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Modeste Mignon

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1482 · 555,055 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Modeste Mignon

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: October 1, 1998 [eBook #1482]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1482

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODESTE MIGNON ***

MODESTE MIGNON


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

                         To a Polish Lady.

  Daughter of an enslaved land, angel through love, witch through
  fancy, child by faith, aged by experience, man in brain, woman in
  heart, giant by hope, mother through sorrows, poet in thy dreams,
  --to _thee_ belongs this book, in which thy love, thy fancy, thy
  experience, thy sorrow, thy hope, thy dreams, are the warp through
  which is shot a woof less brilliant than the poesy of thy soul,
  whose expression, when it shines upon thy countenance, is, to
  those who love thee, what the characters of a lost language are to
  scholars.

                                                        De Balzac.





MODESTE MIGNON




CHAPTER I. THE CHALET


At the beginning of October, 1829, Monsieur Simon Babylas Latournelle,
notary, was walking up from Havre to Ingouville, arm in arm with his
son and accompanied by his wife, at whose side the head clerk of the
lawyer’s office, a little hunchback named Jean Butscha, trotted along
like a page. When these four personages (two of whom came the same way
every evening) reached the elbow of the road where it turns back upon
itself like those called in Italy “cornice,” the notary looked about to
see if any one could overhear him either from the terrace above or
the path beneath, and when he spoke he lowered his voice as a further
precaution.

“Exupere,” he said to his son, “you must try to carry out intelligently
a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you are not to ask
the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I command you to toss
it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man who expects to have
a hand in the government of his country is bound to keep within him for
the secrets of others. After you have paid your respects and compliments
to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon, to Monsieur and Madame Dumay, and
to Monsieur Gobenheim if he is at the Chalet, and as soon as quiet
is restored, Monsieur Dumay will take you aside; you are then to look
attentively at Mademoiselle Modeste (yes, I am willing to allow it)
during the whole time he is speaking to you. My worthy friend will ask
you to go out and take a walk; at the end of an hour, that is, about
nine o’clock, you are to come back in a great hurry; try to puff as if
you were out of breath, and whisper in Monsieur Dumay’s ear, quite low,
but so that Mademoiselle Modeste is sure to overhear you, these words:
‘The young man has come.’”

Exupere was to start the next morning for Paris to begin the study of
law. This impending departure had induced Latournelle to propose him
to his friend Dumay as an accomplice in the important conspiracy which
these directions indicate.

“Is Mademoiselle Modeste suspected of having a lover?” asked Butscha in
a timid voice of Madame Latournelle.

“Hush, Butscha,” she replied, taking her husband’s arm.

Madame Latournelle, the daughter of a clerk of the supreme court,
feels that her birth authorizes her to claim issue from a parliamentary
family. This conviction explains why the lady, who is somewhat blotched
as to complexion, endeavors to assume in her own person the majesty of
a court whose decrees are recorded in her father’s pothooks. She
takes snuff, holds herself as stiff as a ramrod, poses for a person
of consideration, and resembles nothing so much as a mummy brought
momentarily to life by galvanism. She tries to give high-bred tones to
her sharp voice, and succeeds no better in doing that than in hiding
her general lack of breeding. Her social usefulness seems, however,
incontestable when we glance at the flower-bedecked cap she wears,
at the false front frizzling around her forehead, at the gowns of her
choice; for how could shopkeepers dispose of those products if there
were no Madame Latournelle? All these absurdities of the worthy woman,
who is truly pious and charitable, might have passed unnoticed, if
nature, amusing herself as she often does by turning out these ludicrous
creations, had not endowed her with the height of a drum-major, and thus
held up to view the comicalities of her provincial nature. She has
never been out of Havre; she believes in the infallibility of Havre; she
proclaims herself Norman to the very tips of her fingers; she venerates
her father, and adores her husband.

