make
+  myself known to you, though I do not positively say I will not
+  some day do so.
+
+  What shall I add? Read between the lines of this letter, monsieur,
+  the great effort which I am making: permit me to offer you my
+  hand,--that of a friend, ah! a true friend.
+
+Your servant,       O. d'Este M.
+
+
+  P.S.--If you do me the favor to answer this letter address your
+  reply, if you please, to Mademoiselle F. Cochet, "poste restante,"
+  Havre.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A POET OF THE ANGELIC SCHOOL
+
+All young girls, romantic or otherwise, can imagine the impatience in
+which Modeste lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues
+of fire. The trees were like a plumage. She was not conscious of a
+body; she hovered in space, the earth melted away under her feet. Full
+of admiration for the post-office, she followed her little sheet of
+paper on its way; she was happy, as we all are happy at twenty years
+of age, in the first exercise of our will. She was possessed, as in
+the middle ages. She made pictures in her mind of the poet's abode, of
+his study; she saw him unsealing her letter; and then followed myriads
+of suppositions.
+
+After sketching the poetry we cannot do less than give the profile of
+the poet. Canalis is a short, spare man, with an air of good-breeding,
+a dark-complexioned, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like
+that of a man who has more vanity than pride. He loves luxury, rank,
+and splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men.
+Proud of his birth, even more than of his talent, he destroys the
+value of his ancestors by making too much of them in the present day,
+--after all, the Canalis are not Navarreins, nor Cadignans, nor
+Grandlieus. Nature, however, helps him out in his pretensions. He has
+those eyes of Eastern effulgence which we demand in a poet, a delicate
+charm of manner, and a vibrant voice; yet a taint of natural
+charlatanism destroys the effect of nearly all these advantages; he is
+a born comedian. If he puts forward his well-shaped foot, it is
+because the attitude has become a habit; if he uses exclamatory terms
+they are part of himself; if he poses with high dramatic action he has
+made that deportment his second nature. Such defects as these are not
+incompatible with a general benevolence and a certain quality of
+errant and purely ideal chivalry, which distinguishes the paladin from
+the knight. Canalis has not devotion enough for a Don Quixote, but he
+has too much elevation of thought not to put himself on the nobler
+side of questions and things. His poetry, which takes the town by
+storm on all profitable occasions, really injures the man as a poet;
+for he is not without mind, but his talent prevents him from
+developing it; he is overweighted by his reputation, and is always
+aiming to make himself appear greater than he has the credit of being.
+Thus, as often happens, the man is entirely out of keeping with the
+products of his thought. The author of these naive, caressing, tender
+little lyrics, these calm idylls pure and cold as the surface of a
+lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious little
+creature in a tightly buttoned frock-coat, with the air of a diplomat
+seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of aristocracy, full
+of pretension, thirsting for money, already spoiled by success in two
+directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and of laurel. A
+government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand
+francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the Academy,
+three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes and the
+cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
+thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with
+another, by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for
+Modeste's hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he
+usually spent five or six thousand francs more every year; but the
+king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had
+hitherto supplied the deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's
+coronation which earned him a whole silver service,--having refused a
+sum of money on the ground that a Canalis owed his duty to his
+sovereign.
+
+But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
+budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his
+lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
+one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to
+hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue. De Marsay, who did not
+like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to
+the quick of his vanity. "Canalis," he said, "always reminds me of
+that brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a
+battle because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little
+tune." Canalis's ambition was to enter political life, and he made
+capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the
+embassy of the Duc de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according
+to Parisian gossip, in the capacity of "attache to the duchess." How
+many times a sarcasm or a single speech has decided the whole course
+of a man's life. Colla, the late president of the Cisalpine republic,
+and the best lawyer in Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was
+forty years of age that he knew nothing of botany. He was piqued,
+became a second Jussieu, cultivated flowers, and compiled and
+published "The Flora of Piedmont," in Latin, a labor of ten years.
+"I'll master De Marsay some of these days!" thought the crushed poet;
+"after all, Canning and Chateaubriand are both in politics."
+
+Canalis would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but
+he was afraid of the French press, whose criticisms are savage upon
+any writer who takes four alexandrines to express one idea. Of all the
+poets of our day only three, Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and De Vigny,
+have been able to win the double glory of poet and prose-writer, like
+Racine and Voltaire, Moliere, and Rabelais,--a rare distinction in the
+literature of France, which ought to give a man a right to the
+crowning title of poet.
+
+So then, the bard of the faubourg Saint-Germain was doing a wise thing
+in trying to house his little chariot under the protecting roof of the
+present government. When he became president of the court of Claims at
+the foreign office, he stood in need of a secretary,--a friend who
+could take his place in various ways; cook up his interests with
+publishers, see to his glory in the newspapers, help him if need be in
+politics,--in short, a cat's paw and satellite. In Paris many men of
+celebrity in art, science, and literature have one or more train-
+bearers, captains of the guard, chamberlains as it were, who live in
+the sunshine of their presence,--aides-de-camp entrusted with delicate
+missions, allowing themselves to be compromised if necessary; workers
+round the pedestal of the idol; not exactly his servants, nor yet his
+equals; bold in his defence, first in the breach, covering all
+retreats, busy with his business, and devoted to him just so long as
+their illusions last, or until the moment when they have got all they
+wanted. Some of these satellites perceive the ingratitude of their
+great man; others feel that they are simply made tools of; many weary
+of the life; very few remain contented with that sweet equality of
+feeling and sentiment which is the only reward that should be looked
+for in an intimacy with a superior man,--a reward that contented Ali
+when Mohammed raised him to himself.
+
+Many of these men, misled by vanity, think themselves quite as capable
+as their patron. Pure devotion, such as Modeste conceived it, without
+money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare.
+Nevertheless there are Mennevals to be found, more perhaps in Paris
+than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its
+peaceful toil; these are the wandering Benedictines of our social
+world, which offers them no other monastery. These brave, meek hearts
+live, by their actions and in their hidden lives, the poetry that
+poets utter. They are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in
+their lonely vigils and meditations,--as truly poets as others of the
+name on paper, who fatten in the fields of literature at so much a
+verse; like Lord Byron, like all who live, alas, by ink, the
+Hippocrene water of to-day, for want of a better.
+
+Attracted by the fame of Canalis, also by the prospect of political
+interest, and advised thereto by Madame d'Espard, who acted in the
+matter for the Duchesse de Chaulieu, a young lawyer of the court of
+Claims became secretary and confidential friend of the poet, who
+welcomed and petted him very much as a broker caresses his first
+dabbler in the funds. The beginning of this companionship bore a very
+fair resemblance to friendship. The young man had already held the
+same relation to a minister, who went out of office in 1827, taking
+care before he did so to appoint his young secretary to a place in the
+foreign office. Ernest de La Briere, then about twenty-seven years of
+age, was decorated with the Legion of honor but was without other
+means than his salary; he was accustomed to the management of business
+and had learned a good deal of life during his four years in a
+minister's cabinet. Kindly, amiable, and over-modest, with a heart
+full of pure and sound feelings, he was averse to putting himself in
+the foreground. He loved his country, and wished to serve her, but
+notoriety abashed him. To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was
+far more desirable than that of the minister himself. As soon as he
+became the friend and secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of
+labor for him, but by the end of eighteen months he had learned to
+understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary
+expression only. The truth of the old proverb, "The cowl doesn't make
+the monk," is eminently shown in literature. It is extremely rare to
+find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect
+accord. The faculties are not the man himself. This disconnection,
+whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds from an unexplored, possibly an
+unexplorable mystery. The brain and its products of all kinds (for in
+art the hand of man is a continuation of his brain) are a world apart,
+which flourishes beneath the cranium in absolute independence of
+sentiments, feelings, and all that is called virtue, the virtue of
+citizens, fathers, and private life. This, however true, is not
+absolutely so; nothing is absolutely true of man. It is certain that a
+debauched man will dissipate his talent, that a drunkard will waste it
+in libations; while, on the other hand, no man can give himself talent
+by wholesome living: nevertheless, it is all but proved that Virgil,
+the painter of love, never loved a Dido, and that Rousseau, the model
+citizen, had enough pride to had furnished forth an aristocracy. On
+the other hand Raphael and Michael Angelo do present the glorious
+conjunction of genius with the lines of character. Talent in men is
+therefore, in all moral points, very much what beauty is in women,--
+simply a promise. Let us, therefore, doubly admire the man in whom
+both heart and character equal the perfection of his genius.
+
+When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst
+species of egoist (for there are some amiable forms of the vice), he
+felt a delicacy in leaving him. Honest natures cannot easily break the
+ties that bind them, especially if they have tied them voluntarily.
+The secretary was therefore still living in domestic relations with
+the poet when Modeste's letter arrived,--in such relations, be it
+said, as involved a perpetual sacrifice of his feelings. La Briere
+admitted the frankness with which Canalis had laid himself bare before
+him. Moreover, the defects of the man, who will always be considered a
+great poet during his lifetime and flattered as Martmontel was
+flattered, were only the wrong side of his brilliant qualities.
+Without his vanity and his magniloquence it is possible that he might
+never have acquired the sonorous elocution which is so useful and even
+necessary an instrument in political life. His cold-bloodedness
+touched at certain points on rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation
+had a lining of generosity. Results, we must remember, are to the
+profit of society; motives concern God.
+
+But after the arrival of Modeste's letter Ernest deceived himself no
+longer as to Canalis. The pair had just finished breakfast and were
+talking together in the poet's study, which was on the ground-floor of
+a house standing back in a court-yard, and looked into a garden.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Canalis, "I was telling Madame de Chaulieu the
+other day that I ought to bring out another poem; I knew admiration
+was running short, for I have had no anonymous letters for a long
+time."
+
+"Is it from an unknown woman?"
+
+"Unknown? yes!--a D'Este, in Havre; evidently a feigned name."
+
+Canalis passed the letter to La Briere. The little poem, with all its
+hidden enthusiasms, in short, poor Modeste's heart, was disdainfully
+handed over, with the gesture of a spoiled dandy.
+
+"It is a fine thing," said the lawyer, "to have the power to attract
+such feelings; to force a poor woman to step out of the habits which
+nature, education, and the world dictate to her, to break through
+conventions. What privileges genius wins! A letter such as this,
+written by a young girl--a genuine young girl--without hidden
+meanings, with real enthusiasm--"
+
+"Well, what?" said Canalis.
+
+"Why, a man might suffer as much as Tasso and yet feel recompensed,"
+cried La Briere.
+
+"So he might, my dear fellow, by a first letter of that kind, and even
+a second; but how about the thirtieth? And suppose you find out that
+these young enthusiasts are little jades? Or imagine a poet rushing
+along the brilliant path in search of her, and finding at the end of
+it an old Englishwoman sitting on a mile-stone and offering you her
+hand! Or suppose this post-office angel should really be a rather ugly
+girl in quest of a husband? Ah, my boy! the effervescence then goes
+down."
+
+"I begin to perceive," said La Briere, smiling, "that there is
+something poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling
+flowers."
+
+"And then," resumed Canalis, "all these women, even when they are
+simple-minded, have ideals, and you can't satisfy them. They never say
+to themselves that a poet is a vain man, as I am accused of being;
+they can't conceive what it is for an author to be at the mercy of a
+feverish excitement, which makes him disagreeable and capricious; they
+want him always grand, noble; it never occurs to them that genius is a
+disease, or that Nathan lives with Florine; that D'Arthez is too fat,
+and Joseph Bridau is too thin; that Beranger limps, and that their own
+particular deity may have the snuffles! A Lucien de Rubempre, poet and
+cupid, is a phoenix. And why should I go in search of compliments only
+to pull the string of a shower-bath of horrid looks from some
+disillusioned female?"
+
+"Then the true poet," said La Briere, "ought to remain hidden, like
+God, in the centre of his worlds, and be only seen in his own
+creations."
+
+"Glory would cost too dear in that case," answered Canalis. "There is
+some good in life. As for that letter," he added, taking a cup of tea,
+"I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet she
+does not hide in the corner boxes, like a duchess in love with an
+actor; she feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection
+enough, and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem: 'I am the
+nymph Calypso, enamored of Telemachus.' Mystery and feigned names are
+the resources of little minds. For my part I no longer answer masks--"
+
+"I should love a woman who came to seek me," cried La Briere. "To all
+you say I reply, my dear Canalis, that it cannot be an ordinary girl
+who aspires to a distinguished man; such a girl has too little trust,
+too much vanity; she is too faint-hearted. Only a star, a--"
+
+"--princess!" cried Canalis, bursting into a shout of laughter; "only
+a princess can descend to him. My dear fellow, that doesn't happen
+once in a hundred years. Such a love is like that flower that blossoms
+every century. Princesses, let me tell you, if they are young, rich,
+and beautiful, have something else to think of; they are surrounded
+like rare plants by a hedge of fools, well-bred idiots as hollow as
+elder-bushes! My dream, alas! the crystal of my dream, garlanded from
+hence to the Correze with roses--ah! I cannot speak of it--it is in
+fragments at my feet, and has long been so. No, no, all anonymous
+letters are begging letters; and what sort of begging? Write yourself
+to that young woman, if you suppose her young and pretty, and you'll
+find out. There is nothing like experience. As for me, I can't
+reasonably be expected to love every woman; Apollo, at any rate he of
+Belvedere, is a delicate consumptive who must take care of his
+health."
+
+"But when a woman writes to you in this way her excuse must certainly
+be in her consciousness that she is able to eclipse in tenderness and
+beauty every other woman," said Ernest, "and I should think you might
+feel some curiosity--"
+
+"Ah," said Canalis, "permit me, my juvenile friend, to abide by the
+beautiful duchess who is all my joy."
+
+"You are right, you are right!" cried Ernest. However, the young
+secretary read and re-read Modeste's letter, striving to guess the
+mind of its hidden writer.
+
+"There is not the least fine-writing here," he said, "she does not
+even talk of your genius; she speaks to your heart. In your place I
+should feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty,--this proposed
+agreement--"
+
+"Then, sign it!" cried Canalis, laughing; "answer the letter and go to
+the end of the adventure yourself. You shall tell me the results three
+months hence--if the affair lasts so long."
+
+Four days later Modeste received the following letter, written on
+extremely fine paper, protected by two envelopes, and sealed with the
+arms of Canalis.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--The admiration for fine works (allowing that my
+  books are such) implies something so lofty and sincere as to
+  protect you from all light jesting, and to justify before the
+  sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me.
+
+  But first I must thank you for the pleasure which such proofs of
+  sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them,--for the maker
+  of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic
+  worth of their writings,--so readily does self-esteem lend itself
+  to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an
+  unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of
+  criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience,
+  even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.
+
+  Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower
+  of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in
+  the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you
+  have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that
+  might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet
+  of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;
+  they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish,
+  ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing
+  innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with
+  many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your
+  affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be
+  interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought
+  that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not
+  suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am
+  deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding
+  you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,
+  one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual
+  carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous
+  imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,
+  perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where
+  you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which
+  drives all poetry from the manuscript?
+
+  But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life
+  you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose
+  mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can
+  equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that
+  no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,
+  what will you gain,--you, a young girl, brought up to be the
+  virtuous mother of a family,--if you learn to comprehend the
+  terrible agitations of a poet's life in this dreadful capital,
+  which may be defined by one sentence,--the hell in which men love.
+
+  If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl
+  thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and
+  write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of
+  degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one
+  of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?
+  Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within
+  you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,
+  alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too
+  much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
+  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,
+  tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.
+
+  But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you
+  have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious
+  ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet
+  of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what
+  every pure young girl should be,--a good woman, the virtuous
+  mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can
+  make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound
+  a woman's proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no
+  experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before
+  she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,
+  to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such
+  qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.
+
+  Hear the whole truth,--do I not owe it to you in return for your
+  intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great
+  renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man
+  to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore
+  poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He
+  becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we
+  say: "I thought her far more lovely." She has not warranted the
+  portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter,--the
+  fairy whose name is Imagination.
+
+  Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a
+  sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the
+  burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears
+  them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now
+  when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will
+  suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a
+  distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining
+  summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world
+  of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once
+  admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.
+
+  I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised
+  entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can
+  take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing
+  from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an
+  unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.
+
+  Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all
+  women, even those who are disguised and masked.
+
+So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset
+above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had
+postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household
+slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an
+imagination on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by
+anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one,--fancying
+all things, except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous
+forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves
+life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her
+candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep?
+
+All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently
+got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air.
+The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness
+of the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like
+a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. "Ah, there is the
+poet!" thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter
+reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the
+quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied
+the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing
+the wheezing voice of the outer world.
+
+"He is right, and I am wrong," she said to herself. "But who could
+ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find
+nothing but one of Moliere's old men?"
+
+When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, "flagrante delicto,"
+she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the
+object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed
+and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire
+to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some
+fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this
+child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been
+misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows, and
+more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was
+suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She
+had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of
+Doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight
+to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a
+letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates
+in the hearts of young girls.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+BLADE TO BLADE
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  Monsieur,--You are certainly a great poet, and you are something
+  more,--an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a
+  young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you
+  enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following
+  question?
+
+  Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine,--
+  would your ideas, your language have been the same,--had some one
+  whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.
+  d'Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a
+  master?
+
+  Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with
+  yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing
+  that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your
+  confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an
+  answer to your first letter.
+
+  Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do
+  homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to
+  remain always,
+
+Your humble servant,
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some
+little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like
+a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of
+the compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have
+settled the matter in a single phrase, "The girl is a little hussy."
+But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put
+him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to
+awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor,
+Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several
+ways energetically.
+
+"Ah, my dear Ernest," said Truth, "you never would have read that
+lesson to a rich heiress. No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste
+to Havre to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have
+been very unhappy indeed at her preference for genius; and if you
+could have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her
+affections, Mademoiselle d'Este would have been a divinity."
+
+"What?" cried Justice, "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you
+penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom
+you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism
+of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never
+marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl.
+What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who
+revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet
+replies with a blow at her heart!"
+
+"Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she
+has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of
+self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an
+answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the
+honest expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart
+and purge it of its meannesses. What would Moliere's Alceste say?"
+
+And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked
+so slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an
+hour in reaching the boulevard des Capucines. Then he followed the
+quays, which led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time
+close to the Saint-Chapelle. Instead of beginning on the accounts as
+he should have done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities.
+
+"One thing is evident," he said to himself; "she hasn't six millions;
+but that's not the point--"
+
+Six days later, Modeste received the following letter:
+
+  Mademoiselle,--You are not a D'Este. The name is a feigned one to
+  conceal your own. Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a
+  person who is untruthful about herself? Question for question: Are
+  you of an illustrious family? or a noble family? or a middle-class
+  family? Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change; they are
+  one: but obligations vary in the different states of life. Just as
+  the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which
+  we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position.
+  The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in a general, and vice-
+  versa. Observances are not alike in all cases. They are not the
+  same for the gleaner in the field, for the girl who sews at
+  fifteen sous a day, for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for
+  the young bourgoise, for the child of a rich merchant, for the
+  heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Este. A
+  king must not stoop to pick up a piece of gold, but a laborer
+  ought to retrace his steps to find ten sous; though both are
+  equally bound to obey the laws of economy. A daughter of Este, who
+  is worth six millions, has the right to wear a broad-brimmed hat
+  and plume, to flourish her whip, press the flanks of her barb, and
+  ride like an amazon decked in gold lace, with a lackey behind her,
+  into the presence of a poet and say: "I love poetry; and I would
+  fain expiate Leonora's cruelty to Tasso!" but a daughter of the
+  people would cover herself with ridicule by imitating her. To what
+  class do you belong? Answer sincerely, and I will answer the
+  question you have put to me.
+
+  As I have not the honor of knowing you personally, and yet am
+  bound to you, in a measure, by the ties of poetic communion, I am
+  unwilling to offer any commonplace compliments. Perhaps you have
+  already won a malicious victory by thus embarrassing a maker of
+  books.
+
+The young man was certainly not wanting in the sort of shrewdness
+which is permissible to a man of honor. By return courier he received
+an answer:--
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--You grow more and more sensible, my dear
+  poet. My father is a count. The chief glory of our house was a
+  cardinal, in the days when cardinals walked the earth by the side
+  of kings. I am the last of our family, which ends in me; but I
+  have the necessary quarterings to make my entry into any court or
+  chapter-house in Europe. We are quite the equals of the Canalis.
+  You will be so kind as to excuse me from sending you our arms.
+
+  Endeavor to answer me as truthfully as I have now answered you. I
+  await your response to know if I can then sign myself as I do now,
+
+Your servant,       O. d'Este M.
+
+
+"The little mischief! how she abuses her privileges," cried La Briere;
+"but isn't she frank!"
+
+No young man can be four years private secretary to a cabinet
+minister, and live in Paris and observe the carrying on of many
+intrigues, with perfect impunity; in fact, the purest soul is more or
+less intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of the imperial city. Happy
+in the thought that he was not Canalis, our young secretary engaged a
+place in the mail-coach for Havre, after writing a letter in which he
+announced that the promised answer would be sent a few days later,--
+excusing the delay on the ground of the importance of the confession
+and the pressure of his duties at the ministry.
+
+He took care to get from the director-general of the post-office a
+note to the postmaster at Havre, requesting secrecy and attention to
+his wishes. Ernest was thus enabled to see Francoise Cochet when she
+came for the letters, and to follow her without exciting observation.
+Guided by her, he reached Ingouville and saw Modeste Mignon at the
+window of the Chalet.
+
+"Well, Francoise?" he heard the young girl say, to which the maid
+responded,--
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle, I have one."
+
+Struck by the girl's great beauty, Ernest retraced his steps and asked
+a man on the street the name of the owner of that magnificent estate.
+
+"That?" said the man, nodding to the villa.
+
+"Yes, my friend."
+
+"Oh, that belongs to Monsieur Vilquin, the richest shipping merchant
+in Havre, so rich he doesn't know what he is worth."
+
+"There is no Cardinal Vilquin that I know of in history," thought
+Ernest, as he walked back to Havre for the night mail to Paris.
+Naturally he questioned the postmaster about the Vilquin family, and
+learned that it possessed an enormous fortune. Monsieur Vilquin had a
+son and two daughters, one of whom was married to Monsieur Althor,
+junior. Prudence kept La Briere from seeming anxious about the
+Vilquins; the postmaster was already looking at him slyly.
+
+"Is there there any one staying with them at the present moment," he
+asked, "besides the family?"
+
+"The d'Herouville family is there just now. They do talk of a marriage
+between the young duke and the remaining Mademoiselle Vilquin."
+
+"Ha!" thought Ernest; "there was a celebrated Cardinal d'Herouville
+under the Valois, and a terrible marshal whom they made a duke in the
+time of Henri IV."
+
+Ernest returned to Paris having seen enough of Modeste to dream of
+her, and to think that, whether she were rich or whether she were
+poor, if she had a noble soul he would like to make her Madame de La
+Briere; and so thinking, he resolved to continue the correspondence.
+
+Ah! you poor women of France, try to remain hidden if you can; try to
+weave the least little romance about your lives in the midst of a
+civilization which posts in the public streets the hours when the
+coaches arrive and depart; which counts all letters and stamps them
+twice over, first with the hour when they are thrown into the boxes,
+and next with that of their delivery; which numbers the houses, prints
+the tax of every tenant on a metal register at the doors (after
+verifying its particulars), and will soon possess one vast register of
+every inch of its territory down to the smallest parcel of land, and
+the most insignificant features of it,--a giant work ordained by a
+giant. Try, imprudent young ladies, to escape not only the eye of the
+police, but the incessant chatter which takes place in a country town
+about the veriest trifles,--how many dishes the prefect has at his
+dessert, how many slices of melon are left at the door of some small
+householder,--which strains its ear to catch the chink of the gold a
+thrifty man lays by, and spends its evenings in calculating the
+incomes of the village and the town and the department. It was mere
+chance that enabled Modeste to escape discovery through Ernest's
+reconnoitring expedition,--a step which he already regretted; but what
+Parisian can allow himself to be the dupe of a little country girl?
+Incapable of being duped! that horrid maxim is the dissolvent of all
+noble sentiments in man.
+
+We can readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest
+young fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited,
+in which every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will
+be found to have left its trace.
+
+This is what Modeste read a few days later, as she sat by her window
+on a fine summer's day:--
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Without hypocrisy or evasion, YES, if I had been
+  certain that you possessed an immense fortune I should have acted
+  differently. Why? I have searched for the reason; here it is. We
+  have within us an inborn feeling, inordinately developed by social
+  life, which drives us to the pursuit and to the possession of
+  happiness. Most men confound happiness with the means that lead to
+  it; money in their eyes is the chief element of happiness. I
+  should, therefore, have endeavored to win you, prompted by that
+  social sentiment which has in all ages made wealth a religion. At
+  least, I think I should. It is not to be expected of a man still
+  young that he can have the wisdom to substitute sound sense for
+  the pleasure of the senses; within sight of a prey the brutal
+  instincts hidden in the heart of man drive him on. Instead of that
+  lesson, I should have sent you compliments and flatteries. Should
+  I have kept my own esteem in so doing? I doubt it. Mademoiselle,
+  in such a case success brings absolution; but happiness? That is
+  another thing. Should I have distrusted my wife had I won her in
+  that way? Most assuredly I should. Your advance on me would sooner
+  or later have come between us. Your husband, however grand your
+  fancy may make him, would have ended by reproaching you for having
+  abased him. You, yourself, might have come, sooner or later, to
+  despise him. The strong man forgives, but the poet whines. Such,
+  mademoiselle, is the answer which my honesty compels me to make to
+  you.
+
+  And now, listen to me. You have the triumph of forcing me to
+  reflect deeply,--first on you, whom I do not sufficiently know;
+  next, on myself, of whom I knew too little. You have had the power
+  to stir up many of the evil thoughts which crouched in my heart,
+  as in all hearts; but from them something good and generous has
+  come forth, and I salute you with my most fervent benedictions,
+  just as at sea we salute the lighthouse which shows the rocks on
+  which we were about to perish. Here is my confession, for I would
+  not lose your esteem nor my own for all the treasures of earth.
+
+  I wished to know who you are. I have just returned from Havre,
+  where I saw Francoise Cochet, and followed her to Ingouville. You
+  are as beautiful as the woman of a poet's dream; but I do not know
+  if you are Mademoiselle Vilquin concealed under Mademoiselle
+  d'Herouville, or Mademoiselle d'Herouville hidden under
+  Mademoiselle Vilquin. Though all is fair in war, I blushed at such
+  spying and stopped short in my inquiries. You have roused my
+  curiosity; forgive me for being somewhat of a woman; it is, I
+  believe, the privilege of a poet.
+
+  Now that I have laid bare my heart and allowed you to read it, you
+  will believe in the sincerity of what I am about to add. Though
+  the glimpse I had of you was all too rapid, it has sufficed to
+  modify my opinion of your conduct. You are a poet and a poem, even
+  more than you are a woman. Yes, there is in you something more
+  precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of
+  fancy. The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary
+  young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect
+  if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you. Among the
+  crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet
+  to make up a generation there are exceptional souls. If your
+  letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which
+  conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a
+  lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life
+  of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that
+  you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations
+  of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus
+  the ordinary trammels of your sex,--then, assuredly, you are an
+  exception. The law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd
+  is too limited for you. But in that case, the remark in my first
+  letter returns in greater force,--you have done too much or not
+  enough.
+
+  Accept once more my thanks for the service you have rendered me,
+  that of compelling me to sound my heart. You have corrected in me
+  the false idea, only too common in France, that marriage should be
+  a means of fortune. While I struggled with my conscience a sacred
+  voice spoke to me. I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself, and
+  not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my
+  life. I have also reproached myself for the blamable curiosity you
+  have excited in me. You have not six millions. There is no
+  concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such
+  a fortune; you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds
+  of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses,
+  and who have already sent one, the grand equerry, the young duke,
+  among the Vilquins. Therefore, believe me, the sentiments I have
+  now expressed are fixed in my mind as a rule of life, from which I
+  have abstracted all influences of romance or of actual fact. Prove
+  to me, therefore, that you have one of those souls which may be
+  forgiven for its disobedience to the common law, by perceiving and
+  comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my
+  first letter. If you are destined to a middle-class life, obey the
+  iron law which holds society together. Lifted in mind above other
+  women, I admire you; but if you seek to obey an impulse which you
+  ought to repress, I pity you. The all-wise moral of that great
+  domestic epic "Clarissa Harlowe" is that legitimate and honorable
+  love led the poor victim to her ruin because it was conceived,
+  developed, and pursued beyond the boundaries of family restraint.
+  The family, however cruel and even foolish it may be, is in the
+  right against the Lovelaces. The family is Society. Believe me,
+  the glory of a young girl, of a woman, must always be that of
+  repressing her most ardent impulses within the narrow sphere of
+  conventions. If I had a daughter able to become a Madame de Stael
+  I should wish her dead at fifteen. Can you imagine a daughter of
+  yours flaunting on the stage of fame, exhibiting herself to win
+  the plaudits of a crowd, and not suffer anguish at the thought? No
+  matter to what heights a woman can rise by the inward poetry of
+  her soul, she must sacrifice the outer signs of superiority on the
+  altar of her home. Her impulse, her genius, her aspirations toward
+  Good, the whole poem of a young girl's being, should belong to the
+  man she accepts and the children whom she brings into the world. I
+  think I perceive in you a secret desire to widen the narrow circle
+  of the life to which all women are condemned, and to put love and
+  passion into marriage. Ah! it is a lovely dream! it is not
+  impossible; it is difficult, but if realized, may it not be to the
+  despair of souls--forgive me the hackneyed word--"incompris"?
+
+  If you seek a platonic friendship it will be to your sorrow in
+  after years. If your letter was a jest, discontinue it. Perhaps
+  this little romance is to end here--is it? It has not been without
+  fruit. My sense of duty is aroused, and you, on your side, will
+  have learned something of Society. Turn your thoughts to real
+  life; throw the enthusiasms you have culled from literature into
+  the virtues of your sex.
+
+  Adieu, mademoiselle. Do me the honor to grant me your esteem.
+  Having seen you, or one whom I believe to be you, I have known
+  that your letter was simply natural; a flower so lovely turns to
+  the sun--of poetry. Yes, love poetry as you love flowers, music,
+  the grandeur of the sea, the beauties of nature; love them as an
+  adornment of the soul, but remember what I have had the honor of
+  telling you as to the nature of poets. Be cautious not to marry,
+  as you say, a dunce, but seek the partner whom God has made for
+  you. There are souls, believe me, who are fit to appreciate you,
+  and to make you happy. If I were rich, if you were poor, I would
+  lay my heart and my fortunes at your feet; for I believe your soul
+  to be full of riches and of loyalty; to you I could confide my
+  life and my honor in absolute security.
+
+  Once more, adieu, adieu, fairest daughter of Eve the fair.
+
+The reading of this letter, swallowed like a drop of water in the
+desert, lifted the mountain which weighed heavily on Modeste's heart:
+then she saw the mistake she had made in arranging her plan, and
+repaired it by giving Francoise some envelopes directed to herself, in
+which the maid could put the letters which came from Paris and drop
+them again into the box. Modeste resolved to receive the postman
+herself on the steps of the Chalet at the hour when he made his
+delivery.
+
+As to the feelings that this reply, in which the noble heart of poor
+La Briere beat beneath the brilliant phantom of Canalis, excited in
+Modeste, they were as multifarious and confused as the waves which
+rushed to die along the shore while with her eyes fixed on the wide
+ocean she gave herself up to the joy of having (if we dare say so)
+harpooned an angelic soul in the Parisian Gulf, of having divined that
+hearts of price might still be found in harmony with genius, and,
+above all, for having followed the magic voice of intuition.
+
+A vast interest was now about to animate her life. The wires of her
+cage were broken: the bolts and bars of the pretty Chalet--where were
+they? Her thoughts took wings.
+
+"Oh, father!" she cried, looking out to the horizon. "Come back and
+make us rich and happy."
+
+The answer which Ernest de La Briere received some five days later
+will tell the reader more than any elaborate disquisition of ours.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE POWER OF THE UNSEEN
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  My friend,--Suffer me to give you that name,--you have delighted
+  me; I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the
+  first--oh, may it not be the last! Who but a poet could have
+  excused and understood a young girl so delicately?
+
+  I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines
+  of your letter. And first, let me say that most fortunately you do
+  not know me. I can joyfully assure you than I am neither that
+  hideous Mademoiselle Vilquin nor the very noble and withered
+  Mademoiselle d'Herouville who floats between twenty and forty
+  years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The
+  Cardinal d'Herouville flourished in the history of the Church at
+  least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only
+  family glory,--for I take no account of lieutenant-generals, and
+  abbes who write trumpery little verses.
+
+  Moreover, I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is
+  not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that
+  chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from
+  Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a
+  Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am
+  noble on my father's and on my mother's side. On my mother's I
+  derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short, my
+  precautions are well taken. It is not in any man's power, nor even
+  in the power of the law, to unmask my incognito. I shall remain
+  veiled, unknown.
+
+  As to my person and as to my "belongings," as the Normans say,
+  make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl
+  (ignorantly happy) on whom your eyes chanced to light during your
+  visit to Havre; and I do not call myself poverty-stricken,
+  although ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks. I
+  have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her
+  millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even on
+  a wager, to reach me. Alas! though free as air, I am watched and
+  guarded,--by myself, in the first place, and secondly, by people
+  of nerve and courage who would not hesitate to put a knife in your
+  heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat. I do not say this to
+  excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity; I believe I have
+  no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me.
+
+  I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged, of
+  your first sermon.
+
+  Will you have a confession? I said to myself when I saw you so
+  distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations
+  bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had
+  already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged
+  you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh!
+  you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but
+  I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are,
+  and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered
+  with the "Flowers of my Heart" in one or more volumes. And,
+  finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word "Come!"
+  you will not find--you know it now--an old maid, no, nor a poor
+  and ugly one.
+
+  Ah! my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to
+  Havre! You have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God
+  alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough,
+  and trusting enough, and perspicacious enough to come--having
+  faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the
+  depths of my heart--to come to our first meeting with the
+  simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the
+  innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my
+  treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,
+  there is always a man within a poet.
+
+  Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who
+  cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and
+  wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d'Este received
+  your pedantic lesson she said to herself: "No, dear poet, my first
+  letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the
+  highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a
+  net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock
+  above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught."
+
+  All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval.
+  The man who is able to please me, and of whom I believe myself
+  worthy, will have my heart and my life,--with the consent of my
+  parents, for I will neither grieve them, nor take them unawares:
+  happily, I am certain of reigning over them; and, besides, they
+  are wholly without prejudice. Indeed, in every way, I feel myself
+  protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the
+  fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the
+  boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a
+  treasure,--not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if
+  need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with
+  armor of proof on which is engraved the word "Disdain." I have the
+  deepest horror of all that is calculating,--of all that is not
+  pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,
+  the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart
+  of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various
+  things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about
+  Society and social life.
+
+  For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why
+  seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,
+  but your mind, your heart I KNOW; they please me, and I feel an
+  infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius
+  for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be
+  wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a
+  precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You
+  will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl's
+  thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering
+  to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good
+  fortune of the soul,--the honest confidences of an honest girl.
+  Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in
+  her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters
+  warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await
+  you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the
+  castle, the palace--I don't know yet what sort of bower it will
+  be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be
+  possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and
+  that Mademoiselle d'Este has a complying disposition. Has she not
+  left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the
+  salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high
+  emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
+  No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me
+  when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
+  have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear
+  friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have
+  known through the experience of another all the horrors and the
+  delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can
+  contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have
+  no illusions; but I have something better, something real,--I have
+  beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
+
+  Whoever I marry--provided I choose him for myself--may sleep in
+  peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his
+  return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
+  and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he
+  has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
+  follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
+  divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
+  should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
+  life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
+  woman be who thwarts the man she loves?--an illness, a disease,
+  not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
+  a pleasure.
+
+  But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
+  Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
+  expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
+  life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
+  possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
+  women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
+  no longer a chimera.
+
+  Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
+  reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
+  fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"--ah! with
+  what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
+  your secret soul.
+
+  Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
+  that you are her solitary thought,--without a rival except in her
+  father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
+  these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
+  yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
+  that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will
+  suffice for the happiness of your
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary,
+when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more
+than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is
+writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a
+woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?"
+
+Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen
+is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that
+sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with
+fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an
+adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain
+torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this
+charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the
+blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much
+mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere
+allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent;
+and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and
+carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal
+itself through pique.
+
+  Mademoiselle,--Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in
+  the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him
+  if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless
+  regrets,--showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it
+  only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
+  I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you
+  have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
+  can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
+  such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
+  so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
+  first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
+  my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
+  the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
+  little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
+  remonstrances.
+
+  Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
+  true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
+  insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the
+  expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
+  general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful
+  as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
+  could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
+  intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
+  heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
+  to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
+  at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
+  harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
+  in passing, is very rare.
+
+  The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
+  which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
+  flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
+  every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
+  literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
+  But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
+  your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
+  genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
+  not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social
+  woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like
+  circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt
+  only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,--sickly,
+  irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold
+  more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of
+  character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In
+  exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The
+  dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The
+  compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your
+  projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,
+  like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the
+  rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her
+  religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
+  Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship
+  with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was
+  the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was
+  younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us
+  admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a
+  man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously
+  worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched
+  by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,
+  when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away
+  from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,--let us admit, I
+  say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the
+  glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of
+  our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the
+  picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of
+  poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed
+  verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
+  disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am
+  still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
+  The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me
+  sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very
+  ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other empty-
+  headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not roll
+  on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days, of
+  property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do I
+  have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil
+  uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are
+  worth far more than I,--D'Arthez, for instance.
+
+  Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to
+  these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the
+  happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been
+  to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine
+  for  a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode
+  of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might
+  conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which
+  light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their
+  duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end
+  our tale in the common vulgar way,--marriage, a household,
+  children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!--could it be?
+  Therefore, adieu.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis:
+
+  My Friend,--Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But
+  perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to
+  each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and
+  asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the
+  answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of
+  Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not
+  remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most
+  lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that
+  of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,--happy to old age. Ah!
+  friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist
+  as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating
+  with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in
+  himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to
+  find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go
+  into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in
+  Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has
+  deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has
+  inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is
+  something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian
+  coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called
+  men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with
+  the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to
+  cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle
+  fragrance can never fail,--it is eternal.
+
+  Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or
+  commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude,
+  I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of
+  Lord Byron's many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
+  You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you
+  shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of
+  which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the
+  roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak,
+  and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and
+  see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty,
+  intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the
+  vulgarities of life! it is yours--yours, before any eye has
+  blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my
+  thoughts,--all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my
+  heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If
+  you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can
+  live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your
+  sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your
+  friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
+  have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my
+  future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks
+  not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a
+  poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of
+  his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden--so
+  devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you--is Friendship,
+  pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who
+  listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of
+  the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked
+  with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not
+  find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile
+  alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be
+  any the worse if Mademoiselle d'Este does not give it two or three
+  sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As
+  for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a
+  mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in
+  the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my
+  thoughts and all my earthly efforts.
+
+  I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
+  am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never
+  belong to any ninny just because he is the son of a peer of
+  France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day,
+  nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the
+  household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty
+  times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My
+  father adores my wishes; he will never oppose them. If I please my
+  poet, and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall
+  be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune.
+  I am an eaglet; and you will see it in my eyes.
+
+  I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I will put its
+  substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to
+  you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by
+  love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. Ah!
+  my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to
+  us through the first exercise of my will: listen to its
+  argument:--
+
+  A young girl with a lively imagination, locked up in a tower, is
+  weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only
+  are allowed to rove. She invents a way to loosen her bars; she
+  jumps from the casement; she scales the park wall; she frolics
+  along the neighbor's sward--it is the Everlasting comedy. Well,
+  that young girl is my soul, the neighbor's park is your genius. Is
+  it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not
+  complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to
+  my poet to answer.
+
+  But does the lofty reasoner after the fashion of Moliere want
+  still better reasons? Well, here they are. My dear Geronte,
+  marriages are usually made in defiance of common-sense. Parents
+  make inquiries about a young man. If the Leander--who is supplied
+  by some friend, or caught in a ball-room--is not a thief, and has
+  no visible rent in his reputation, if he has the necessary
+  fortune, if he comes from a college or a law-school and so fulfils
+  the popular ideas of education, and if he wears his clothes with a
+  gentlemanly air, he is allowed to meet the young lady, whose
+  mother has ordered her to guard her tongue, to let no sign of her
+  heart or soul appear on her face, which must wear the smile of a
+  danseuse finishing a pirouette. These commands are coupled with
+  instructions as to the danger of revealing her real character, and
+  the additional advice of not seeming alarmingly well educated. If
+  the settlements have all been agreed upon, the parents are good-
+  natured enough to let the pair see each other for a few moments;
+  they are allowed to talk or walk together, but always without the
+  slightest freedom, and knowing that they are bound by rigid rules.
