Modeste Mignon (tr. Katharine Prescott Wormeley)
by Honore de Balzac
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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
him