Little Latournelle was bold enough to marry this lady after she had
attained the anti-matrimonial age of thirty-three, and what is more, he
had a son by her. As he could have got the sixty thousand francs of
her “dot” in several other ways, the public assigned his uncommon
intrepidity to a desire to escape an invasion of the Minotaur, against
whom his personal qualifications would have insufficiently protected him
had he rashly dared his fate by bringing home a young and pretty wife.
The fact was, however, that the notary recognized the really fine
qualities of Mademoiselle Agnes (she was called Agnes) and reflected to
himself that a woman’s beauty is soon past and gone to a husband. As
to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court bestowed in
baptism his Norman name of “Exupere,” Madame Latournelle is still so
surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty-five years and
seven months, that she would still provide him, if it were necessary,
with her breast and her milk,--an hyperbole which alone can fully
express her impassioned maternity. “How handsome he is, that son of
mine!” she says to her little friend Modeste, as they walk to church,
with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. “He is like you,” Modeste
Mignon answers, very much as she might have said, “What horrid
weather!” This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite important as an
accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been the chaperone of the
young girl against whom the notary and his friend Dumay are now plotting
to set up what we have called, in the “Physiologie du Mariage,” a
“mouse-trap.”

As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the purest
honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any stranger
would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to which,
however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His eyesight,
said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green goggles for the
protection of his eyes, which were constantly inflamed. The arch of each
eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair, surrounded the tortoise-shell
rim of the glasses and made a couple of circles as it were, slightly
apart. If you have never observed on the human face the effect produced
by these circumferences placed one within the other, and separated by a
hollow space or line, you can hardly imagine how perplexing such a face
will be to you, especially if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a
pointed chin like that of Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give
to cats. This double resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas
Latournelle. Above the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown,
all the more crafty in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with
motion, let the white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered
crookedly across the forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent
Norman, clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on
a couple of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy
of men, would have sought, without finding it, for the reason of such
physical misrepresentation.

Jean Butscha, a natural son abandoned by his parents and taken care of
by the clerk of the court and his daughter, and now, through sheer hard
work, head-clerk to the notary, fed and lodged by his master, who
gave him a salary of nine hundred francs, almost a dwarf, and with
no semblance of youth,--Jean Butscha made Modeste his idol, and would
willingly have given his life for hers. The poor fellow, whose eyes
were hollowed beneath their heavy lids like the touch-holes of a cannon,
whose head overweighted his body, with its shock of crisp hair, and
whose face was pock-marked, had lived under pitying eyes from the time
he was seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain his whole
being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct, he went
his way over that vast tract of country named on the map of the heart
Love-without-Hope, the sublime and arid steppes of Desire. Modeste had
christened this grotesque little being her “Black Dwarf.” The nickname
sent him to the pages of Walter Scott’s novel, and he one day said
to Modeste: “Will you accept a rose against the evil day from your
mysterious dwarf?” Modeste instantly sent the soul of her adorer to its
humble mud-cabin with a terrible glance, such as young girls bestow
on the men who cannot please them. Butscha’s conception of himself was
lowly, and, like the wife of his master, he had never been out of Havre.