+  The man is as much dressed up in soul as he is in body, and so is
+  the young girl. This pitiable comedy, mixed with bouquets, jewels,
+  and theatre-parties is called "paying your addresses." It revolts
+  me: I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a
+  previous and long marriage of souls. A young girl, a woman, has
+  throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second
+  sight, and experience are necessary to her. She plays her liberty,
+  her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice; she risks
+  her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator. I have the right,
+  the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as
+  did my mother, who, won by beauty and led by instinct, married the
+  most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men. I know
+  that you are free, a poet, and noble-looking. Be sure that I
+  should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo who was
+  already married. If my mother was won by beauty, which is perhaps
+  the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit
+  and the form united? Shall I not know you better by studying you
+  in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience
+  of "receiving your addresses"? This is the question, as Hamlet
+  says.
+
+  But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not
+  binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and
+  every illusion its to-morrow. That is why there are so many
+  partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of
+  love lies in two things,--suffering and happiness. When, after
+  passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown
+  each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when
+  they have really observed each other's character, then they may go
+  to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that
+  our little drama thus begun was to have no future? In any case
+  shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence?
+
+  I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart,
+
+Your handmaiden,
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+  To Mademoiselle O. d'Este M.,--You are a witch, a spirit, and I
+  love you! Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls?
+  Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with
+  the follies which are you able to make a poet commit. If so, you
+  have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit
+  of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a
+  Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future
+  depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of
+  an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will
+  touch you,--if you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety
+  enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can
+  personally please you. If your reply is favorable I change my
+  life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the
+  folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown,
+  is what you dream it to be,--a fusion of feelings, a perfect
+  accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God
+  does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round
+  of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of
+  heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say
+  that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good,
+  the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the
+  entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble
+  intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to
+  fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar?--for
+  to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly
+  on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.
+
+  I cannot speak to you any more of myself; not of my past life, nor
+  of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side,
+  filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed--an
+  effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word
+  "sacrifice." You have already rendered me forgetful, if not
+  ungrateful; does that satisfy you? Oh, speak! Say to me one word,
+  and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de
+  Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully.
+  Our life will be, for me at least, that "felicity untroubled"
+  which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,--a poem far
+  superior to his Inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in
+  the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of
+  a dreamed existence; it is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the
+  power to love, and to love endlessly,--to march to the grave with
+  gentle slowness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and
+  with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls. Yes, I dare to
+  face our mutual old age, to see ourselves with whitening heads,
+  like the venerable historian of Italy, inspired always with the
+  same affection but transformed in soul by our life's seasons. Hear
+  me, I can no longer be your friend only. Though Chrysale, Geronte,
+  and Argante re-live, you say, in me, I am not yet old enough to
+  drink from the cup held to my lips by the sweet hands of a veiled
+  woman without a passionate desire to tear off the domino and the
+  mask and see the face. Either write me no more, or give me hope.
+  Let me see you, or let me go. Must I bid you adieu? Will you
+  permit me to sign myself,
+
+Your Friend?
+
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--What flattery! with what rapidity is the
+  grave Anselme transformed into a handsome Leander! To what must I
+  attribute such a change? to this black which I put upon this
+  white? to these ideas which are to the flowers of my soul what a
+  rose drawn in charcoal is to the roses in the garden? Or is it to
+  a recollection of the young girl whom you took for me, and who is
+  personally as like me as a waiting-woman is like her mistress?
+  Have we changed roles? Have I the sense? have you the fancy? But a
+  truce with jesting.
+
+  Your letter has made me know the elating pleasures of the soul;
+  the first that I have known outside of my family affections. What,
+  says a poet, are the ties of blood which are so strong in ordinary
+  minds, compared to those divinely forged within us by mysterious
+  sympathies? Let me thank you--no, we must not thank each other for
+  such things--but God bless you for the happiness you have given
+  me; be happy in the joy you have shed into my soul. You explain to
+  me some of the apparent injustices in social life. There is
+  something, I know not what, so dazzling, so virile in glory, that
+  it belongs only to man; God forbids us women to wear its halo, but
+  he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes
+  the brow scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and
+  you have now confirmed it.
+
+  Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of
+  inexpressible sweetness; a sort of peace, tender and divine, gives
+  me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction.
+  I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to
+  my Southern sunsets, full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fetes
+  and ardent poems. Well, after reading your letter, so full of
+  feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my
+  celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature,
+  and fancy that I am destined to die for one I love. One of your
+  poems, "The Maiden's Song," paints these delicious moments, when
+  gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need; it is one of my
+  favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one?--well
+  then, I think you worthy to be ME!
+
+  Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I
+  have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity,
+  your projects; but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy
+  your wishes. Hear me, dear; the mystery in which I am shrouded
+  allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my
+  heart. Hear me: if we once meet, adieu to our mutual
+  comprehension! Will you make a compact with me? Was the first
+  disadvantageous to you? But remember it won you my esteem, and it
+  is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lined throughout
+  with esteem. Here is the compact: write me your life in a few
+  words; then tell me what you do in Paris, day by day, with no
+  reservations, and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well,
+  having done that, I will take a step myself--I will see you, I
+  promise you that. And it is a great deal.
+
+  This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure; no gallantry, as you men
+  say, can come of it, I warn you frankly. It involves my life, and
+  more than that,--something that causes me remorse for the many
+  thoughts that fly to you in flocks--it involves my father's and my
+  mother's life. I adore them, and my choice must please them; they
+  must find a son in you.
+
+  Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to
+  whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding
+  their amiability,--how far can they bend under a family yoke, and
+  put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated
+  upon. Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!
+  Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way;
+  and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor
+  the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my
+  long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you
+  have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which
+  they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in
+  their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions
+  of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself,
+  "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit
+  for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you
+  tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were
+  the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared
+  a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you
+  perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to
+  escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for
+  the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither
+  Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any
+  inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And
+  this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their
+  blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The
+  visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their
+  results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who
+  has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to
+  his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates
+  all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not
+  perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is
+  so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to
+  bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what
+  sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the
+  life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering
+  his personal life, Moliere's comedy is horrible.
+
+  The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you
+  in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found self-
+  interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my best
+  loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I should
+  have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was sixteen.
+  What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that fame is
+  a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in my heart
+  was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do you know
+  what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the recesses
+  of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said, "Bring me
+  the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,--marry me to
+  whom you please." And the man might have been a notary, banker,
+  miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as the
+  usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without
+  two ideas,--he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in
+  me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded
+  in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have
+  revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of
+  the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting
+  lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
+  See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia,
+  breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a
+  curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have
+  taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight
+  of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a bureau-
+  drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor girls
+  ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,--but ah! I have YOU, I
+  believe in YOU, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts
+  and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes--see how far
+  my frankness leads me--I wish I were in the middle of the book we
+  are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments,
+  such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by
+  reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,--if
+  indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.
+
+  If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
+  fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the
+  dreadful word "folly!" might escape you, and I should be cruelly
+  punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring
+  of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years
+  that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by
+  charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
+  the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
+  into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
+  with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
+  outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
+  take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for
+  a few weeks.
+
+  Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
+  mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
+  little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
+  hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
+  departed for the Crusades, "God wills it."
+
+  Ah! but you will cry out, "What a chatterbox!" All the people
+  round me say, on the contrary, "Mademoiselle is very taciturn."
+
+O. d'Este M.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE
+
+The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom
+the author of the "Comedy of Human Life" obtained them; but their
+interest in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may
+not be shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the
+battle. The respect due to the majority in every nation under a
+constitutional government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven
+other letters exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of
+September. If, later on, some flattering majority should arise to
+claim them, let us hope that we can then find means to insert them in
+their proper place.
+
+Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable,
+the truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves
+free play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more
+beautiful than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by
+a sense of the communion of two free souls. Ernest's whole life was
+now wrapped up in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what
+banknotes are to a miser; while in Modeste's soul a deep love took the
+place of her delight in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite
+of distance, its mainspring. Ernest's heart was the complement of
+Canalis's glory. Alas! it often takes two men to make a perfect lover,
+just as in literature we compose a type by collecting the
+peculiarities of several similar characters. How many a time a woman
+has been heard to say in her own salon after close and intimate
+conversations:--
+
+"Such a one is my ideal as to soul, and I love the other who is only a
+dream of the senses."
+
+The last letter written by Modeste, which here follows, gives us a
+glimpse of the enchanted isle to which the meanderings of this
+correspondence had led the two lovers.
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Be at Havre next Sunday; go to church;
+  after the morning service, walk once or twice round the nave, and
+  go out without speaking to any one; but wear a white rose in your
+  button-hole. Then return to Paris, where you shall receive an
+  answer. I warn you that this answer will not be what you wish;
+  for, as I told you, the future is not yet mine. But should I not
+  indeed be mad and foolish to say yes without having seen you? When
+  I have seen you I can say no without wounding you; I can make sure
+  that you shall not see me.
+
+This letter had been sent off the evening before the day when the
+abortive struggle between Dumay and Modeste had taken place. The happy
+girl was impatiently awaiting Sunday, when her eyes were to vindicate
+or condemn her heart and her actions,--a solemn moment in the life of
+any woman, and which three months of close communion of souls now
+rendered as romantic as the most imaginative maiden could have wished.
+Every one, except the mother, had taken this torpor of expectation for
+the calm of innocence. No matter how firmly family laws and religious
+precepts may bind, there will always be the Clarissas and the Julies,
+whose souls like flowing cups o'erlap the brim under some spiritual
+pressure. Modeste was glorious in the savage energy with which she
+repressed her exuberant youthful happiness and remained demurely
+quiet. Let us say frankly that the memory of her sister was more
+potent upon her than any social conventions; her will was iron in the
+resolve to bring no grief upon her father and her mother. But what
+tumultuous heavings were within her breast! no wonder that a mother
+guessed them.
+
+On the following day Modeste and Madame Dumay took Madame Mignon about
+mid-day to a seat in the sun among the flowers. The blind woman turned
+her wan and blighted face toward the ocean; she inhaled the odors of
+the sea and took the hand of her daughter who remained beside her. The
+mother hesitated between forgiveness and remonstrance ere she put the
+important question; for she comprehended the girl's love and
+recognized, as the pretended Canalis had done, that Modeste was
+exceptional in nature.
+
+"God grant that your father return in time! If he delays much longer
+he will find none but you to love him. Modeste, promise me once more
+never to leave him," she said in a fond maternal tone.
+
+Modeste lifted her mother's hands to her lips and kissed them gently,
+replying: "Need I say it again?"
+
+"Ah, my child! I did this thing myself. I left my father to follow my
+husband; and yet my father was all alone; I was all the child he had.
+Is that why God has so punished me? What I ask of you is to marry as
+your father wishes, to cherish him in your heart, not to sacrifice him
+to your own happiness, but to make him the centre of your home. Before
+losing my sight, I wrote him all my wishes, and I know he will execute
+them. I enjoined him to keep his property intact and in his own hands;
+not that I distrust you, my Modeste, for a moment, but who can be sure
+of a son-in-law? Ah! my daughter, look at me; was I reasonable? One
+glance of the eye decided my life. Beauty, so often deceitful, in my
+case spoke true; but even were it the same with you, my poor child,
+swear to me that you will let your father inquire into the character,
+the habits, the heart, and the previous life of the man you
+distinguish with your love--if, by chance, there is such a man."
+
+"I will never marry without the consent of my father," answered
+Modeste.
+
+"You see, my darling," said Madame Mignon after a long pause, "that if
+I am dying by inches through Bettina's wrong-doing, your father would
+not survive yours, no, not for a moment. I know him; he would put a
+pistol to his head,--there could be no life, no happiness on earth for
+him."
+
+Modeste walked a few steps away from her mother, but immediately came
+back.
+
+"Why did you leave me?" demanded Madame Mignon.
+
+"You made me cry, mamma," answered Modeste.
+
+"Ah, my little darling, kiss me. You love no one here? you have no
+lover, have you?" she asked, holding Modeste on her lap, heart to
+heart.
+
+"No, my dear mamma," said the little Jesuit.
+
+"Can you swear it?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Modeste.
+
+Madame Mignon said no more; but she still doubted.
+
+"At least, if you do choose your husband, you will tell your father?"
+she resumed.
+
+"I promised that to my sister, and to you, mother. What evil do you
+think I could commit while I wear that ring upon my finger and read
+those words: 'Think of Bettina?' Poor sister!"
+
+At these words a truce of silence came between the pair; the mother's
+blighted eyes rained tears which Modeste could not check, though she
+threw herself upon her knees, and cried: "Forgive me! oh, forgive me,
+mother!"
+
+At this instant the excellent Dumay was coming up the hill of
+Ingouville on the double-quick,--a fact quite abnormal in the present
+life of the cashier.
+
+Three letters had brought ruin to the Mignons; a single letter now
+restored their fortunes. Dumay had received from a sea-captain just
+arrived from the China Seas the following letter containing the first
+news of his patron and friend, Charles Mignon:--
+
+  To Monsieur Jean Dumay:
+
+  My Dear Dumay,--I shall quickly follow, barring the chances of the
+  voyage, the vessel which carries this letter. In fact, I should
+  have taken it, but I did not wish to leave my own ship to which I
+  am accustomed.
+
+  I told you that no new was to be good news. But the first words of
+  this letter ought to make you a happy man. I have made seven
+  millions at the least. I am bringing back a large part of it in
+  indigo, one third in safe London securities, and another third in
+  good solid gold. Your remittances helped me to make the sum I had
+  settled in my own mind much sooner than I expected. I wanted two
+  millions for my daughters and a competence for myself.
+
+  I have been engaged in the opium trade with the largest houses in
+  Canton, all ten times richer than ever I was. You have no idea, in
+  Europe, what these rich East India merchants are. I went to Asia
+  Minor and purchased opium at low prices, and from thence to Canton
+  where I delivered my cargoes to the companies who control the
+  trade. My last expedition was to the Philippine Islands where I
+  exchanged opium for indigo of the first quality. In fact, I may
+  have half a million more than I stated, for I reckoned the indigo
+  at what it cost me. I have always been well in health; not the
+  slightest illness. That is the result of working for one's
+  children. Since the second year I have owned a pretty little brig
+  of seven hundred tons, called the "Mignon." She is built of oak,
+  double-planked, and copper-fastened; and all the interior fittings
+  were done to suit me. She is, in fact, an additional piece of
+  property.
+
+  A sea-life and the active habits required by my business have kept
+  me in good health. To tell you all this is the same as telling it
+  to my two daughters and my dear wife. I trust that the wretched
+  man who took away my Bettina deserted her when he heard of my
+  ruin; and that I shall find the poor lost lamb at the Chalet. My
+  three dear women and my Dumay! All four of you have been ever
+  present in my thoughts for the last three years. You are a rich
+  man, now, Dumay. Your share, outside of my own fortune, amounts to
+  five hundred and sixty thousand francs, for which I send you
+  herewith a check, which can only be paid to you in person by the
+  Mongenods, who have been duly advised from New York.
+
+  A few short months, and I shall see you all again, and all well, I
+  trust. My dear Dumay, if I write this letter to you it is because
+  I am anxious to keep my fortune a secret for the present. I
+  therefore leave to you the happiness of preparing my dear angels
+  for my return. I have had enough of commerce; and I am resolved to
+  leave Havre. My intention is to buy back the estate of La Bastie,
+  and to entail it, so as to establish an estate yielding at least a
+  hundred thousand francs a year, and then to ask the king to grant
+  that one of my sons-in-law may succeed to my name and title. You
+  know, my poor Dumay, what a terrible misfortune overtook us
+  through the fatal reputation of a large fortune,--my daughter's
+  honor was lost. I have therefore resolved that the amount of my
+  present fortune shall not be known. I shall not disembark at
+  Havre, but at Marseilles. I shall sell my indigo, and negotiate
+  for the purchase of La Bastie through the house of Mongenod in
+  Paris. I shall put my funds in the Bank of France and return to
+  the Chalet giving out that I have a considerable fortune in
+  merchandise. My daughters will be supposed to have two or three
+  hundred thousand francs. To choose which of my sons-in-law is
+  worthy to succeed to my title and estates and to live with us, is
+  now the object of my life; but both of them must be, like you and
+  me, honest, loyal, and firm men, and absolutely honorable.
+
+  My dear old fellow, I have never doubted you for a moment. We have
+  gone through wars and commerce together and now we will undertake
+  agriculture; you shall be my bailiff. You will like that, will you
+  not? And so, old friend, I leave it to your discretion to tell
+  what you think best to my wife and daughters; I rely upon your
+  prudence. In four years great changes may have taken place in
+  their characters.
+
+  Adieu, my old Dumay. Say to my daughters and to my wife that I
+  have never failed to kiss them in my thoughts morning and evening
+  since I left them. The second check for forty thousand francs
+  herewith enclosed is for my wife and children.
+
+  Till we meet.--Your colonel and friend,
+
+Charles Mignon.
+
+
+"Your father is coming," said Madame Mignon to her daughter.
+
+"What makes you think so, mamma?" asked Modeste.
+
+"Nothing else could make Dumay hurry himself."
+
+"Victory! victory!" cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the
+garden gate. "Madame, the colonel has not been ill a moment; he is
+coming back--coming back on the 'Mignon,' a fine ship of his own,
+which together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine
+hundred thousand francs. But he requires secrecy from all of us; his
+heart is still wrung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl."
+
+"He has still to learn her death," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right, to the rapacity
+of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the
+lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to
+any one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle,"
+he whispered in Modeste's ear, "write to your father and tell him of
+his loss and also the terrible results on your mother's health and
+eyesight; prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to
+get the letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will
+have to pass through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter; you
+have plenty of time. I will take the letter on Monday; Monday I shall
+probably go to Paris."
+
+Modeste was so afraid that Canalis and Dumay would meet that she
+started hastily for the house to write to her poet and put off the
+rendezvous.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Dumay, in a very humble manner and barring
+Modeste's way, "may your father find his daughter with no other
+feelings in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother
+before he was obliged to leave her."
+
+"I have sworn to myself, to my sister, and to my mother to be the joy,
+the consolation, and the glory of my father, and I SHALL KEEP MY
+OATH!" replied Modeste with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumay.
+"Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father's return with
+insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl's heart from beating--
+you don't want me to be a mummy, do you?" she said. "My hand belongs
+to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my father and
+my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, monsieur?"
+
+"Thank you, mademoiselle; you restore me to life," said Dumay, "but
+you might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!"
+
+"Swear to me," said her mother, "that you have not engaged a word or a
+look with any young man."
+
+"I can swear that, my dear mother," said Modeste, laughing, and
+looking at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a
+mischievous girl.
+
+"She must be false indeed if you are right," cried Dumay, when Modeste
+had left them and gone into the house.
+
+"My daughter Modeste may have faults," said her mother, "but falsehood
+is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true."
+
+"Well! then let us feel easy," continued Dumay, "and believe that
+misfortune has closed his account with us."
+
+"God grant it!" answered Madame Mignon. "You will see HIM, Dumay; but
+I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A DECLARATION OF LOVE,--SET TO MUSIC
+
+At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father,
+was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing
+her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much
+larger fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her
+new-found ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the
+six millions she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated
+by her two joys and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she
+seated herself at the piano, that confidant of so many young girls,
+who tell out their wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing
+them by the notes and tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his
+wife in the garden under the windows, telling her the secret of their
+own wealth, and questioning her as to her desires and her intentions.
+Madame Dumay had, like her husband, no other family than the Mignons.
+Husband and wife agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the
+Comte de La Bastie really meant to live in Provence, and to leave
+their money to whichever of Modeste's children might need it most.
+
+"Listen to Modeste," said Madame Mignon, addressing them. "None but a
+girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music."
+
+Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant
+lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a
+maiden's love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming
+acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently
+eat through the globe, if nothing stops it.
+
+Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting
+to music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here--albeit
+they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had
+mentioned--because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the
+inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste
+had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the
+admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too
+precise, of his measures.
+
+  THE MAIDEN'S SONG
+
+  Hear, arise! the lark is shaking
+    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
+  Sleep no more; the violet, waking,
+    Wafts her incense to the skies.
+
+  Flowers revived, their eyes unclosing,
+    See themselves in drops of dew
+  In each calyx-cup reposing,--
+    Pearls of a day their mirror true.
+
+  Breeze divine, the god of roses,
+    Passed by night to bless their bloom;
+  See! for him each bud uncloses,
+    Glows, and yields its rich perfume.
+
+  Then arise! the lark is shaking
+    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
+  Nought is sleeping--Heart, awaking,
+    Lift thine incense to the skies.
+
+"It is very pretty," said Madame Dumay. "Modeste is a musician, and
+that's the whole of it."
+
+"The devil is in her!" cried the cashier, into whose heart the
+suspicion of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.
+
+"She loves," persisted Madame Mignon.
+
+By succeeding, through the undeniable testimony of the song, in making
+the cashier a sharer in her belief as to the state of Modeste's heart,
+Madame Mignon destroyed the happiness the return and the prosperity of
+his master had brought him. The poor Breton went down the hill to
+Havre and to his desk in Gobenheim's counting-room with a heavy heart;
+then, before returning to dinner, he went to see Latournelle, to tell
+his fears, and beg once more for the notary's advice and assistance.
+
+"Yes, my dear friend," said Dumay, when they parted on the steps of
+the notary's door, "I now agree with madame; she loves,--yes, I am
+sure of it; and the devil knows the rest. I am dishonored."
+
+"Don't make yourself unhappy, Dumay," answered the little notary.
+"Among us all we can surely get the better of the little puss; sooner
+or later, every girl in love betrays herself,--you may be sure of
+that. But we will talk about it this evening."
+
+Thus it happened that all those devoted to the Mignon family were
+fully as disquieted and uncertain as they were before the old soldier
+tried the experiment which he expected would be so decisive. The ill-
+success of his past efforts so stimulated Dumay's sense of duty, that
+he determined not to go to Paris to see after his own fortune as
+announced by his patron, until he had guessed the riddle of Modeste's
+heart. These friends, to whom feelings were more precious than
+interests, well knew that unless the daughter were pure and innocent,
+the father would die of grief when he came to know the death of
+Bettina and the blindness of his wife. The distress of poor Dumay made
+such an impression on the Latournelles that they even forgot their
+parting with Exupere, whom they had sent off that morning to Paris.
+During dinner, while the three were alone, Monsieur and Madame
+Latournelle and Butscha turned the problem over and over in their
+minds, and discussed every aspect of it.
+
+"If Modeste loved any one in Havre she would have shown some fear
+yesterday," said Madame Latournelle; "her lover, therefore, lives
+somewhere else."
+
+"She swore to her mother this morning," said the notary, "in presence
+of Dumay, that she had not exchanged a look or a word with any living
+soul."
+
+"Then she loves after my fashion!" exclaimed Butscha.
+
+"And how is that, my poor lad?" asked Madame Latournelle.
+
+"Madame," said the little cripple, "I love alone and afar--oh! as far
+as from here to the stars."
+
+"How do you manage it, you silly fellow?" said Madame Latournelle,
+laughing.
+
+"Ah, madame!" said Butscha, "what you call my hump is the socket of my
+wings."
+
+"So that is the explanation of your seal, is it?" cried the notary.
+
+Butscha's seal was a star, and under it the words "Fulgens, sequar,"--
+"Shining One, I follow thee,"--the motto of the house of
+Chastillonest.
+
+"A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest," said
+Butscha, as if speaking to himself; "Modeste is clever enough to fear
+she may be loved only for her beauty."
+
+Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for,
+according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish.
+The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these
+outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the
+nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal
+conditions,--where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to
+say, in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being. From this,
+forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism,
+though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the
+spiritual world. It is rare to find a deformed person who is not
+gifted with some special faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety
+perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness. Like
+instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings,
+highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as
+Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently
+concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced
+to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive. This explains
+many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs,
+deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them,
+containing elixirs and precious balms.
+
+Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With
+all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to
+die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia,
+who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to
+capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking,
+he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of
+care upon his brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all
+these watchful eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which
+he should entrap his lady. It would have to be, he thought, by some
+intercepted glance, some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon
+lays his finger on a hidden sore. That evening Gobenheim did not
+appear, and Butscha was Dumay's partner against Monsieur and Madame
+Latournelle. During the few moment's of Modeste's absence, about nine
+o'clock, to prepare for her mother's bedtime, Madame Mignon and her
+friends spoke openly to one another; but the poor clerk, depressed by
+the conviction of Modeste's love, which had now seized upon him as
+upon the rest, seemed as remote from the discussion as Gobenheim had
+been the night before.
+
+"Well, what's the matter with you, Butscha?" cried Madame Latournelle;
+"one would really think you hadn't a friend in the world."
+
+Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a
+Swedish sailor, and whose mother was dead.
+
+"I have no one in the world but you," he answered with a troubled
+voice; "and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I
+can never lose it--and I will never deserve to lose it."
+
+This answer struck the sensitive chord of true delicacy in the minds
+of all present.
+
+"We love you, Monsieur Butscha," said Madame Mignon, with much feeling
+in her voice.
+
+"I've six hundred thousand francs of my own, this day," cried Dumay,
+"and you shall be a notary and the successor of Latournelle."
+
+The American wife took the hand of the poor hunchback and pressed it.
+
+"What! you have six hundred thousand francs!" exclaimed Latournelle,
+pricking up his ears as Dumay let fall the words; "and you allow these
+ladies to live as they do! Modeste ought to have a fine horse; and why
+doesn't she continue to take lessons in music, and painting, and--"
+
+"Why, he has only had the money a few hours!" cried the little wife.
+
+"Hush!" murmured Madame Mignon.
+
+While these words were exchanged, Butscha's august mistress turned
+towards him, preparing to make a speech:--
+
+"My son," she said, "you are so surrounded by true affection that I
+never thought how my thoughtless use of that familiar phrase might be
+construed; but you must thank me for my little blunder, because it has
+served to show you what friends your noble qualities have won."
+
+"Then you must have news from Monsieur Mignon," resumed the notary.
+
+"He is on his way home," said Madame Mignon; "but let us keep the
+secret to ourselves. When my husband learns how faithful Butscha has
+been to us, how he has shown us the warmest and the most disinterested
+friendship when others have given us the cold shoulder, he will not
+let you alone provide for him, Dumay. And so, my friend," she added,
+turning her blind face toward Butscha; "you can begin at once to
+negotiate with Latournelle."
+
+"He's of legal age, twenty-five and a half years. As for me, it will
+be paying a debt, my boy, to make the purchase easy for you," said the
+notary.
+
+Butscha was kissing Madame Mignon's hand, and his face was wet with
+tears as Modeste opened the door of the salon.
+
+"What are you doing to my Black Dwarf?" she demanded. "Who is making
+him unhappy?"
+
+"Ah! Mademoiselle Mignon, do we luckless fellows, cradled in
+misfortune, ever weep for grief? They have just shown me as much
+affection as I could feel for them if they were indeed my own
+relations. I'm to be a notary; I shall be rich. Ha! ha! the poor
+Butscha may become the rich Butscha. You don't know what audacity
+there is in this abortion," he cried.
+
+With that he gave himself a resounding blow on the cavity of his chest
+and took up a position before the fireplace, after casting a glance at
+Modeste, which slipped like a ray of light between his heavy
+half-closed eyelids. He perceived, in this unexpected incident, a
+chance of interrogating the heart of his sovereign. Dumay thought for
+a moment that the clerk dared to aspire to Modeste, and he exchanged a
+rapid glance with the others, who understood him, and began to eye the
+little man with a species of terror mingled with curiosity.
+
+"I, too, have my dreams," said Butscha, not taking his eyes from
+Modeste.
+
+The young girl lowered her eyelids with a movement that was a
+revelation to the young man.
+
+"You love romance," he said, addressing her. "Let me, in this moment
+of happiness, tell you mine; and you shall tell me in return whether
+the conclusion of the tale I have invented for my life is possible. To
+me wealth would bring greater happiness than to other men; for the
+highest happiness I can imagine would be to enrich the one I loved.
+You, mademoiselle, who know so many things, tell me if it is possible
+for a man to make himself beloved independently of his person, be it
+handsome or ugly, and for his spirit only?"
+
+Modeste raised her eyes and looked at Butscha. It was a piercing and
+questioning glance; for she shared Dumay's suspicion of Butscha's
+motive.
+
+"Let me be rich, and I will seek some beautiful poor girl, abandoned
+like myself, who has suffered, who knows what misery is. I will write
+to her and console her, and be her guardian spirit; she shall read my
+heart, my soul; she shall possess by double wealth, my two wealths,--
+my gold, delicately offered, and my thought robed in all the splendor
+which the accident of birth has denied to my grotesque body. But I
+myself shall remain hidden like the cause that science seeks. God
+himself may not be glorious to the eye. Well, naturally, the maiden
+will be curious; she will wish to see me; but I shall tell her that I
+am a monster of ugliness; I shall picture myself hideous."
+
+At these words Modeste gave Butscha a glance that looked him through
+and through. If she had said aloud, "What do you know of my love?" she
+could not have been more explicit.
+
+"If I have the honor of being loved for the poem of my heart, if some
+day such love may make a woman think me only slightly deformed, I ask
+you, mademoiselle, shall I not be happier than the handsomest of men,
+--as happy as a man of genius beloved by some celestial being like
+yourself."
+
+The color which suffused the young girl's face told the cripple nearly
+all he sought to know.
+
+"Well, if that be so," he went on, "if we enrich the one we love, if
+we please the spirit and withdraw the body, is not that the way to
+make one's self beloved? At any rate it is the dream of your poor
+dwarf,--a dream of yesterday; for to-day your mother gives me the key
+to future wealth by promising me the means of buying a practice. But
+before I become another Gobenheim, I seek to know whether this dream
+could be really carried out. What do you say, mademoiselle, YOU?"
+
+Modeste was so astonished that she did not notice the question. The
+trap of the lover was much better baited than that of the soldier, for
+the poor girl was rendered speechless.
+
+"Poor Butscha!" whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband. "Do you
+think he is going mad?"
+
+"You want to realize the story of Beauty and the Beast," said Modeste
+at length; "but you forget that the Beast turned into Prince
+Charming."
+
+"Do you think so?" said the dwarf. "Now I have always thought that
+that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible,
+obliterating the form under the light of the spirit. If I were not
+loved I should stay hidden, that is all. You and yours, madame," he
+continued, addressing his mistress, "instead of having a dwarf at your
+service, will now have a life and a fortune."
+
+So saying, Butscha resumed his seat, remarking to the three whist-
+players with an assumption of calmness, "Whose deal is it?" but within
+his soul he whispered sadly to himself: "She wants to be loved for
+herself; she corresponds with some pretended great man; how far has it
+gone?"
+
+"Dear mamma, it is nearly ten o'clock," said Modeste.
+
+Madame Mignon said good-night to her friends, and went to bed.
+
+They who wish to love in secret may have Pyrenean hounds, mothers,
+Dumays, and Latournelles to spy upon them, and yet not be in any
+danger; but when it comes to a lover!--ah! that is diamond cut
+diamond, flame against flame, mind to mind, an equation whose terms
+are mutual.
+
+On Sunday morning Butscha arrived at the Chalet before Madame
+Latournelle, who always came to take Modeste to church, and he
+proceeded to blockade the house in expectation of the postman.
+
+"Have you a letter for Mademoiselle Mignon?" he said to that humble
+functionary when he appeared.
+
+"No, monsieur, none."
+
+"This house has been a good customer to the post of late," remarked
+the clerk.
+
+"You may well say that," replied the man.
+
+Modeste both heard and saw the little colloquy from her chamber
+window, where she always posted herself behind the blinds at this
+particular hour to watch for the postman. She ran downstairs, went
+into the little garden, and called in an imperative voice:--
+
+"Monsieur Butscha!"
+
+"Here am I, mademoiselle," said the cripple, reaching the gate as
+Modeste herself opened it.
+
+"Will you be good enough to tell me whether among your various titles
+to a woman's affection you count that of the shameless spying in which
+you are now engaged?" demanded the girl, endeavoring to crush her
+slave with the glance and gesture of a queen.
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle," he answered proudly. "Ah! I never expected," he
+continued in a low tone, "that the grub could be of service to a star,
+--but so it is. Would you rather that your mother and Monsieur Dumay
+and Madame Latournelle had guessed your secret than one, excluded as
+it were from life, who seeks to be to you one of those flowers that
+you cut and wear for a moment? They all know you love; but I, I alone,
+KNOW HOW. Use me as you would a vigilant watch-dog; I will obey you,
+protect you, and never bark; neither will I condemn you. I ask only to
+be of service to you. Your father has made Dumay keeper of the hen-
+roost, take Butscha to watch outside,--poor Butscha, who doesn't ask
+for anything, not so much as a bone."
+
+"Well, I've give you a trial," said Modeste, whose strongest desire
+was to get rid of so clever a watcher. "Please go at once to all the
+hotels in Graville and in Havre, and ask if a gentleman has arrived
+from England named Monsieur Arthur--"
+
+"Listen to me, mademoiselle," said Butscha, interrupting Modeste
+respectfully. "I will go and take a walk on the seashore, for you
+don't want me to go to church to-day; that's what it is."
+
+Modeste looked at her dwarf with a perfectly stupid astonishment.
+
+"Mademoiselle, you have wrapped your face in cotton-wool and a silk
+handkerchief, but there's nothing the matter with you; and you have
+put that thick veil on your bonnet to see some one yourself without
+being seen."
+
+"Where did you acquire all that perspicacity?" cried Modeste,
+blushing.
+
+"Moreover, mademoiselle, you have not put on your corset; a cold in
+the head wouldn't oblige you to disfigure your waist and wear half a
+dozen petticoats, nor hide your hands in these old gloves, and your
+pretty feet in those hideous shoes, nor dress yourself like a beggar-
+woman, nor--"
+
+"That's enough," she said. "How am I to be certain that you will obey
+me?"
+
+"My master is obliged to go to Sainte-Adresse. He does not like it,
+but he is so truly good he won't deprive me of my Sunday; I will offer
+to go for him."
+
+"Go, and I will trust you."
+
+"You are sure I can do nothing for you in Havre?"
+
+"Nothing. Hear me, mysterious dwarf,--look," she continued, pointing
+to the cloudless sky; "can you see a single trace of that bird that
+flew by just now? No; well then, my actions are pure as the air is
+pure, and leave no stain behind them. You may reassure Dumay and the
+Latournelles, and my mother. That hand," she said, holding up a pretty
+delicate hand, with the points of the rosy fingers, through which the
+light shone, slightly turning back, "will never be given, it will
+never even be kissed by what people call a lover until my father has
+returned."
+
+"Why don't you want me in the church to-day?"
+
+"Do you venture to question me after all I have done you the honor to
+say, and to ask of you?"
+
+Butscha bowed without another word, and departed to find his master,
+in all the rapture of being taken into the service of his goddess.
+
+Half an hour later, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle came to fetch
+Modeste, who complained of a horrible toothache.
+
+"I really have not had the courage to dress myself," she said.
+
+"Well then," replied the worthy chaperone, "stay at home."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Modeste. "I would rather not. I have bundled myself up,
+and I don't think it will do me any harm to go out."
+
+And Mademoiselle Mignon marched off beside Latournelle, refusing to
+take his arm lest she should be questioned about the outward trembling
+which betrayed her inward agitation at the thought of at last seeing
+her great poet. One look, the first,--was it not about to decide her
+fate?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF MONSIEUR DE LA BRIERE
+
+Is there in the life of man a more delightful moment than that of a
+first rendezvous? Are the sensations then hidden at the bottom of our
+hearts and finding their first expression ever renewed? Can we feel
+again the nameless pleasures that we felt when, like Ernest de La
+Briere, we looked up our sharpest razors, our finest shirt, an
+irreproachable collar, and our best clothes? We deify the garments
+associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic
+fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either
+party guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away. Are not
+such things like the flower of wild fruits, bitter-sweet, grown in the
+heart of a forest, the joy of the scant sun-rays, the joy, as Canalis
+says in the "Maiden's Song," of the plant itself whose eyes unclosing
+see its own image within its breast?
+
+Such emotions, now taking place in La Briere, tend to show that, like
+other poor fellows for whom life begins in toil and care, he had never
+yet been loved. Arriving at Havre overnight, he had gone to bed at
+once, like a true coquette, to obliterate all traces of fatigue; and
+now, after taking his bath, he had put himself into a costume
+carefully adapted to show him off to the best advantage. This is,
+perhaps, the right moment to exhibit a full-length portrait of him, if
+only to justify the last letter that Modeste was still to write to
+him.
+
+Born of a good family in Toulouse, and allied by marriage to the
+minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air
+of good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and
+the habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness
+which was not pedantic,--though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of
+premature gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon
+all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-
+tints, though without color, and relieved by a small moustache and
+imperial a la Mazarin. Without this evidence of virility he might have
+resembled a young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of his
+face and the cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of a
+set of teeth, regular enough to have seemed artificial. Add to these
+womanly points a habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the
+face; as gentle, too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and
+you will readily understand how it was that the minister occasionally
+called his young secretary Mademoiselle de La Briere. The full, clear
+forehead, well framed by abundant black hair, was dreamy, and did not
+contradict the character of the face, which was altogether melancholy.
+The prominent arch of the upper eyelid, though very beautifully cut,
+overshadowed the glance of the eye, and added a physical sadness,--if
+we may so call it,--produced by the droop of the lid over the eyeball.
+This inward doubt or eclipse--which is put into language by the word
+modesty--was expressed in his whole person. Perhaps we shall be able
+to make his appearance better understood if we say that the logic of
+design required greater length in the oval of his head, more space
+between the chin, which ended abruptly, and the forehead, which was
+reduced in height by the way in which the hair grew. The face had, in
+short, a rather compressed appearance. Hard work had already drawn
+furrows between the eyebrows, which were somewhat too thick and too
+near together, like those of a jealous nature. Though La Briere was
+then slight, he belonged to the class of temperaments which begin,
+after they are thirty, to take on an unexpected amount of flesh.
+
+The young man would have seemed to a student of French history a very
+fair representative of the royal and almost inconceivable figure of
+Louis XIII.,--that historical figure of melancholy modesty without
+known cause; pallid beneath the crown; loving the dangers of war and
+the fatigues of hunting, but hating work; timid with his mistress to
+the extent of keeping away from her; so indifferent as to allow the
+head of his friend to be cut off,--a figure that nothing can explain
+but his remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a
+Catholic Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the
+undying worm which gnawed at the king's vitals was in Ernest's case
+simply distrust of himself,--the timidity of a man to whom no woman
+had ever said, "Ah, how I love thee!" and, above all, the spirit of
+self-devotion without an object. After hearing the knell of the
+monarchy in the fall of his patron's ministry, the poor fellow had
+next fallen upon a rock covered with exquisite mosses, named Canalis;
+he was, therefore, still seeking a power to love, and this spaniel-
+like search for a master gave him outwardly the air of a king who has
+met with his. This play of feeling, and a general tone of suffering in
+the young man's face made it more really beautiful than he was himself
+aware of; for he had always been annoyed to find himself classed by
+women among the "handsome disconsolate,"--a class which has passed out
+of fashion in these days, when every man seeks to blow his own trumpet
+and put himself in the advance.
+
+The self-distrustful Ernest now rested his immediate hopes on the
+fashionable clothes he intended to wear. He put on, for this sacred
+interview, where everything depended on a first impression, a pair of
+black trousers and carefully polished boots, a sulphur-colored
+waistcoat, which left to sight an exquisitely fine shirt with opal
+buttons, a black cravat, and a small blue surtout coat which seemed
+glued to his back and shoulders by some newly-invented process. The
+ribbon of the Legion of honor was in his buttonhole. He wore a well-
+fitting pair of kid gloves of the Florentine bronze color, and carried
+his cane and hat in the left hand with a gesture and air that was
+worthy of the Grand Monarch, and enabled him to show, as the sacred
+precincts required, his bare head with the light falling on his
+carefully arranged hair. He stationed himself before the service began
+in the church porch, from whence he could examine the church, and the
+Christians--more particularly the female Christians--who dipped their
+fingers in the holy water.
+
+An inward voice cried to Modeste as she entered, "It is he!" That
+surtout, and indeed the whole bearing of the young man were
+essentially Parisian; the ribbon, the gloves, the cane, the very
+perfume of his hair were not of Havre. So when La Briere turned about
+to examine the tall and imposing Madame Latournelle, the notary, and
+the bundled-up (expression sacred to women) figure of Modeste, the
+poor child, though she had carefully tutored herself for the event,
+received a violent blow on her heart when her eyes rested on this
+poetic figure, illuminated by the full light of day as it streamed
+through the open door. She could not be mistaken; a small white rose
+nearly hid the ribbon of the Legion. Would he recognize his unknown
+mistress muffled in an old bonnet with a double veil? Modeste was so
+in fear of love's clairvoyance that she began to stoop in her walk
+like an old woman.
+
+"Wife," said little Latournelle as they took their seats, "that
+gentleman does not belong to Havre."
+
+"So many strangers come here," answered his wife.
+
+"But," said the notary, "strangers never come to look at a church like
+ours, which is less than two centuries old."
+
+Ernest remained in the porch throughout the service without seeing any
+woman who realized his hopes. Modeste, on her part, could not control
+the trembling of her limbs until Mass was nearly over. She was in the
+grasp of a joy that none but she herself could depict. At last she
+heard the foot-fall of a gentleman on the pavement of the aisle. The
+service over, La Briere was making a circuit of the church, where no
+one now remained but the punctiliously pious, whom he proceeded to
+subject to a shrewd and keen analysis. Ernest noticed that a prayer-
+book shook violently in the hands of a veiled woman as he passed her;
+as she alone kept her face hidden his suspicions were aroused, and
+then confirmed by Modeste's dress, which the lover's eye now scanned
+and noted. He left the church with the Latournelles and followed them
+at a distance to the rue Royale, where he saw them enter a house
+accompanied by Modeste, whose custom it was to stay with her friends
+till the hour of vespers. After examining the little house, which was
+ornamented with scutcheons, he asked the name of the owner, and was
+told that he was Monsieur Latournelle, the chief notary in Havre. As
+Ernest lounged along the rue Royale hoping for a glimpse into the
+house, Modeste caught sight of him, and thereupon declared herself too
+ill to go to vespers. Poor Ernest thus had his trouble for his pains.
+He dared not wander about Ingouville; moreover, he made it a point of
+honor to obey orders, and he therefore went back to Paris, previously
+writing a letter which Francoise Cochet duly delivered on the morrow
+with the Havre postmark.
+
+It was the custom of Monsieur and Madame Latournelle to dine at the
+Chalet every Sunday when they brought back Modeste after vespers. So,
+as soon as the invalid felt a little better, they started for
+Ingouville, accompanied by Butscha. Once at home, the happy Modeste
+forgot her pretended illness and her disguise, and dressed herself
+charmingly, humming as she came down to dinner,--
+
+  "Nought is sleeping--Heart! awaking,
+  Lift thine incense to the skies."
+
+Butscha shuddered slightly when he caught sight of her, so changed did
+she seem to him. The wings of love were fastened to her shoulders; she
+had the air of a nymph, a Psyche; her cheeks glowed with the divine
+color of happiness.
+
+"Who wrote the words to which you have put that pretty music?" asked
+her mother.
+
+"Canalis, mamma," she answered, flushing rosy red from her throat to
+her forehead.
+
+"Canalis!" cried the dwarf, to whom the inflections of the girl's
+voice and her blush told the only thing of which he was still
+ignorant. "He, that great poet, does he write songs?"
+
+"They are only simple verses," she said, "which I have ventured to set
+to German airs."
+
+"No, no," interrupted Madame Mignon, "the music is your own, my
+daughter."
+
+Modeste, feeling that she grew more and more crimson, went off into
+the garden, calling Butscha after her.
+
+"You can do me a great service," she said. "Dumay is keeping a secret
+from my mother and me as to the fortune which my father is bringing
+back with him; and I want to know what it is. Did not Dumay send papa
+when he first went away over five hundred thousand francs? Yes. Well,
+papa is not the kind of man to stay away four years and only double
+his capital. It seems he is coming back on a ship of his own, and
+Dumay's share amounts to almost six hundred thousand francs."
+
+"There is no need to question Dumay," said Butscha. "Your father lost,
+as you know, about four millions when he went away, and he has
+doubtless recovered them. He would of course give Dumay ten per cent
+of his profits; the worthy man admitted the other day how much it was,
+and my master and I think that in that case the colonel's fortune must
+amount to six or seven millions--"
+
+"Oh, papa!" cried Modeste, crossing her hands on her breast and
+looking up to heaven, "twice you have given me life!"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle!" said Butscha, "you love a poet. That kind of man
+is more or less of a Narcissus. Will he know how to love you? A
+phrase-maker, always busy in fitting words together, must be a bore.
+Mademoiselle, a poet is no more poetry than a seed is a flower."
+
+"Butscha, I never saw so handsome a man."
+
+"Beauty is a veil which often serves to hide imperfections."
+
+"He has the most angelic heart of heaven--"
+
+"I pray God you may be right," said the dwarf, clasping his hands,
+"--and happy! That man shall have, as you have, a servant in Jean
+Butscha. I will not be notary; I shall give that up; I shall study the
+sciences."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, to train up your children, if you will deign to
+make me their tutor. But, oh! if you would only listen to some advice.
+Let me take up this matter; let me look into the life and habits of
+this man,--find out if he is kind, or bad-tempered, or gentle, if he
+commands the respect which you merit in a husband, if he is able to
+love utterly, preferring you to everything, even his own talent--"
+
+"What does that signify if I love him?"
+
+"Ah, true!" cried the dwarf.
+
+At that instant Madame Mignon was saying to her friends,--
+
+"My daughter saw the man she loves this morning."
+
+"Then it must have been that sulphur waistcoat which puzzled you so,
+Latournelle," said his wife. "The young man had a pretty white rose in
+his buttonhole."
+
+"Ah!" sighed the mother, "the sign of recognition."
+
+"And he also wore the ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor. He
+is a charming young man. But we are all deceiving ourselves; Modeste
+never raised her veil, and her clothes were huddled on like a beggar-
+woman's--"
+
+"And she said she was ill," cried the notary; "but she has taken off
+her mufflings and is just as well as she ever was."
+
+"It is incomprehensible!" said Dumay.
+
+"Not at all," said the notary; "it is now as clear as day."
+
+"My child," said Madame Mignon to Modeste, as she came into the room,
+followed by Butscha, "did you see a well-dressed young man at church
+this morning, with a white rose in his button-hole?"
+
+"I saw him," said Butscha quickly, perceiving by everybody's strained
+attention that Modeste was likely to fall into a trap. "It was
+Grindot, the famous architect, with whom the town is in treaty for the
+restoration of the church. He has just come from Paris, and I met him
+this morning examining the exterior as I was on my way to Sainte-
+Adresse."
+
+"Oh, an architect, was he? he puzzled me," said Modeste, for whom
+Butscha had thus gained time to recover herself.
+
+Dumay looked askance at Butscha. Modeste, fully warned, recovered her
+impenetrable composure. Dumay's distrust was now thoroughly aroused,
+and he resolved to go the mayor's office early in the morning and
+ascertain if the architect had really been in Havre the previous day.
+Butscha, on the other hand, was equally determined to go to Paris and
+find out something about Canalis.
+
+Gobenheim came to play whist, and by his presence subdued and
+compressed all this fermentation of feelings. Modeste awaited her
+mother's bedtime with impatience. She intended to write, but never did
+so except at night. Here is the letter which love dictated to her
+while all the world was sleeping:--
+
+  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Ah! my friend, my well-beloved! What
+  atrocious falsehoods those portraits in the shop-windows are! And
+  I, who made that horrible lithograph my joy!--I am humbled at the
+  thought of loving one so handsome. No; it is impossible that those
+  Parisian women are so stupid as not to have seen their dreams
+  fulfilled in you. You neglected! you unloved! I do not believe a
+  word of all that you have written me about your lonely and obscure
+  life, your hunger for an idol,--sought in vain until now. You have
+  been too well loved, monsieur; your brow, white and smooth as a
+  magnolia leaf, reveals it; and it is I who must be neglected,--for
+  who am I? Ah! why have you called me to life? I felt for a moment
+  as though the heavy burden of the flesh was leaving me; my soul
+  had broken the crystal which held it captive; it pervaded my whole
+  being; the cold silence of material things had ceased; all things
+  in nature had a voice and spoke to me. The old church was
+  luminous. It's arched roof, brilliant with gold and azure like
+  those of an Italian cathedral, sparkled above my head. Melodies
+  such as the angels sang to martyrs, quieting their pains, sounded
+  from the organ. The rough pavements of Havre seemed to my feet a
+  flowery mead; the sea spoke to me with a voice of sympathy, like
+  an old friend whom I had never truly understood. I saw clearly how
+  the roses in my garden had long adored me and bidden me love; they
+  lifted their heads and smiled as I came back from church. I heard
+  your name, "Melchior," chiming in the flower-bells; I saw it
+  written on the clouds. Yes, yes, I live, I am living, thanks to
+  thee,--my poet, more beautiful than that cold, conventional Lord
+  Byron, with a face as dull as the English climate. One glance of
+  thine, thine Orient glance, pierced through my double veil and
+  sent thy blood to my heart, and from thence to my head and feet.
+  Ah! that is not the life our mother gave us. A hurt to thee would
+  hurt me too at the very instant it was given,--my life exists by
+  thy thought only. I know now the purpose of the divine faculty of
+  music; the angels invented it to utter love. Ah, my Melchior, to
+  have genius and to have beauty is too much; a man should be made
+  to choose between them at his birth.
+
+  When I think of the treasures of tenderness and affection which
+  you have given me, and more especially for the last month, I ask
+  myself if I dream. No, but you hide some mystery; what woman can
+  yield you up to me and not die? Ah! jealousy has entered my heart
+  with love,--love in which I could not have believed. How could I
+  have imagined so mighty a conflagration? And now--strange and
+  inconceivable revulsion!--I would rather you were ugly.
+
+  What follies I committed after I came home! The yellow dahlias
+  reminded me of your waistcoat, the white roses were my loving
+  friends; I bowed to them with a look that belonged to you, like
+  all that is of me. The very color of the gloves, moulded to hands
+  of a gentleman, your step along the nave,--all, all, is so printed
+  on my memory that sixty years hence I shall see the veriest
+  trifles of this day of days,--the color of the atmosphere, the ray
+  of sunshine that flickered on a certain pillar; I shall hear the
+  prayer your step interrupted; I shall inhale the incense of the
+  altar; forever I shall feel above our heads the priestly hands
+  that blessed us both as you passed by me at the closing
+  benediction. The good Abbe Marcelin married us then! The
+  happiness, above that of earth, which I feel in this new world of
+  unexpected emotions can only be equalled by the joy of telling it
+  to you, of sending it back to him who poured it into my heart with
+  the lavishness of the sun itself. No more veils, no more
+  disguises, my beloved. Come back to me, oh, come back soon. With
+  joy I now unmask.
+
+  You have no doubt heard of the house of Mignon in Havre? Well, I
+  am, through an irreparable misfortune, its sole heiress. But you
+  are not to look down upon us, descendant of an Auvergne knight;
+  the arms of the Mignon de La Bastie will do no dishonor to those
+  of Canalis. We bear gules, on a bend sable four bezants or;
+  quarterly four crosses patriarchal or; a cardinal's hat as crest,
+  and the fiocchi for supports. Dear, I will be faithful to our
+  motto: "Una fides, unus Dominus!"--the true faith, and one only
+  Master.
+
+  Perhaps, my friend, you will find some irony in my name, after all
+  that I have done, and all that I herein avow. I am named Modeste.
+  Therefore I have not deceived you by signing "O. d'Este M."
+  Neither have I misled you about our fortune; it will amount, I
+  believe, to the sum which rendered you so virtuous. I know that to
+  you money is a consideration of small importance; therefore I
+  speak of it without reserve. Let me tell you how happy it makes me
+  to give freedom of action to our happiness,--to be able to say,
+  when the fancy for travel takes us, "Come, let us go in a
+  comfortable carriage, sitting side by side, without a thought of
+  money"--happy, in short, to tell the king, "I have the fortune
+  which you require in your peers." Thus Modeste Mignon can be of
+  service to you, and her gold will have the noblest of uses.
+
+  As to your servant herself,--you did see her once, at her window.
+  Yes, "the fairest daughter of Eve the fair" was indeed your
+  unknown damozel; but how little the Modeste of to-day resembles
+  her of that long past era! That one was in her shroud, this one--
+  have I made you know it?--has received from you the life of life.
+  Love, pure, and sanctioned, the love my father, now returning
+  rich and prosperous, will authorize, has raised me with its
+  powerful yet childlike hand from the grave in which I slept. You
+  have wakened me as the sun wakens the flowers. The eyes of your
+  beloved are no longer those of the little Modeste so daring in her
+  ignorance,--no, they are dimmed with the sight of happiness, and
+  the lids close over them. To-day I tremble lest I can never
+  deserve my fate. The king has come in his glory; my lord has now a
+  subject who asks pardon for the liberties she has taken, like the
+  gambler with loaded dice after cheating Monsieur de Grammont.
+
+  My cherished poet! I will be thy Mignon--happier far than the
+  Mignon of Goethe, for thou wilt leave me in mine own land,--in thy
+  heart. Just as I write this pledge of our betrothal a nightingale
+  in the Vilquin park answers for thee. Ah, tell me quick that his
+  note, so pure, so clear, so full, which fills my heart with joy 
+  and love like an Annunciation, does not lie to me.
+
+  My father will pass through Paris on his way from Marseilles; the
+  house of Mongenod, with whom he corresponds, will know his
+  address. Go to him, my Melchior, tell him that you love me; but do
+  not try to tell him how I love you,--let that be forever between
+  ourselves and God. I, my dear one, am about to tell everything to
+  my mother. Her heart will justify my conduct; she will rejoice in
+  our secret poem, so romantic, human and divine in one.
+
+  You have the confession of the daughter; you must now obtain the
+  consent of the Comte de La Bastie, father of your
+
+Modeste.
+
+
+  P.S.--Above all, do not come to Havre without having first
+  obtained my father's consent. If you love me you will not fail to
+  find him on his way through Paris.
+
+
+"What are you doing, up at this hour, Mademoiselle Modeste?" said the
+voice of Dumay at her door.
+
+"Writing to my father," she answered; "did you not tell me you should
+start in the morning?"
+
+Dumay had nothing to say to that, and he went to bed, while Modeste
+wrote another long letter, this time to her father.
+
+On the morrow, Francois Cochet, terrified at seeing the Havre postmark
+on the envelope which Ernest had mailed the night before, brought her
+young mistress the following letter and took away the one which
+Modeste had written:--
+
+  To Mademoiselle O. d'Este M.,--My heart tells me that you were the
+  woman so carefully veiled and disguised, and seated between
+  Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, who have but one child, a son.
+  Ah, my love, if you have only a modest station, without 
+  distinction, without importance, without money even, you do not
+  know how happy that would make me. You ought to understand me by
+  this time; why will you not tell me the truth? I am no poet,--
+  except in heart, through love, through you. Oh! what power of
+  affection there is in me to keep me here in this hotel, instead of
+  mounting to Ingouville which I can see from my windows. Will you
+  ever love me as I love you? To leave Havre in such uncertainty! Am
+  I not punished for loving you as if I had committed a crime? But I
+  obey you blindly. Let me have a letter quickly, for if you have
+  been mysterious, I have returned you mystery for mystery, and I
+  must at last throw off my disguise, show you the poet that I am,
+  and abdicate my borrowed glory.
+
+This letter made Modeste terribly uneasy. She could not get back the
+one which Francoise had carried away before she came to the last
+words, whose meaning she now sought by reading them again and again;
+but she went to her own room and wrote an answer in which she demanded
+an immediate explanation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MATTERS GROWN COMPLICATED
+
+During these little events other little events were going on in Havre,
+which caused Modeste to forget her present uneasiness. Dumay went down
+to Havre early in the morning, and soon discovered that no architect
+had been in town the day before. Furious at Butscha's lie, which
+revealed a conspiracy of which he was resolved to know the meaning, he
+rushed from the mayor's office to his friend Latournelle.
+
+"Where's your Master Butscha?" he demanded of the notary, when he saw
+that the clerk was not in his place.
+
+"Butscha, my dear fellow, has gone to Paris. He heard some news of his
+father this morning on the quays, from a Swedish sailor. It seems the
+father went to the Indies and served a prince, or something, and he is
+now in Paris."
+
+"Lies! it's all a trick! infamous! I'll find that damned cripple if
+I've got to go express to Paris for him," cried Dumay. "Butscha is
+deceiving us; he knows something about Modeste, and hasn't told us. If
+he meddles in this thing he shall never be a notary. I'll roll him in
+the mud from which he came, I'll--"
+
+"Come, come, my friend; never hang a man before you try him," said
+Latournelle, frightened at Dumay's rage.
+
+After stating the facts on which his suspicions were founded, Dumay
+begged Madame Latournelle to go and stay at the Chalet during his
+absence.
+
+"You will find the colonel in Paris," said the notary. "In the
+shipping news quoted this morning in the Journal of Commerce, I found
+under the head of Marseilles--here, see for yourself," he said,
+offering the paper. "'The Bettina Mignon, Captain Mignon, arrived
+October 6'; it is now the 17th, and the colonel is sure to be in
+Paris."
+
+Dumay requested Gobenheim to do without him in future, and then went
+back to the Chalet, which he reached just as Modeste was sealing her
+two letters, to her father and Canalis. Except for the address the
+letters were precisely alike both in weight and appearance. Modeste
+thought she had laid that to her father over that to her Melchior, but
+had, in fact, done exactly the reverse. This mistake, so often made in
+the little things of life, occasioned the discovery of her secret by
+Dumay and her mother. The former was talking vehemently to Madame
+Mignon in the salon, and revealing to her his fresh fears caused by
+Modeste's duplicity and Butscha's connivance.
+
+"Madame," he cried, "he is a serpent whom we have warmed in our
+bosoms; there's no place in his contorted little body for a soul!"
+
+Modeste put the letter for her father into the pocket of her apron,
+supposing it to be that for Canalis, and came downstairs with the
+letter for her lover in her hand, to see Dumay before he started for
+Paris.
+
+"What has happened to my Black Dwarf? why are you talking so loud!"
+she said, appearing at the door.
+
+"Mademoiselle, Butscha has gone to Paris, and you, no doubt, know why,
+--to carry on that affair of the little architect with the sulphur
+waistcoat, who, unluckily for the hunchback's lies, has never been
+here."
+
+Modeste was struck dumb; feeling sure that the dwarf had departed on a
+mission of inquiry as to her poet's morals, she turned pale, and sat
+down.
+
+"I'm going after him; I shall find him," continued Dumay. "Is that the
+letter for your father, mademoiselle?" he added, holding out his hand.
+"I will take it to the Mongenods. God grant the colonel and I may not
+pass each other on the road."
+
+Modeste gave him the letter. Dumay looked mechanically at the address.
+
+"'Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, No. 29'!"
+he cried out; "what does that mean?"
+
+"Ah, my daughter! that is the man you love," exclaimed Madame Mignon;
+"the stanzas you set to music were his--"
+
+"And that's his portrait that you have in a frame upstairs," added
+Dumay.
+
+"Give me back that letter, Monsieur Dumay," said Modeste, erecting
+herself like a lioness defending her cubs.
+
+"There it is, mademoiselle," he replied.
+
+Modeste put it into the bosom of her dress, and gave Dumay the one
+intended for her father.
+
+"I know what you are capable of, Dumay," she said; "and if you take
+one step against Monsieur de Canalis, I shall take another out of this
+house, to which I will never return."
+
+"You will kill your mother, mademoiselle," replied Dumay, who left the
+room and called his wife.
+
+The poor mother was indeed half-fainting,--struck to the heart by
+Modeste's words.
+
+"Good-bye, wife," said the Breton, kissing the American. "Take care of
+the mother; I go to save the daughter."
+
+He made his preparations for the journey in a few minutes, and started
+for Havre. An hour later he was travelling post to Paris, with the
+haste that nothing but passion or speculation can get out of wheels.
+
+Recovering herself under Modeste's tender care, Madame Mignon went up
+to her bedroom leaning on the arm of her daughter, to whom she said,
+as her sole reproach, when they were alone:--
+
+"My unfortunate child, see what you have done! Why did you conceal
+anything from me? Am I so harsh?"
+
+"Oh! I was just going to tell it to you comfortably," sobbed Modeste.
+
+She thereupon related everything to her mother, read her the letters
+and their answers, and shed the rose of her poem petal by petal into
+the heart of the kind German woman. When this confidence, which took
+half the day, was over, when she saw something that was almost a smile
+on the lips of the too indulgent mother, Modeste fell upon her breast
+in tears.
+
+"Oh, mother!" she said amid her sobs, "you, whose heart, all gold and
+poetry, is a chosen vessel, chosen of God to hold a sacred love, a
+single and celestial love that endures for life; you, whom I wish to
+imitate by loving no one but my husband,--you will surely understand
+what bitter tears I am now shedding. This butterfly, this Psyche of my
+thoughts, this dual soul which I have nurtured with maternal care, my
+love, my sacred love, this living mystery of mysteries--it is about to
+fall into vulgar hands, and they will tear its diaphanous wings and
+rend its veil under the miserable pretext of enlightening me, of
+discovering whether genius is as prudent as a banker, whether my
+Melchior has saved his money, or whether he has some entanglement to
+shake off; they want to find out if he is guilty to bourgeois eyes of
+youthful indiscretions,--which to the sun of our love are like the
+clouds of the dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See!
+feel my hand, it burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it."
+
+And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed,
+causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and
+Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the
+lieutenant to Paris,--to which city the logic of events compels us to
+transport our drama for a moment.
+
+Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially
+those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither
+loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the
+young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste's letter. Could
+it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his
+artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This
+flattery is the flattery supreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the
+signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it
+is the divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to
+create it by the power of an inward look,--is not that the highest
+reach of love? And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture
+of an applauded author, "At last I am beloved!" When a woman, be she
+maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, "Thou art
+handsome," the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull
+to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an
+everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived
+judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual
+testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince.
+Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter,
+full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to
+criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to
+him, "Modeste is right." He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw
+his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his
+ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:--
+
+"She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!"
+
+Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the
+peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the
+pavement.
+
+"Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes," he cried;
+"what a maddening situation I have put myself in!"
+
+La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his
+heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of
+honor. He at once resolved to find Modeste's father, if he were in
+Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious
+results of their Parisian jest. To a sensitive nature like his,
+Modeste's large fortune was in itself a determining reason. He could
+not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the
+correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a
+"dot." Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue
+Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business
+connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed
+his start in life.
+
+At the hour when La Briere was inquiring about the father of his
+beloved from the head of the house of Mongenod, and getting
+information that might be useful to him in his strange position, a
+scene was taking place in Canalis's study which the ex-lieutenant's
+hasty departure from Havre may have led the reader to foresee.
+
+Like a true soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood
+had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick
+of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,--a buffoon addicted to
+choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white
+at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and
+linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink
+than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he had tumbled from
+the moon, except when scribbling at a desk, like Butscha. But the
+seething of the Breton's heart and brain received a violent
+application of cold water when he entered the courtyard of the pretty
+house occupied by the poet and saw a groom washing a carriage, and
+also, through the windows of a handsome dining-room, a valet dressed
+like a banker, to whom the groom referred him, and who answered,
+looking the stranger over from head to foot, that Monsieur le baron
+was not visible. "There is," added the man, "a meeting of the council
+of state to-day, at which Monsieur le baron is obliged to be present."
+
+"Is this really the house of Monsieur Canalis," said Dumay, "a writer
+of poetry?"
+
+"Monsieur le baron de Canalis," replied the valet, "is the great poet
+of whom you speak; but he is also the president of the court of Claims
+attached to the ministry of foreign affairs."
+
+Dumay, who had come to box the ears of a scribbling nobody, found
+himself confronted by a high functionary of the state. The salon where
+he was told to wait offered, as a topic for his meditations, the
+insignia of the Legion of honor glittering on a black coat which the
+valet had left upon a chair. Presently his eyes were attracted by the
+beauty and brilliancy of a silver-gilt cup bearing the words "Given by
+MADAME." Then he beheld before him, on a pedestal, a Sevres vase on
+which was engraved, "The gift of Madame la DAUPHINE."
+
+These mute admonitions brought Dumay to his senses while the valet
+went to ask his master if he would receive a person who had come from
+Havre expressly to see him,--a stranger named Dumay.
+
+"What sort of a man?" asked Canalis.
+
+"He is well-dressed, and wears the ribbon of the Legion of honor."
+
+Canalis made a sign of assent, and the valet retreated, and then
+returned and announced, "Monsieur Dumay."
+
+When he heard himself announced, when he was actually in presence of
+Canalis, in a study as gorgeous as it was elegant, with his feet on a
+carpet far handsomer than any in the house of Mignon, and when he met
+the studied glance of the poet who was playing with the tassels of a
+sumptuous dressing-gown, Dumay was so completely taken aback that he
+allowed the great poet to have the first word.
+
+"To what do I owe the honor of your visit, monsieur?"
+
+"Monsieur," began Dumay, who remained standing.
+
+"If you have a good deal to say," interrupted Canalis, "I must ask you
+to be seated."
+
+And Canalis himself plunged into an armchair a la Voltaire, crossed
+his legs, raised the upper one to the level of his eye and looked
+fixedly at Dumay, who became, to use his own martial slang,
+"bayonetted."
+
+"I am listening, monsieur," said the poet; "my time is precious,--the
+ministers are expecting me."
+
+"Monsieur," said Dumay, "I shall be brief. You have seduced--how, I do
+not know--a young lady in Havre, young, beautiful, and rich; the last
+and only hope of two noble families; and I have come to ask your
+intentions."
+
+Canalis, who had been busy during the last three months with serious
+matters of his own, and was trying to get himself made commander of
+the Legion of honor and minister to a German court, had completely
+forgotten Modeste's letter."
+
+"I!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You!" repeated Dumay.
+
+"Monsieur," answered Canalis, smiling; "I know no more of what you are
+talking about than if you had said it in Hebrew. I seduce a young
+girl! I, who--" and a superb smile crossed his features. "Come, come,
+monsieur, I'm not such a child as to steal fruit over the hedges when
+I have orchards and gardens of my own where the finest peaches ripen.
+All Paris knows where my affections are set. Very likely there may be
+some young girl in Havre full of enthusiasm for my verses,--of which
+they are not worthy; that would not surprise me at all; nothing is
+more common. See! look at that lovely coffer of ebony inlaid with
+mother-of-pearl, and edged with that iron-work as fine as lace. That
+coffer belonged to Pope Leo X., and was given to me by the Duchesse de
+Chaulieu, who received it from the king of Spain. I use it to hold the
+letters I receive from ladies and young girls living in every quarter
+of Europe. Oh! I assure you I feel the utmost respect for these
+flowers of the soul, cut and sent in moments of enthusiasm that are
+worthy of all reverence. Yes, to me the impulse of a heart is a noble
+and sublime thing! Others--scoffers--light their cigars with such
+letters, or give them to their wives for curl-papers; but I, who am a
+bachelor, monsieur, I have too much delicacy not to preserve these
+artless offerings--so fresh, so disinterested--in a tabernacle of
+their own. In fact, I guard them with a species of veneration, and at
+my death they will be burned before my eyes. People may call that
+ridiculous, but I do not care. I am grateful; these proofs of devotion
+enable me to bear the criticisms and annoyances of a literary life.
+When I receive a shot in the back from some enemy lurking under cover
+of a daily paper, I look at that casket and think,--here and there in
+this wide world there are hearts whose wounds have been healed, or
+soothed, or dressed by me!"
+
+This bit of poetry, declaimed with all the talent of a great actor,
+petrified the lieutenant, whose eyes opened to their utmost extent,
+and whose astonishment delighted the poet.
+
+"I will permit you," continued the peacock, spreading his tail, "out
+of respect for your position, which I fully appreciate, to open that
+coffer and look for the letter of your young lady. Though I know I am
+right, I remember names, and I assure you you are mistaken in
+thinking--"
+
+"And this is what a poor child comes to in this gulf of Paris!" cried
+Dumay,--"the darling of her parents, the joy of her friends, the hope
+of all, petted by all, the pride of a family, who has six persons so
+devoted to her that they would willingly make a rampart of their lives
+and fortunes between her and sorrow. Monsieur," Dumay remarked after a
+pause, "you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier. For
+fifteen years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of
+many a bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner
+there; the Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I
+suffered. I have seen thousands of my comrades die,--but you, you have
+given me a chill to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt
+before."
+
+Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only
+flattered him,--a thing which at this period of his life had become
+almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the
+first perfumed phial that praise had broken over his head.
+
+"Ah, my soldier!" he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay's
+shoulder, and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier
+of the empire tremble, "this young girl may be all in all to you, but
+to society at large what is she? nothing. At this moment the greatest
+mandarin in China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the
+universe in mourning, and what is that to you? The English are killing
+thousands of people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this
+very moment while I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being
+burned alive,--did that make you care less for your cup of coffee this
+morning at breakfast? Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in
+rags does not cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever
+finds it; and yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost
+five louis, and I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy,
+exclaiming, 'Divine! delicious! charming! food for the soul!' Social
+nature, like Nature herself, is a great forgetter. You will be quite
+surprised ten years hence at what you have done to-day. You are here
+in a city where people die, where they marry, where they adore each
+other at an assignation, where young girls suffocate themselves, where
+the man of genius with his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane
+beneficence goes to the bottom,--all side by side, sometimes under the
+same roof, and yet ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent.
+And here you come among us and ask us to expire with grief at this
+commonplace affair."
+
+"You call yourself a poet!" cried Dumay, "but don't you feel what you
+write?"
+
+"Good heavens! if we endured the joys or the woes we sing we should be
+as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet,
+smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see
+Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis
+had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet:
+Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that
+his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a
+treasure which is his alone, it is--"
+
+"Forgive me for interrupting you," said Dumay, who was gazing at the
+poet with horror, "but did you ever come to Havre?"
+
+"I was there for a day and a night in the spring of 1824 on my way to
+London."
+
+"You are a man of honor," continued Dumay; "will you give me your word
+that you do not know Mademoiselle Modeste Mignon?"
+
+"This is the first time that name ever struck my ear," replied
+Canalis.
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" said Dumay, "into what dark intrigue am I about to
+plunge? Can I count upon you to help me in my inquiries?--for I am
+certain that some one has been using your name. You ought to have had
+a letter yesterday from Havre."
+
+"I received none. Be sure, monsieur, that I will help you," said
+Canalis, "so far as I have the opportunity of doing so."
+
+Dumay withdrew, his heart torn with anxiety, believing that the
+wretched Butscha had worn the skin of the poet to deceive Modeste;
+whereas Butscha himself, keen-witted as a prince seeking revenge, and
+far cleverer than any paid spy, was ferretting out the life and
+actions of Canalis, escaping notice by his insignificance, like an
+insect that bores its way into the sap of a tree.
+
+The Breton had scarcely left the poet's house when La Briere entered
+his friend's study. Naturally, Canalis told him of the visit of the
+man from Havre.
+
+"Ha!" said Ernest, "Modeste Mignon; that is just what I have come to
+speak of."
+
+"Ah, bah!" cried Canalis; "have I had a triumph by proxy?"
+
+"Yes; and here is the key to it. My friend, I am loved by the sweetest
+girl in all the world,--beautiful enough to shine beside the greatest
+beauties in Paris, with a heart and mind worthy of Clarissa. She has
+seen me; I have pleased her, and she thinks me the great Canalis. But
+that is not all. Modeste Mignon is of high birth, and Mongenod has
+just told me that her father, the Comte de La Bastie, has something
+like six millions. The father is here now, and I have asked him
+through Mongenod for an interview at two o'clock. Mongenod is to give
+him a hint, just a word, that it concerns the happiness of his
+daughter. But you will readily understand that before seeing the
+father I feel I ought to make a clean breast of it to you."
+
+"Among the plants whose flowers bloom in the sunshine of fame," said
+Canalis, impressively, "there is one, and the most magnificent, which
+bears like the orange-tree a golden fruit amid the mingled perfumes of
+beauty and of mind; a lovely plant, a true tenderness, a perfect
+bliss, and--it eludes me." Canalis looked at the carpet that Ernest
+might not read his eyes. "Could I," he continued after a pause to
+regain his self-possession, "how could I have divined that flower from
+a pretty sheet of perfumed paper, that true heart, that young girl,
+that woman in whom love wears the livery of flattery, who loves us for
+ourselves, who offers us felicity? It needed but an angel or a demon
+to perceive her; and what am I but the ambitious head of a Court of
+Claims! Ah, my friend, fame makes us the target of a thousand arrows.
+One of us owes his rich marriage to an hydraulic piece of poetry,
+while I, more seductive, more a woman's man than he, have missed mine,
+--for, do you love her, poor girl?" he said, looking up at La Briere.
+
+"Oh!" ejaculated the young man.
+
+"Well then," said the poet, taking his secretary's arm and leaning
+heavily upon it, "be happy, Ernest. By a mere accident I have been not
+ungrateful to you. You are richly rewarded for your devotion, and I
+will generously further your happiness."
+
+Canalis was furious; but he could not behave otherwise than with
+propriety, and he made the best of his disappointment by mounting it
+as a pedestal.
+
+"Ah, Canalis, I have never really known you till this moment."
+
+"Did you expect to? It takes some time to go round the world," replied
+the poet with his pompous irony.
+
+"But think," said La Briere, "of this enormous fortune."
+
+"Ah, my friend, is it not well invested in you?" cried Canalis,
+accompanying the words with a charming gesture.
+
+"Melchior," said La Briere, "I am yours for life and death."
+
+He wrung the poet's hand and left him abruptly, for he was in haste to
+meet Monsieur Mignon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A FATHER STEPS IN
+
+The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows
+which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his
+daughter's letter of Bettina's death and of his wife's infirmity, and
+Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to
+Modeste's love affairs.
+
+"Leave me to myself," he said to his faithful friend.
+
+As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on
+a sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears
+which suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon
+dried, yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn.
+
+"To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to
+have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?" he cried, springing up
+with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. "To be a
+father is to give one's self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I
+meet that D'Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives
+her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to
+whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If
+it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a
+lover!--I will strangle him with my two hands," he cried, making an
+involuntary gesture of furious determination. "And what then? suppose
+my Modeste were to die of grief?"
+
+He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and
+then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of
+six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had
+encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles
+Mignon's head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now
+bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an
+air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.
+
+"Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to
+ask me for my daughter," he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest
+de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La
+Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.
+
+"You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?" he said.
+
+"Yes," replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as
+sombre as Othello's. "My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the
+family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during
+his term of office. On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the
+Court of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly
+succeed as chief--"
+
+"And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked the
+count.
+
+"Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being
+loved by her. Hear me, monsieur," cried Ernest, checking a violent
+movement on the part of the angry father. "I have the strangest
+confession to make to you, a shameful one for a man of honor; but the
+worst punishment of my conduct, natural enough in itself, is not the
+telling of it to you; no, I fear the daughter even more than the
+father."
+
+Ernest then related simply, and with the nobleness that comes of
+sincerity, all the facts of his little drama, not omitting the twenty
+or more letters, which he had brought with him, nor the interview
+which he had just had with Canalis. When Monsieur Mignon had finished
+reading the letters, the unfortunate lover, pale and suppliant,
+actually trembled under the fiery glance of the Provencal.
+
+"Monsieur," said the latter, "in this whole matter there is but one
+error, but that is cardinal. My daughter will not have six millions;
+at the utmost, she will have a marriage portion of two hundred
+thousand francs, and very doubtful expectations."
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" cried Ernest, rising and grasping Monsieur Mignon's
+hand; "you take a load from my breast. Nothing can now hinder my
+happiness. I have friends, influence; I shall certainly be chief of
+the Court of Claims. Had Mademoiselle Mignon no more than ten thousand
+francs, if I had even to make a settlement on her, she should still be
+my wife; and to make her happy as you, monsieur, have made your wife
+happy, to be to you a real son (for I have no father), are the deepest
+desires of my heart."
+
+Charles Mignon stepped back three paces and fixed upon La Briere a
+look which entered the eyes of the young man as a dagger enters its
+sheath; he stood silent a moment, recognizing the absolute candor, the
+pure truthfulness of that open nature in the light of the young man's
+inspired eyes. "Is fate at last weary of pursuing me?" he asked
+himself. "Am I to find in this young man the pearl of sons-in-law?" He
+walked up and down the room in strong agitation.
+
+"Monsieur," he said at last, "you are bound to submit wholly to the
+judgment which you have come here to seek, otherwise you are now
+playing a farce."
+
+"Oh, monsieur!"
+
+"Listen to me," said the father, nailing La Briere where he stood with
+a glance. "I shall be neither harsh, nor hard, nor unjust. You shall
+have the advantages and the disadvantages of the false position in
+which you have placed yourself. My daughter believes that she loves
+one of the great poets of the day, whose fame is really that which has
+attracted her. Well, I, her father, intend to give her the opportunity
+to choose between the celebrity which has been a beacon to her, and
+the poor reality which the irony of fate has flung at her feet. Ought
+she not to choose between Canalis and yourself? I rely upon your honor
+not to repeat what I have told you as to the state of my affairs. You
+may each come, I mean you and your friend the Baron de Canalis, to
+Havre for the last two weeks of October. My house will be open to both
+of you, and my daughter must have an opportunity to study you. You
+must yourself bring your rival, and not disabuse him as to the foolish
+tales he will hear about the wealth of the Comte de La Bastie. I go to
+Havre to-morrow, and I shall expect you three days later. Adieu,
+monsieur."
+
+Poor La Briere went back to Canalis with a dragging step. The poet,
+meantime, left to himself, had given way to a current of thought out
+of which had come that secondary impulse which Monsieur de Talleyrand
+valued so much. The first impulse is the voice of nature, the second
+that of society.
+
+"A girl worth six millions," he thought to himself, "and my eyes were
+not able to see that gold shining in the darkness! With such a fortune
+I could be peer of France, count, marquis, ambassador. I've replied to
+middle-class women and silly women, and crafty creatures who wanted
+autographs; I've tired myself to death with masked-ball intrigues,--at
+the very moment when God was sending me a soul of price, an angel with
+golden wings! Bah! I'll make a poem on it, and perhaps the chance will
+come again. Heavens! the luck of that little La Briere,--strutting
+about in my lustre--plagiarism! I'm the cast and he's to be the
+statue, is he? It is the old fable of Bertrand and Raton. Six
+millions, a beauty, a Mignon de La Bastie, an aristocratic divinity
+loving poetry and the poet! And I, who showed my muscle as man of the
+world, who did those Alcide exercises to silence by moral force the
+champion of physical force, that old soldier with a heart, that friend
+of this very young girl, whom he'll now go and tell that I have a
+heart of iron!--I, to play Napoleon when I ought to have been
+seraphic! Good heavens! True, I shall have my friend. Friendship is a
+beautiful thing. I have kept him, but at what a price! Six millions,
+that's the cost of it; we can't have many friends if we pay all that
+for them."
+
+La Briere entered the room as Canalis reached this point in his
+meditations. He was gloom personified.
+
+"Well, what's the matter?" said Canalis.
+
+"The father exacts that his daughter shall choose between the two
+Canalis--"
+
+"Poor boy!" cried the poet, laughing, "he's a clever fellow, that
+father."
+
+"I have pledged my honor that I will take you to Havre," said La
+Briere, piteously.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Canalis, "if it is a question of your honor you
+may count on me. I'll ask for leave of absence for a month."
+
+"Modeste is so beautiful!" exclaimed La Briere, in a despairing tone.
+"You will crush me out of sight. I wondered all along that fate should
+be so kind to me; I knew it was all a mistake."
+
+"Bah! we will see about that," said Canalis with inhuman gaiety.
+
+That evening, after dinner, Charles Mignon and Dumay, were flying, by
+virtue of three francs to each postilion, from Paris to Havre. The
+father had eased the watch-dog's mind as to Modeste and her love
+affairs; the guard was relieved, and Butscha's innocence established.
+
+"It is all for the best, my old Dumay," said the count, who had been
+making certain inquiries of Mongenod respecting Canalis and La Briere.
+"We are going to have two actors for one part!" he cried gaily.
+
+Nevertheless, he requested his old comrade to be absolutely silent
+about the comedy which was now to be played at the Chalet,--a comedy
+it might be, but also a gentle punishment, or, if you prefer it, a
+lesson given by the father to the daughter.
+
+The two friends kept up a long conversation all the way from Paris to
+Havre, which put the colonel in possession of the facts relating to
+his family during the past four years, and informing Dumay that
+Desplein, the great surgeon, was coming to Havre at the end of the
+present month to examine the cataract on Madame Mignon's eyes, and
+decide if it were possible to restore her sight.
+
+A few moments before the breakfast-hour at the Chalet, the clacking of
+a postilion's whip apprised the family that the two soldiers were
+arriving; only a father's joy at returning after long absence could be
+heralded with such clatter, and it brought all the women to the garden
+gate. There is many a father and many a child--perhaps more fathers
+than children--who will understand the delights of such an arrival,
+and that happy fact shows that literature has no need to depict it.
+Perhaps all gentle and tender emotions are beyond the range of
+literature.