Perhaps it will be well, for the sake of those who have never seen
that city, to say a few words as to the present destination of the
Latournelle family,--the head clerk being included in the latter term.
Ingouville is to Havre what Montmartre is to Paris,--a high hill at the
foot of which the city lies; with this difference, that the hill and the
city are surrounded by the sea and the Seine, that Havre is helplessly
circumscribed by enclosing fortifications, and, in short, that the mouth
of the river, the harbor, and the docks present a very different aspect
from the fifty thousand houses of Paris. At the foot of Montmartre an
ocean of slate roofs lies in motionless blue billows; at Ingouville the
sea is like the same roofs stirred by the wind. This eminence, or line
of hills, which coasts the Seine from Rouen to the seashore, leaving a
margin of valley land more or less narrow between itself and the river,
and containing in its cities, its ravines, its vales, its meadows,
veritable treasures of the picturesque, became of enormous value in
and about Ingouville, after the year 1816, the period at which the
prosperity of Havre began. This township has become since that time
the Auteuil, the Ville-d’Avray, the Montmorency, in short, the suburban
residence of the merchants of Havre. Here they build their houses on
terraces around its ampitheatre of hills, and breathe the sea air
laden with the fragrance of their splendid gardens. Here these bold
speculators cast off the burden of their counting-rooms and the
atmosphere of their city houses, which are built closely together
without open spaces, often without court-yards,--a vice of construction
with the increasing population of Havre, the inflexible line of the
fortifications, and the enlargement of the docks has forced upon them.
The result is, weariness of heart in Havre, cheerfulness and joy at
Ingouville. The law of social development has forced up the suburb of
Graville like a mushroom. It is to-day more extensive than Havre itself,
which lies at the foot of its slopes like a serpent.

At the crest of the hill Ingouville has but one street, and (as in all
such situations) the houses which overlook the river have an immense
advantage over those on the other side of the road, whose view they
obstruct, and which present the effect of standing on tip-toe to look
over the opposing roofs. However, there exist here, as elsewhere,
certain servitudes. Some houses standing at the summit have a finer
position or possess legal rights of view which compel their opposite
neighbors to keep their buildings down to a required height. Moreover,
the openings cut in the capricious rock by roads which follow its
declensions and make the ampitheatre habitable, give vistas through
which some estates can see the city, or the river, or the sea. Instead
of rising to an actual peak, the hill ends abruptly in a cliff. At the
end of the street which follows the line of the summit, ravines appear
in which a few villages are clustered (Sainte-Adresse and two or three
other Saint-somethings) together with several creeks which murmur and
flow with the tides of the sea. These half-deserted slopes of Ingouville
form a striking contrast to the terraces of fine villas which overlook
the valley of the Seine. Is the wind on this side too strong for
vegetation? Do the merchants shrink from the cost of terracing it?
However this may be, the traveller approaching Havre on a steamer is
surprised to find a barren coast and tangled gorges to the west of
Ingouville, like a beggar in rags beside a perfumed and sumptuously
apparelled rich man.

In 1829 one of the last houses looking toward the sea, and which in
all probability stands about the centre of the Ingouville to-day, was
called, and perhaps is still called, “the Chalet.” Originally it was a
porter’s lodge with a trim little garden in front of it. The owner of
the villa to which it belonged,--a mansion with park, gardens, aviaries,
hot-houses, and lawns--took a fancy to put the little dwelling more in
keeping with the splendor of his own abode, and he reconstructed it on
the model of an ornamental cottage. He divided this cottage from his own
lawn, which was bordered and set with flower-beds and formed the terrace
of his villa, by a low wall along which he planted a concealing hedge.
Behind the cottage (called, in spite of all his efforts to prevent it,
the Chalet) were the orchards and kitchen gardens of the villa. The
Chalet, without cows or dairy, is separated from the roadway by a wooden
fence whose palings are hidden under a luxuriant hedge. On the other
side of the road the opposite house, subject to a legal privilege, has
a similar hedge and paling, so as to leave an unobstructed view of Havre
to the Chalet.

This little dwelling was the torment of the present proprietor of the
villa, Monsieur Vilquin; and here is the why and the wherefore. The
original creator of the villa, whose sumptuous details cry aloud,
“Behold our millions!” extended his park far into the country for the
purpose, as he averred, of getting his gardeners out of his pockets; and
so, when the Chalet was finished, none but a friend could be allowed to
inhabit it. Monsieur Mignon, the next owner of the property, was very
much attached to his cashier, Dumay, and the following history will
prove that the attachment was mutual; to him therefore he offered
the little dwelling. Dumay, a stickler for legal methods, insisted on
signing a lease for three hundred francs for twelve years, and Monsieur
Mignon willingly agreed, remarking,--

“My dear Dumay, remember, you have now bound yourself to live with me
for twelve years.”