+
+Not a word that could trouble the peace of the family was uttered on
+this joyful day. Truce was tacitly established between father, mother,
+and child as to the so-called mysterious love which had paled
+Modeste's cheeks,--for this was the first day she had left her bed
+since Dumay's departure for Paris. The colonel, with the charming
+delicacy of a true soldier, never left his wife's side nor released
+her hand; but he watched Modeste with delight, and was never weary of
+noting her refined, elegant, and poetic beauty. Is it not by such
+seeming trifles that we recognize a man of feeling? Modeste, who
+feared to interrupt the subdued joy of the husband and wife kept at a
+little distance, coming from time to time to kiss her father's
+forehead, and when she kissed it overmuch she seemed to mean that she
+was kissing it for two,--for Bettina and herself.
+
+"Oh, my darling, I understand you," said the colonel, pressing her
+hand as she assailed him with kisses.
+
+"Hush!" whispered the young girl, glancing at her mother.
+
+Dumay's rather sly and pregnant silence made Modeste somewhat uneasy
+as to the upshot of his journey to Paris. She looked at him furtively
+every now and then, without being able to get beneath his epidermis.
+The colonel, like a prudent father, wanted to study the character of
+his only daughter, and above all consult his wife, before entering on
+a conference upon which the happiness of the whole family depended.
+
+"To-morrow, my precious child," he said as they parted for the night,
+"get up early, and we will go and take a walk on the seashore. We have
+to talk about your poems, Mademoiselle de La Bastie."
+
+His last words, accompanied by a smile, which reappeared like an echo
+on Dumay's lips, were all that gave Modeste any clew to what was
+coming; but it was enough to calm her uneasiness and keep her awake
+far into the night with her head full of suppositions; this, however,
+did not prevent her from being dressed and ready in the morning long
+before the colonel.
+
+"You know all, my kind papa?" she said as soon as they were on the
+road to the beach.
+
+"I know all, and a good deal more than you do," he replied.
+
+After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.
+
+"Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother
+idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a
+stranger without consulting her."
+
+"Oh, papa! because mamma would never have allowed it."
+
+"And do you think, my daughter, that that was proper? Though you have
+been educating your mind in this fatal way, how is it that your good
+sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and
+show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a
+man's head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should
+lack pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two
+hours in hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has
+been the same as Bettina's without the excuse of a heart's seduction;
+you were a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is head-
+love, the worst vice of French women."
+
+"I, without pride!" said Modeste, weeping; "but HE has not yet seen
+me."
+
+"HE knows your name."
+
+"I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the
+correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had
+spoken to each other."
+
+"Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason
+with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your
+family."
+
+"But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity,"
+she said, pouting.
+
+"Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?"
+
+"A temerity that my mother practised before me," she retorted quickly.
+
+"Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her
+father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me.
+Be honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily
+conceived, I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad
+action of writing to a stranger?"
+
+"A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose
+character and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to
+detraction, to calumny,--a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear
+father, I was a mere literary and dramatic personage, one of
+Shakespeare's women, until the moment when I wished to know if the man
+himself were as beautiful as his soul."
+
+"Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But
+if, from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of
+their families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke
+of parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the
+misfortunes that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and
+which you are therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them.
+Poetry is indeed one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life
+itself."
+
+"Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the
+struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of
+family."
+
+"Alas for the child that finds her happiness in resisting them," said
+the colonel, gravely. "In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis
+d'Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and
+the pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl
+took for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage."
+
+"My poet has told me all that," she answered. "He played Orgon for
+some time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of
+poets."
+
+"I have read your letters," said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a
+malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, "and I
+ought to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any
+woman, even a Julie d'Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!"
+
+"We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or
+not; I think it is better to read them. There are not so many
+adventures in these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV.,
+and so they publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those
+letters, you must know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the
+most sternly upright man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen
+that we love one another at least as much as you and mamma love each
+other. Well, I admit that it was not all exactly conventional; I did,
+if you WILL have me say so, wrong--"
+
+"I have read your letters," said her father, interrupting her, "and I
+know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a
+proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood
+life, and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young
+girl of twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing."
+
+"Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded
+Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to
+the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways
+to act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering,
+or we must go to him frankly. Isn't the last way grand and noble? We
+French girls are delivered over by our families like so much
+merchandise, at sixty days' sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle
+Vilquin; but in England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow
+very much the plan I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to
+that? Am I not half German?"
+
+"Child!" cried the colonel, looking at her; "the supremacy of France
+comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble
+language constrains her mind. France is the reason of the whole world.
+England and Germany are romantic in their marriage customs,--though
+even there noble families follow our customs. You certainly do not
+mean to deny that your parents, who know life, who are responsible for
+your soul and for your happiness, have no right to guard you from the
+stumbling-blocks that are in your way? Good heavens!" he continued,
+speaking half to himself, "is it their fault, or is it ours? Ought we
+to hold our children under an iron yoke? Must we be punished for the
+tenderness that leads us to make them happy, and teaches our hearts
+how to do so?"
+
+Modeste watched her father out of the corner of her eye as she
+listened to this species of invocation, uttered in a broken voice.
+
+"Was it wrong," she said, "in a girl whose heart was free, to choose
+for her husband not only a charming companion, but a man of noble
+genius, born to an honorable position, a gentleman; the equal of
+myself, a gentlewoman?"
+
+"You love him?" asked her father.
+
+"Father!" she said, laying her head upon his breast, "would you see me
+die?"
+
+"Enough!" said the old soldier. "I see your love is inextinguishable."
+
+"Yes, inextinguishable."
+
+"Can nothing change it?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"No circumstances, no treachery, no betrayal? You mean that you will
+love him in spite of everything, because of his personal attractions?
+Even though he proved a D'Estourny, would you love him still?"
+
+"Oh, my father! you do not know your daughter. Could I love a coward,
+a man without honor, without faith?"
+
+"But suppose he had deceived you?"
+
+"He? that honest, candid soul, half melancholy? You are joking,
+father, or else you have never met him."
+
+"But you see now that your love is not inextinguishable, as you chose
+to call it. I have already made you admit that circumstances could
+alter your poem; don't you now see that fathers are good for
+something?"
+
+"You want to give me a lecture, papa; it is positively l'Ami des
+Enfants over again."
+
+"Poor deceived girl," said her father, sternly; "it is no lecture of
+mine, I count for nothing in it; indeed, I am only trying to soften
+the blow."
+
+"Father, don't play tricks with my life," exclaimed Modeste, turning
+pale.
+
+"Then, my daughter, summon all your courage. It is you who have been
+playing tricks with your life, and life is now tricking you."
+
+Modeste looked at her father in stupid amazement.
+
+"Suppose that young man whom you love, whom you saw four days ago at
+church in Havre, was a deceiver?"
+
+"Never!" she cried; "that noble head, that pale face full of poetry--"
+
+"--was a lie," said the colonel interrupting her. "He was no more
+Monsieur de Canalis than I am that sailor over there putting out to
+sea."
+
+"Do you know what you are killing in me?" she said in a low voice.
+
+"Comfort yourself, my child; though accident has put the punishment of
+your fault into the fault itself, the harm done is not irreparable.
+The young man whom you have seen, and with whom you exchanged hearts
+by correspondence, is a loyal and honorable fellow; he came to me and
+confided everything. He loves you, and I have no objection to him as a
+son-in-law."
+
+"If he is not Canalis, who is he then?" said Modeste in a changed
+voice.
+
+"The secretary; his name is Ernest de La Briere. He is not a nobleman;
+but he is one of those plain men with fixed principles and sound
+morality who satisfy parents. However, that is not the point; you have
+seen him and nothing can change your heart; you have chosen him,
+comprehend his soul, it is as beautiful as he himself."
+
+The count was interrupted by a heavy sigh from Modeste. The poor girl
+sat with her eyes fixed on the sea, pale and rigid as death, as if a
+pistol shot had struck her in those fatal words, A PLAIN MAN, WITH
+FIXED PRINCIPLES AND SOUND MORALITY.
+
+"Deceived!" she said at last.
+
+"Like your poor sister, but less fatally."
+
+"Let us go home, father," she said, rising from the hillock on which
+they were sitting. "Papa, hear me, I swear before God to obey your
+wishes, whatever they may be, in the AFFAIR of my marriage."
+
+"Then you don't love him any longer?" asked her father.
+
+"I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as
+yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the
+paint of another man's glory on his cheeks."
+
+"You said nothing could change you"; remarked the colonel, ironically.
+
+"Ah, do not trifle with me!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands and
+looking at her father in distressful anxiety; "don't you see that you
+are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes."
+
+"God forbid! I have told you the exact truth."
+
+"You are very kind, father," she said after a pause, and with a sort
+of solemnity.
+
+"He has kept your letters," resumed the colonel; "now suppose the rash
+caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets
+who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?"
+
+"Oh!--you are going too far."
+
+"Canalis told him so."
+
+"Has Dumay seen Canalis?"
+
+"Yes," answered her father.
+
+The two walked along in silence.
+
+"So that is why that GENTLEMAN," resumed Modeste, "told me so much
+harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said-- Why,"
+she added, interrupting herself, "his virtues, his noble qualities,
+his fine sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who
+steals glory and a name may very likely--"
+
+"--break locks, steal purses, and cut people's throats on the
+highway," cried the colonel. "Ah, you young girls, that's just like
+you,--with your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man
+who once deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he
+ought to die."
+
+This ridicule stopped Modeste's effervescence for a moment and least,
+and again there was silence.
+
+"My child," said the colonel, presently, "men in society, as in nature
+everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must defend
+themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise?
+Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was
+yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman;
+it is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences,
+short of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he
+does deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her
+wanting in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a
+queen, an actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems
+to him a queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame--and
+for a young girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given
+her that is sacred and lovely and noble,--no matter with what grace or
+what poetry or what precautions she surrounds her fault."
+
+"To seek the master and find the servant!" she said bitterly, "oh! I
+can never recover from it!"
+
+"Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the
+equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet
+minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a
+heart, and he adores you, but--he DOES NOT WRITE VERSES. No, I admit,
+he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry.
+At any rate, my dear girl," added her father, as Modeste made a
+gesture of disgust, "you are to see both of them, the sham and the
+true Canalis--"
+
+"Oh, papa!--"
+
+"Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the
+AFFAIR of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two
+you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall
+finish with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character
+of these gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing
+excursions."
+
+Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to
+what he said but replying only in monosyllables.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+DISENCHANTED
+
+The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in
+search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to
+use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the
+soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality,
+Imagination--which in that delicate bosom united the whole of
+womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to
+the passionate desires of the sex--had led her into enchanted gardens
+where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not
+the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the
+black mandragora." Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from
+the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with
+ditches,--in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent,
+aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall?
+Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste
+who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two
+hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the
+boards. She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to
+see. The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no
+longer spoke to her. Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes,
+she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion. She fought against
+reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and
+conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing. She
+would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and
+tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the
+utmost.
+
+"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.
+
+The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time
+and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality. Sadness,
+when caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,--sometimes a
+fatal one. It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in
+what ways and by what means Thought produces the same internal
+disorganization as poison; and how it is that despair affects the
+appetite, destroys the pylorus, and changes all the physical
+conditions of the strongest life. Such was the case with Modeste. In
+three short days she became the image of morbid melancholy; she did
+not sing, she could not be made to smile. Charles Mignon, becoming
+uneasy at the non-arrival of the two friends, thought of going to
+fetch them, when, on the evening of the fifth day, he received news of
+their movements through Latournelle.
+
+Canalis, excessively delighted at the idea of a rich marriage, was
+determined to neglect nothing that might help him to cut out La
+Briere, without, however, giving La Briere a chance to reproach him
+for having violated the laws of friendship. The poet felt that nothing
+would lower a lover so much in the eyes of a young girl as to exhibit
+him in a subordinate position; and he therefore proposed to La Briere,
+in the most natural manner, to take a little country-house at
+Ingouville for a month, and live there together on pretence of
+requiring sea-air. As soon as La Briere, who at first saw nothing
+amiss in the proposal, had consented, Canalis declared that he should
+pay all expenses, and he sent his valet to Havre, telling him to see
+Monsieur Latournelle and get his assistance in choosing the house,--
+well aware that the notary would repeat all particulars to the
+Mignons. Ernest and Canalis had, as may well be supposed, talked over
+all the aspects of the affair, and the rather prolix Ernest had given
+a good many useful hints to his rival. The valet, understanding his
+master's wishes, fulfilled them to the letter; he trumpeted the
+arrival of the great poet, for whom the doctors advised sea-air to
+restore his health, injured as it was by the double toils of
+literature and politics. This important personage wanted a house,
+which must have at least such and such a number of rooms, as he would
+bring with him a secretary, cook, two servants, and a coachman, not
+counting himself, Germain Bonnet, the valet. The carriage, selected
+and hired for a month by Canalis, was a pretty one; and Germain set
+about finding a pair of fine horses which would also answer as saddle-
+horses,--for, as he said, monsieur le baron and his secretary took
+horseback exercise. Under the eyes of little Latournelle, who went
+with him to various houses, Germain made a good deal of talk about the
+secretary, rejecting two or three because there was no suitable room
+for Monsieur de La Briere.
+
+"Monsieur le baron," he said to the notary, "makes his secretary quite
+his best friend. Ah! I should be well scolded if Monsieur de La Briere
+was not as well treated as monsieur le baron himself; and after all,
+you know, Monsieur de La Briere is a lawyer in my master's court."
+
+Germain never appeared in public unless punctiliously dressed in
+black, with spotless gloves, well-polished boots, and otherwise as
+well apparelled as a lawyer. Imagine the effect he produced in Havre,
+and the idea people took of the great poet from this sample of him!
+The valet of a man of wit and intellect ends by getting a little wit
+and intellect himself which has rubbed off from his master. Germain
+did not overplay his part; he was simple and good-humored, as Canalis
+had instructed him to be. Poor La Briere was in blissful ignorance of
+the harm Germain was doing to his prospects, and the depreciation his
+consent to the arrangement had brought upon him; it is, however, true
+that some inkling of the state of things rose to Modeste's ears from
+these lower regions.
+
+Canalis had arranged to bring his secretary in his own carriage, and
+Ernest's unsuspicious nature did not perceive that he was putting
+himself in a false position until too late to remedy it. The delay in
+the arrival of the pair which had troubled Charles Mignon was caused
+by the painting of the Canalis arms on the panels of the carriage, and
+by certain orders given to a tailor; for the poet neglected none of
+the innumerable details which might, even the smallest of them,
+influence a young girl.
+
+"It is all right," said Latournelle to Mignon on the sixth day. "The
+baron's valet has hired Madame Amaury's villa at Sanvic, all
+furnished, for seven hundred francs; he has written to his master that
+he may start, and that all will be ready on his arrival. So the two
+gentlemen will be here Sunday. I have also had a letter from Butscha;
+here it is; it's not long: 'My dear master,--I cannot get back till
+Sunday. Between now and then I have some very important inquiries to
+make which concern the happiness of a person in whom you take an
+interest.'"
+
+The announcement of this arrival did not rouse Modeste from her gloom;
+the sense of her fall and the bewilderment of her mind were still too
+great, and she was not nearly as much of a coquette as her father
+thought her to be. There is, in truth, a charming and permissible
+coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness.
+Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish
+between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,--the
+thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true
+colonel of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read,
+only the young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but
+in the letters which we were forced to lack of space to suppress, a
+better judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve
+which Modeste had substituted for the rather aggressive and light-
+minded tone of her first letters. The father, however, was only too
+cruelly right on one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have read,
+had indeed spoken as though the marriage were a settled fact, and the
+remembrance of that letter filled her with shame; she thought her
+father very harsh and cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy of
+her, yet to whom her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She questioned
+Dumay about his interview with the poet, she inveigled him into
+relating its every detail, and she did not think Canalis as barbarous
+as the lieutenant had declared him. The thought of the beautiful
+casket which held the letters of the thousand and one women of this
+literary Don Juan made her smile, and she was strongly tempted to say
+to her father: "I am not the only one to write to him; the elite of my
+sex send their leaves for the laurel wreath of the poet."
+
+During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation. The
+catastrophe--and it was a great one to her poetic nature--roused a
+faculty of discernment and also the malice latent in her girlish
+heart, in which her suitors were about to encounter a formidable
+adversary. It is a fact that when a young woman's heart is chilled her
+head becomes clear; she observes with great rapidity of judgment, and
+with a tinge of pleasantry which Shakespeare's Beatrice so admirably
+represents in "Much Ado about Nothing." Modeste was seized with a deep
+disgust for men, now that the most distinguished among them had
+betrayed her hopes. When a woman loves, what she takes for disgust is
+simply the ability to see clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is
+never, especially if she is a young girl, in a condition to see
+clearly. If she cannot admire, she despises. And so, after passing
+through terrible struggles of the soul, Modeste necessarily put on the
+armor on which, as she had once declared, the word "Disdain" was
+engraved. After reaching that point she was able, in the character of
+uninterested spectator, to take part in what she was pleased to call
+the "farce of the suitors," a performance in which she herself was
+about to play the role of heroine. She particularly set before her
+mind the satisfaction of humiliating Monsieur de La Briere.
+
+"Modeste is saved," said Madame Mignon to her husband; "she wants to
+revenge herself on the false Canalis by trying to love the real one."
+
+Such in truth was Modeste's plan. It was so utterly commonplace that
+her mother, to whom she confided her griefs, advised her on the
+contrary to treat Monsieur de La Briere with extreme politeness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A THIRD SUITOR
+
+"Those two young men," said Madame Latournelle, on the Saturday
+evening, "have no idea how many spies they have on their tracks. We
+are eight in all, on the watch."
+
+"Don't say two young men, wife; say three!" cried little Latournelle,
+looking round him. "Gobenheim is not here, so I can speak out."
+
+Modeste raised her head, and everybody, imitating Modeste, raised
+theirs and looked at the notary.
+
+"Yes, a third lover--and he is something like a lover--offers himself
+as a candidate."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed the colonel.
+
+"I speak of no less a person," said Latournelle, pompously, "than
+Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, Marquis de Saint-Sever, Duc de Nivron,
+Comte de Bayeux, Vicomte d'Essigny, grand equerry and peer of France,
+knight of the Spur and the Golden Fleece, grandee of Spain, and son of
+the last governor of Normandy. He saw Mademoiselle Modeste at the time
+when he was staying with the Vilquins, and he regretted then--as his
+notary, who came from Bayeux yesterday, tells me--that she was not
+rich enough for him; for his father recovered nothing but the estate
+of Herouville on his return to France, and that is saddled with a
+sister. The young duke is thirty-three years old. I am definitively
+charged to lay these proposals before you, Monsieur le comte," added
+the notary, turning respectfully to the colonel.
+
+"Ask Modeste if she wants another bird in her cage," replied the
+count; "as far as I am concerned, I am willing that my lord the grand
+equerry shall pay her attention."
+
+Notwithstanding the care with which Charles Mignon avoided seeing
+people, and though he stayed in the Chalet and never went out without
+Modeste, Gobenheim had reported Dumay's wealth; for Dumay had said to
+him when giving up his position as cashier: "I am to be bailiff for my
+colonel, and all my fortune, except what my wife needs, is to go to
+the children of our little Modeste." Every one in Havre had therefore
+propounded the same question that the notary had already put to
+himself: "If Dumay's share in the profits is six hundred thousand
+francs, and he is going to be Monsieur Mignon's bailiff, then Monsieur
+Mignon must certainly have a colossal fortune. He arrived at
+Marseilles on a ship of his own, loaded with indigo; and they say at
+the Bourse that the cargo, not counting the ship, is worth more than
+he gives out as his whole fortune."
+
+The colonel was unwilling to dismiss the servants he had brought back
+with him, whom he had chosen with care during his travels; and he
+therefore hired a house for them in the lower part of Ingouville,
+where he installed his valet, cook, and coachman, all Negroes, and
+three mulattos on whose fidelity he could rely. The coachman was told
+to search for saddle-horses for Mademoiselle and for his master, and
+for carriage-horses for the caleche in which the colonel and the
+lieutenant had returned to Havre. That carriage, bought in Paris, was
+of the latest fashion, and bore the arms of La Bastie, surmounted by a
+count's coronet. These things, insignificant in the eyes of a man who
+for four years had been accustomed to the unbridled luxury of the
+Indies and of the English merchants at Canton, were the subject of
+much comment among the business men of Havre and the inhabitants of
+Ingouville and Graville. Before five days had elapsed the rumor of
+them ran from one end of Normandy to the other like a train of
+gunpowder touched by fire.
+
+"Monsieur Mignon has come back from China with millions," some one
+said in Rouen; "and it seems he was made a count in mid-ocean."
+
+"But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution," answered
+another.
+
+"So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon
+for twenty-five years! What are we coming to?" said a third.
+
+Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her
+parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes
+began once more to see her merits. The aunt and sister of the Duc
+d'Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur
+Charles Mignon's right to the title and arms of count, derived from
+Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal's hat and tassels were added as
+a crest. They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were
+staying at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished
+head of their house now became active.
+
+"If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,"
+said the aunt of the young duke, "she is the best match in the
+province. SHE at least is noble."
+
+The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been
+able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in
+that bourgeois household.
+
+Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle
+and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our
+story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this late
+arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own
+diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more space here than
+he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, offspring of
+the matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born
+during the emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of
+the present duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819,
+before he was able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast
+chateau of Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which
+he had bought back with some difficulty; all of which returned a
+rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the
+post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the
+usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the
+pauper peers of France. But what were these twenty-seven thousand
+francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family? In
+Paris, of course, the young duke used the king's coaches, and had a
+mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the
+royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his
+twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy. If this
+noble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his
+aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables. Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the
+spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them
+up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French nobility,
+who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under the new
+law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc
+d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses;
+but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these
+people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration,
+from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d'Herouville, though in quest of
+millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker,
+with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.
+
+At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her
+nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering
+whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or
+whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen,
+who wished to make her daughter a duchess. The king, anxious to
+restore the d'Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought
+about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew
+ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When
+great things disappear they leave crumbs, "frusteaux," Rabelais would
+say, behind them; and the French nobility of this century has left us
+too many such fragments. Neither the clergy nor the nobility have
+anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs.
+Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well
+represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of
+historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the
+present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already
+done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The
+Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very
+nobleness of the nobility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it
+be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud
+house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation,
+cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis
+XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That
+is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris
+when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the
+entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing
+the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature
+in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a
+past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies
+of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete
+generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished
+qualities,--forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have
+preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish
+may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched
+result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.
+
+The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face,
+was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized
+figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins
+and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The
+house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the
+deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical
+Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the
+member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty.
+The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and
+respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his
+ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused
+him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy
+virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons,
+or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such
+habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes
+turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed
+upon him,--very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of
+wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed
+itself when he felt at ease. Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was
+supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him "a sound
+wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews." The
+beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only
+worship, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was
+repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious
+sayings.
+
+"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine
+workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."
+
+Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of grand
+equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh,
+--although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the
+matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood
+and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his
+fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed
+through her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the
+circumstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the
+courtship of the Duc d'Herouville would save her from being at the
+mercy of either Canalis.
+
+"I see no reason," she said to Latournelle, "why the Duc d'Herouville
+should not be received. I have passed, in spite of our indigence," she
+continued, with a mischievous look at her father, "to the condition of
+heiress. Haven't you observed Gobenheim's glances? They have quite
+changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being
+able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my
+charms."
+
+"Hush, my darling!" cried Madame Latournelle, "here he comes."
+
+"Old Althor is in despair," said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he
+entered.
+
+"Why?" asked the count.
+
+"Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several
+millions. What ill-luck for his son!"
+
+"No one knows," said Charles Mignon, coldly, "what my liabilities in
+India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence
+as to my private affairs. Dumay," he whispered to his friend, "if
+Vilquin is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what
+he gave for it."
+
+Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on
+Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in
+advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc
+d'Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following
+Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at
+Graville. This assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse
+remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at
+Ingouville. "If this goes on, she will have a hospital here," said the
+younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a duchess.
+
+The everlasting comedy of "The Heiress," about to be played at the
+Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste's frame of mind,
+"The Designs of a Young Girl"; for since the overthrow of her
+illusions she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man
+whose qualifications did not fully satisfy her.
+
+The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first
+visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their
+arrival. They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and
+arranging Madame Amaury's house for a month's stay. The poet, always
+calculating effects, wished to make the most of the probable
+excitement which his arrival would case in Havre, and which would of
+course echo up to the Mignons. Therefore, in his role of a man needing
+rest, he did not leave the house. La Briere went twice to walk past
+the Chalet, though always with a sense of despair, for he feared to
+displease Modeste, and the future seemed to him dark with clouds. The
+two friends came down to dinner on Monday dressed for the momentous
+visit. La Briere wore the same clothes he had so carefully selected
+for the famous Sunday; but he now felt like the satellite of planet,
+and resigned himself to the uncertainties of his situation. Canalis,
+on the other hand, had carefully attended to his black coat, his
+orders, and all those little drawing-room elegancies, which his
+intimacy with the Duchesse de Chaulieu and the fashionable world of
+the faubourg had brought to perfection. He had gone into the minutiae
+of dandyism, while poor La Briere was about to present himself with
+the negligence of a man without hope. Germain, as he waited at dinner
+could not help smiling to himself at the contrast. After the second
+course, however, the valet came in with a diplomatic, that is to say,
+uneasy air.
+
+"Does Monsieur le baron know," he said to Canalis in a low voice,
+"that Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of
+the same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur
+le baron to the sea-shore?"
+
+"What, the little Duc d'Herouville?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Is he coming for Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked La Briere,
+coloring.
+
+"So it appears, monsieur."
+
+"We are cheated!" cried Canalis looking at La Briere.
+
+"Ah!" retorted Ernest quickly, "that is the first time you have said,
+'we' since we left Paris: it has been 'I' all along."
+
+"You understood me," cried Canalis, with a burst of laughter. "But we
+are not in a position to struggle against a ducal coronet, nor the
+duke's title, nor against the waste lands which the Council of State
+have just granted, on my report, to the house of Herouville."
+
+"His grace," said La Briere, with a spice of malice that was
+nevertheless serious, "will furnish you with compensation in the
+person of his sister."
+
+At this instant, the Comte de La Bastie was announced; the two young
+men rose at once, and La Briere hastened forward to present Canalis.
+
+"I wished to return the visit that you paid me in Paris," said the
+count to the young lawyer, "and I knew that by coming here I should
+have the double pleasure of greeting one of our great living poets."
+
+"Great!--Monsieur," replied the poet, smiling, "no one can be great in
+a century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of
+would-be great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius
+nowadays, and renders real distinction impossible."
+
+"Is that the reason why you have thrown yourself into politics?" asked
+the count.
+
+"It is the same thing in that sphere," said the poet; "there are no
+statesmen in these days, only men who handle events more or less. Look
+at it, monsieur; under the system of government that we derive from
+the Charter, which makes a tax-list of more importance than a coat-of-
+arms, there is absolutely nothing solid except that which you went to
+seek in China,--wealth."
+
+Satisfied with himself and with the impression he was making on the
+prospective father-in-law, Canalis turned to Germain.
+
+"Serve the coffee in the salon," he said, inviting Monsieur de La
+Bastie to leave the dining-room.
+
+"I thank you for this visit, monsieur le comte," said La Briere; "it
+saves me from the embarrassment of presenting my friend to you in your
+own house. You have a heart, and you have also a quick mind."
+
+"Bah! the ready wit of Provence, that is all," said Charles Mignon.
+
+"Ah, do you come from Provence?" cried Canalis.
+
+"You must pardon my friend," said La Briere; "he has not studied, as I
+have, the history of La Bastie."
+
+At the word FRIEND Canalis threw a searching glance at Ernest.
+
+"If your health will allow," said the count to the poet, "I shall hope
+to receive you this evening under my roof; it will be a day to mark,
+as the old writer said 'albo notanda lapillo.' Though we cannot duly
+receive so great a fame in our little house, yet your visit will
+gratify my daughter, whose admiration for your poems has even led her
+to set them to music."
+
+"You have something better than fame in your house," said Canalis;
+"you have beauty, if I am to believe Ernest."
+
+"Yes, a good daughter; but you will find her rather countrified," said
+Charles Mignon.
+
+"A country girl sought by the Duc d'Herouville," remarked Canalis,
+dryly.
+
+"Oh!" replied Monsieur Mignon, with the perfidious good-humor of a
+Southerner, "I leave my daughter free. Dukes, princes, commoners,--
+they are all the same to me, even men of genius. I shall make no
+pledges, and whoever my Modeste chooses will be my son-in-law, or
+rather my son," he added, looking at La Briere. "It could not be
+otherwise. Madame de La Bastie is German. She has never adopted our
+etiquette, and I let my two women lead me their own way. I have always
+preferred to sit in the carriage rather than on the box. I can make a
+joke of all this at present, for we have not yet seen the Duc
+d'Herouville, and I do not believe in marriages arranged by proxy, any
+more than I believe in choosing my daughter's husband."
+
+"That declaration is equally encouraging and discouraging to two young
+men who are searching for the philosopher's stone of happiness in
+marriage," said Canalis.
+
+"Don't you consider it useful, necessary, and even politic to
+stipulate for perfect freedom of action for parents, daughters, and
+suitors?" asked Charles Mignon.
+
+Canalis, at a sign from La Briere, kept silence. The conversation
+presently became unimportant, and after a few turns round the garden
+the count retired, urging the visit of the two friends.
+
+"That's our dismissal," cried Canalis; "you saw it as plainly as I
+did. Well, in his place, I should not hesitate between the grand
+equerry and either of us, charming as we are."
+
+"I don't think so," said La Briere. "I believe that frank soldier came
+here to satisfy his desire to see you, and to warn us of his
+neutrality while receiving us in his house. Modeste, in love with your
+fame, and misled by my person, stands, as it were, between the real
+and the ideal, between poetry and prose. I am, unfortunately, the
+prose."
+
+"Germain," said Canalis to the valet, who came to take away the
+coffee, "order the carriage in half an hour. We will take a drive
+before we go to the Chalet."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A SPLENDID FIRST APPEARANCE
+
+The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere
+dreaded the interview, while Canalis approached it with the confidence
+of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the
+father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the
+ex-merchant, showed Canalis his own maladroitness, and determined him
+to select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend
+indifference, though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to
+appear to disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love.
+Trained by the handsome Duchesse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be
+worthy of his reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he
+did not know them at all,--which is often the case with those who are
+the happy victims of an exclusive passion. While poor Ernest, gloomily
+ensconced in his corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of
+genuine love, and foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and
+disdain of an injured and offended young girl, Canalis was preparing
+himself, not less silently, like an actor making ready for an
+important part in a new play; certainly neither of them presented the
+appearance of a happy man. Important interests were involved for
+Canalis. The mere suggestion of his desire to marry would bring about
+a rupture of the tie which had bound him for the last ten years to the
+Duchesse de Chaulieu. Though he had covered the purpose of his journey
+with the vulgar pretext of needing rest,--in which, by the bye, women
+never believe, even when it is true,--his conscience troubled him
+somewhat; but the word "conscience" seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere
+that he shrugged his shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.
+
+"Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than
+a dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real
+advantages and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de
+Chaulieu; for, if you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would
+renounce without the slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a
+passion that has been mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If
+you simply mean that you are afraid of displeasing your protectress,
+should she find out the object of your stay here, I believe you. To
+renounce the duchess and yet not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a
+risk. You take the anxiety of this alternative for remorse."
+
+"You have no comprehension of feelings," said the poet, irritably,
+like a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.
+
+"That is what a bigamist should tell the jury," retorted La Briere,
+laughing.
+
+This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Canalis. He began
+to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.
+
+The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Canalis
+livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors
+were expected, and all the personages of this history were assembled
+to receive them, except the duke and Butscha.
+
+"Which is the poet?" asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the
+embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she
+heard the wheels.
+
+"The one who walks like a drum-major," answered the lieutenant.
+
+"Ah!" said the notary's wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his
+body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with
+the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,--as all
+women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them;
+Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a
+certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his
+defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is
+never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to
+which the man is accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine
+manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by
+the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by
+telling himself that they pleased that "grande dame," whose taste was
+law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is
+improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance,
+Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and
+much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which
+neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people
+say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he
+bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to
+himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis "dragged the time."
+He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself
+into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of
+demeanor which actors call "balancoires,"--the picturesque phrase of
+an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the
+head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting
+slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview
+with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow
+suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing
+attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his
+discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up.
+He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a
+practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager,
+that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at
+his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.
+
+These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of
+flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior
+himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as
+exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by
+which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon
+him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always
+handsome,--without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas!
+neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn
+them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale,
+when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the
+expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and
+the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews
+its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything
+else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have
+hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a
+shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it,
+without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in
+meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was
+perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments,
+charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more
+delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its cut-and-
+dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier. He
+remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no
+impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as
+minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!" Many
+men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the
+administration of non-success in little doses.
+
+These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint-
+Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity,
+and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected
+diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so--are surrounded by
+excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent
+their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces,
+whose own absurdities are of a totally different type. Canalis, by
+nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in
+fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the
+duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if
+you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything
+everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France.
+Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the
+customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character,--
+as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic;
+it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social
+centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable
+only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-
+class vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself
+much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be,
+everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he
+carried his own public with him wherever he went,--an error shared by
+several of the great men of Paris.
+
+While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of
+the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no
+account.
+
+"Ha! do I see my soldier?" said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after
+addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other
+women. "Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?" he said, offering
+his hand effusively; "I comprehend them to their fullest extent after
+seeing mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of
+angels."
+
+All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this
+speech.
+
+"I shall always consider it a triumph," resumed the poet, observing
+that everybody wished for an explanation, "to have stirred to mention
+on of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the
+supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal to
+be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this
+triumph--why should I be proud of it?--I count for nothing. It was the
+triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay,
+your heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form
+in which Napoleon's idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what
+remains? The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go
+without revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian,
+the writer, futurity would have no knowledge of those heroic days.
+Therefore your fifteen years of war are now ideas and nothing more;
+that which preserves the Empire forever is the poem that the poets
+make of them. A nation that can win such battles must know how to sing
+them."
+
+Canalis paused, to gather by a glance that ran round the circle the
+tribute of amazement which he expected of provincials.
+
+"You must be aware, monsieur, of the regret I feel at not seeing you,"
+said Madame Mignon, "since you compensate me with the pleasure of
+hearing you."
+
+Modeste, determined to think Canalis sublime, sat motionless with
+amazement; the embroidery slipped from her fingers, which held it only
+by the needleful of thread.
+
+"Modeste, this is Monsieur Ernest de La Briere. Monsieur Ernest, my
+daughter," said the count, thinking the secretary too much in the
+background.
+
+The young girl bowed coldly, giving Ernest a glance that was meant to
+prove to every one present that she saw him for the first time.
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur," she said without blushing; "the great
+admiration I feel for the greatest of our poets is, in the eyes of my
+friends, a sufficient excuse for seeing only him."
+
+The pure, fresh voice, with accents like that of Mademoiselle Mars,
+charmed the poor secretary, already dazzled by Modeste's beauty, and
+in his sudden surprise he answered by a phrase that would have been
+sublime, had it been true.
+
+"He is my friend," he said.
+
+"Ah, then you do pardon me," she replied.
+
+"He is more than a friend," cried Canalis taking Ernest by the
+shoulder and leaning upon it like Alexander on Hephaestion, "we love
+each other as though we were brothers--"
+
+Madame Latournelle cut short the poet's speech by pointing to Ernest
+and saying aloud to her husband, "Surely that is the gentleman we saw
+at church."
+
+"Why not?" said Charles Mignon, quickly, observing that Ernest
+reddened.
+
+Modeste coldly took up her embroidery.
+
+"Madame may be right; I have been twice in Havre lately," replied La
+Briere, sitting down by Dumay.
+
+Canalis, charmed with Modeste's beauty, mistook the admiration she
+expressed, and flattered himself he had succeeded in producing his
+desired effects.
+
+"I should think a man without heart, if he had no devoted friend near
+him," said Modeste, to pick up the conversation interrupted by Madame
+Latournelle's awkwardness.
+
+"Mademoiselle, Ernest's devotion makes me almost think myself worth
+something," said Canalis; "for my dear Pylades is full of talent; he
+was the right hand of the greatest minister we have had since the
+peace. Though he holds a fine position, he is good enough to be my
+tutor in the science of politics; he teaches me to conduct affairs and
+feeds me with his experience, when all the while he might aspire to a
+much better situation. Oh! he is worth far more than I." At a gesture
+from Modeste he continued gracefully: "Yes, the poetry that I express
+he carries in his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is
+because he has the modesty of a nun."
+
+"Enough, oh, enough!" cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to
+look. "My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to
+marry off her daughter."
+
+"How is it, monsieur," said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, "that
+you can even think of becoming a political character?"
+
+"It is abdication," said Modeste, "for a poet; politics are the
+resource of matter-of-fact men."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the
+world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the
+meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the
+rallying-point of courage."
+
+Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on
+political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day
+the orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A
+poet may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever
+cease to be himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he
+would one day be greater on the political side than on the literary.
+"The forum of France was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles
+supplanted fields of battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer
+than any Austerlitz, and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals;
+they spent their lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as
+those who went to war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal
+outlets of the vital fluid that man had ever known," etc.
+
+This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases
+and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de
+Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made
+a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame
+Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at
+the theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,--very much
+like that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all
+these high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as
+it were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with
+her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had
+created as he read her letters and answered them.
+
+This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful
+not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an
+invitation to dinner on the following Monday.
+
+"We shall not be at the Chalet," said the Comte de La Bastie. "Dumay
+will have sole possession of it. I return to the villa, having bought
+it back under a deed of redemption within six months, which I have
+to-day signed with Monsieur Vilquin."
+
+"I hope," said Dumay, "that Vilquin will not be able to return to you
+the sum you have just lent him, and that the villa will remain yours."
+
+"It is an abode in keeping with your fortune," said Canalis.
+
+"You mean the fortune that I am supposed to have," replied Charles
+Mignon, hastily.
+
+"It would be too sad," said Canalis, turning to Modeste with a
+charming little bow, "if this Madonna were not framed in a manner
+worthy of her divine perfections."
+
+That was the only thing Canalis said to Modeste. He affected not to
+look at her, and behaved like a man to whom all idea of marriage was
+interdicted.
+
+"Ah! my dear Madame Mignon," cried the notary's wife, as soon as the
+gravel was heard to grit under the feet of the Parisians, "what an
+intellect!"
+
+"Is he rich?--that is the question," said Gobenheim.
+
+Modeste was at the window, not losing a single movement of the great
+poet, and paying no attention to his companion. When Monsieur Mignon
+returned to the salon, and Modeste, having received a last bow from
+the two friends as the carriage turned, went back to her seat, a
+weighty discussion took place, such as provincials invariably hold
+over Parisians after a first interview. Gobenheim repeated his phrase,
+"Is he rich?" as a chorus to the songs of praise sung by Madame
+Latournelle, Modeste, and her mother.
+
+"Rich!" exclaimed Modeste; "what can that signify! Do you not see that
+Monsieur de Canalis is one of those men who are destined for the
+highest places in the State. He has more than fortune; he possesses
+that which gives fortune."
+
+"He will be minister or ambassador," said Monsieur Mignon.
+
+"That won't hinder tax-payers from having to pay the costs of his
+funeral," remarked the notary.
+
+"How so?" asked Charles Mignon.
+
+"He strikes me as a man who will waste all the fortunes with whose
+gifts Mademoiselle Modeste so liberally endows him," answered
+Latournelle.
+
+"Modeste can't avoid being liberal to a poet who called her a
+Madonna," said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with
+which Canalis had originally inspired him.
+
+Gobenheim arranged the whist-table with all the more persistency
+because, since the return of Monsieur Mignon, Latournelle and Dumay
+had allowed themselves to play for ten sous points.
+
+"Well, my little darling," said the father to the daughter in the
+embrasure of a window. "Admit that papa thinks of everything. If you
+send your orders this evening to your former dressmaker in Paris, and
+all your other furnishing people, you shall show yourself eight days
+hence in all the splendor of an heiress. Meantime we will install
+ourselves in the villa. You already have a pretty horse, now order a
+habit; you owe that amount of civility to the grand equerry."
+
+"All the more because there will be a number of us to ride," said
+Modeste, who was recovering the colors of health.
+
+"The secretary did not say much," remarked Madame Mignon.
+
+"A little fool," said Madame Latournelle; "the poet has an attentive
+word for everybody. He thanked Monsieur Latournelle for his help in
+choosing the house; and said he must have taken counsel with a woman
+of good taste. But the other looked as gloomy as a Spaniard, and kept
+his eyes fixed on Modeste as though he would like to swallow her
+whole. If he had even looked at me I should have been afraid of him."
+
+"He had a pleasant voice," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"No doubt he came to Havre to inquire about the Mignons in the
+interests of his friend the poet," said Modeste, looking furtively at
+her father. "It was certainly he whom we saw in church."
+
+Madame Dumay and Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, accepted this as the
+natural explanation of Ernest's journey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+OF WHICH THE AUTHOR THINKS A GOOD DEAL
+
+"Do you know, Ernest," cried Canalis, when they had driven a short
+distance from the house, "I don't see any marriageable woman in
+society in Paris who compares with that adorable girl."
+
+"Ah, that ends it!" replied Ernest. "She loves you, or she will love
+you if you desire it. Your fame won half the battle. Well, you may now
+have it all your own way. You shall go there alone in future. Modeste
+despises me; she is right to do so; and I don't see any reason why I
+should condemn myself to see, to love, desire, and adore that which I
+can never possess."
+
+After a few consoling remarks, dashed with his own satisfaction at
+having made a new version of Caesar's phrase, Canalis divulged a
+desire to break with the Duchesse de Chaulieu. La Briere, totally
+unable to keep up the conversation, made the beauty of the night an
+excuse to be set down, and then rushed like one possessed to the
+seashore, where he stayed till past ten, in a half-demented state,
+walking hurriedly up and down, talking aloud in broken sentences,
+sometimes standing still or sitting down, without noticing the
+uneasiness of two custom-house officers who were on the watch. After
+loving Modeste's wit and intellect and her aggressive frankness, he
+now joined adoration of her beauty--that is to say, love without
+reason, love inexplicable--to all the other reasons which had drawn
+him ten days earlier, to the church in Havre.
+
+He returned to the Chalet, where the Pyrenees hounds barked at him
+till he was forced to relinquish the pleasure of gazing at Modeste's
+windows. In love, such things are of no more account to the lover than
+the work which is covered by the last layer of color is to an artist;
+yet they make up the whole of love, just as the hidden toil is the
+whole of art. Out of them arise the great painter and the true lover
+whom the woman and the public end, sometimes too late, by adoring.
+
+"Well then!" he cried aloud, "I will stay, I will suffer, I will love
+her for myself only, in solitude. Modeste shall be my sun, my life; I
+will breathe with her breath, rejoice in her joys and bear her griefs,
+be she even the wife of that egoist, Canalis."
+
+"That's what I call loving, monsieur," said a voice which came from a
+shrub by the side of the road. "Ha, ha, so all the world is in love
+with Mademoiselle de La Bastie?"
+
+And Butscha suddenly appeared and looked at La Briere. La Briere
+checked his anger when, by the light of the moon, he saw the dwarf,
+and he made a few steps without replying.
+
+"Soldiers who serve in the same company ought to be good comrades,"
+remarked Butscha. "You don't love Canalis; neither do I."
+
+"He is my friend," replied Ernest.
+
+"Ha, you are the little secretary?"
+
+"You are to know, monsieur, that I am no man's secretary. I have the
+honor to be of counsel to a supreme court of this kingdom."
+
+"I have the honor to salute Monsieur de La Briere," said Butscha. "I
+myself have the honor to be head clerk to Latournelle, chief
+councillor of Havre, and my position is a better one than yours. Yes,
+I have had the happiness of seeing Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie
+nearly every evening for the last four years, and I expect to live
+near her, as a king's servant lives in the Tuileries. If they offered
+me the throne of Russia I should answer, 'I love the sun too well.'
+Isn't that telling you, monsieur, that I care more for her than for
+myself? I am looking after her interests with the most honorable
+intentions. Do you believe that the proud Duchesse de Chaulieu would
+cast a favorable eye on the happiness of Madame de Canalis if her
+waiting-woman, who is in love with Monsieur Germain, not liking that
+charming valet's absence in Havre, were to say to her mistress while
+brushing her hair--"
+
+"Who do you know about all this?" said La Briere, interrupting
+Butscha.
+
+"In the first place, I am clerk to a notary," answered Butscha. "But
+haven't you seen my hump? It is full of resources, monsieur. I have
+made myself cousin to Mademoiselle Philoxene Jacmin, born at Honfleur,
+where my mother was born, a Jacmin,--there are eight branches of the
+Jacmins at Honfleur. So my cousin Philoxene, enticed by the bait of a
+highly improbable fortune, has told me a good many things."
+
+"The duchess is vindictive?" said La Briere.
+
+"Vindictive as a queen, Philoxene says; she has never yet forgiven the
+duke for being nothing more than her husband," replied Butscha. "She
+hates as she loves. I know all about her character, her tastes, her
+toilette, her religion, and her manners; for Philoxene stripped her
+for me, soul and corset. I went to the opera expressly to see her, and
+I didn't grudge the ten francs it cost me--I don't mean the play. If
+my imaginary cousin had not told me the duchess had seen her fifty
+summers, I should have thought I was over-generous in giving her
+thirty; she has never known a winter, that duchess!"
+
+"Yes," said La Briere, "she is a cameo--preserved because it is stone.
+Canalis would be in a bad way if the duchess were to find out what he
+is doing here; and I hope, monsieur, that you will go no further in
+this business of spying, which is unworthy of an honest man."
+
+"Monsieur," said Butscha, proudly; "for me Modeste is my country. I do
+not spy; I foresee, I take precautions. The duchess will come here if
+it is desirable, or she will stay tranquilly where she is, according
+to what I judge best."
+
+"You?"
+
+"I."
+
+"And how, pray?"
+
+"Ha, that's it!" said the little hunchback, plucking a blade of grass.
+"See here! this herb believes that men build palaces for it to grow
+in; it wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble, and brings
+them down, just as the masses forced into the edifice of feudality
+have brought it to the ground. The power of the feeble life that can
+creep everywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their
+cannons. I am one of three who have sworn that Modeste shall be happy,
+and we would sell our honor for her. Adieu, monsieur. If you truly
+love Mademoiselle de La Bastie, forget this conversation and shake
+hands with me, for I think you've got a heart. I longed to see the
+Chalet, and I got here just as SHE was putting out her light. I saw
+the dogs rush at you, and I overheard your words, and that is why I
+take the liberty of saying we serve in the same regiment--that of
+loyal devotion."
+
+"Monsieur," said La Briere, wringing the hunchback's hand, "would you
+have the friendliness to tell me if Mademoiselle Modeste ever loved
+any one WITH LOVE before she wrote to Canalis?"
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Butscha in an altered voice; "that thought is an
+insult. And even now, who knows if she really loves? does she know
+herself? She is enamored of genius, of the soul and intellect of that
+seller of verses, that literary quack; but she will study him, we
+shall all study him; and I know how to make the man's real character
+peep out from under that turtle-shell of fine manners,--we'll soon see
+the petty little head of his ambition and his vanity!" cried Butscha,
+rubbing his hands. "So, unless mademoiselle is desperately taken with
+him--"
+
+"Oh! she was seized with admiration when she saw him, as if he were
+something marvellous," exclaimed La Briere, letting the secret of his
+jealousy escape him.
+
+"If he is a loyal, honest fellow, and loves her; if he is worthy of
+her; if he renounces his duchess," said Butscha,--"then I'll manage
+the duchess! Here, my dear sir, take this road, and you will get home
+in ten minutes."
+
+But as they parted, Butscha turned back and hailed poor Ernest, who,
+as a true lover, would gladly have stayed there all night talking of
+Modeste.
+
+"Monsieur," said Butscha, "I have not yet had the honor of seeing our
+great poet. I am very curious to observe that magnificent phenomenon
+in the exercise of his functions. Do me the favor to bring him to the
+Chalet to-morrow evening, and stay as long as possible; for it takes
+more than an hour for a man to show himself for what he is. I shall be
+the first to see if he loves, if he can love, or if he ever will love
+Mademoiselle Modeste."
+
+"You are very young to--"
+
+"--to be a professor," said Butscha, cutting short La Briere. "Ha,
+monsieur, deformed folks are born a hundred years old. And besides, a
+sick man who has long been sick, knows more than his doctor; he knows
+the disease, and that is more than can be said for the best of
+doctors. Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart
+when the woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his
+deformity; he ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes
+seductive, just as the sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone
+is incurable. I have had neither father nor mother since I was six
+years old; I am now twenty-five. Public charity has been my mother,
+the procureur du roi my father. Oh! don't be troubled," he added,
+seeing Ernest's gesture; "I am much more lively than my situation.
+Well, for the last six years, ever since a woman's eye first told me I
+had no right to love, I do love, and I study women. I began with the
+ugly ones, for it is best to take the bull by the horns. So I took my
+master's wife, who has certainly been an angel to me, for my first
+study. Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn't help it. I passed her
+through my alembic and what did I find? this thought, crouching at the
+bottom of her heart, 'I am not so ugly as they think me'; and if a man
+were to work upon that thought he could bring her to the edge of the
+abyss, pious as she is."
+
+"And have you studied Modeste?"
+
+"I thought I told you," replied Butscha, "that my life belongs to her,
+just as France belongs to the king. Do you now understand what you
+called my spying in Paris? No one but me really knows what nobility,
+what pride, what devotion, what mysterious grace, what unwearying
+kindness, what true religion, gaiety, wit, delicacy, knowledge, and
+courtesy there are in the soul and in the heart of that adorable
+creature!"
+
+Butscha drew out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and La Briere
+pressed his hand for a long time.
+
+"I live in the sunbeam of her existence; it comes from her, it is
+absorbed in me; that is how we are united,--as nature is to God, by
+the Light and by the Word. Adieu, monsieur; never in my life have I
+talked in this way; but seeing you beneath her windows, I felt in my
+heart that you loved her as I love her."
+
+Without waiting for an answer Butscha quitted the poor lover, into
+whose heart his words had put an inexpressible balm. Ernest resolved
+to make a friend of him, not suspecting that the chief object of the
+clerk's loquacity was to gain communication with some one connected
+with Canalis. Ernest was rocked to sleep that night by the ebb and
+flow of thoughts and resolutions and plans for his future conduct,
+whereas Canalis slept the sleep of the conqueror, which is the
+sweetest of slumbers after that of the just.
+
+At breakfast next morning, the friends agreed to spend the evening of
+the following day at the Chalet and initiate themselves into the
+delights of provincial whist. To get rid of the day they ordered their
+horses, purchased by Germain at a large price, and started on a voyage
+of discovery round the country, which was quite as unknown to them as
+China; for the most foreign thing to Frenchmen in France is France
+itself.
+
+By dint of reflecting on his position as an unfortunate and despised
+lover, Ernest went through something of the same process as Modeste's
+first letter had forced upon him. Though sorrow is said to develop
+virtue, it only develops it in virtuous persons; that cleaning-out of
+the conscience takes place only in persons who are by nature clean. La
+Briere vowed to endure his sufferings in Spartan silence, to act
+worthily, and give way to no baseness; while Canalis, fascinated by
+the enormous "dot," was telling himself to take every means of
+captivating the heiress. Selfishness and devotion, the key-notes of
+the two characters, therefore took, by the action of a moral law which
+is often very odd in its effects, certain measures that were contrary
+to their respective natures. The selfish man put on self-abnegation;
+the man who thought chiefly of others took refuge on the Aventinus of
+pride. That phenomenon is often seen in political life. Men frequently
+turn their characters wrong side out, and it sometimes happens that
+the public is unable to tell which is the right side.
+
+After dinner the two friends heard of the arrival of the grand
+equerry, who was presented at the Chalet the same evening by
+Latournelle. Mademoiselle d'Herouville had contrived to wound that
+worthy man by sending a footmen to tell him to come to her, instead of
+sending her nephew in person; thus depriving the notary of a
+distinguished visit he would certainly have talked about for the rest
+of his natural life. So Latournelle curtly informed the grand equerry,
+when he proposed to drive him to the Chalet, that he was engaged to
+take Madame Latournelle. Guessing from the little man's sulky manner
+that there was some blunder to repair, the duke said graciously:--
+
+"Then I shall have the pleasure, if you will allow me, of taking
+Madame Latournelle also."
+
+Disregarding Mademoiselle d'Herouville's haughty shrug, the duke left
+the room with the notary. Madame Latournelle, half-crazed with joy at
+seeing the gorgeous carriage at her door, with footmen in royal livery
+letting down the steps, was too agitated on hearing that the grand
+equerry had called for her, to find her gloves, her parasol, her
+absurdity, or her usual air of pompous dignity. Once in the carriage,
+however, and while expressing confused thanks and civilities to the
+little duke, she suddenly exclaimed, from a thought in her kind
+heart,--
+
+"But Butscha, where is he?"
+
+"Let us take Butscha," said the duke, smiling.
+
+When the people on the quays, attracted in groups by the splendor of
+the royal equipage, saw the funny spectacle, the three little men with
+the spare gigantic woman, they looked at one another and laughed.
+
+"If you melt all three together, they might make one man fit to mate
+with that big cod-fish," said a sailor from Bordeaux.
+
+"Is there any other thing you would like to take with you, madame?"
+asked the duke, jestingly, while the footman awaited his orders.
+
+"No, monseigneur," she replied, turning scarlet and looking at her
+husband as much as to say, "What did I do wrong?"
+
+"Monsieur le duc honors me by considering that I am a thing," said
+Butscha; "a poor clerk is usually thought to be a nonentity."
+
+Though this was said with a laugh, the duke colored and did not
+answer. Great people are to blame for joking with their social
+inferiors. Jesting is a game, and games presuppose equality; it is to
+obviate any inconvenient results of this temporary equality that
+players have the right, after the game is over, not to recognize each
+other.
+
+The visit of the grand equerry had the ostensible excuse of an
+important piece of business; namely, the retrieval of an immense tract
+of waste land left by the sea between the mouths of the two rivers,
+which tract had just been adjudged by the Council of State to the
+house of Herouville. The matter was nothing less than putting flood-
+gates with double bridges, draining three or four hundred acres,
+cutting canals, and laying out roadways. When the duke had explained
+the condition of the land, Charles Mignon remarked that time must be
+allowed for the soil, which was still moving, to settle and grow solid
+in a natural way.
+
+"Time, which has providentially enriched your house, Monsieur le duc,
+can alone complete the work," he said, in conclusion. "It would be
+prudent to let fifty years elapse before you reclaim the land."
+
+"Do not let that be your final word, Monsieur le comte," said the
+duke. "Come to Herouville and see things for yourself."
+
+Charles Mignon replied that every capitalist should take time to
+examine into such matters with a cool head, thus giving the duke a
+pretext for his visits to the Chalet. The sight of Modeste made a
+lively impression on the young man, and he asked the favor of
+receiving her at Herouville with her father, saying that his sister
+and his aunt had heard much of her, and wished to make her
+acquaintance. On this the count proposed to present his daughter to
+those ladies himself, and invited the whole party to dinner on the day
+of his return to the villa. The duke accepted the invitation. The blue
+ribbon, the title, and above all, the ecstatic glances of the noble
+gentleman had an effect upon Modeste; but she appeared to great
+advantage in carriage, dignity, and conversation. The duke withdrew
+reluctantly, carrying with him an invitation to visit the Chalet every
+evening,--an invitation based on the impossibility of a courtier of
+Charles X. existing for a single evening without his rubber.
+
+The following evening, therefore, Modeste was to see all three of her
+lovers. No matter what young girls may say, and though the logic of
+the heart may lead them to sacrifice everything to preference, it is
+extremely flattering to their self-love to see a number of rival
+adorers around them,--distinguished or celebrated men, or men of
+ancient lineage,--all endeavoring to shine and to please. Suffer as
+Modeste may in general estimation, it must be told she subsequently
+admitted that the sentiments expressed in her letters paled before the
+pleasure of seeing three such different minds at war with one another,
+--three men who, taken separately, would each have done honor to the
+most exacting family. Yet this luxury of self-love was checked by a
+misanthropical spitefulness, resulting from the terrible wound she had
+received,--although by this time she was beginning to think of that
+wound as a disappointment only. So when her father said to her,
+laughing, "Well, Modeste, do you want to be a duchess?" she answered,
+with a mocking curtsey,--
+
+"Sorrows have made me philosophical."
+
+"Do you mean to be only a baroness?" asked Butscha.
+
+"Or a viscountess?" said her father.
+
+"How could that be?" she asked quickly.
+
+"If you accept Monsieur de La Briere, he has enough merit and
+influence to obtain permission from the king to bear my titles and
+arms."
+
+"Oh, if it comes to disguising himself, HE will not make any
+difficulty," said Modeste, scornfully.
+
+Butscha did not understand this epigram, whose meaning could only be
+guessed by Monsieur and Madame Mignon and Dumay.
+
+"When it is a question of marriage, all men disguise themselves,"
+remarked Latournelle, "and women set them the example. I've heard it
+said ever since I came into the world that 'Monsieur this or
+Mademoiselle that has made a good marriage,'--meaning that the other
+side had made a bad one."
+
+"Marriage," said Butscha, "is like a lawsuit; there's always one side
+discontented. If one dupes the other, certainly half the husbands in
+the world are playing a comedy at the expense of the other half."
+
+"From which you conclude, Sieur Butscha?" inquired Modeste.
+
+"To pay the utmost attention to the manoeuvres of the enemy," answered
+the clerk.
+
+"What did I tell you, my darling?" said Charles Mignon, alluding to
+their conversation on the seashore.
+
+"Men play as many parts to get married as mothers make their daughters
+play to get rid of them," said Latournelle.
+
+"Then you approve of stratagems?" said Modeste.
+
+"On both sides," cried Gobenheim, "and that brings it even."
+
+This conversation was carried on by fits and starts, as they say, in
+the intervals of cutting and dealing the cards; and it soon turned
+chiefly on the merits of the Duc d'Herouville, who was thought very
+good-looking by little Latournelle, little Dumay, and little Butscha.
+Without the foregoing discussion on the lawfulness of matrimonial
+tricks, the reader might possibly find the forthcoming account of the
+evening so impatiently awaited by Butscha, somewhat too long.
+
+Desplein, the famous surgeon, arrived the next morning, and stayed
+only long enough to send to Havre for fresh horses and have them put-
+to, which took about an hour. After examining Madame Mignon's eyes, he
+decided that she could recover her sight, and fixed a suitable time, a
+month later, to perform the operation. This important consultation
+took place before the assembled members of the Chalet, who stood
+trembling and expectant to hear the verdict of the prince of science.
+That illustrious member of the Academy of Sciences put about a dozen
+brief questions to the blind woman as he examined her eyes in the
+strong light from a window. Modeste was amazed at the value which a
+man so celebrated attached to time, when she saw the travelling-
+carriage piled with books which the great surgeon proposed to read
+during the journey; for he had left Paris the evening before, and had
+spent the night in sleeping and travelling. The rapidity and clearness
+of Desplein's judgment on each answer made by Madame Mignon, his
+succinct tone, his decisive manner, gave Modeste her first real idea
+of a man of genius. She perceived the enormous difference between a
+second-rate man, like Canalis, and Desplein, who was even more than a
+superior man. A man of genius finds in the consciousness of his talent
+and in the solidity of his fame an arena of his own, where his
+legitimate pride can expand and exercise itself without interfering
+with others. Moreover, his perpetual struggle with men and things
+leave them no time for the coxcombry of fashionable genius, which
+makes haste to gather in the harvests of a fugitive season, and whose
+vanity and self-love are as petty and exacting as a custom-house which
+levies tithes on all that comes in its way.
+
+Modeste was the more enchanted by this great practical genius, because
+he was evidently charmed with the exquisite beauty of Modeste,--he,
+through whose hands so many women had passed, and who had long since
+examined the sex, as it were, with magnifier and scalpel.
+
+"It would be a sad pity," he said, with an air of gallantry which he
+occasionally put on, and which contrasted with his assumed
+brusqueness, "if a mother were deprived of the sight of so charming a
+daughter."
+
+Modeste insisted on serving the simple breakfast which was all the
+great surgeon would accept. She accompanied her father and Dumay to
+the carriage stationed at the garden-gate, and said to Desplein at
+parting, her eyes shining with hope,--
+
+"And will my dear mamma really see me?"
+
+"Yes, my little sprite, I'll promise you that," he answered, smiling;
+"and I am incapable of deceiving you, for I, too, have a daughter."
+
+The horses started and carried him off as he uttered the last words
+with unexpected grace and feeling. Nothing is more charming than the
+peculiar unexpectedness of persons of talent.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE POET DOES HIS EXERCISES
+
+This visit of the great surgeon was the event of the day, and it left
+a luminous trace in Modeste's soul. The young enthusiast ardently
+admired the man whose life belonged to others, and in whom the habit
+of studying physical suffering had destroyed the manifestations of
+egoism. That evening, when Gobenheim, the Latournelles, and Butscha,
+Canalis, Ernest, and the Duc d'Herouville were gathered in the salon,
+they all congratulated the Mignon family on the hopes which Desplein
+encouraged. The conversation, in which the Modeste of her letters was
+once more in the ascendant, turned naturally on the man whose genius,
+unfortunately for his fame, was appreciable only by the faculty and
+men of science. Gobenheim contributed a phrase which is the sacred
+chrism of genius as interpreted in these days by public economists and
+bankers,--
+
+"He makes a mint of money."
+
+"They say he is very grasping," added Canalis.
+
+The praises which Modeste showered on Desplein had annoyed the poet.
+Vanity acts like a woman,--they both think they are defrauded when
+love or praise is bestowed on others. Voltaire was jealous of the wit
+of a roue whom Paris admired for two days; and even a duchess takes
+offence at a look bestowed upon her maid. The avarice excited by these
+two sentiments is such that a fraction of them given to the poor is
+thought robbery.
+
+"Do you think, monsieur," said Modeste, smiling, "that we should judge
+genius by ordinary standards?"
+
+"Perhaps we ought first of all to define the man of genius," replied
+Canalis. "One of the conditions of genius is invention,--invention of
+a form, a system, a force. Napoleon was an inventor, apart from his
+other conditions of genius. He invented his method of making war.
+Walter Scott is an inventor, Linnaeus is an inventor, Geoffrey Saint-
+Hilaire and Cuvier are inventors. Such men are men of genius of the
+first rank. They renew, increase, or modify both science and art. But
+Desplein is merely a man whose vast talent consists in properly
+applying laws already known; in observing, by means of a natural gift,
+the limits laid down for each temperament, and the time appointed by
+Nature for an operation. He has not founded, like Hippocrates, the
+science itself. He has invented no system, as did Galen, Broussais,
+and Rasori. He is merely an executive genius, like Moscheles on the
+piano, Paganini on the violin, or Farinelli on his own larynx,--men
+who have developed enormous faculties, but who have not created music.
+You must permit me to discriminate between Beethoven and la Catalani:
+to one belongs the immortal crown of genius and of martyrdom, to the
+other innumerable five-franc pieces; one we can pay in coin, but the
+world remains throughout all time a debtor to the other. Each day
+increases our debt to Moliere, but Baron's comedies have been
+overpaid."
+
+"I think you make the prerogative of ideas too exclusive," said Ernest
+de La Briere, in a quiet and melodious voice, which formed a sudden
+contrast to the peremptory tones of the poet, whose flexible organ had
+abandoned its caressing notes for the strident and magisterial voice
+of the rostrum. "Genius must be estimated according to its utility;
+and Parmentier, who brought potatoes into general use, Jacquart, the
+inventor of silk looms; Papin, who first discovered the elastic
+quality of steam, are men of genius, to whom statues will some day be
+erected. They have changed, or they will change in a certain sense,
+the face of the State. It is in that sense that Desplein will always
+be considered a man of genius by thinkers; they see him attended by a
+generation of sufferers whose pains are stifled by his hand."
+
+That Ernest should give utterance to this opinion was enough to make
+Modeste oppose it.
+
+"If that be so, monsieur," she said, "then the man who could discover
+a way to mow wheat without injuring the straw, by a machine that could
+do the work of ten men, would be a man of genius."
+
+"Yes, my daughter," said Madame Mignon; "and the poor would bless him
+for cheaper bread,--he that is blessed by the poor is blessed of God."
+
+"That is putting utility above art," said Modeste, shaking her head.
+
+"Without utility what would become of art?" said Charles Mignon. "What
+would it rest on? what would it live on? Where would you lodge, and
+how would you pay the poet?"
+
+"Oh! my dear papa, such opinions are fearfully flat and antediluvian!
+I am not surprised that Gobenheim and Monsieur de La Briere, who are
+interested in the solution of social problems should think so; but
+you, whose life has been the most useless poetry of the century,--
+useless because the blood you shed all over Europe, and the horrible
+sufferings exacted by your colossus, did not prevent France from
+losing ten departments acquired under the Revolution,--how can YOU
+give in to such excessively pig-tail notions, as the idealists say? It
+is plain you've just come from China."
+
+The impertinence of Modeste's speech was heightened by a little air of
+contemptuous disdain which she purposely put on, and which fairly
+astounded Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle, and Dumay. As for Madame
+Latournelle, she opened her eyes so wide she no longer saw anything.
+Butscha, whose alert attention was comparable to that of a spy, looked
+at Monsieur Mignon, expecting to see him flush with sudden and violent
+indignation.
+
+"A little more, young lady, and you will be wanting in respect for
+your father," said the colonel, smiling, and noticing Butscha's look.
+"See what it is to spoil one's children!"
+
+"I am your only child," she said saucily.
+
+"Child, indeed," remarked the notary, significantly.
+
+"Monsieur," said Modeste, turning upon him, "my father is delighted to
+have me for his governess; he gave me life and I give him knowledge;
+he will soon owe me something."
+
+"There seems occasion for it," said Madame Mignon.
+
+"But mademoiselle is right," said Canalis, rising and standing before
+the fireplace in one of the finest attitudes of his collection. "God,
+in his providence, has given food and clothing to man, but he has not
+directly given him art. He says to man: 'To live, thou must bow
+thyself to earth; to think, thou shalt lift thyself to Me.' We have as
+much need of the life of the soul as of the life of the body,--hence,
+there are two utilities. It is true we cannot be shod by books or
+clothed by poems. An epic song is not, if you take the utilitarian
+view, as useful as the broth of a charity kitchen. The noblest ideas
+will not sail a vessel in place of canvas. It is quite true that the
+cotton-gin gives us calicoes for thirty sous a yard less than we ever
+paid before; but that machine and all other industrial perfections
+will not breathe the breath of life into a people, will not tell
+futurity of a civilization that once existed. Art, on the contrary,
+Egyptian, Mexican, Grecian, Roman art, with their masterpieces--now
+called useless!--reveal the existence of races back in the vague
+immense of time, beyond where the great intermediary nations, denuded
+of men of genius, have disappeared, leaving not a line nor a trace
+behind them! The works of genius are the 'summum' of civilization, and
+presuppose utility. Surely a pair of boots are not as agreeable to
+your eyes as a fine play at the theatre; and you don't prefer a
+windmill to the church of Saint-Ouen, do you? Well then, nations are
+imbued with the same feelings as the individual man, and the man's
+cherished desire is to survive himself morally just as he propagates
+himself physically. The survival of a people is the work of its men of
+genius. At this very moment France is proving, energetically, the
+truth of that theory. She is, undoubtedly, excelled by England in
+commerce, industry, and navigation, and yet she is, I believe, at the
+head of the world,--by reason of her artists, her men of talent, and
+the good taste of her products. There is no artist and no superior
+intellect that does not come to Paris for a diploma. There is no
+school of painting at this moment but that of France; and we shall
+reign far longer and perhaps more securely by our books than by our
+swords. In La Briere's system, on the other hand, all that is glorious
+and lovely must be suppressed,--woman's beauty, music, painting,
+poetry. Society will not be overthrown, that is true, but, I ask you,
+who would willingly accept such a life? All useful things are ugly and
+forbidding. A kitchen is indispensable, but you take care not to sit
+there; you live in the salon, which you adorn, like this, with
+superfluous things. Of what USE, let me ask you, are these charming
+wall-paintings, this carved wood-work? There is nothing beautiful but
+that which seems to us useless. We called the sixteenth century the
+Renascence with admirable truth of language. That century was the dawn
+of a new era. Men will continue to speak of it when all remembrance of
+anterior centuries had passed away,--their only merit being that they
+once existed, like the million beings who count as the rubbish of a
+generation."
+
+"Rubbish! yes, that may be, but my rubbish is dear to me," said the
+Duc d'Herouville, laughing, during the silent pause which followed the
+poet's pompous oration.
+
+"Let me ask," said Butscha, attacking Canalis, "does art, the sphere
+in which, according to you, genius is required to evolve itself, exist
+at all? Is it not a splendid lie, a delusion, of the social man? Do I
+want a landscape scene of Normandy in my bedroom when I can look out
+and see a better one done by God himself? Our dreams make poems more
+glorious than Iliads. For an insignificant sum of money I can find at
+Valogne, at Carentan, in Provence, at Arles, many a Venus as beautiful
+as those of Titian. The police gazette publishes tales, differing
+somewhat from those of Walter Scott, but ending tragically with blood,
+not ink. Happiness and virtue exist above and beyond both art and
+genius."
+
+"Bravo, Butscha!" cried Madame Latournelle.
+
+"What did he say?" asked Canalis of La Briere, failing to gather from
+the eyes and attitude of Mademoiselle Mignon the usual signs of
+artless admiration.
+
+The contemptuous indifference which Modeste had exhibited toward La
+Briere, and above all, her disrespectful speeches to her father, so
+depressed the young man that he made no answer to Canalis; his eyes,
+fixed sorrowfully on Modeste, were full of deep meditation. The Duc
+d'Herouville took up Butscha's argument and reproduced it with much
+intelligence, saying finally that the ecstasies of Saint-Theresa were
+far superior to the creations of Lord Byron.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur le duc," exclaimed Modeste, "hers was a purely personal
+poetry, whereas the genius of Lord Byron and Moliere benefit the
+world."
+
+"How do you square that opinion with those of Monsieur le baron?"
+cried Charles Mignon, quickly. "Now you are insisting that genius must
+be useful, and benefit the world as though it were cotton,--but
+perhaps you think logic as antediluvian as your poor old father."
+
+Butscha, La Briere, and Madame Latournelle exchanged glances that were
+more than half derisive, and drove Modeste to a pitch of irritation
+that kept her silent for a moment.
+
+"Mademoiselle, do not mind them," said Canalis, smiling upon her, "we
+are neither beaten, nor caught in a contradiction. Every work of art,
+let it be in literature, music, painting, sculpture, or architecture,
+implies a positive social utility, equal to that of all other
+commercial products. Art is pre-eminently commerce; presupposes it, in
+short. An author pockets ten thousand francs for his book; the making
+of books means the manufactory of paper, a foundry, a printing-office,
+a bookseller,--in other words, the employment of thousands of men. The
+execution of a symphony of Beethoven or an opera by Rossini requires
+human arms and machinery and manufactures. The cost of a monument is
+an almost brutal case in point. In short, I may say that the works of
+genius have an extremely costly basis and are, necessarily, useful to
+the workingman."
+
+Astride of that theme, Canalis spoke for some minutes with a fine
+luxury of metaphor, and much inward complacency as to his phrases; but
+it happened with him, as with many another great speaker, that he
+found himself at last at the point from which the conversation
+started, and in full agreement with La Briere without perceiving it.
+
+"I see with much pleasure, my dear baron," said the little duke,
+slyly, "that you will make an admirable constitutional minister."
+
+"Oh!" said Canalis, with the gesture of a great man, "what is the use
+of all these discussions? What do they prove?--the eternal verity of
+one axiom: All things are true, all things are false. Moral truths as
+well as human beings change their aspect according to their
+surroundings, to the point of being actually unrecognizable."
+
+"Society exists through settled opinions," said the Duc d'Herouville.
+
+"What laxity!" whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband.
+
+"He is a poet," said Gobenheim, who overheard her.
+
+Canalis, who was ten leagues above the heads of his audience, and who
+may have been right in his last philosophical remark, took the sort of
+coldness which now overspread the surrounding faces of a symptom of
+provincial ignorance; but seeing that Modeste understood him, he was
+content, being wholly unaware that monologue is particularly
+disagreeable to country-folk, whose principal desire it is to exhibit
+the manner of life and the wit and wisdom of the provinces to
+Parisians.
+
+"It is long since you have seen the Duchesse de Chaulieu?" asked the
+duke, addressing Canalis, as if to change the conversation.
+
+"I left her about six days ago."
+
+"Is she well?" persisted the duke.
+
+"Perfectly well."
+
+"Have the kindness to remember me to her when you write."
+
+"They say she is charming," remarked Modeste, addressing the duke.
+
+"Monsieur le baron can speak more confidently than I," replied the
+grand equerry.
+
+"More than charming," said Canalis, making the best of the duke's
+perfidy; "but I am partial, mademoiselle; she has been a friend to me
+for the last ten years; I owe all that is good in me to her; she has
+saved me from the dangers of the world. Moreover, Monsieur le Duc de
+Chaulieu launched me in my present career. Without the influence of
+that family the king and the princesses would have forgotten a poor
+poet like me; therefore my affection for the duchess must always be
+full of gratitude."
+
+His voice quivered.
+
+"We ought to love the woman who has led you to write those sublime
+poems, and who inspires you with such noble feelings," said Modeste,
+quite affected. "Who can think of a poet without a muse!"
+
+"He would be without a heart," replied Canalis. "He would write barren
+verses like Voltaire, who never loved any one but Voltaire."
+
+"I thought you did me the honor to say, in Paris," interrupted Dumay,
+"that you never felt the sentiments you expressed."
+
+"The shoe fits, my soldier," replied the poet, smiling; "but let me
+tell you that it is quite possible to have a great deal of feeling
+both in the intellectual life and in real life. My good friend here,
+La Briere, is madly in love," continued Canalis, with a fine show of
+generosity, looking at Modeste. "I, who certainly love as much as he,
+--that is, I think so unless I delude myself,--well, I can give to my
+love a literary form in harmony with its character. But I dare not
+say, mademoiselle," he added, turning to Modeste with too studied a
+grace, "that to-morrow I may not be without inspiration."
+
+Thus the poet triumphed over all obstacles. In honor of his love he
+rode a-tilt at the hindrances that were thrown in his way, and Modeste
+remained wonder-struck at the Parisian wit that scintillated in his
+declamatory discourse, of which she had hitherto known little or
+nothing.
+
+"What an acrobat!" whispered Butscha to Latournelle, after listening
+to a magnificent tirade on the Catholic religion and the happiness of
+having a pious wife,--served up in response to a remark by Madame
+Mignon.
+
+Modeste's eyes were blindfolded as it were; Canalis's elocution and
+the close attention which she was predetermined to pay to him
+prevented her from seeing that Butscha was carefully noting the
+declamation, the want of simplicity, the emphasis that took the place
+of feeling, and the curious incoherencies in the poet's speech which
+led the dwarf to make his rather cruel comment. At certain points of
+Canalis's discourse, when Monsieur Mignon, Dumay, Butscha, and
+Latournelle wondered at the man's utter want of logic, Modeste admired
+his suppleness, and said to herself, as she dragged him after her
+through the labyrinth of fancy, "He loves me!" Butscha, in common with
+the other spectators of what we must call a stage scene, was struck
+with the radiant defect of all egoists, which Canalis, like many men
+accustomed to perorate, allowed to be too plainly seen. Whether he
+understood beforehand what the person he was speaking to meant to say,
+whether he was not listening, or whether he had the faculty of
+listening when he was thinking of something else, it is certain that
+Melchior's face wore an absent-minded look in conversation, which
+disconcerted the ideas of others and wounded their vanity. Not to
+listen is not merely a want of politeness, it is a mark of disrespect.
+Canalis pushed this habit too far; for he often forgot to answer a
+speech which required an answer, and passed, without the ordinary
+transitions of courtesy, to the subject, whatever it was, that
+preoccupied him. Though such impertinence is accepted without protest
+from a man of marked distinction, it stirs a leaven of hatred and
+vengeance in many hearts; in those of equals it even goes so far as to
+destroy a friendship. If by chance Melchior was forced to listen, he
+fell into another fault; he merely lent his attention, and never gave
+it. Though this may not be so mortifying, it shows a kind of semi-
+concession which is almost as unsatisfactory to the hearer and leaves
+him dissatisfied. Nothing brings more profit in the commerce of
+society than the small change of attention. He that heareth let him
+hear, is not only a gospel precept, it is an excellent speculation;
+follow it, and all will be forgiven you, even vice. Canalis took a
+great deal of trouble in his anxiety to please Modeste; but though he
+was compliant enough with her, he fell back into his natural self with
+the others.
+
+Modeste, pitiless for the ten martyrs she was making, begged Canalis
+to read some of his poems; she wanted, she said, a specimen of his
+gift for reading, of which she had heard so much. Canalis took the
+volume which she gave him, and cooed (for that is the proper word) a
+poem which is generally considered his finest,--an imitation of
+Moore's "Loves of the Angels," entitled "Vitalis," which Monsieur and
+Madame Dumay, Madame Latournelle, and Gobenheim welcomed with a few
+yawns.
+
+"If you are a good whist-player, monsieur," said Gobenheim,
+flourishing five cards held like a fan, "I must say I have never met a
+man as accomplished as you."
+
+The remark raised a laugh, for it was the translation of everybody's
+thought.
+
+"I play it sufficiently well to live in the provinces for the rest of
+my days," replied Canalis. "That, I think, is enough, and more than
+enough literature and conversation for whist-players," he added,
+throwing the volume impatiently on a table.
+
+This little incident serves to show what dangers environ a drawing-
+room hero when he steps, like Canalis, out of his sphere; he is like
+the favorite actor of a second-rate audience, whose talent is lost
+when he leaves his own boards and steps upon those of an upper-class
+theatre.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+MODESTE PLAYS HER PART
+
+The game opened with the baron and the duke, Gobenheim and Latournelle
+as partners. Modeste took a seat near the poet, to Ernest's deep
+disappointment; he watched the face of the wayward girl, and marked
+the progress of the fascination which Canalis exerted over her. La
+Briere had not the gift of seduction which Melchior possessed. Nature
+frequently denies it to true hearts, who are, as a rule, timid. This
+gift demands fearlessness, an alacrity of ways and means that might be
+called the trapeze of the mind; a little mimicry goes with it; in fact
+there is always, morally speaking, something of the comedian in a
+poet. There is a vast difference between expressing sentiments we do
+not feel, though we may imagine all their variations, and feigning to
+feel them when bidding for success on the theatre of private life. And
+yet, though the necessary hypocrisy of a man of the world may have
+gangrened a poet, he ends by carrying the faculties of his talent into
+the expression of any required sentiment, just as a great man doomed
+to solitude ends by infusing his heart into his mind.
+
+"He is after the millions," thought La Briere, sadly; "and he can play
+passion so well that Modeste will believe him."
+
+Instead of endeavoring to appear more amiable and wittier than his
+rival, Ernest imitated the Duc d'Herouville, and was gloomy, anxious,
+and watchful; but whereas the courier studied the freaks of the young
+heiress, Ernest simply fell a prey to the pains of dark and
+concentrated jealousy. He had not yet been able to obtain a glance
+from his idol. After a while he left the room with Butscha.
+
+"It is all over!" he said; "she is caught by him; I am more
+disagreeable to her, and moreover, she is right. Canalis is charming;
+there's intellect in his silence, passion in his eyes, poetry in his
+rhodomontades."
+
+"Is he an honest man?" asked Butscha.
+
+"Oh, yes," replied La Briere. "He is loyal and chivalrous, and capable
+of getting rid, under Modeste's influence, of those affectations which
+Madame de Chaulieu has taught him."
+
+"You are a fine fellow," said the hunchback; "but is he capable of
+loving,--will he love her?"
+
+"I don't know," answered La Briere. "Has she said anything about me?"
+he asked after a moment's silence.
+
+"Yes," said Butscha, and he repeated Modeste's speech about disguises.
+
+Poor Ernest flung himself upon a bench and held his head in his hands.
+He could not keep back his tears, and he did not wish Butscha to see
+them; but the dwarf was the very man to guess his emotion.
+
+"What troubles you?" he asked.
+
+"She is right!" cried Ernest, springing up; "I am a wretch."
+
+And he related the deception into which Canalis had led him when
+Modeste's first letter was received, carefully pointing out to Butscha
+that he had wished to undeceive the young girl before she herself took
+off the mask, and apostrophizing, in rather juvenile fashion, his
+luckless destiny. Butscha sympathetically understood the love in the
+flavor and vigor of his simple language, and in his deep and genuine
+anxiety.
+
+"But why don't you show yourself to Mademoiselle Modeste for what you
+are?" he said; "why do you let your rival do his exercises?"
+
+"Have you never felt your throat tighten when you wished to speak to
+her?" cried La Briere; "is there never a strange feeling in the roots
+of your hair and on the surface of your skin when she looks at you,--
+even if she is thinking of something else?"
+
+"But you had sufficient judgment to show displeasure when she as good
+as told her excellent father that he was a dolt."
+
+"Monsieur, I love her too well not to have felt a knife in my heart
+when I heard her contradicting her own perfections."
+
+"Canalis supported her."
+
+"If she had more self-love than heart there would be nothing for a man
+to regret in losing her," answered La Briere.