In consequence of certain events which will presently be related, the
estates of Monsieur Mignon, formerly the richest merchant in Havre, were
sold to Vilquin, one of his business competitors. In his joy at getting
possession of the celebrated villa Mignon, the latter forgot to demand
the cancelling of the lease. Dumay, anxious not to hinder the sale,
would have signed anything Vilquin required, but the sale once made, he
held to his lease like a vengeance. And there he remained, in Vilquin’s
pocket as it were; at the heart of Vilquin’s family life, observing
Vilquin, irritating Vilquin,--in short, the gadfly of all the Vilquins.
Every morning, when he looked out of his window, Vilquin felt a violent
shock of annoyance as his eye lighted on the little gem of a building,
the Chalet, which had cost sixty thousand francs and sparkled like a
ruby in the sun. That comparison is very nearly exact. The architect has
constructed the cottage of brilliant red brick pointed with white.
The window-frames are painted of a lively green, the woodwork is brown
verging on yellow. The roof overhangs by several feet. A pretty gallery,
with open-worked balustrade, surmounts the lower floor and projects
at the centre of the facade into a veranda with glass sides. The
ground-floor has a charming salon and a dining-room, separated from
each other by the landing of a staircase built of wood, designed
and decorated with elegant simplicity. The kitchen is behind the
dining-room, and the corresponding room back of the salon, formerly a
study, is now the bedroom of Monsieur and Madame Dumay. On the upper
floor the architect has managed to get two large bedrooms, each with a
dressing-room, to which the veranda serves as a salon; and above this
floor, under the eaves, which are tipped together like a couple of
cards, are two servants’ rooms with mansard roofs, each lighted by a
circular window and tolerably spacious.

Vilquin has been petty enough to build a high wall on the side toward
the orchard and kitchen garden; and in consequence of this piece
of spite, the few square feet which the lease secured to the Chalet
resembled a Parisian garden. The out-buildings, painted in keeping
with the cottage, stood with their backs to the wall of the adjoining
property.

The interior of this charming dwelling harmonized with its exterior.
The salon, floored entirely with iron-wood, was painted in a style that
suggested the beauties of Chinese lacquer. On black panels edged with
gold, birds of every color, foliage of impossible greens, and fantastic
oriental designs glowed and shimmered. The dining-room was entirely
sheathed in Northern woods carved and cut in open-work like the
beautiful Russian chalets. The little antechamber formed by the landing
and the well of the staircase was painted in old oak to represent Gothic
ornament. The bedrooms, hung with chintz, were charming in their costly
simplicity. The study, where the cashier and his wife now slept, was
panelled from top to bottom, on the walls and ceiling, like the cabin of
a steamboat. These luxuries of his predecessor excited Vilquin’s wrath.
He would fain have lodged his daughter and her husband in the cottage.
This desire, well known to Dumay, will presently serve to illustrate the
Breton obstinacy of the latter.

The entrance to the Chalet is by a little trellised iron door, the
uprights of which, ending in lance-heads, show for a few inches above
the fence and its hedge. The little garden, about as wide as the more
pretentious lawn, was just now filled with flowers, roses, and dahlias
of the choicest kind, and many rare products of the hot-houses, for
(another Vilquinard grievance) the elegant little hot-house, a very whim
of a hot-house, a hot-house representing dignity and style, belonged
to the Chalet, and separated, or if you prefer, united it to the villa
Vilquin. Dumay consoled himself for the toils of business in taking care
of this hot-house, whose exotic treasures were one of Modeste’s joys.
The billiard-room of the villa Vilquin, a species of gallery, formerly
communicated through an immense aviary with this hot-house. But after
the building of the wall which deprived him of a view into the orchards,
Dumay bricked up the door of communication. “Wall for wall!” he said.