+
+At this moment, Modeste, followed by Canalis, who had lost the rubber,
+came out with her father and Madame Dumay to breathe the fresh air of
+the starry night. While his daughter walked about with the poet,
+Charles Mignon left her and came up to La Briere.
+
+"Your friend, monsieur, ought to have been a lawyer," he said, smiling
+and looking attentively at the young man.
+
+"You must not judge a poet as you would an ordinary man,--as you would
+me, for example, Monsieur le comte," said La Briere. "A poet has a
+mission. He is obliged by his nature to see the poetry of questions,
+just as he expresses that of things. When you think him inconsistent
+with himself he is really faithful to his vocation. He is a painter
+copying with equal truth a Madonna and a courtesan. Moliere is as true
+to nature in his old men as in his young ones, and Moliere's judgment
+was assuredly a sound and healthy one. These witty paradoxes might be
+dangerous for second-rate minds, but they have no real influence on
+the character of great men."
+
+Charles Mignon pressed La Briere's hand.
+
+"That adaptability, however, leads a man to excuse himself in his own
+eyes for actions that are diametrically opposed to each other; above
+all, in politics."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle," Canalis was at this moment saying, in a caressing
+voice, replying to a roguish remark of Modeste, "do not think that a
+multiplicity of emotions can in any way lessen the strength of
+feelings. Poets, even more than other men, must needs love with
+constancy and faith. You must not be jealous of what is called the
+Muse. Happy is the wife of a man whose days are occupied. If you heard
+the complaints of women who have to endure the burden of an idle
+husband, either a man without duties, or one so rich as to have
+nothing to do, you would know that the highest happiness of a Parisian
+wife is freedom,--the right to rule in her own home. Now we writers
+and men of functions and occupations, we leave the sceptre to our
+wives; we cannot descend to the tyranny of little minds; we have
+something better to do. If I ever marry,--which I assure you is a
+catastrophe very remote at the present moment,--I should wish my wife
+to enjoy the same moral freedom that a mistress enjoys, and which is
+perhaps the real source of her attraction."
+
+Canalis talked on, displaying the warmth of his fancy and all his
+graces, for Modeste's benefit, as he spoke of love, marriage, and the
+adoration of women, until Monsieur Mignon, who had rejoined them,
+seized the opportunity of a slight pause to take his daughter's arm
+and lead her up to Ernest de La Briere, whom he had been advising to
+seek an open explanation with her.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Ernest, in a voice that was scarcely his own, "it
+is impossible for me to remain any longer under the weight of your
+displeasure. I do not defend myself; I do not seek to justify my
+conduct; I desire only to make you see that BEFORE reading your most
+flattering letter, addressed to the individual and no longer to the
+poet,--the last which you sent to me,--I wished, and I told you in my
+note written at Havre that I wished, to correct the error under which
+you were acting. All the feelings that I have had the happiness to
+express to you are sincere. A hope dawned on me in Paris when your
+father told me he was comparatively poor,--but now that all is lost,
+now that nothing is left for me but endless regrets, why should I stay
+here where all is torture? Let me carry away with me one smile to live
+forever in my heart."
+
+"Monsieur," answered Modeste, who seemed cold and absent-minded, "I am
+not the mistress of this house; but I certainly should deeply regret
+to retain any one where he finds neither pleasure nor happiness."
+
+She left La Briere and took Madame Dumay's arm to re-enter the house.
+A few moments later all the actors in this domestic scene reassembled
+in the salon, and were a good deal surprised to see Modeste sitting
+beside the Duc d'Herouville and coquetting with him like an
+accomplished Parisian woman. She watched his play, gave him the advice
+he wanted, and found occasion to say flattering things by ranking the
+merits of noble birth with those of genius and beauty. Canalis thought
+he knew the reason of this change; he had tried to pique Modeste by
+calling marriage a catastrophe, and showing that he was aloof from it;
+but like others who play with fire, he had burned his fingers.
+Modeste's pride and her present disdain frightened him, and he
+endeavored to recover his ground, exhibiting a jealousy which was all
+the more visible because it was artificial. Modeste, implacable as an
+angel, tasted the sweets of power, and, naturally enough, abused it.
+The Duc d'Herouville had never known such a happy evening; a woman
+smiled on him! At eleven o'clock, an unheard-of hour at the Chalet,
+the three suitors took their leave,--the duke thinking Modeste
+charming, Canalis believing her excessively coquettish, and La Briere
+heart-broken by her cruelty.
+
+For eight days the heiress continued to be to her three lovers very
+much what she had been during that evening; so that the poet appeared
+to carry the day against his rivals, in spite of certain freaks and
+caprices which from time to time gave the Duc d'Herouville a little
+hope. The disrespect she showed to her father, and the great liberties
+she took with him; her impatience with her blind mother, to whom she
+seemed to grudge the little services which had once been the delight
+of her filial piety,--seemed the result of a capricious nature and a
+heedless gaiety indulged from childhood. When Modeste went too far,
+she turned round and openly took herself to task, ascribing her
+impertinence and levity to a spirit of independence. She acknowledged
+to the duke and Canalis her distaste for obedience, and professed to
+regard it as an obstacle to her marriage; thus investigating the
+nature of her suitors, after the manner of those who dig into the
+earth in search of metals, coal, tufa, or water.
+
+"I shall never," she said, the evening before the day on which the
+family were to move into the villa, "find a husband who will put up
+with my caprices as my father does; his kindness never flags. I am
+sure no one will ever be as indulgent to me as my precious mother."
+
+"They know that you love them, mademoiselle," said La Briere.
+
+"You may be very sure, mademoiselle, that your husband will know the
+full value of his treasure," added the duke.
+
+"You have spirit and resolution enough to discipline a husband," cried
+Canalis, laughing.
+
+Modeste smiled as Henri IV. must have smiled after drawing out the
+characters of his three principal ministers, for the benefit of a
+foreign ambassador, by means of three answers to an insidious
+question.
+
+On the day of the dinner, Modeste, led away by the preference she
+bestowed on Canalis, walked alone with him up and down the gravelled
+space which lay between the house and the lawn with its flower-beds.
+From the gestures of the poet, and the air and manner of the young
+heiress, it was easy to see that she was listening favorably to him.
+The two demoiselles d'Herouville hastened to interrupt the scandalous
+tete-a-tete; and with the natural cleverness of women under such
+circumstances, they turned the conversation on the court, and the
+distinction of an appointment under the crown,--pointing out the
+difference that existed between appointments in the household of the
+king and those of the crown. They tried to intoxicate Modeste's mind
+by appealing to her pride, and describing one of the highest stations
+to which a woman could aspire.
+
+"To have a duke for a son," said the elder lady, "is an actual
+advantage. The title is a fortune that we secure to our children
+without the possibility of loss."
+
+"How is it, then," said Canalis, displeased at his tete-a-tete being
+thus broken in upon, "that Monsieur le duc has had so little success
+in a matter where his title would seem to be of special service to
+him?"
+
+The two ladies cast a look at Canalis as full of venom as the tooth of
+a snake, and they were so disconcerted by Modeste's amused smile that
+they were actually unable to reply.
+
+"Monsieur le duc has never blamed you," she said to Canalis, "for the
+humility with which you bear your fame; why should you attack him for
+his modesty?"
+
+"Besides, we have never yet met a woman worthy of my nephew's rank,"
+said Mademoiselle d'Herouville. "Some had only the wealth of the
+position; others, without fortune, had the wit and birth. I must admit
+that we have done well to wait till God granted us an opportunity to
+meet one in whom we find the noble blood, the mind, and fortune of a
+Duchesse d'Herouville."
+
+"My dear Modeste," said Helene d'Herouville, leading her new friend
+apart, "there are a thousand barons in the kingdom, just as there are
+a hundred poets in Paris, who are worth as much as he; he is so little
+of a great man that even I, a poor girl forced to take the veil for
+want of a 'dot,' I would not take him. You don't know what a young man
+is who has been for ten years in the hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu.
+None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments
+of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,--a habit in
+Louis XIV. that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance. It is true
+the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have
+him always about her."
+
+Then, practising a well-known manoeuvre peculiar to her sex, Helene
+d'Herouville repeated in a low voice all the calumnies which women
+jealous of the Duchesse de Chaulieu were in the habit of spreading
+about the poet. This little incident, common as it is in the
+intercourse of women, will serve to show with what fury the hounds
+were after Modeste's wealth.
+
+Ten days saw a great change in the opinions at the Chalet as to the
+three suitors for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand. This change, which
+was much to the disadvantage of Canalis, came about through
+considerations of a nature which ought to make the holders of any kind
+of fame pause, and reflect. No one can deny, if we remember the
+passion with which people seek for autographs, that public curiosity
+is greatly excited by celebrity. Evidently most provincials never form
+an exact idea in their own minds of how illustrious Parisians put on
+their cravats, walk on the boulevards, stand gaping at nothing, or eat
+a cutlet; because, no sooner do they perceive a man clothed in the
+sunbeams of fashion or resplendent with some dignity that is more or
+less fugitive (though always envied), than they cry out, "Look at
+that!" "How queer!" and other depreciatory exclamations. In a word,
+the mysterious charm that attaches to every kind of fame, even that
+which is most justly due, never lasts. It is, and especially with
+superficial people who are envious or sarcastic, a sensation which
+passes off with the rapidity of lightning, and never returns. It would
+seem as though fame, like the sun, hot and luminous at a distance, is
+cold as the summit of an alp when you approach it. Perhaps man is only
+really great to his peers; perhaps the defects inherent in his
+constitution disappear sooner to the eyes of his equals than to those
+of vulgar admirers. A poet, if he would please in ordinary life, must
+put on the fictitious graces of those who are able to make their
+insignificances forgotten by charming manners and complying speeches.
+The poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, who did not choose to bow
+before this social dictum, was made before long to feel that an
+insulting provincial indifference had succeeded to the dazed
+fascination of the earlier evenings. The prodigality of his wit and
+wisdom had produced upon these worthy souls somewhat the effect which
+a shopful of glass-ware produces on the eye; in other words, the fire
+and brilliancy of Canalis's eloquence soon wearied people who, to use
+their own words, "cared more for the solid."
+
+Forced after a while to behave like an ordinary man, the poet found an
+unexpected stumbling-block on ground where La Briere had already won
+the suffrage of the worthy people who at first had thought him sulky.
+They felt the need of compensating themselves for Canalis's reputation
+by preferring his friend. The best of men are influenced by such
+feelings as these. The simple and straightforward young fellow jarred
+no one's self-love; coming to know him better they discovered his
+heart, his modesty, his silent and sure discretion, and his excellent
+bearing. The Duc d'Herouville considered him, as a political element,
+far above Canalis. The poet, ill-balanced, ambitious, and restless as
+Tasso, loved luxury, grandeur, and ran into debt; while the young
+lawyer, whose character was equable and well-balanced, lived soberly,
+was useful without proclaiming it, awaited rewards without begging for
+them, and laid by his money.
+
+Canalis had moreover laid himself open in a special way to the
+bourgeois eyes that were watching him. For two or three days he had
+shown signs of impatience; he had given way to depression, to states
+of melancholy without apparent reason, to those capricious changes of
+temper which are the natural results of the nervous temperament of
+poets. These originalities (we use the provincial word) came from the
+uneasiness that his conduct toward the Duchesse de Chaulieu which grew
+daily less explainable, caused him. He knew he ought to write to her,
+but could not resolve on doing so. All these fluctuations were
+carefully remarked and commented on by the gentle American, and the
+excellent Madame Latournelle, and they formed the topic of many a
+discussion between these two ladies and Madame Mignon. Canalis felt
+the effects of these discussions without being able to explain them.
+The attention paid to him was not the same, the faces surrounding him
+no longer wore the entranced look of the earlier days; while at the
+same time Ernest was evidently gaining ground.
+
+For the last two days the poet had endeavored to fascinate Modeste
+only, and he took advantage of every moment when he found himself
+alone with her, to weave the web of passionate language around his
+love. Modeste's blush, as she listened to him on the occasion we have
+just mentioned, showed the demoiselles d'Herouville the pleasure with
+which she was listening to sweet conceits that were sweetly said; and
+they, horribly uneasy at the sight, had immediate recourse to the
+"ultima ratio" of women in such cases, namely, those calumnies which
+seldom miss their object. Accordingly, when the party met at the
+dinner-table the poet saw a cloud on the brow of his idol; he knew
+that Mademoiselle d'Herouville's malignity allowed him to lose no
+time, and he resolved to offer himself as a husband at the first
+moment when he could find himself alone with Modeste.
+
+Overhearing a few acid though polite remarks exchanged between the
+poet and the two noble ladies, Gobenheim nudged Butscha with his
+elbow, and said in an undertone, motioning towards the poet and the
+grand equerry,--
+
+"They'll demolish one another!"
+
+"Canalis has genius enough to demolish himself all alone," answered
+the dwarf.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+A RIDDLE GUESSED
+
+During the dinner, which was magnificent and admirably well served,
+the duke obtained a signal advantage over Canalis. Modeste, who had
+received her habit and other equestrian equipments the night before,
+spoke of taking rides about the country. A turn of the conversation
+led her to express the wish to see a hunt with hounds, a pleasure she
+had never yet enjoyed. The duke at once proposed to arrange a hunt in
+one of the crown forests, which lay a few leagues from Havre. Thanks
+to his intimacy with the Prince de Cadignan, Master of the Hunt, he
+saw his chance of displaying an almost regal pomp before Modeste's
+eyes, and alluring her with a glimpse of court fascinations, to which
+she could be introduced by marriage. Glances were exchanged between
+the duke and the two demoiselles d'Herouville, which plainly said,
+"The heiress is ours!" and the poet, who detected them, and who had
+nothing but his personal splendors to depend on, determined all the
+more firmly to obtain some pledge of affection at once. Modeste, on
+the other hand, half-frightened at being thus pushed beyond her
+intentions by the d'Herouvilles, walked rather markedly apart with
+Melchior, when the company adjourned to the park after dinner. With
+the pardonable curiosity of a young girl, she let him suspect the
+calumnies which Helene had poured into her ears; but on Canalis's
+exclamation of anger, she begged him to keep silence about them, which
+he promised.
+
+"These stabs of the tongue," he said, "are considered fair in the
+great world. They shock your upright nature; but as for me, I laugh at
+them; I am even pleased. These ladies must feel that the duke's
+interests are in great peril, when they have recourse to such
+warfare."
+
+Making the most of the advantage Modeste had thus given him, Canalis
+entered upon his defence with such warmth, such eagerness, and with a
+passion so exquisitely expressed, as he thanked her for a confidence
+in which he could venture to see the dawn of love, that she found
+herself suddenly as much compromised with the poet as she feared to be
+with the grand equerry. Canalis, feeling the necessity of prompt
+action, declared himself plainly. He uttered vows and protestations in
+which his poetry shone like a moon, invoked for the occasion, and
+illuminating his allusions to the beauty of his mistress and the
+charms of her evening dress. This counterfeit enthusiasm, in which the
+night, the foliage, the heavens and the earth, and Nature herself
+played a part, carried the eager lover beyond all bounds; for he dwelt
+on his disinterestedness, and revamped in his own charming style,
+Diderot's famous apostrophe to "Sophie and fifteen hundred francs!"
+and the well-worn "love in a cottage" of every lover who knows
+perfectly well the length of the father-in-law's purse.
+
+"Monsieur," said Modeste, after listening with delight to the melody
+of this concerto; "the freedom granted to me by my parents has allowed
+me to listen to you; but it is to them that you must address
+yourself."
+
+"But," exclaimed Canalis, "tell me that if I obtain their consent, you
+will ask nothing better than to obey them."
+
+"I know beforehand," she replied, "that my father has certain fancies
+which may wound the proper pride of an old family like yours. He
+wishes to have his own title and name borne by his grandsons."
+
+"Ah! dear Modeste, what sacrifices would I not make to commit my life
+to the guardian care of an angel like you."
+
+"You will permit me not to decide in a moment the fate of my whole
+life," she said, turning to rejoin the demoiselles d'Herouville.
+
+Those noble ladies were just then engaged in flattering the vanity of
+little Latournelle, intending to win him over to their interests.
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville, to whom we shall in future confine the
+family name, to distinguish her from her niece Helene, was giving the
+notary to understand that the post of judge of the Supreme Court in
+Havre, which Charles X. would bestow as she desired, was an office
+worthy of his legal talent and his well-known probity. Butscha,
+meanwhile, who had been walking about with La Briere, was greatly
+alarmed at the progress Canalis was evidently making, and he waylaid
+Modeste at the lower step of the portico when the whole party returned
+to the house to endure the torments of their inevitable whist.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, in a low whisper, "I do hope you don't call
+him Melchior."
+
+"I'm very near it, my Black Dwarf," she said, with a smile that might
+have made an angel swear.
+
+"Good God!" exclaimed Butscha, letting fall his hands, which struck
+the marble steps.
+
+"Well! and isn't he worth more than that spiteful and gloomy secretary
+in whom you take such an interest?" she retorted, assuming, at the
+mere thought of Ernest, the haughty manner whose secret belongs
+exclusively to young girls,--as if their virginity lent them wings to
+fly to heaven. "Pray, would your little La Briere accept me without a
+fortune?" she said, after a pause.
+
+"Ask your father," replied Butscha, who walked a few steps from the
+house, to get Modeste at a safe distance from the windows. "Listen to
+me, mademoiselle. You know that he who speaks to you is ready to give
+not only his life but his honor for you, at any moment, and at all
+times. Therefore you may believe in him; you can confide to him that
+which you may not, perhaps, be willing to say to your father. Tell me,
+has that sublime Canalis been making you the disinterested offer that
+you now fling as a reproach at poor Ernest?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"That question, my manikin," she replied, giving him one of the ten or
+a dozen nicknames she had invented for him, "strikes me as
+undervaluing the strength of my self-love."
+
+"Ah, you are laughing, my dear Mademoiselle Modeste; then there's no
+danger: I hope you are only making a fool of him."
+
+"Pray what would you think of me, Monsieur Butscha, if I allowed
+myself to make fun of those who do me the honor to wish to marry me?
+You ought to know, master Jean, that even if a girl affects to despise
+the most despicable attentions, she is flattered by them."
+
+"Then I flatter you?" said the young man, looking up at her with a
+face that was illuminated like a city for a festival.
+
+"You?" she said; "you give me the most precious of all friendships,--a
+feeling as disinterested as that of a mother for her child. Compare
+yourself to no one; for even my father is obliged to be devoted to
+me." She paused. "I cannot say that I love you, in the sense which men
+give to that word, but what I do give you is eternal and can know no
+change."
+
+"Then," said Butscha, stooping to pick up a pebble that he might kiss
+the hem of her garment, "suffer me to watch over you as a dragon
+guards a treasure. The poet was covering you just now with the lace-
+work of his precious phrases, the tinsel of his promises; he chanted
+his love on the best strings of his lyre, I know he did. If, as soon
+as this noble lover finds out how small your fortune is, he makes a
+sudden change in his behavior, and is cold and embarrassed, will you
+still marry him? shall you still esteem him?"
+
+"He would be another Francisque Althor," she said, with a gesture of
+bitter disgust.
+
+"Let me have the pleasure of producing that change of scene," said
+Butscha. "Not only shall it be sudden, but I believe I can change it
+back and make your poet as loving as before,--nay, it is possible to
+make him blow alternately hot and cold upon your heart, just as
+gracefully as he has talked on both sides of an argument in one
+evening without ever finding it out."
+
+"If you are right," she said, "who can be trusted?"
+
+"One who truly loves you."
+
+"The little duke?"
+
+Butscha looked at Modeste. The pair walked some distance in silence;
+the girl was impenetrable and not an eyelash quivered.
+
+"Mademoiselle, permit me to be the exponent of the thoughts that are
+lying at the bottom of your heart like sea-mosses under the waves, and
+which you do not choose to gather up."
+
+"Eh!" said Modeste, "so my intimate friend and counsellor thinks
+himself a mirror, does he?"
+
+"No, an echo," he answered, with a gesture of sublime humility. "The
+duke loves you, but he loves you too much. If I, a dwarf, have
+understood the infinite delicacy of your heart, it would be repugnant
+to you to be worshipped like a saint in her shrine. You are eminently
+a woman; you neither want a man perpetually at your feet of whom you
+are eternally sure, nor a selfish egoist like Canalis, who will always
+prefer himself to you. Why? ah, that I don't know. But I will make
+myself a woman, an old woman, and find out the meaning of the plan
+which I have read in your eyes, and which perhaps is in the heart of
+every girl. Nevertheless, in your great soul you feel the need of
+worshipping. When a man is at your knees, you cannot put yourself at
+his. You can't advance in that way, as Voltaire might say. The little
+duke has too many genuflections in his moral being and the poet has
+too few,--indeed, I might say, none at all. Ha, I have guessed the
+mischief in your smiles when you talk to the grand equerry, and when
+he talks to you and you answer him. You would never be unhappy with
+the duke, and everybody will approve your choice, if you do choose
+him; but you will never love him. The ice of egotism, and the burning
+heat of ecstasy both produce indifference in the heart of every woman.
+It is evident to my mind that no such perpetual worship will give you
+the infinite delights which you are dreaming of in marriage,--in some
+marriage where obedience will be your pride, where noble little
+sacrifices can be made and hidden, where the heart is full of
+anxieties without a cause, and successes are awaited with eager hope,
+where each new chance for magnanimity is hailed with joy, where souls
+are comprehended to their inmost recesses, and where the woman
+protects with her love the man who protects her."
+
+"You are a sorcerer!" exclaimed Modeste.
+
+"Neither will you find that sweet equality of feeling, that continual
+sharing of each other's life, that certainty of pleasing which makes
+marriage tolerable, if you take Canalis,--a man who thinks of himself
+only, whose 'I' is the one string to his lute, whose mind is so fixed
+on himself that he has hitherto taken no notice of your father or the
+duke,--a man of second-rate ambitions, to whom your dignity and your
+devotion will matter nothing, who will make you a mere appendage to
+his household, and who already insults you by his indifference to your
+behavior; yes, if you permitted yourself to go so far as to box your
+mother's ears Canalis would shut his eyes to it, and deny your crime
+even to himself, because he thirsts for your money. And so,
+mademoiselle, when I spoke of the man who truly loves you I was not
+thinking of the great poet who is nothing but a little comedian, nor
+of the duke, who might be a good marriage for you, but never a
+husband--"
+
+"Butscha, my heart is a blank page on which you are yourself writing
+all that you read there," cried Modeste, interrupting him. "You are
+carried away by your provincial hatred for everything that obliges you
+to look higher than your own head. You can't forgive a poet for being
+a statesman, for possessing the gift of speech, for having a noble
+future before him,--and you calumniate his intentions."
+
+"His!--mademoiselle, he will turn his back upon you with the baseness
+of an Althor."
+
+"Make him play that pretty little comedy, and--"
+
+"That I will! he shall play it through and through within three days,
+--on Wednesday,--recollect, Wednesday! Until then, mademoiselle, amuse
+yourself by listening to the little tunes of the lyre, so that the
+discords and the false notes may come out all the more distinctly."
+
+Modeste ran gaily back to the salon, where La Briere, who was sitting
+by the window, where he had doubtless been watching his idol, rose to
+his feet as if a groom of the chambers had suddenly announced, "The
+Queen." It was a movement of spontaneous respect, full of that living
+eloquence that lies in gesture even more than in speech. Spoken love
+cannot compare with acts of love; and every young girl of twenty has
+the wisdom of fifty in applying the axiom. In it lies the great secret
+of attraction. Instead of looking Modeste in the face, as Canalis who
+paid her public homage would have done, the neglected lover followed
+her with a furtive look between his eyelids, humble after the manner
+of Butscha, and almost timid. The young heiress observed it, as she
+took her place by Canalis, to whose game she proceeded to pay
+attention. During a conversation which ensued, La Briere heard Modeste
+say to her father that she should ride out for the first time on the
+following Wednesday; and she also reminded him that she had no whip in
+keeping with her new equipments. The young man flung a lightning
+glance at the dwarf, and a few minutes later the two were pacing the
+terrace.
+
+"It is nine o'clock," cried Ernest. "I shall start for Paris at full
+gallop; I can get there to-morrow morning by ten. My dear Butscha,
+from you she will accept anything, for she is attached to you; let me
+give her a riding-whip in your name. If you will do me this immense
+kindness, you shall have not only my friendship but my devotion."
+
+"Ah, you are very happy," said Butscha, ruefully; "you have money,
+you!"
+
+"Tell Canalis not to expect me, and that he must find some pretext to
+account for my absence."
+
+An hour later Ernest had ridden out of Havre. He reached Paris in
+twelve hours, where his first act was to secure a place in the mail-
+coach for Havre on the following evening. Then he went to three of the
+chief jewellers in Paris and compared all the whip-handles that they
+could offer; he was in search of some artistic treasure that was
+regally superb. He found one at last, made by Stidmann for a Russian,
+who was unable to pay for it when finished,--a fox-head in gold, with
+a ruby of exorbitant value; all his savings went into the purchase,
+the cost of which was seven thousand francs. Ernest gave a drawing of
+the arms of La Bastie, and allowed the shop-people twenty hours to
+engrave them. The handle, a masterpiece of delicate workmanship, was
+fitted to an india-rubber whip and put into a morocco case lined with
+velvet, on which two M.'s interlaced were stamped in gold.
+
+La Briere got back to Havre by the mail-coach Wednesday morning in
+time to breakfast with Canalis. The poet had concealed his secretary's
+absence by declaring that he was busy with some work sent from Paris.
+Butscha, who met La Briere at the coach-door, took the box containing
+the precious work of art to Francoise Cochet, with instructions to
+place it on Modeste's dressing-table.
+
+"Of course you will accompany Mademoiselle Modeste on her ride
+to-day?" said Butscha, who went to Canalis's house to let La Briere
+know by a wink that the whip had gone to its destination.
+
+"I?" answered Ernest; "no, I am going to bed."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Canalis, looking at him. "I don't know what to make
+of you."
+
+Breakfast was then served, and the poet naturally invited their
+visitor to stay and take it. Butscha complied, having seen in the
+expression of the valet's face the success of a trick in which we
+shall see the first fruits of his promise to Modeste.
+
+"Monsieur is very right to detain the clerk of Monsieur Latournelle,"
+whispered Germain in his master's ear.
+
+Canalis and Germain went into the salon on a sign that passed between
+them.
+
+"I went out this morning to see the men fish, monsieur," said the
+valet,--"an excursion proposed to me by the captain of a smack, whose
+acquaintance I have made."
+
+Germain did not acknowledge that he had the bad taste to play
+billiards in a cafe,--a fact of which Butscha had taken advantage to
+surround him with friends of his own and manage him as he pleased.
+
+"Well?" said Canalis, "to the point,--quick!"
+
+"Monsieur le baron, I heard a conversation about Monsieur Mignon,
+which I encouraged as far as I could; for no one, of course, knew that
+I belong to you. Ah! monsieur, judging by the talk of the quays, you
+are running your head into a noose. The fortune of Mademoiselle de La
+Bastie is, like her name, modest. The vessel on which the father
+returned does not belong to him, but to rich China merchants to whom
+he renders an account. They even say things that are not at all
+flattering to Monsieur Mignon's honor. Having heard that you and
+Monsieur le duc were rivals for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand, I
+have taken the liberty to warn you; of the two, wouldn't it be better
+that his lordship should gobble her? As I came home I walked round the
+quays, and into that theatre-hall where the merchants meet; I slipped
+boldly in and out among them. Seeing a well-dressed stranger, those
+worthy fellows began to talk to me of Havre, and I got them, little by
+little, to speak of Colonel Mignon. What they said only confirms the
+stories the fishermen told me; and I feel that I should fail in my
+duty if I keep silence. That is why I did not get home in time to
+dress monsieur this morning."
+
+"What am I to do?" cried Canalis, who remembered his proposals to
+Modeste the night before, and did not see how he could get out of
+them.
+
+"Monsieur knows my attachment to him," said Germain, perceiving that
+the poet was quite thrown off his balance; "he will not be surprised
+if I give him a word of advice. There is that clerk; try to get the
+truth out of him. Perhaps he'll unbutton after a bottle or two of
+champagne, or at any rate a third. It would be strange indeed if
+monsieur, who will one day be ambassador, as Philoxene has heard
+Madame la duchesse say time and time again, couldn't turn a little
+notary's clerk inside out."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+BUTSCHA DISTINGUISHES HIMSELF
+
+At this instant Butscha, the hidden prompter of the fishing part, was
+requesting the secretary to say nothing about his trip to Paris, and
+not to interfere in any way with what he, Butscha, might do. The dwarf
+had already made use of an unfavorable feeling lately roused against
+Monsieur Mignon in Havre in consequence of his reserve and his
+determination to keep silence as to the amount of his fortune. The
+persons who were most bitter against him even declared calumniously
+that he had made over a large amount of property to Dumay to save it
+from the just demands of his associates in China. Butscha took
+advantage of this state of feeling. He asked the fishermen, who owed
+him many a good turn, to keep the secret and lend him their tongues.
+They served him well. The captain of the fishing-smack told Germain
+that one of his cousins, a sailor, had just returned from Marseilles,
+where he had been paid off from the brig in which Monsieur Mignon
+returned to France. The brig had been sold to the account of some
+other person than Monsieur Mignon, and the cargo was only worth three
+or four hundred thousand francs at the utmost.
+
+"Germain," said Canalis, as the valet was leaving the room, "serve
+champagne and claret. A member of the legal fraternity of Havre must
+carry away with him proper ideas of a poet's hospitality. Besides, he
+has got a wit that is equal to Figaro's," added Canalis, laying his
+hand on the dwarf's shoulder, "and we must make it foam and sparkle
+with champagne; you and I, Ernest, will not spare the bottle either.
+Faith, it is over two years since I've been drunk," he added, looking
+at La Briere.
+
+"Not drunk with wine, you mean," said Butscha, looking keenly at him,
+"yes, I can believe that. You get drunk every day on yourself, you
+drink in so much praise. Ha, you are handsome, you are a poet, you are
+famous in your lifetime, you have the gift of an eloquence that is
+equal to your genius, and you please all women,--even my master's
+wife. Admired by the finest sultana-valide that I ever saw in my life
+(and I never saw but her) you can, if you choose, marry Mademoiselle
+de La Bastie. Goodness! the mere inventory of your present advantages,
+not to speak of the future (a noble title, peerage, embassy!), is
+enough to make me drunk already,--like the men who bottle other men's
+wine."
+
+"All such social distinctions," said Canalis, "are of little use
+without the one thing that gives them value,--wealth. Here we can talk
+as men with men; fine sentiments only do in verse."
+
+"That depends on circumstances," said the dwarf, with a knowing
+gesture.
+
+"Ah! you writer of conveyances," said the poet, smiling at the
+interruption, "you know as well as I do that 'cottage' rhymes with
+'pottage,'--and who would like to live on that for the rest of his
+days?"
+
+At table Butscha played the part of Trigaudin, in the "Maison en
+loterie," in a way that alarmed Ernest, who did not know the waggery
+of a lawyer's office, which is quite equal to that of an atelier.
+Butscha poured forth the scandalous gossip of Havre, the private
+history of fortune and boudoirs, and the crimes committed code in
+hand, which are called in Normandy, "getting out of a thing as best
+you can." He spared no one; and his liveliness increased with the
+torrents of wine which poured down his throat like rain through a
+gutter.
+
+"Do you know, La Briere," said Canalis, filling Butscha's glass, "that
+this fellow would make a capital secretary to the embassy?"
+
+"And oust his chief!" cried the dwarf flinging a look at Canalis whose
+insolence was lost in the gurgling of carbonic acid gas. "I've little
+enough gratitude and quite enough scheming to get astride of your
+shoulders. Ha, ha, a poet carrying a hunchback! that's been seen,
+often seen--on book-shelves. Come, don't look at me as if I were
+swallowing swords. My dear great genius, you're a superior man; you
+know that gratitude is the word of fools; they stick it in the
+dictionary, but it isn't in the human heart; pledges are worth
+nothing, except on a certain mount that is neither Pindus nor
+Parnassus. You think I owe a great deal to my master's wife, who
+brought me up. Bless you, the whole town has paid her for that in
+praises, respect, and admiration,--the very best of coin. I don't
+recognize any service that is only the capital of self-love. Men make
+a commerce of their services, and gratitude goes down on the debit
+side,--that's all. As to schemes, they are my divinity. What?" he
+exclaimed, at a gesture of Canalis, "don't you admire the faculty
+which enables a wily man to get the better of a man of genius? it
+takes the closest observation of his vices, and his weaknesses, and
+the wit to seize the happy moment. Ask diplomacy if its greatest
+triumphs are not those of craft over force? If I were your secretary,
+Monsieur le baron, you'd soon be prime-minister, because it would be
+my interest to have you so. Do you want a specimen of my talents in
+that line? Well then, listen; you love Mademoiselle Modeste
+distractedly, and you've good reason to do so. The girl has my fullest
+esteem; she is a true Parisian. Sometimes we get a few real Parisians
+born down here in the provinces. Well, Modeste is just the woman to
+help a man's career. She's got THAT in her," he cried, with a turn of
+his wrist in the air. "But you've a dangerous competitor in the duke;
+what will you give me to get him out of Havre within three days?"
+
+"Finish this bottle," said the poet, refilling Butscha's glass.
+
+"You'll make me drunk," said the dwarf, tossing off his ninth glass of
+champagne. "Have you a bed where I could sleep it off? My master is as
+sober as the camel that he is, and Madame Latournelle too. They are
+brutal enough, both of them, to scold me; and they'd have the rights
+of it too--there are those deeds I ought to be drawing!--" Then,
+suddenly returning to his previous ideas, after the fashion of a
+drunken man, he exclaimed, "and I've such a memory; it is on a par
+with my gratitude."
+
+"Butscha!" cried the poet, "you said just now you had no gratitude;
+you contradict yourself."
+
+"Not at all," he replied. "To forget a thing means almost always
+recollecting it. Come, come, do you want me to get rid of the duke?
+I'm cut out for a secretary."
+
+"How could you manage it?" said Canalis, delighted to find the
+conversation taking this turn of its own accord.
+
+"That's none of your business," said the dwarf, with a portentous
+hiccough.
+
+Butscha's head rolled between his shoulders, and his eyes turned from
+Germain to La Briere, and from La Briere to Canalis, after the manner
+of men who, knowing they are tipsy, wish to see what other men are
+thinking of them; for in the shipwreck of drunkenness it is noticeable
+that self-love is the last thing that goes to the bottom.
+
+"Ha! my great poet, you're a pretty good trickster yourself; but you
+are not deep enough. What do you mean by taking me for one of your own
+readers,--you who sent your friend to Paris, full gallop, to inquire
+into the property of the Mignon family? Ha, ha! I hoax, thou hoaxest,
+we hoax--Good! But do me the honor to believe that I'm deep enough to
+keep the secrets of my own business. As the head-clerk of a notary, my
+heart is a locked box, padlocked! My mouth never opens to let out
+anything about a client. I know all, and I know nothing. Besides, my
+passion is well known. I love Modeste; she is my pupil, and she must
+make a good marriage. I'll fool the duke, if need be; and you shall
+marry--"
+
+"Germain, coffee and liqueurs," said Canalis.
+
+"Liqueurs!" repeated Butscha with a wave of his hand, and the air of a
+sham virgin repelling seduction; "Ah, those poor deeds! one of 'em was
+a marriage contract; and that second clerk of mine is as stupid as--as
+--an epithalamium, and he's capable of digging his penknife right
+through the bride's paraphernalia; he thinks he's a handsome man
+because he's five feet six,--idiot!"
+
+"Here is some creme de the, a liqueur of the West Indies," said
+Canalis. "You, whom Mademoiselle Modeste consults--"
+
+"Yes, she consults me."
+
+"Well, do you think she loves me?" asked the poet.
+
+"Loves you? yes, more than she loves the duke, answered the dwarf,
+rousing himself from a stupor which was admirably played. "She loves
+you for your disinterestedness. She told me she was ready to make the
+greatest sacrifices for your sake; to give up dress and spend as
+little as possible on herself, and devote her life to showing you that
+in marrying her you hadn't done so" (hiccough) "bad a thing for
+yourself. She's as right as a trivet,--yes, and well informed. She
+knows everything, that girl."
+
+"And she has three hundred thousand francs?"
+
+"There may be quite as much as that," cried the dwarf,
+enthusiastically. "Papa Mignon,--mignon by name, mignon by nature, and
+that's why I respect him,--well, he would rob himself of everything to
+marry his daughter. Your Restoration" (hiccough) "has taught him how
+to live on half-pay; he'd be quite content to live with Dumay on next
+to nothing, if he could rake and scrape enough together to give the
+little one three hundred thousand francs. But don't let's forget that
+Dumay is going to leave all his money to Modeste. Dumay, you know, is
+a Breton, and that fact clinches the matter; he won't go back from his
+word, and his fortune is equal to the colonel's. But I don't approve
+of Monsieur Mignon's taking back that villa, and, as they often ask my
+advice, I told them so. 'You sink too much in it,' I said; 'if Vilquin
+does not buy it back there's two hundred thousand francs which won't
+bring you a penny; it only leaves you a hundred thousand to get along
+with, and it isn't enough.' The colonel and Dumay are consulting about
+it now. But nevertheless, between you and me, Modeste is sure to be
+rich. I hear talk on the quays against it; but that's all nonsense;
+people are jealous. Why, there's no such 'dot' in Havre," cried
+Butscha, beginning to count on his fingers. "Two to three hundred
+thousand in ready money," bending back the thumb of his left hand with
+the forefinger of his right, "that's one item; the reversion of the
+villa Mignon, that's another; 'tertio,' Dumay's property!" doubling
+down his middle finger. "Ha! little Modeste may count upon her six
+hundred thousand francs as soon as the two old soldiers have got their
+marching orders for eternity."
+
+This coarse and candid statement, intermingled with a variety of
+liqueurs, sobered Canalis as much as it appeared to befuddle Butscha.
+To the latter, a young provincial, such a fortune must of course seem
+colossal. He let his head fall into the palm of his right hand, and
+putting his elbows majestically on the table, blinked his eyes and
+continued talking to himself:--
+
+"In twenty years, thanks to that Code, which pillages fortunes under
+what they call 'Successions,' an heiress worth a million will be as
+rare as generosity in a money-lender. Suppose Modeste does want to
+spend all the interest of her own money,--well, she is so pretty, so
+sweet and pretty; why she's--you poets are always after metaphors--
+she's a weasel as tricky as a monkey."
+
+"How came you to tell me she had six millions?" said Canalis to La
+Briere, in a low voice.
+
+"My friend," said Ernest, "I do assure you that I was bound to silence
+by an oath; perhaps, even now, I ought not to say as much as that."
+
+"Bound! to whom?"
+
+"To Monsieur Mignon."
+
+"Ernest! you who know how essential fortune is to me--"
+
+Butscha snored.
+
+"--who know my situation, and all that I shall lose in the Duchesse de
+Chaulieu, by this attempt at marrying, YOU could coldly let me plunge
+into such a thing as this?" exclaimed Canalis, turning pale. "It was a
+question of friendship; and ours was a compact entered into long
+before you ever saw that crafty Mignon."
+
+"My dear fellow," said Ernest, "I love Modeste too well to--"
+
+"Fool! then take her," cried the poet, "and break your oath."
+
+"Will you promise me on your word of honor to forget what I now tell
+you, and to behave to me as though this confidence had never been
+made, whatever happens?"
+
+"I'll swear that, by my mother's memory."
+
+"Well then," said La Briere, "Monsieur Mignon told me in Paris that he
+was very far from having the colossal fortune which the Mongenods told
+me about and which I mentioned to you. The colonel intends to give two
+hundred thousand francs to his daughter. And now, Melchior, I ask you,
+was the father really distrustful of us, as you thought; or was he
+sincere? It is not for me to answer those questions. If Modeste
+without a fortune deigns to choose me, she will be my wife."
+
+"A blue-stocking! educated till she is a terror! a girl who has read
+everything, who knows everything,--in theory," cried Canalis, hastily,
+noticing La Briere's gesture, "a spoiled child, brought up in luxury
+in her childhood, and weaned of it for five years. Ah! my poor friend,
+take care what you are about."
+
+"Ode and Code," said Butscha, waking up, "you do the ode and I the
+code; there's only a C's difference between us. Well, now, code comes
+from 'coda,' a tail,--mark that word! See here! a bit of good advice
+is worth your wine and your cream of tea. Father Mignon--he's cream,
+too; the cream of honest men--he is going with his daughter on this
+riding party; do you go up frankly and talk 'dot' to him. He'll answer
+plainly, and you'll get at the truth, just as surely as I'm drunk, and
+you're a great poet,--but no matter for that; we are to leave Havre
+together, that's settled, isn't it? I'm to be your secretary in place
+of that little fellow who sits there grinning at me and thinking I'm
+drunk. Come, let's go, and leave him to marry the girl."
+
+Canalis rose to leave the room to dress for the excursion.
+
+"Hush, not a word,--he is going to commit suicide," whispered Butscha,
+sober as a judge, to La Briere as he made the gesture of a street boy
+at Canalis's back. "Adieu, my chief!" he shouted, in stentorian tones,
+"will you allow me to take a snooze in that kiosk down in the garden?"
+
+"Make yourself at home," answered the poet.
+
+Butscha, pursued by the laughter of the three servants of the
+establishment, gained the kiosk by walking over the flower-beds and
+round the vases with the perverse grace of an insect describing its
+interminable zig-zags as it tries to get out of a closed window. When
+he had clambered into the kiosk, and the servants had retired, he sat
+down on a wooden bench and wallowed in the delights of his triumph. He
+had completely fooled a great man; he had not only torn off his mask,
+but he had made him untie the strings himself; and he laughed like an
+author over his own play,--that is to say, with a true sense of the
+immense value of his "vis comica."
+
+"Men are tops!" he cried, "you've only to find the twine to wind 'em
+up with. But I'm like my fellows," he added, presently. "I should
+faint away if any one came and said to me 'Mademoiselle Modeste has
+been thrown from her horse, and has broken her leg.'"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE POET FEELS THAT HE IS LOVED TOO WELL
+
+An hour later, Modeste, charmingly equipped in a bottle-green
+cassimere habit, a small hat with a green veil, buckskin gloves, and
+velvet boots which met the lace frills of her drawers, and mounted on
+an elegantly caparisoned little horse, was exhibiting to her father
+and the Duc d'Herouville the beautiful present she had just received;
+she was evidently delighted with an attention of a kind that
+particularly flatters women.
+
+"Did it come from you, Monsieur le duc?" she said, holding the
+sparkling handle toward him. "There was a card with it, saying, 'Guess
+if you can,' and some asterisks. Francoise and Dumay credit Butscha
+with this charming surprise; but my dear Butscha is not rich enough to
+buy such rubies. And as for papa (to whom I said, as I remember, on
+Sunday evening, that I had no whip), he sent to Rouen for this one,"--
+pointing to a whip in her father's hand, with a top like a cone of
+turquoise, a fashion then in vogue which has since become vulgar.
+
+"I would give ten years of my old age, mademoiselle, to have the right
+to offer you that beautiful jewel," said the duke, courteously.
+
+"Ah, here comes the audacious giver!" cried Modeste, as Canalis rode
+up. "It is only a poet who knows where to find such choice things.
+Monsieur," she said to Melchior, "my father will scold you, and say
+that you justify those who accuse you of extravagance."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Canalis, with apparent simplicity, "so that is why La
+Briere rode at full gallop from Havre to Paris?"
+
+"Does your secretary take such liberties?" said Modeste, turning pale,
+and throwing the whip to Francoise with an impetuosity that expressed
+scorn. "Give me your whip, papa."
+
+"Poor Ernest, who lies there on his bed half-dead with fatigue!" said
+Canalis, overtaking the girl, who had already started at a gallop.
+"You are pitiless, mademoiselle. 'I have' (the poor fellow said to me)
+'only this one chance to remain in her memory.'"
+
+"And should you think well of a woman who could take presents from
+half the parish?" said Modeste.
+
+She was surprised to receive no answer to this inquiry, and attributed
+the poet's inattention to the noise of the horse's feet.
+
+"How you delight in tormenting those who love you," said the duke.
+"Your nobility of soul and your pride are so inconsistent with your
+faults that I begin to suspect you calumniate yourself, and do those
+naughty things on purpose."
+
+"Ah! have you only just found that out, Monsieur le duc?" she
+exclaimed, laughing. "You have the sagacity of a husband."
+
+They rode half a mile in silence. Modeste was a good deal astonished
+not to receive the fire of the poet's eyes. The evening before, as she
+was pointing out to him an admirable effect of setting sunlight across
+the water, she had said, remarking his inattention, "Well, don't you
+see it?"--to which he replied, "I can see only your hand"; but now his
+admiration for the beauties of nature seemed a little too intense to
+be natural.
+
+"Does Monsieur de La Briere know how to ride?" she asked, for the
+purpose of teasing him.
+
+"Not very well, but he gets along," answered the poet, cold as
+Gobenheim before the colonel's return.
+
+At a cross-road, which Monsieur Mignon made them take through a lovely
+valley to reach a height overlooking the Seine, Canalis let Modeste
+and the duke pass him, and then reined up to join the colonel.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," he said, "you are an open-hearted soldier, and I
+know you will regard my frankness as a title to your esteem. When
+proposals of marriage, with all their brutal,--or, if you please, too
+civilized--discussions, are carried on by third parties, it is an
+injury to all. We are both gentlemen, and both discreet; and you, like
+myself, have passed beyond the age of surprises. Let us therefore
+speak as intimates. I will set you the example. I am twenty-nine years
+old, without landed estates, and full of ambition. Mademoiselle
+Modeste, as you must have perceived, pleases me extremely. Now, in
+spite of the little defects which your dear girl likes to assume--"
+
+"--not counting those she really possesses," said the colonel,
+smiling,--
+
+"--I should gladly make her my wife, and I believe I could render her
+happy. The question of money is of the utmost importance to my future,
+which hangs to-day in the balance. All young girls expect to be loved
+WHETHER OR NO--fortune or no fortune. But you are not the man to marry
+your dear Modeste without a 'dot,' and my situation does not allow me
+to make a marriage of what is called love unless with a woman who has
+a fortune at least equal to mine. I have, from my emoluments and
+sinecures, from the Academy and from my works, about thirty thousand
+francs a year, a large income for a bachelor. If my wife brought me as
+much more, I should still be in about the same condition that I am
+now. Shall you give Mademoiselle a million?"
+
+"Ah, monsieur, we have not reached that point as yet," said the
+colonel, Jesuitically.
+
+"Then suppose," said Canalis, quickly, "that we go no further; we will
+let the matter drop. You shall have no cause to complain of me,
+Monsieur le comte; the world shall consider me among the unfortunate
+suitors of your charming daughter. Give me your word of honor to say
+nothing on the subject to any one, not even to Mademoiselle Modeste,
+because," he added, throwing a word of promise to the ear, "my
+circumstances may so change that I can ask you for her without 'dot.'"
+
+"I promise you that," said the colonel. "You know, monsieur, with what
+assurance the public, both in Paris and the provinces, talk of
+fortunes that they make and unmake. People exaggerate both happiness
+and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as
+people say we are. There is nothing sure and certain in business
+except investments in land. I am awaiting the accounts of my agents
+with very great impatience. The sale of my merchandise and my ship,
+and the settlement of my affairs in China, are not yet concluded; and
+I cannot know the full amount of my fortune for at least six months. I
+did, however, say to Monsieur de La Briere in Paris that I would
+guarantee a 'dot' of two hundred thousand francs in ready money. I
+wish to entail my estates, and enable my grandchildren to inherit my
+arms and title."
+
+Canalis did not listen to this statement after the opening sentence.
+The four riders, having now reached a wider road, went abreast and
+soon reached a stretch of table-land, from which the eye took in on
+one side the rich valley of the Seine toward Rouen, and on the other
+an horizon bounded only by the sea.
+
+"Butscha was right, God is the greatest of all landscape painters,"
+said Canalis, contemplating the view, which is unique among the many
+fine scenes that have made the shores of the Seine so justly
+celebrated.
+
+"Above all do we feel that, my dear baron," said the duke, "on
+hunting-days, when nature has a voice, and a lively tumult breaks the
+silence; at such times the landscape, changing rapidly as we ride
+through it, seems really sublime."
+
+"The sun is the inexhaustible palette," said Modeste, looking at the
+poet in a species of bewilderment.
+
+A remark that she presently made on his absence of mind gave him an
+opportunity of saying that he was just then absorbed in his own
+thoughts,--an excuse that authors have more reason for giving than
+other men.
+
+"Are we really made happy by carrying our lives into the midst of the
+world, and swelling them with all sorts of fictitious wants and over-
+excited vanities?" said Modeste, moved by the aspect of the fertile
+and billowy country to long for a philosophically tranquil life.
+
+"That is a bucolic, mademoiselle, which is only written on tablets of
+gold," said the poet.
+
+"And sometimes under garret-roofs," remarked the colonel.
+
+Modeste threw a piercing glance at Canalis, which he was unable to
+sustain; she was conscious of a ringing in her ears, darkness seemed
+to spread before her, and then she suddenly exclaimed in icy tones:--
+
+"Ah! it is Wednesday!"
+
+"I do not say this to flatter your passing caprice, mademoiselle,"
+said the duke, to whom the little scene, so tragical for Modeste, had
+left time for thought; "but I declare I am so profoundly disgusted
+with the world and the Court and Paris that had I a Duchesse
+d'Herouville, gifted with the wit and graces of mademoiselle, I would
+gladly bind myself to live like a philosopher at my chateau, doing
+good around me, draining my marshes, educating my children--"
+
+"That, Monsieur le duc, will be set to the account of your great
+goodness," said Modeste, letting her eyes rest steadily on the noble
+gentleman. "You flatter me in not thinking me frivolous, and in
+believing that I have enough resources within myself to be able to
+live in solitude. It is perhaps my lot," she added, glancing at
+Canalis, with an expression of pity.
+
+"It is the lot of all insignificant fortunes," said the poet. "Paris
+demands Babylonian splendor. Sometimes I ask myself how I have ever
+managed to keep it up."
+
+"The king does that for both of us," said the duke, candidly; "we live
+on his Majesty's bounty. If my family had not been allowed, after the
+death of Monsieur le Grand, as they call Cinq-Mars, to keep his office
+among us, we should have been obliged to sell Herouville to the Black
+Brethren. Ah, believe me, mademoiselle, it is a bitter humiliation to
+me to have to think of money in marrying."
+
+The simple honesty of this confession came from his heart, and the
+regret was so sincere that it touched Modeste.
+
+"In these days," said the poet, "no man in France, Monsieur le duc, is
+rich enough to marry a woman for herself, her personal worth, her
+grace, or her beauty--"
+
+The colonel looked at Canalis with a curious eye, after first watching
+Modeste, whose face no longer expressed the slightest astonishment.
+
+"For persons of high honor," he said slowly, "it is a noble employment
+of wealth to repair the ravages of time and destiny, and restore the
+old historic families."
+
+"Yes, papa," said Modeste, gravely.
+
+The colonel invited the duke and Canalis to dine with him sociably in
+their riding-dress, promising them to make no change himself. When
+Modeste went to her room to make her toilette, she looked at the
+jewelled whip she had disdained in the morning.
+
+"What workmanship they put into such things nowadays!" she said to
+Francoise Cochet, who had become her waiting-maid.
+
+"That poor young man, mademoiselle, who has got a fever--"
+
+"Who told you that?"
+
+"Monsieur Butscha. He came here this afternoon and asked me to say to
+you that he hoped you would notice he had kept his word on the
+appointed day."
+
+Modeste came down into the salon dressed with royal simplicity.
+
+"My dear father," she said aloud, taking the colonel by the arm,
+"please go and ask after Monsieur de La Briere's health, and take him
+back his present. You can say that my small means, as well as my
+natural tastes, forbid my wearing ornaments which are only fit for
+queens or courtesans. Besides, I can only accept gifts from a
+bridegroom. Beg him to keep the whip until you know whether you are
+rich enough to buy it back."
+
+"My little girl has plenty of good sense," said the colonel, kissing
+his daughter on the forehead.
+
+Canalis took advantage of a conversation which began between the duke
+and Madame Mignon to escape to the terrace, where Modeste joined him,
+influenced by curiosity, though the poet believed her desire to become
+Madame de Canalis had brought her there. Rather alarmed at the
+indecency with which he had just executed what soldiers call a "volte-
+face," and which, according to the laws of ambition, every man in his
+position would have executed quite as brutally, he now endeavored, as
+the unfortunate Modeste approached him, to find plausible excuses for
+his conduct.
+
+"Dear Modeste," he began, in a coaxing tone, "considering the terms on
+which we stand to each other, shall I displease you if I say that your
+replies to the Duc d'Herouville were very painful to a man in love,--
+above all, to a poet whose soul is feminine, nervous, full of the
+jealousies of true passion. I should make a poor diplomatist indeed if
+I had not perceived that your first coquetries, your little
+premeditated inconsistencies, were only assumed for the purpose of
+studying our characters--"
+
+Modeste raised her head with the rapid, intelligent, half-coquettish
+motion of a wild animal, in whom instinct produces such miracles of
+grace.
+
+"--and therefore when I returned home and thought them over, they
+never misled me. I only marvelled at a cleverness so in harmony with
+your character and your countenance. Do not be uneasy, I never doubted
+that your assumed duplicity covered an angelic candor. No, your mind,
+your education, have in no way lessened the precious innocence which
+we demand in a wife. You are indeed a wife for a poet, a diplomatist,
+a thinker, a man destined to endure the chances and changes of life;
+and my admiration is equalled only by the attachment I feel to you. I
+now entreat you--if yesterday you were not playing a little comedy
+when you accepted the love of a man whose vanity will change to pride
+if you accept him, one whose defects will become virtues under your
+divine influence--I entreat you do not excite a passion which, in him,
+amounts to vice. Jealousy is a noxious element in my soul, and you
+have revealed to me its strength; it is awful, it destroys everything
+--Oh! I do not mean the jealousy of an Othello," he continued,
+noticing Modeste's gesture. "No, no; my thoughts were of myself: I
+have been so indulged on that point. You know the affection to which I
+owe all the happiness I have ever enjoyed,--very little at the best"
+(he sadly shook his head). "Love is symbolized among all nations as a
+child, because it fancies the world belongs to it, and it cannot
+conceive otherwise. Well, Nature herself set the limit to that
+sentiment. It was still-born. A tender, maternal soul guessed and
+calmed the painful constriction of my heart,--for a woman who feels,
+who knows, that she is past the joys of love becomes angelic in her
+treatment of others. The duchess has never made me suffer in my
+sensibilities. For ten years not a word, not a look, that could wound
+me! I attach more value to words, to thoughts, to looks, than ordinary
+men. If a look is to me a treasure beyond all price, the slightest
+doubt is deadly poison; it acts instantaneously, my love dies. I
+believe--contrary to the mass of men, who delight in trembling,
+hoping, expecting--that love can only exist in perfect, infantile, and
+infinite security. The exquisite purgatory, where women delight to
+send us by their coquetry, is a base happiness to which I will not
+submit: to me, love is either heaven or hell. If it is hell, I will
+have none of it. I feel an affinity with the azure skies of Paradise
+within my soul. I can give myself without reserve, without secrets,
+doubts or deceptions, in the life to come; and I demand reciprocity.
+Perhaps I offend you by these doubts. Remember, however, that I am
+only talking of myself--"
+
+"--a good deal, but never too much," said Modeste, offended in every
+hole and corner of her pride by this discourse, in which the Duchesse
+de Chaulieu served as a dagger. "I am so accustomed to admire you, my
+dear poet."
+
+"Well, then, can you promise me the same canine fidelity which I offer
+to you? Is it not beautiful? Is it not just what you have longed for?"
+
+"But why, dear poet, do you not marry a deaf-mute, and one who is also
+something of an idiot? I ask nothing better than to please my husband.
+But you threaten to take away from a girl the very happiness you so
+kindly arrange for her; you are tearing away every gesture, every
+word, every look; you cut the wings of your bird, and then expect it
+to hover about you. I know poets are accused of inconsistency--oh!
+very unjustly," she added, as Canalis made a gesture of denial; "that
+alleged defect which comes from the brilliant activity of their minds
+which commonplace people cannot take into account. I do not believe,
+however, that a man of genius can invent such irreconcilable
+conditions and call his invention life. You are requiring the
+impossible solely for the pleasure of putting me in the wrong,--like
+the enchanters in fairy-tales, who set tasks to persecuted young girls
+whom the good fairies come and deliver."
+
+"In this case the good fairy would be true love," said Canalis in a
+curt tone, aware that his elaborate excuse for a rupture was seen
+through by the keen and delicate mind which Butscha had piloted so
+well.
+
+"My dear poet, you remind me of those fathers who inquire into a
+girl's 'dot' before they are willing to name that of their son. You
+are quarrelling with me without knowing whether you have the slightest
+right to do so. Love is not gained by such dry arguments as yours. The
+poor duke on the contrary abandons himself to it like my Uncle Toby;
+with this difference, that I am not the Widow Wadman,--though widow
+indeed of many illusions as to poetry at the present moment. Ah, yes,
+we young girls will not believe in anything that disturbs our world of
+fancy! I was warned of all this beforehand. My dear poet, you are
+attempting to get up a quarrel which is unworthy of you. I no longer
+recognize the Melchior of yesterday."
+
+"Because Melchior has discovered a spirit of ambition in you which--"
+
+Modeste looked at him from head to foot with an imperial eye.
+
+"But I shall be peer of France and ambassador as well as he," added
+Canalis.
+
+"Do you take me for a bourgeois," she said, beginning to mount the
+steps of the portico; but she instantly turned back and added, "That
+is less impertinent than to take me for a fool. The change in your
+conduct comes from certain silly rumors which you have heard in Havre,
+and which my maid Francoise has repeated to me."
+
+"Ah, Modeste, how can you think it?" said Canalis, striking a dramatic
+attitude. "Do you think me capable of marrying you only for your
+money?"
+
+"If I do you that wrong after your edifying remarks on the banks of
+the Seine can you easily undeceive me," she said, annihilating him
+with her scorn.
+
+"Ah!" thought the poet, as he followed her into the house, "if you
+think, my little girl, that I'm to be caught in that net, you take me
+to be younger than I am. Dear, dear, what a fuss about an artful
+little thing whose esteem I value about as much as that of the king of
+Borneo. But she has given me a good reason for the rupture by accusing
+me of such unworthy sentiments. Isn't she sly? La Briere will get a
+burden on his back--idiot that he is! And five years hence it will be
+a good joke to see them together."
+
+The coldness which this altercation produced between Modeste and
+Canalis was visible to all eyes that evening. The poet went off early,
+on the ground of La Briere's illness, leaving the field to the grand
+equerry. About eleven o'clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with
+Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste's ear, "Was I right?"
+
+"Alas, yes," she said.
+
+"But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come
+back; we agreed upon that, you know."
+
+"Anger got the better of me," said Modeste. "Such meanness sent the
+blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him."
+
+"Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can't
+speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love
+and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself."
+
+"Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a
+man of intellect."
+
+"Your father's eight millions are more to him than all that."
+
+"Eight millions!" exclaimed Modeste.
+
+"My master, who has sold his practice, is going to Provence to attend
+to the purchase of lands which your father's agent has suggested to
+him. The sum that is to be paid for the estate of La Bastie is four
+millions; your father has agreed to it. You are to have a 'dot' of two
+millions and another million for an establishment in Paris, a hotel
+and furniture. Now, count up."
+
+"Ah! then I can be Duchesse d'Herouville!" cried Modeste, glancing at
+Butscha.
+
+"If it hadn't been for that comedian of a Canalis you would have kept
+HIS whip, thinking it came from me," said the dwarf, indirectly
+pleading La Briere's cause.
+
+"Monsieur Butscha, may I ask if I am to marry to please you?" said
+Modeste, laughing.
+
+"That fine fellow loves you as well as I do,--and you loved him for
+eight days," retorted Butscha; "and HE has got a heart."
+
+"Can he compete, pray, with an office under the Crown? There are but
+six, grand almoner, chancellor, grand chamberlain, grand master, high
+constable, grand admiral,--but they don't appoint high constables any
+longer."
+
+"In six months, mademoiselle, the masses--who are made up of wicked
+Butschas--could send all those grand dignities to the winds. Besides,
+what signifies nobility in these days? There are not a thousand real
+noblemen in France. The d'Herouvilles are descended from a tipstaff in
+the time of Robert of Normandy. You will have to put up with many a
+vexation from the old aunt with the furrowed face. Look here,--as you
+are so anxious for the title of duchess,--you belong to the Comtat,
+and the Pope will certainly think as much of you as he does of all
+those merchants down there; he'll sell you a duchy with some name
+ending in 'ia' or 'agno.' Don't play away your happiness for an office
+under the Crown."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+A DIPLOMATIC LETTER
+
+The poet's reflections during the night were thoroughly matter-of
+fact. He sincerely saw nothing worse in life than the situation of a
+married man without money. Still trembling at the danger he had been
+led into by his vanity, his desire to get the better of the duke, and
+his belief in the Mignon millions, he began to ask himself what the
+duchess must be thinking of his stay in Havre, aggravated by the fact
+that he had not written to her for fourteen days, whereas in Paris
+they exchanged four or five letters a week.
+
+"And that poor woman is working hard to get me appointed commander of
+the Legion and ambassador to the Court of Baden!" he cried.
+
+Thereupon, with that promptitude of decision which results--in poets
+as well as in speculators--from a lively intuition of the future, he
+sat down and composed the following letter:--
+
+  To Madame la Duchesse de Chaulieu:
+
+  My dear Eleonore,--You have doubtless been surprised at not
+  hearing from me; but the stay I am making in this place is not
+  altogether on account of my health. I have been trying to do a
+  good turn to our little friend La Briere. The poor fellow has
+  fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie, a
+  rather pale, insignificant, and thread-papery little thing, who,
+  by the way, has the vice of liking literature, and calls herself a
+  poet to excuse the caprices and humors of a rather sullen nature.
+  You know Ernest,--he is so easy to catch that I have been afraid
+  to leave him to himself. Mademoiselle de La Bastie was inclined to
+  coquet with your Melchior, and was only too ready to become your
+  rival, though her arms are thin, and she has no more bust than
+  most girls; moreover, her hair is as dead and colorless as that of
+  Madame de Rochefide, and her eyes small, gray, and very
+  suspicious. I put a stop--perhaps rather brutally--to the
+  attentions of Mademoiselle Immodeste; but love, such as mine for
+  you, demanded it. What care I for all the women on earth,--
+  compared to you, what are they?
+
+  The people with whom I pass my time, and who form the circle round
+  the heiress, are so thoroughly bourgeois that they almost turn my
+  stomach. Pity me; imagine! I pass my evenings with notaries,
+  notaresses, cashiers, provincial money-lenders--ah! what a change
+  from my evenings in the rue de Grenelle. The alleged fortune of
+  the father, lately returned from China, has brought to Havre that
+  indefatigable suitor, the grand equerry, hungry after the
+  millions, which he wants, they say, to drain his marshes. The king
+  does not know what a fatal present he made the duke in those waste
+  lands. His Grace, who has not yet found out that the lady had only
+  a small fortune, is jealous of ME; for La Briere is quietly making
+  progress with his idol under cover of his friend, who serves as a
+  blind.
+
+  Notwithstanding Ernest's romantic ecstasies, I myself, a poet,
+  think chiefly of the essential thing, and I have been making some
+  inquiries which darken the prospects of our friend. If my angel
+  would like absolution for some of our little sins, she will try to
+  find out the facts of the case by sending for Mongenod, the
+  banker, and questioning him, with the dexterity that characterizes
+  her, as to the father's fortune? Monsieur Mignon, formerly colonel
+  of cavalry in the Imperial guard, has been for the last seven
+  years a correspondent of the Mongenods. It is said that he gives
+  his daughter a "dot" of two hundred thousand francs, and before I
+  make the offer on Ernest's behalf I am anxious to get the rights
+  of the story. As soon as the affair is arranged I shall return to
+  Paris. I know a way to settle everything to the advantage of our
+  young lover,--simply by the transmission of the father-in-law's
+  title, and no one, I think, can more readily obtain that favor
+  than Ernest, both on account of his own services and the influence
+  which you and I and the duke can exert for him. With his tastes,
+  Ernest, who of course will step into my office when I go to Baden,
+  will be perfectly happy in Paris with twenty-five thousand francs
+  a year, a permanent place, and a wife--luckless fellow!
+
+  Ah, dearest, how I long for the rue de Grenelle! Fifteen days of
+  absence! when they do not kill love, they revive all the ardor of
+  its earlier days, and you know, better than I, perhaps, the
+  reasons that make my love eternal,--my bones will love thee in the
+  grave! Ah! I cannot bear this separation. If I am forced to stay
+  here another ten days, I shall make a flying visit of a few hours
+  to Paris.
+
+  Has the duke obtained for me the thing we wanted; and shall you,
+  my dearest life, be ordered to drink the Baden waters next year?
+  The billing and cooing of the "handsome disconsolate," compared
+  with the accents of our happy love--so true and changeless for now
+  ten years!--have given me a great contempt for marriage. I had
+  never seen the thing so near. Ah, dearest! what the world calls a
+  "false step" brings two beings nearer together than the law--does
+  it not?
+
+The concluding idea served as a text for two pages of reminiscences
+and aspirations a little too confidential for publication.
+
+The evening before the day on which Canalis put the above epistle into
+the post, Butscha, under the name of Jean Jacmin, had received a
+letter from his fictitious cousin, Philoxene, and had mailed his
+answer, which thus preceded the letter of the poet by about twelve
+hours. Terribly anxious for the last two weeks, and wounded by
+Melchior's silence, the duchess herself dictated Philoxene's letter to
+her cousin, and the moment she had read the answer, rather too
+explicit for her quinquagenary vanity, she sent for the banker and
+made close inquiries as to the exact fortune of Monsieur Mignon.
+Finding herself betrayed and abandoned for the millions, Eleonore gave
+way to a paroxysm of anger, hatred, and cold vindictiveness. Philoxene
+knocked at the door of the sumptuous room, and entering found her
+mistress with her eyes full of tears,--so unprecedented a phenomenon
+in the fifteen years she had waited upon her that the woman stopped
+short stupefied.
+
+"We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes," she heard the
+duchess say.
+
+"A letter from Havre, madame."
+
+Eleonore read the poet's prose without noticing the presence of
+Philoxene, whose amazement became still greater when she saw the dawn
+of fresh serenity on the duchess's face as she read further and
+further into the letter. Hold out a pole no thicker than a walking-
+stick to a drowning man, and he will think it a high-road of safety.
+The happy Eleonore believed in Canalis's good faith when she had read
+through the four pages in which love and business, falsehood and
+truth, jostled each other. She who, a few moments earlier, had sent
+for her husband to prevent Melchior's appointment while there was
+still time, was now seized with a spirit of generosity that amounted
+almost to the sublime.
+
+"Poor fellow!" she thought; "he has not had one faithless thought; he
+loves me as he did on the first day; he tells me all--Philoxene!" she
+cried, noticing her maid, who was standing near and pretending to
+arrange the toilet-table.
+
+"Madame la duchesse?"
+
+"A mirror, child!"
+
+Eleonore looked at herself, saw the fine razor-like lines traced on
+her brow, which disappeared at a little distance; she sighed, and in
+that sigh she felt she bade adieu to love. A brave thought came into
+her mind, a manly thought, outside of all the pettiness of women,--a
+thought which intoxicates for a moment, and which explains, perhaps,
+the clemency of the Semiramis of Russia when she married her young and
+beautiful rival to Momonoff.
+
+"Since he has not been faithless, he shall have the girl and her
+millions," she thought,--"provided Mademoiselle Mignon is as ugly as
+he says she is."
+
+Three raps, circumspectly given, announced the duke, and his wife went
+herself to the door to let him in.
+
+"Ah! I see you are better, my dear," he cried, with the counterfeit
+joy that courtiers assume so readily, and by which fools are so
+readily taken in.
+
+"My dear Henri," she answered, "why is it you have not yet obtained
+that appointment for Melchior,--you who sacrificed so much to the king
+in taking a ministry which you knew could only last one year."
+
+The duke glanced at Philoxene, who showed him by an almost
+imperceptible sign the letter from Havre on the dressing-table.
+
+"You would be terribly bored at Baden and come back at daggers drawn
+with Melchior," said the duke.
+
+"Pray why?"
+
+"Why, you would always be together," said the former diplomat, with
+comic good-humor.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "I am going to marry him."
+
+"If we can believe d'Herouville, our dear Canalis stands in no need of
+your help in that direction," said the duke, smiling. "Yesterday
+Grandlieu read me some passages from a letter the grand equerry had
+written him. No doubt they were dictated by the aunt for the express
+purpose of their reaching you, for Mademoiselle d'Herouville, always
+on the scent of a 'dot,' knows that Grandlieu and I play whist nearly
+every evening. That good little d'Herouville wants the Prince de
+Cadignan to go down and give a royal hunt in Normandy, and endeavor to
+persuade the king to be present, so as to turn the head of the damozel
+when she sees herself the object of such a grand affair. In short, two
+words from Charles X. would settle the matter. D'Herouville says the
+girl has incomparable beauty--"
+
+"Henri, let us go to Havre!" cried the duchess, interrupting him.
+
+"Under what pretext?" said her husband, gravely; he was one of the
+confidants of Louis XVIII.
+
+"I never saw a hunt."
+
+"It would be all very well if the king went; but it is a terrible bore
+to go so far, and he will not do it; I have just been speaking with
+him about it."
+
+"Perhaps MADAME would go?"
+
+"That would be better," returned the duke, "I dare say the Duchesse de
+Maufrigneuse would help you to persuade her from Rosny. If she goes
+the king will not be displeased at the use of his hunting equipage.
+Don't go to Havre, my dear," added the duke, paternally, "that would
+be giving yourself away. Come, here's a better plan, I think.
+Gaspard's chateau of Rosembray is on the other side of the forest of
+Brotonne; why not give him a hint to invite the whole party?"
+
+"He invite them?" said Eleonore.
+
+"I mean, of course, the duchess; she is always engaged in pious works
+with Mademoiselle d'Herouville; give that old maid a hint, and get her
+to speak to Gaspard."
+
+"You are a love of a man," cried Eleonore; "I'll write to the old maid
+and to Diane at once, for we must get hunting things made,--a riding
+hat is so becoming. Did you win last night at the English embassy?"
+
+"Yes," said the duke; "I cleared myself."
+
+"Henri, above all things, stop proceedings about Melchior's two
+appointments."
+
+After writing half a dozen lines to the beautiful Diane de
+Maufrigneuse, and a short hint to Mademoiselle d'Herouville, Eleonore
+sent the following answer like the lash of a whip through the poet's
+lies.
+
+  To Monsieur le Baron de Canalis:--
+
+  My dear poet,--Mademoiselle de La Bastie is very beautiful;
+  Mongenod has proved to me that her father has millions. I did
+  think of marrying you to her; I am therefore much displeased at
+  your want of confidence. If you had any intention of marrying La
+  Briere when you went to Havre it is surprising that you said
+  nothing to me about it before you started. And why have you
+  omitted writing to a friend who is so easily made anxious as I?
+  Your letter arrived a trifle late; I had already seen the banker.
+  You are a child, Melchior, and you are playing tricks with us. It
+  is not right. The duke himself is quite indignant at your
+  proceedings; he thinks you less than a gentleman, which casts some
+  reflections on your mother's honor.
+
+  Now, I intend to see things for myself. I shall, I believe, have
+  the honor of accompanying MADAME to the hunt which the Duc
+  d'Herouville proposes to give for Mademoiselle de La Bastie. I
+  will manage to have you invited to Rosembray, for the meet will
+  probably take place in Duc de Verneuil's park.
+
+  Pray believe, my dear poet, that I am none the less, for life,
+
+
+Your friend,      Eleonore de M.
+
+
+"There, Ernest, just look at that!" cried Canalis, tossing the letter
+at Ernest's nose across the breakfast-table; "that's the two
+thousandth love-letter I have had from that woman, and there isn't
+even a 'thou' in it. The illustrious Eleonore has never compromised
+herself more than she does there. Marry, and try your luck! The worst
+marriage in the world is better than this sort of halter. Ah, I am the
+greatest Nicodemus that ever tumbled out of the moon! Modeste has
+millions, and I've lost her; for we can't get back from the poles,
+where we are to-day, to the tropics, where we were three days ago!
+Well, I am all the more anxious for your triumph over the grand
+equerry, because I told the duchess I came here only for your sake;
+and so I shall do my best for you."
+
+"Alas, Melchior, Modeste must needs have so noble, so grand, so well-
+balanced a nature to resist the glories of the Court, and all these
+splendors cleverly displayed for her honor and glory by the duke, that
+I cannot believe in the existence of such perfection,--and yet, if she
+is still the Modeste of her letters, there might be hope!"
+
+"Well, well, you are a happy fellow, you young Boniface, to see the
+world and your mistress through green spectacles!" cried Canalis,
+marching off to pace up and down the garden.
+
+Caught between two lies, the poet was at a loss what to do.
+
+"Play by rule, and you lose!" he cried presently, sitting down in the
+kiosk. "Every man of sense would have acted as I did four days ago,
+and got himself out of the net in which I saw myself. At such times
+people don't disentangle nets, they break through them! Come, let us
+be calm, cold, dignified, affronted. Honor requires it; English
+stiffness is the only way to win her back. After all, if I have to
+retire finally, I can always fall back on my old happiness; a fidelity
+of ten years can't go unrewarded. Eleonore will arrange me some good
+marriage."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+TRUE LOVE
+
+The hunt was destined to be not only a meet of the hounds, but a
+meeting of all the passions excited by the colonel's millions and
+Modeste's beauty; and while it was in prospect there was truce between
+the adversaries. During the days required for the arrangement of this
+forestrial solemnity, the salon of the villa Mignon presented the
+tranquil picture of a united family. Canalis, cut short in his role of
+injured love by Modeste's quick perceptions, wished to appear
+courteous; he laid aside his pretensions, gave no further specimens of
+his oratory, and became, what all men of intellect can be when they
+renounce affectation, perfectly charming. He talked finances with
+Gobenheim, and war with the colonel, Germany with Madame Mignon, and
+housekeeping with Madame Latournelle,--endeavoring to bias them all in
+favor of La Briere. The Duc d'Herouville left the field to his rivals,
+for he was obliged to go to Rosembray to consult with the Duc de
+Verneuil, and see that the orders of the Royal Huntsman, the Prince de
+Cadignan, were carried out. And yet the comic element was not
+altogether wanting. Modeste found herself between the depreciatory
+hints of Canalis as to the gallantry of the grand equerry, and the
+exaggerations of the two Mesdemoiselles d'Herouville, who passed every
+evening at the villa. Canalis made Modeste take notice that, instead
+of being the heroine of the hunt, she would be scarcely noticed.
+MADAME would be attended by the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, daughter-in-
+law of the Prince de Cadignan, by the Duchesse de Chaulieu, and other
+great ladies of the Court, among whom she could produce no sensation;
+no doubt the officers in garrison at Rouen would be invited, etc.
+Helene, on the other hand, was incessantly telling her new friend,
+whom she already looked upon as a sister-in-law, that she was to be
+presented to MADAME; undoubtedly the Duc de Verneuil would invite her
+father and herself to stay at Rosembray; if the colonel wished to
+obtain a favor of the king,--a peerage, for instance,--the opportunity
+was unique, for there was hope of the king himself being present on
+the third day; she would be delighted with the charming welcome with
+which the beauties of the Court, the Duchesses de Chaulieu, de
+Maufrigneuse, de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and other ladies, were prepared
+to meet her. It was in fact an excessively amusing little warfare,
+with its marches and countermarches and stratagems,--all of which were
+keenly enjoyed by the Dumays, the Latournelles, Gobenheim, and
+Butscha, who, in conclave assembled, said horrible things of these
+noble personages, cruelly noting and intelligently studying all their
+little meannesses.
+
+The promises on the d'Herouville side were, however, confirmed by the
+arrival of an invitation, couched in flattering terms, from the Duc de
+Verneuil and the Master of the Hunt to Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie
+and his daughter, to stay at Rosembray and be present at a grand hunt
+on the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, of November following.
+
+La Briere, full of dark presentiments, craved the presence of Modeste
+with an eagerness whose bitter joys are known only to lovers who feel
+that they are parted, and parted fatally from those they love. Flashes
+of joy came to him intermingled with melancholy meditations on the one
+theme, "I have lost her," and made him all the more interesting to
+those who watched him, because his face and his whole person were in
+keeping with his profound feeling. There is nothing more poetic than a
+living elegy, animated by a pair of eyes, walking about, and sighing
+without rhymes.
+
+The Duc d'Herouville arrived at last to arrange for Modeste's
+departure; after crossing the Seine she was to be conveyed in the
+duke's caleche, accompanied by the Demoiselles d'Herouville. The duke
+was charmingly courteous, he begged Canalis and La Briere to be of the
+party, assuring them, as he did the colonel, that he had taken
+particular care that hunters should be provided for them. The colonel
+invited the three lovers to breakfast on the morning of the start.
+Canalis then began to put into execution a plan that he had been
+maturing in his own mind for the last few days; namely, to quietly
+reconquer Modeste, and throw over the duchess, La Briere, and the
+duke. A graduate of diplomacy could hardly remain stuck in the
+position in which he found himself. On the other hand La Briere had
+come to the resolution of bidding Modeste an eternal farewell. Each
+suitor was therefore on the watch to slip in a last word, like the
+defendant's counsel to the court before judgment is pronounced; for
+all felt that the three weeks' struggle was approaching its
+conclusion. After dinner on the evening before the start was to be
+made, the colonel had taken his daughter by the arm and made her feel
+the necessity of deciding.
+
+"Our position with the d'Herouville family will be quite intolerable
+at Rosembray," he said to her. "Do you mean to be a duchess?"
+
+"No, father," she answered.
+
+"Then do you love Canalis?"
+
+"No, papa, a thousand times no!" she exclaimed with the impatience of
+a child.
+
+The colonel looked at her with a sort of joy.
+
+"Ah, I have not influenced you," cried the true father, "and I will
+now confess that I chose my son-in-law in Paris when, having made him
+believe that I had but little fortune, he grasped my hand and told me
+I took a weight from his mind--"
+
+"Who is it you mean?" asked Modeste, coloring.
+
+"THE MAN OF FIXED PRINCIPLES AND SOUND MORALITIES," said her father,
+slyly, repeating the words which had dissolved poor Modeste's dream on
+the day after his return.
+
+"I was not even thinking of him, papa. Please leave me at liberty to
+refuse the duke myself; I understand him, and I know how to soothe
+him."
+
+"Then your choice is not made?"
+
+"Not yet; there is another syllable or two in the charade of my
+destiny still to be guessed; but after I have had a glimpse of court
+life at Rosembray I will tell you my secret."
+
+"Ah! Monsieur de La Briere," cried the colonel, as the young man
+approached them along the garden path in which they were walking, "I
+hope you are going to this hunt?"
+
+"No, colonel," answered Ernest. "I have come to take leave of you and
+of mademoiselle; I return to Paris--"
+
+"You have no curiosity," said Modeste, interrupting, and looking at
+him.
+
+"A wish--that I cannot expect--would suffice to keep me," he replied.
+
+"If that is all, you must stay to please me; I wish it," said the
+colonel, going forward to meet Canalis, and leaving his daughter and
+La Briere together for a moment.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said the young man, raising his eyes to hers with the
+boldness of a man without hope, "I have an entreaty to make to you."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"Let me carry away with me your forgiveness. My life can never be
+happy; it must be full of remorse for having lost my happiness--no
+doubt by my own fault; but, at least,--"
+
+"Before we part forever," said Modeste, interrupting a la Canalis, and
+speaking in a voice of some emotion, "I wish to ask you one thing; and
+though you once disguised yourself, I think you cannot be so base as
+to deceive me now."
+
+The taunt made him turn pale, and he cried out, "Oh, you are
+pitiless!"
+
+"Will you be frank?"
+
+"You have the right to ask me that degrading question," he said, in a
+voice weakened by the violent palpitation of his heart.
+
+"Well, then, did you read my letters to Monsieur de Canalis?"
+
+"No, mademoiselle; and I allowed your father to read them it was to
+justify my love by showing him how it was born, and how sincere my
+efforts were to cure you of your fancy."
+
+"But how came the idea of that unworthy masquerade ever to arise?" she
+said, with a sort of impatience.
+
+La Briere related truthfully the scene in the poet's study which
+Modeste's first letter had occasioned, and the sort of challenge that
+resulted from his expressing a favorable opinion of a young girl thus
+led toward a poet's fame, as a plant seeks its share of the sun.
+
+"You have said enough," said Modeste, restraining some emotion. "If
+you have not my heart, monsieur, you have at least my esteem."
+
+These simple words gave the young man a violent shock; feeling himself
+stagger, he leaned against a tree, like a man deprived for a moment of
+reason. Modest, who had left him, turned her head and came hastily
+back.
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked, taking his hand to prevent him from
+falling.
+
+"Forgive me--I thought you despised me."
+
+"But," she answered, with a distant and disdainful manner, "I did not
+say that I loved you."
+
+And she left him again. But this time, in spite of her harshness, La
+Briere thought he walked on air; the earth softened under his feet,
+the trees bore flowers; the skies were rosy, the air cerulean, as they
+are in the temples of Hymen in those fairy pantomimes which finish
+happily. In such situations every woman is a Janus, and sees behind
+her without turning round; and thus Modeste perceived on the face of
+her lover the indubitable symptoms of a love like Butscha's,--surely
+the "ne plus ultra" of a woman's hope. Moreover, the great value which
+La Briere attached to her opinion filled Modeste with an emotion that
+was inestimably sweet.
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Canalis, leaving the colonel and waylaying
+Modeste, "in spite of the little value you attach to my sentiments, my
+honor is concerned in effacing a stain under which I have suffered too
+long. Here is a letter which I received from the Duchesse de Chaulieu
+five days after my arrival in Havre."
+
+He let Modeste read the first lines of the letter we have seen, which
+the duchess began by saying that she had seen Mongenod, and now wished
+to marry her poet to Modeste; then he tore that passage from the body
+of the letter, and placed the fragment in her hand.
+
+"I cannot let you read the rest," he said, putting the paper in his
+pocket; "but I confide these few lines to your discretion, so that you
+may verify the writing. A young girl who could accuse me of ignoble
+sentiments is quite capable of suspecting some collusion, some
+trickery. Ah, Modeste," he said, with tears in his voice, "your poet,
+the poet of Madame de Chaulieu, has no less poetry in his heart than
+in his mind. You are about to see the duchess; suspend your judgment
+of me till then."
+
+He left Modeste half bewildered.
+
+"Oh, dear!" she said to herself; "it seems they are all angels--and
+not marriageable; the duke is the only one that belongs to humanity."
+
+"Mademoiselle Modeste," said Butscha, appearing with a parcel under
+his arm, "this hunt makes me very uneasy. I dreamed your horse ran
+away with you, and I have been to Rouen to see if I could get a
+Spanish bit which, they tell me, a horse can't take between his teeth.
+I entreat you to use it. I have shown it to the colonel, and he has
+thanked me more than there is any occasion for."
+
+"Poor, dear Butscha!" cried Modeste, moved to tears by this maternal
+care.
+
+Butscha went skipping off like a man who has just heard of the death
+of a rich uncle.
+
+"My dear father," said Modeste, returning to the salon; "I should like
+to have that beautiful whip,--suppose you were to ask Monsieur de La
+Briere to exchange it for your picture by Van Ostade."
+
+Modeste looked furtively at Ernest, while the colonel made him this
+proposition, standing before the picture which was the sole thing he
+possessed in memory of his campaigns, having bought it of a burgher at
+Rabiston; and she said to herself as La Briere left the room
+precipitately, "He will be at the hunt."
+
+A curious thing happened. Modeste's three lovers each and all went to
+Rosembray with their hearts full of hope, and captivated by her many
+perfections.
+
+Rosembray,--an estate lately purchased by the Duc de Verneuil, with
+the money which fell to him as his share of the thousand millions
+voted as indemnity for the sale of the lands of the emigres,--is
+remarkable for its chateau, whose magnificence compares only with that
+of Mesniere or of Balleroy. This imposing and noble edifice is
+approached by a wide avenue of four rows of venerable elms, from which
+the visitor enters an immense rising court-yard, like that at
+Versailles, with magnificent iron railings and two lodges, and adorned
+with rows of large orange-trees in their tubs. Facing this court-yard,
+the chateau presents, between two fronts of the main building which
+retreat on either side of this projection, a double row of nineteen
+tall windows, with carved arches and diamond panes, divided from each
+other by a series of fluted pilasters surmounted by an entablature
+which hides an Italian roof, from which rise several stone chimneys
+masked by carved trophies of arms. Rosembray was built, under Louis
+XIV., by a "fermier-general" named Cottin. The facade toward the park
+differs from that on the court-yard by having a narrower projection in
+the centre, with columns between five windows, above which rises a
+magnificent pediment. The family of Marigny, to whom the estates of
+this Cottin were brought in marriage by Mademoiselle Cottin, her
+father's sole heiress, ordered a sunrise to be carved on this pediment
+by Coysevox. Beneath it are two angels unwinding a scroll, on which is
+cut this motto in honor of the Grand Monarch, "Sol nobis benignus."
+
+From the portico, reached by two grand circular and balustraded
+flights of steps, the view extends over an immense fish-pond, as long
+and wide as the grand canal at Versailles, beginning at the foot of a
+grass-plot which compares well with the finest English lawns, and
+bordered with beds and baskets now filled with the brilliant flowers
+of autumn. On either side of the piece of water two gardens, laid out
+in the French style, display their squares and long straight paths,
+like brilliant pages written in the ciphers of Lenotre. These gardens
+are backed to their whole length by a border of nearly thirty acres of
+woodland. From the terrace the view is bounded by a forest belonging
+to Rosembray and contiguous to two other forests, one of which belongs
+to the Crown, the other to the State. It would be difficult to find a
+nobler landscape.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+A GIRL'S REVENGE
+
+Modeste's arrival at Rosembray made a certain sensation in the avenue
+when the carriage with the liveries of France came in sight,
+accompanied by the grand equerry, the colonel, Canalis, and La Briere
+on horseback, preceded by an outrider in full dress, and followed by
+six servants,--among whom were the Negroes and the mulatto,--and the
+britzka of the colonel for the two waiting-women and the luggage. The
+carriage was drawn by four horses, ridden by postilions dressed with
+an elegance specially commanded by the grand equerry, who was often
+better served than the king himself. As Modeste, dazzled by the
+magnificence of the great lords, entered and beheld this lesser
+Versailles, she suddenly remembered her approaching interview with the
+celebrated duchesses, and began to fear that she might seem awkward,
+or provincial, or parvenue; in fact, she lost her self-possession, and
+heartily repented having wished for a hunt.
+
+Fortunately, however, as the carriage drew up, Modeste saw an old man,
+in a blond wig frizzed into little curls, whose calm, plump, smooth
+face wore a fatherly smile and an expression of monastic cheerfulness
+which the half-veiled glance of the eye rendered almost noble. This
+was the Duc de Verneuil, master of Rosembray. The duchess, a woman of
+extreme piety, the only daughter of a rich and deceased chief-justice,
+spare and erect, and the mother of four children, resembled Madame
+Latournelle,--if the imagination can go so far as to adorn the
+notary's wife with the graces of a bearing that was truly abbatial.
+
+"Ah, good morning, dear Hortense!" said Mademoiselle d'Herouville,
+kissing the duchess with the sympathy that united their haughty
+natures; "let me present to you and to the dear duke our little angel,
+Mademoiselle de La Bastie."
+
+"We have heard so much of you, mademoiselle," said the duchess, "that
+we were in haste to receive you."
+
+"And regret the time lost," added the Duc de Verneuil, with courteous
+admiration.
+
+"Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie," said the grand equerry, taking the
+colonel by the arm and presenting him to the duke and duchess, with an
+air of respect in his tone and gesture.
+
+"I am glad to welcome you, Monsieur le comte!" said Monsieur de
+Verneuil. "You possess more than one treasure," he added, looking at
+Modeste.
+
+The duchess took Modeste under her arm and led her into an immense
+salon, where a dozen or more women were grouped about the fireplace.
+The men of the party remained with the duke on the terrace, except
+Canalis, who respectfully made his way to the superb Eleonore. The
+Duchesse de Chaulieu, seated at an embroidery-frame, was showing
+Mademoiselle de Verneuil how to shade a flower.
+
+If Modeste had run a needle through her finger when handling a pin-
+cushion she could not have felt a sharper prick than she received from
+the cold and haughty and contemptuous stare with which Madame de
+Chaulieu favored her. For an instant she saw nothing but that one
+woman, and she saw through her. To understand the depths of cruelty to
+which these charming creatures, whom our passions deify, can go, we
+must see women with each other. Modeste would have disarmed almost any
+other than Eleonore by the perfectly stupid and involuntary admiration
+which her face betrayed. Had she not known the duchess's age she would
+have thought her a woman of thirty-six; but other and greater
+astonishments awaited her.
+
+The poet had run plump against a great lady's anger. Such anger is the
+worst of sphinxes; the face is radiant, all the rest menacing. Kings
+themselves cannot make the exquisite politeness of a mistress's cold
+anger capitulate when she guards it with steel armor. Canalis tried to
+cling to the steel, but his fingers slipped on the polished surface,
+like his words on the heart; and the gracious face, the gracious
+words, the gracious bearing of the duchess hid the steel of her wrath,
+now fallen to twenty-five below zero, from all observers. The
+appearance of Modeste in her sublime beauty, and dressed as well as
+Diane de Maufrigneuse herself, had fired the train of gunpowder which
+reflection had been laying in Eleonore's mind.
+
+All the women had gone to the windows to see the new wonder get out of
+the royal carriage, attended by her three suitors.
+
+"Do not let us seem so curious," Madame de Chaulieu had said, cut to
+the heart by Diane's exclamation,--"She is divine! where in the world
+does she come from?"--and with that the bevy flew back to their seats,
+resuming their composure, though Eleonore's heart was full of hungry
+vipers all clamorous for a meal.
+
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville said in a low voice and with much meaning to
+the Duchesse de Verneuil, "Eleonore receives her Melchior very
+ungraciously."
+
+"The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse thinks there is a coolness between
+them," said Laure de Verneuil, with simplicity.
+
+Charming phrase! so often used in the world of society,--how the north
+wind blows through it.
+
+"Why so?" asked Modeste of the pretty young girl who had lately left
+the Sacre-Coeur.
+
+"The great poet," said the pious duchess--making a sign to her
+daughter to be silent--"left Madame de Chaulieu without a letter for
+more than two weeks after he went to Havre, having told her that he
+went there for his health--"
+
+Modeste made a hasty movement, which caught the attention of Laure,
+Helene, and Mademoiselle d'Herouville.
+
+"--and during that time," continued the devout duchess, "she was
+endeavoring to have him appointed commander of the Legion of honor,
+and minister at Baden."
+
+"Oh, that was shameful in Canalis; he owes everything to her,"
+exclaimed Mademoiselle d'Herouville.
+
+"Why did not Madame de Chaulieu come to Havre?" asked Modeste of
+Helene, innocently.
+
+"My dear," said the Duchesse de Verneuil, "she would let herself be
+cut in little pieces without saying a word. Look at her,--she is
+regal; her head would smile, like Mary Stuart's, after it was cut off;
+in fact, she has some of that blood in her veins."
+
+"Did she not write to him?" asked Modeste.
+
+"Diane tells me," answered the duchess, prompted by a nudge from
+Mademoiselle d'Herouville, "that in answer to Canalis's first letter
+she made a cutting reply a few days ago."
+
+This explanation made Modeste blush with shame for the man before her;
+she longed, not to crush him under her feet, but to revenge herself by
+one of those malicious acts that are sharper than a dagger's thrust.
+She looked haughtily at the Duchesse de Chaulieu--
+
+"Monsieur Melchior!" she said.
+
+All the women snuffed the air and looked alternately at the duchess,
+who was talking in an undertone to Canalis over the embroidery-frame,
+and then at the young girl so ill brought up as to disturb a lovers'
+meeting,--a think not permissible in any society. Diane de
+Maufrigneuse nodded, however, as much as to say, "The child is in the
+right of it." All the women ended by smiling at each other; they were
+enraged with a woman who was fifty-six years old and still handsome
+enough to put her fingers into the treasury and steal the dues of
+youth. Melchior looked at Modeste with feverish impatience, and made
+the gesture of a master to a valet, while the duchess lowered her head
+with the movement of a lioness disturbed at a meal; her eyes, fastened
+on the canvas, emitted red flames in the direction of the poet, which
+stabbed like epigrams, for each word revealed to her a triple insult.
+
+"Monsieur Melchior!" said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its
+right to be heard.
+
+"What, mademoiselle?" demanded the poet.
+
+Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery
+frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was
+seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa. What bitter
+reflections came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from
+Eleonore. If he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between
+himself and his protectress. Not to obey her was to avow his slavery,
+to lose the chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and
+to disregard the plainest laws of decency and civility. The greater
+the folly, the more imperatively the duchess exacted it. Modeste's
+beauty and money thus pitted against Eleonore's rights and influence
+made this hesitation between the man and his honor as terrible to
+witness as the peril of a matador in the arena. A man seldom feels
+such palpitations as those which now came near causing Canalis an
+aneurism, except, perhaps, before the green table, where his fortune
+or his ruin is about to be decided.
+
+"Mademoiselle d'Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left
+behind me," said Modeste to Canalis, "my handkerchief--"
+
+Canalis shrugged his shoulders significantly.
+
+"And," continued Modeste, taking no notice of his gesture, "I had tied
+into one corner of it the key of a desk which contains the fragment of
+an important letter; have the kindness, Monsieur Melchior, to get it
+for me."
+
+Between an angel and a tiger equally enraged Canalis, who had turned
+livid, no longer hesitated,--the tiger seemed to him the least
+dangerous of the two; and he was about to do as he was told, and
+commit himself irretrievably, when La Briere appeared at the door of
+the salon, seeming to his anguished mind like the archangel Gabriel
+tumbling from heaven.
+
+"Ernest, here, Mademoiselle de La Bastie wants you," said the poet,
+hastily returning to his chair by the embroidery frame.
+
+Ernest rushed to Modeste without bowing to any one; he saw only her,
+took his commission with undisguised joy, and darted from the room,
+with the secret approbation of every woman present.
+
+"What an occupation for a poet!" said Modeste to Helene d'Herouville,
+glancing toward the embroidery at which the duchess was now working
+savagely.
+
+"If you speak to her, if you ever look at her, all is over between
+us," said the duchess to the poet in a low voice, not at all satisfied
+with the very doubtful termination which Ernest's arrival had put to
+the scene; "and remember, if I am not present, I leave behind me eyes
+that will watch you."
+
+So saying, the duchess, a woman of medium height, but a little too
+stout, like all women over fifty who retain their beauty, rose and
+walked toward the group which surrounded Diane de Maufrigneuse,
+stepping daintily on little feet that were as slender and nervous as a
+deer's. Beneath her plumpness could be seen the exquisite delicacy of
+such women, which comes from the vigor of their nervous systems
+controlling and vitalizing the development of flesh. There is no other
+way to explain the lightness of her step, and the incomparable
+nobility of her bearing. None but the women whose quarterings begin
+with Noah know, as Eleonore did, how to be majestic in spite of a
+buxom tendency. A philosopher might have pitied Philoxene, while
+admiring the graceful lines of the bust and the minute care bestowed
+upon a morning dress, which was worn with the elegance of a queen and
+the easy grace of a young girl. Her abundant hair, still undyed, was
+simply wound about her head in plaits; she bared her snowy throat and
+shoulders, exquisitely modelled, and her celebrated hand and arm, with
+pardonable pride. Modeste, together with all other antagonists of the
+duchess, recognized in her a woman of whom they were forced to say,
+"She eclipses us." In fact, Eleonore was one of the "grandes dames"
+now so rare. To endeavor to explain what august quality there was in
+the carriage of the head, what refinement and delicacy in the curve of
+the throat, what harmony in her movements, and nobility in her
+bearing, what grandeur in the perfect accord of details with the whole
+being, and in the arts, now a second nature, which render a woman
+grand and even sacred,--to explain all these things would simply be to
+attempt to analyze the sublime. People enjoy such poetry as they enjoy
+that of Paganini; they do not explain to themselves the medium, they
+know the cause is in the spirit that remains invisible.
+
+Madame de Chaulieu bowed her head in salutation of Helene and her
+aunt; then, saying to Diane, in a pure and equable tone of voice,
+without a trace of emotion, "Is it not time to dress, duchess?" she
+made her exit, accompanied by her daughter-in-law and Mademoiselle
+d'Herouville. As she left the room she spoke in an undertone to the
+old maid, who pressed her arm, saying, "You are charming,"--which
+meant, "I am all gratitude for the service you have just done us."
+After that, Mademoiselle d'Herouville returned to the salon to play
+her part of spy, and her first glance apprised Canalis that the
+duchess had made him no empty threat. That apprentice in diplomacy
+became aware that his science was not sufficient for a struggle of
+this kind, and his wit served him to take a more honest position, if
+not a worthier one. When Ernest returned, bringing Modeste's
+handkerchief, the poet seized his arm and took him out on the terrace.
+
+"My dear friend," he said, "I am not only the most unfortunate man in
+the world, but I am also the most ridiculous; and I come to you to get
+me out of the hornet's nest into which I have run myself. Modeste is a
+demon; she sees my difficulty and she laughs at it; she has just
+spoken to me of a fragment of a letter of Madame de Chaulieu, which I
+had the folly to give her; if she shows it I can never make my peace
+with Eleonore. Therefore, will you at once ask Modeste to send me back
+that paper, and tell her, from me, that I make no pretensions to her
+hand. Say I count upon her delicacy, upon her propriety as a young
+girl, to behave to me as if we had never known each other. I beg her
+not to speak to me; I implore her to treat me harshly,--though I
+hardly dare ask her to feign a jealous anger, which would help my
+interests amazingly. Go, I will wait here for an answer."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+MODESTE BEHAVES WITH DIGNITY
+
+On re-entering the salon Ernest de La Briere found a young officer of
+the company of the guard d'Havre, the Vicomte de Serizy, who had just
+arrived from Rosny to announce that MADAME was obliged to be present
+at the opening of the Chambers. We know the importance then attached
+to this constitutional solemnity, at which Charles X. delivered his
+speech, surrounded by the royal family,--Madame la Dauphine and MADAME
+being present in their gallery. The choice of the emissary charged
+with the duty of expressing the princess's regrets was an attention to
+Diane, who was then an object of adoration to this charming young man,
+son of a minister of state, gentleman in ordinary of the chamber, only
+son and heir to an immense fortune. The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
+permitted his attentions solely for the purpose of attracting notice
+to the age of his mother, Madame de Serizy, who was said, in those
+chronicles that are whispered behind the fans, to have deprived her of
+the heart of the handsome Lucien de Rubempre.
+
+"You will do us the pleasure, I hope, to remain at Rosembray," said
+the severe duchess to the young officer.
+
+While giving ear to every scandal, the devout lady shut her eyes to
+the derelictions of her guests who had been carefully selected by the
+duke; indeed, it is surprising how much these excellent women will
+tolerate under pretence of bringing the lost sheep back to the fold by
+their indulgence.
+
+"We reckoned without our constitutional government," said the grand
+equerry; "and Rosembray, Madame la duchesse, will lose a great honor."
+
+"We shall be more at our ease," said a tall thin old man, about
+seventy-five years of age, dressed in blue cloth, and wearing his
+hunting-cap by permission of the ladies. This personage, who closely
+resembled the Duc de Bourbon, was no less than the Prince de Cadignan,
+Master of the Hunt, and one of the last of the great French lords.
+Just as La Briere was endeavoring to slip behind the sofa and obtain a
+moment's intercourse with Modeste, a man of thirty-eight, short, fat,
+and very common in appearance, entered the room.
+
+"My son, the Prince de Loudon," said the Duchesse de Verneuil to
+Modeste, who could not restrain the expression of amazement that
+overspread her young face on seeing the man who bore the historical
+name that the hero of La Vendee had rendered famous by his bravery and
+the martyrdom of his death.
+
+"Gaspard," said the duchess, calling her son to her. The young prince
+came at once, and his mother continued, motioning to Modeste,
+"Mademoiselle de La Bastie, my friend."
+
+The heir presumptive, whose marriage with Desplein's only daughter had
+lately been arranged, bowed to the young girl without seeming struck,
+as his father had been, with her beauty. Modeste was thus enabled to
+compare the youth of to-day with the old age of a past epoch; for the
+old Prince de Cadignan had already said a few words which made her
+feel that he rendered as true a homage to womanhood as to royalty. The
+Duc de Rhetore, the eldest son of the Duchesse de Chaulieu, chiefly
+remarkable for manners that were equally impertinent and free and
+easy, bowed to Modeste rather cavalierly. The reason of this contrast
+between the fathers and the sons is to be found, probably, in the fact
+that young men no longer feel themselves great beings, as their
+forefathers did, and they dispense with the duties of greatness,
+knowing well that they are now but the shadow of it. The fathers
+retain the inherent politeness of their vanished grandeur, like the
+mountain-tops still gilded by the sun when all is twilight in the
+valley.
+
+Ernest was at last able to slip a word into Modeste's ear, and she
+rose immediately.
+
+"My dear," said the duchesse, thinking she was going to dress, and
+pulling a bell-rope, "they shall show you your apartment."
+
+Ernest accompanied Modeste to the foot of the grand staircase,
+presenting the request of the luckless poet, and endeavoring to touch
+her feelings by describing Melchior's agony.
+
+"You see, he loves--he is a captive who thought he could break his
+chain."
+
+"Love in such a rapid seeker after fortune!" retorted Modeste.
+
+"Mademoiselle, you are at the entrance of life; you do not know its
+defiles. The inconsistencies of a man who falls under the dominion of
+a woman much older than himself should be forgiven, for he is really
+not accountable. Think how many sacrifices Canalis has made to her. He
+has sown too much seed of that kind to resign the harvest; the duchess
+represents to him ten years of devotion and happiness. You made him
+forget all that, and unfortunately, he has more vanity than pride; he
+did not reflect on what he was losing until he met Madame Chaulieu
+here to-day. If you really understood him, you would help him. He is a
+child, always mismanaging his life. You call him a seeker after
+fortune, but he seeks very badly; like all poets, he is a victim of
+sensations; he is childish, easily dazzled like a child by anything
+that shines, and pursuing its glitter. He used to love horses and
+pictures, and he craved fame,--well, he sold his pictures to buy armor
+and old furniture of the Renaissance and Louis XV.; just now he is
+seeking political power. Admit that his hobbies are noble things."
+
+"You have said enough," replied Modeste; "come," she added, seeing her
+father, whom she called with a motion of her head to give her his arm;
+"come with me, and I will give you that scrap of paper; you shall
+carry it to the great man and assure him of my condescension to his
+wishes, but on one condition,--you must thank him in my name for the
+pleasure I have taken in seeing one of the finest of the German plays
+performed in my honor. I have learned that Goethe's masterpiece is
+neither Faust nor Egmont--" and then, as Ernest looked at the
+malicious girl with a puzzled air, she added: "It is Torquato Tasso!
+Tell Monsieur de Canalis to re-read it," she added smiling; "I
+particularly desire that you will repeat to your friend word for word
+what I say; for it is not an epigram, it is the justification of his
+conduct,--with this trifling difference, that he will, I trust, become
+more and more reasonable, thanks to the folly of his Eleonore."
+
+The duchess's head-woman conducted Modeste and her father to their
+apartment, where Francoise Cochet had already put everything in order,
+and the choice elegance of which astounded the colonel, more
+especially after he heard from Francoise that there were thirty other
+apartments in the chateau decorated with the same taste.
+
+"This is what I call a proper country-house," said Modeste.
+
+"The Comte de La Bastie must build you one like it," replied her
+father.
+
+"Here, monsieur," said Modeste, giving the bit of paper to Ernest;
+"carry it to our friend and put him out of his misery."
+
+The word OUR friend struck the young man's heart. He looked at Modeste
+to see if there was anything real in the community of interests which
+she seemed to admit, and she, understanding perfectly what his look
+meant, added, "Come, go at once, your friend is waiting."
+
+La Briere colored excessively, and left the room in a state of doubt
+and anxiety less endurable than despair. The path that approaches
+happiness is, to the true lover, like the narrow way which Catholic
+poetry has called the entrance to Paradise,--expressing thus a dark
+and gloomy passage, echoing with the last cries of earthly anguish.
+
+An hour later this illustrious company were all assembled in the
+salon; some were playing whist, others conversing; the women had their
+embroideries in hand, and all were waiting the announcement of dinner.
+The Prince de Cadignan was drawing Monsieur Mignon out upon China, and
+his campaigns under the empire, and making him talk about the
+Portendueres, the L'Estorades, and the Maucombes, Provencal families;
+he blamed him for not seeking service, and assured him that nothing
+would be easier than to restore him to his rank as colonel of the
+Guard.
+
+"A man of your birth and your fortune ought not to belong to the
+present Opposition," said the prince, smiling.
+
+This society of distinguished persons not only pleased Modeste, but it
+enabled her to acquire, during her stay, a perfection of manners which
+without this revelation she would have lacked all her life. Show a
+clock to an embryo mechanic, and you reveal to him the whole
+mechanism; he thus develops the germs of his faculty which lie dormant
+within him. In like manner Modeste had the instinct to appropriate the
+distinctive qualities of Madame de Maufrigneuse and Madame de
+Chaulieu. For her, the sight of these women was an education; whereas
+a bourgeois would merely have ridiculed their ways or made them absurd
+by clumsy imitation. A well-born, well-educated, and right-minded
+young woman like Modeste fell naturally into connection with these
+people, and saw at once the differences that separate the aristocratic
+world from the bourgeois world, the provinces from the faubourg Saint-
+Germain; she caught the almost imperceptible shadings; in short, she
+perceived the grace of the "grande dame" without doubting that she
+could herself acquire it. She noticed also that her father and La
+Briere appeared infinitely better in this Olympus than Canalis. The
+great poet, abdicating his real and incontestable power, that of the
+mind, became nothing more than a courtier seeking a ministry,
+intriguing for an order, and forced to please the whole galaxy. Ernest
+de La Briere, without ambitions, was able to be himself; while
+Melchior became, to use a vulgar expression, a mere toady, and courted
+the Prince de Loudon, the Duc de Rhetore, the Vicomte de Serizy, or
+the Duc de Maufrigneuse, like a man not free to assert himself, as did
+Colonel Mignon, who was justly proud of his campaigns, and of the
+confidence of the Emperor Napoleon. Modeste took note of the strained
+efforts of the man of real talent, seeking some witticism that should
+raise a laugh, some clever speech, some compliment with which to
+flatter these grand personages, whom it was his interest to please. In
+a word, to Modeste's eyes the peacock plucked out his tail-feathers.
+
+Toward the middle of the evening the young girl sat down with the
+grand equerry in a corner of the salon. She led him there purposely to
+end a suit which she could no longer encourage if she wished to retain
+her self-respect.
+
+"Monsieur le duc, if you really knew me," she said, "you would
+understand how deeply I am touched by your attentions. It is because
+of the profound respect I feel for your character, and the friendship
+which a soul like yours inspires in mine, that I cannot endure to
+wound your self-love. Before your arrival in Havre I loved sincerely,
+deeply, and forever, one who is worthy of being loved, and my
+affection for whom is still a secret; but I wish you to know--and in
+saying this I am more sincere than most young girls--that had I not
+already formed this voluntary attachment, you would have been my
+choice, for I recognize your noble and beautiful qualities. A few
+words which your aunt and sister have said to me as to your intentions
+lead me to make this frank avowal. If you think it desirable, a letter
+from my mother shall recall me, on pretence of her illness, to-morrow
+morning before the hunt begins. Without your consent I do not choose
+to be present at a fete which I owe to your kindness, and where, if my
+secret should escape me, you might feel hurt and defrauded. You will
+ask me why I have come here at all. I could not withstand the
+invitation. Be generous enough not to reproach me for what was almost
+a necessary curiosity. But this is not the chief, not the most
+delicate thing I have to say to you. You have firm friends in my
+father and myself,--more so than perhaps you realize; and as my
+fortune was the first cause that brought you to me, I wish to say--but
+without intending to use it as a sedative to calm the grief which
+gallantry requires you to testify--that my father has thought over the
+affair of the marshes, his friend Dumay thinks your project feasible,
+and they have already taken steps to form a company. Gobenheim, Dumay,
+and my father have subscribed fifteen hundred thousand francs, and
+undertake to get the rest from capitalists, who will feel it in their
+interest to take up the matter. If I have not the honor of becoming
+the Duchesse d'Herouville, I have almost the certainty of enabling you
+to choose her, free from all trammels in your choice, and in a higher
+sphere than mine. Oh! let me finish," she cried, at a gesture from the
+duke.
+
+"Judging by my nephew's emotion," whispered Mademoiselle d'Herouville
+to her niece, "it is easy to see you have a sister."
+
+"Monsieur le duc, all this was settled in my mind the day of our first
+ride, when I heard you deplore your situation. This is what I have
+wished to say to you. That day determined my future life. Though you
+did not make the conquest of a woman, you have at least gained
+faithful friends at Ingouville--if you will deign to accord us that
+title."
+
+This little discourse, which Modeste had carefully thought over, was
+said with so much charm of soul that the tears came to the grand
+equerry's eyes; he seized her hand and kissed it.
+
+"Stay during the hunt," he said; "my want of merit has accustomed me
+to these refusals; but while accepting your friendship and that of the
+colonel, you must let me satisfy myself by the judgment of competent
+scientific men, that the draining of those marshes will be no risk to
+the company you speak of, before I agree to the generous offer of your
+friends. You are a noble girl, and though my heart aches to think I
+can only be your friend, I will glory in that title, and prove it to
+you at all times and in all seasons."
+
+"In that case, Monsieur le duc, let us keep our secret. My choice will
+not be known, at least I think not, until after my mother's complete
+recovery. I should like our first blessing to come from her eyes."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+"Ladies," said the Prince de Cadignan, as the guests were about to
+separate for the night, "I know that several of you propose to follow
+the hounds with us to-morrow, and it becomes my duty to tell you that
+if you will be Dianas you must rise, like Diana, with the dawn. The
+meet is for half-past eight o'clock. I have in the course of my life
+seen many women display greater courage than men, but for a few
+seconds only; and you will need a strong dose of resolution to keep
+you on horseback the whole day, barring a halt for breakfast, which we
+shall take, like true hunters and huntresses, on the nail. Are you
+still determined to show yourselves trained horse-women?"
+
+"Prince, it is necessary for me to do so," said Modeste, adroitly.
+
+"I answer for myself," said the Duchesse de Chaulieu.
+
+"And I for my daughter Diane; she is worthy of her name," added the
+prince. "So, then, you all persist in your intentions? However, I
+shall arrange, for the sake of Madame and Mademoiselle de Verneuil and
+others of the party who stay at home, to drive the stag to the further
+end of the pond."
+
+"Make yourself quite easy, mesdames," said the Prince de Loudon, when
+the Royal Huntsman had left the room; "that breakfast 'on the nail'
+will take place under a comfortable tent."
+
+The next day, at dawn, all signs gave promise of a glorious day. The
+skies, veiled by a slight gray vapor, showed spaces of purest blue,
+and would surely be swept clear before mid-day by the northwest wind,
+which was already playing with the fleecy cloudlets. As the hunting
+party left the chateau, the Master of the Hunt, the Duc de Rhetore,
+and the Prince de Loudon, who had no ladies to escort, rode in the
+advance, noticing the white masses of the chateau, with its rising
+chimneys relieved against the brilliant red-brown foliage which the
+trees in Normandy put on at the close of a fine autumn.
+
+"The ladies are fortunate in their weather," remarked the Duc de
+Rhetore.
+
+"Oh, in spite of all their boasting," replied the Prince de Cadignan,
+"I think they will let us hunt without them!"
+
+"So they might, if each had not a squire," said the duke.
+
+At this moment the attention of these determined huntsmen--for the
+Prince de Loudon and the Duc de Rhetore are of the race of Nimrod, and
+the best shots of the faubourg Saint-Germain--was attracted by a loud
+altercation; and they spurred their horses to an open space at the
+entrance to the forest of Rosembray, famous for its mossy turf, which
+was appointed for the meet. The cause of the quarrel was soon
+apparent. The Prince de Loudon, afflicted with anglomania, had brought
+out his own hunting establishment, which was exclusively Britannic,
+and placed it under orders of the Master of the Hunt. Now, one of his
+men, a little Englishman,--fair, pale, insolent, and phlegmatic,
+scarcely able to speak a word of French, and dressed with a neatness
+which distinguishes all Britons, even those of the lower classes,--had
+posted himself on one side of this open space. John Barry wore a short
+frock-coat, buttoned tightly at the waist, made of scarlet cloth, with
+buttons bearing the De Verneuil arms, white leather breeches, top-
+boots, a striped waistcoat, and a collar and cape of black velvet. He
+held in his hand a small hunting-whip, and hanging to his wrist by a
+silken cord was a brass horn. This man, the first whipper-in, was
+accompanied by two thorough-bred dogs,--fox-hounds, white, with liver
+spots, long in the leg, fine in the muzzle, with slender heads, and
+little ears at their crests. The huntsman--famous in the English
+county from which the Prince de Loudon had obtained him at great cost
+--was in charge of an establishment of fifteen horses and sixty
+English hounds, which cost the Duc de Verneuil, who was nothing of a
+huntsman, but chose to indulge his son in this essentially royal
+taste, an enormous sum of money to keep up.
+
+Now, when John arrived on the ground, he found himself forestalled by
+three other whippers-in, in charge of two of the royal packs of hounds
+which had been brought there in carts. They were the three best
+huntsmen of the Prince de Cadignan, and presented, both in character
+and in their distinctively French costume, a marked contrast to the
+representative of insolent Albion. These favorites of the Prince, each
+wearing full-brimmed, three-cornered hats, very flat and very wide-
+spreading, beneath which grinned their swarthy, tanned, and wrinkled
+faces, lighted by three pairs of twinkling eyes, were noticeably lean,
+sinewy, and vigorous, like men in whom sport had become a passion. All
+three were supplied with immense horns of Dampierre, wound with green
+worsted cords, leaving only the brass tubes visible; but they
+controlled their dogs by the eye and voice. Those noble animals were
+far more faithful and submissive subjects than the human lieges whom
+the king was at that moment addressing; all were marked with white,
+black, or liver spots, each having as distinctive a countenance as the
+soldiers of Napoleon, their eyes flashing like diamonds at the
+slightest noise. One of them, brought from Poitou, was short in the
+back, deep in the shoulder, low-jointed, and lop-eared; the other,
+from England, white, fine as a greyhound with no belly, small ears,
+and built for running. Both were young, impatient, and yelping
+eagerly, while the old hounds, on the contrary, covered with scars,
+lay quietly with their heads on their forepaws, and their ears to the
+earth like savages.
+
+As the Englishman came up, the royal dogs and huntsmen looked at each
+other as though they said, "If we cannot hunt by ourselves his
+Majesty's service is insulted."
+
+Beginning with jests, the quarrel presently grew fiercer between
+Monsieur Jacquin La Roulie, the old French whipper-in, and John Barry,
+the young islander. The two princes guessed from afar the subject of
+the altercation, and the Master of the Hunt, setting spurs to his
+horse, brought it to an end by saying, in a voice of authority:--
+
+"Who drew the wood?"
+
+"I, monseigneur," said the Englishman.
+
+"Very good," said the Prince de Cadignan, proceeding to take Barry's
+report.
+
+Dogs and men became silent and respectful before the Royal Huntsman,
+as though each recognized his dignity as supreme. The prince laid out
+the day's work; for it is with a hunt as it is with a battle, and the
+Master of Charles X.'s hounds was the Napoleon of forests. Thanks to
+the admirable system which he has introduced into French venery, he
+was able to turn his thoughts exclusively to the science and strategy
+of it. He now quietly assigned a special duty to the Prince de
+Loudon's establishment, that of driving the stag to water, when, as he
+expected, the royal hounds had sent it into the Crown forest which
+outlined the horizon directly in front of the chateau. The prince knew
+well how to soothe the self-love of his old huntsmen by giving them
+the most arduous part of the work, and also that of the Englishman,
+whom he employed at his own speciality, affording him a chance to show
+the fleetness of his horses and dogs in the open. The two national
+systems were thus face to face and allowed to do their best under each
+other's eyes.
+
+"Does monseigneur wish us to wait any longer?" said La Roulie,
+respectfully.
+
+"I know what you mean, old friend," said the prince. "It is late,
+but--"
+
+"Here come the ladies," said the second whipper-in.
+
+At that moment the cavalcade of sixteen riders was seen to approach at
+the head of which were the green veils of the four ladies. Modeste,
+accompanied by her father, the grand equerry, and La Briere, was in
+the advance, beside the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse whom the Vicomte de
+Serizy escorted. Behind them rode the Duchesse de Chaulieu, flanked by
+Canalis, on whom she was smiling without a trace of rancor. When they
+had reached the open space where the huntsmen with their red coats and
+brass bugles, surrounded by the hounds, made a picture worthy of Van
+der Meulen, the Duchesse de Chaulieu, who, in spite of her embonpoint,
+sat her horse admirably, rode up to Modeste, finding it more for her
+dignity not to avoid that young person, to whom the evening before she
+had not said a single word.
+
+When the Master of the Hunt finished his compliments to the ladies on
+their amazing punctuality, Eleonore deigned to observe the magnificent
+whip which sparked in Modeste's little hand, and graciously asked
+leave to look at it.
+
+"I have never seen anything of the kind more beautiful," she said,
+showing it to Diane de Maufrigneuse. "It is in keeping with its
+possessor," she added, returning it to Modeste.
+
+"You must admit, Madame la duchesse," answered Mademoiselle de La
+Bastie, with a tender and malicious glance at La Briere, "that it is a
+rather strange gift from the hand of a future husband."
+
+"I should take it," said Madame de Maufrigneuse, "as a declaration of
+my rights, in remembrance of Louis XIV."
+
+La Briere's eyes were suffused, and for a moment he dropped his reins;
+but a second glance from Modeste ordered him not to betray his
+happiness. The hunt now began.
+
+The Duc d'Herouville took occasion to say in a low voice to his
+fortunate rival; "Monsieur, I hope that you will make your wife happy;
+if I can be useful to you in any way, command my services; I should be
+only too glad to contribute to the happiness of so charming a pair."
+
+This great day, in which such vast interests of heart and fortune were
+decided, caused but one anxiety to the Master of the Hunt,--namely,
+whether or not the stag would cross the pond and be killed on the lawn
+before the house; for huntsmen of his calibre are like great chess-
+players who can predict a checkmate under certain circumstances. The
+happy old man succeeded to the height of his wishes; the run was
+magnificent, and the ladies released him from his attendance upon them
+for the hunt of the next day but one,--which, however, turned out to
+be rainy.
+
+The Duc de Verneuil's guests stayed five days at Rosembray. On the
+last day the Gazette de France announced the appointment of Monsieur
+le Baron de Canalis to the rank of commander of the Legion of honor,
+and to the post of minister at Carlsruhe.
+
+When, early in the month of December, Madame de La Bastie, operated
+upon by Desplein, recovered her sight and saw Ernest de La Briere for
+the first time, she pressed Modeste's hand and whispered in her ear,
+"I should have chosen him myself."
+
+Toward the last of February all the deeds for the estates in Provence
+were signed by Latournelle, and about that time the family of La
+Bastie obtained the marked honor of the king's signature to the
+marriage contract and to the ordinance transmitting their title and
+arms to La Briere, who henceforth took the name of La Briere-La 
+Bastie. The estate of La Bastie was entailed by letters-patent issued
+about the end of April. La Briere's witnesses on the occasion of his
+marriage were Canalis and the minister whom he had served for five
+years as secretary. Those of the bride were the Duc d'Herouville and
+Desplein, whom the Mignons long held in grateful remembrance, after
+giving him magnificent and substantial proofs of their regard.
+
+Later, in the course of this long history of our manners and customs,
+we may again meet Monsieur and Madame de La Briere-La Bastie; and
+those who have the eyes to see, will then behold how sweet, how easy,
+is the marriage yoke with an educated and intelligent woman; for
+Modeste, who had the wit to avoid the follies of pedantry, is the
+pride and happiness of her husband, as she is of her family and of all
+those who surround her.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Beaupre, Fanny
+  A Start in Life
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Bixiou, Jean-Jacques
+  The Purse    
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Government Clerks
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Beatrix
+  A Man of Business
+  Gaudissart II.
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Blondet, Emile
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  The Peasantry
+
+Bridau, Joseph
+  The Purse
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Start in Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  Pierre Grassou
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Cadignan, Prince de
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+
+Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Magic Skin
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Start in Life
+  Beatrix
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Chatillonest, De
+  A Woman of Thirty
+
+Chaulieu, Henri, Duc de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Thirteen
+
+Dauriat
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Desplein
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cousin Pons
+  Lost Illusions
+  The Thirteen
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+
+Estourny, Charles d'
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Man of Business
+
+Fontaine, Comte de
+  The Chouans
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Grandlieu, Duc Ferdinand de
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Thirteen
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Herouville, Duc d'
+  The Hated Son
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Cousin Betty
+
+La Bastie la Briere, Ernest de
+  The Government Clerks
+
+La Bastie la Briere, Madame Ernest de (Modeste)
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Loudon, Prince de
+  The Chouans
+
+Marsay, Henri de
+  The Thirteen
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Lily of the Valley
+  Father Goriot
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Ursule Mirouet
+  A Marriage Settlement
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Muse of the Department
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
+  Father Goriot
+  The Thirteen
+  Eugenie Grandet
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Schinner, Hippolyte
+  The Purse 
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Pierre Grassou
+  A Start in Life
+  Albert Savarus
+  The Government Clerks
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Serizy, Comte Hugret de
+  A Start in Life
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Honorine
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Serizy, Vicomte de
+  A Start in Life
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+
+Sommervieux, Theodore de
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Stidmann
+  Beatrix
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Cousin Betty
+  Cousin Pons
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac
+
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