In 1827 Vilquin offered Dumay a salary of six thousand francs, and ten
thousand more as indemnity, if he would give up the lease. The cashier
refused; though he had but three thousand francs from Gobenheim, a
former clerk of his master. Dumay was a Breton transplanted by fate into
Normandy. Imagine therefore the hatred conceived for the tenants of the
Chalet by the Norman Vilquin, a man worth three millions! What criminal
leze-million on the part of a cashier, to hold up to the eyes of such
a man the impotence of his wealth! Vilquin, whose desperation in the
matter made him the talk of Havre, had just proposed to give Dumay a
pretty house of his own, and had again been refused. Havre itself began
to grow uneasy at the man’s obstinacy, and a good many persons explained
it by the phrase, “Dumay is a Breton.” As for the cashier, he thought
Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon would be ill-lodged elsewhere. His
two idols now inhabited a temple worthy of them; the sumptuous little
cottage gave them a home, where these dethroned royalties could keep the
semblance of majesty about them,--a species of dignity usually denied to
those who have seen better days.

Perhaps as the story goes on, the reader will not regret having learned
in advance a few particulars as to the home and the habitual companions
of Modeste Mignon, for, at her age, people and things have as much
influence upon the future life as a person’s own character,--indeed,
character often receives ineffaceable impressions from its surroundings.




CHAPTER II. A PORTRAIT FROM LIFE


From the manner with which the Latournelles entered the Chalet a
stranger would readily have guessed that they came there every evening.

“Ah, you are here already,” said the notary, perceiving the young banker
Gobenheim, a connection of Gobenheim-Keller, the head of the great
banking house in Paris.

This young man with a livid face--a blonde of the type with black eyes,
whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober in speech
as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but nevertheless
vigorously framed--visited the family of his former master and the house
of his cashier less from affection than from self-interest. Here they
played whist at two sous a point; a dress-coat was not required; he
accepted no refreshment except “eau sucree,” and consequently had
no civilities to return. This apparent devotion to the Mignon family
allowed it to be supposed that Gobenheim had a heart; it also released
him from the necessity of going into the society of Havre and incurring
useless expenses, thus upsetting the orderly economy of his domestic
life. This disciple of the golden calf went to bed at half-past ten
o’clock and got up at five in the morning. Moreover, being perfectly
sure of Latournelle’s and Butscha’s discretion, he could talk over
difficult business matters, obtain the advice of the notary gratis,
and get an inkling of the real truth of the gossip of the street. This
stolid gold-glutton (the epithet is Butscha’s) belonged by nature to
the class of substances which chemistry terms absorbents. Ever since the
catastrophe of the house of Mignon, where the Kellers had placed him to
learn the principles of maritime commerce, no one at the Chalet had ever
asked him to do the smallest thing, no matter what; his reply was too
well known. The young fellow looked at Modeste precisely as he would
have looked at a cheap lithograph.

“He’s one of the pistons of the big engine called ‘Commerce,’” said poor
Butscha, whose clever mind made itself felt occasionally by such little
sayings timidly jerked out.

The four Latournelles bowed with the most respectful deference to an
old lady dressed in black velvet, who did not rise from the armchair in
which she was seated, for the reason that both eyes were covered with
the yellow film produced by cataract. Madame Mignon may be sketched in
one sentence. Her august countenance of the mother of a family attracted
instant notice as that of one whose irreproachable life defies the
assaults of destiny, which nevertheless makes her the target of its
arrows and a member of the unnumbered tribe of Niobes. Her blonde wig,
carefully curled and well arranged upon her head, became the cold white
face which resembled that of some burgomaster’s wife painted by Hals or
Mirevelt. The extreme neatness of her dress, the velvet boots, the lace
collar, the shawl evenly folded and put on, all bore testimony to the
solicitous care which Modeste bestowed upon her mother.

When silence was, as the notary had predicted, restored in the pretty
salon, Modeste, sitting beside her mother, for whom she was embroidering
a kerchief, became for an instant the centre of observation. This
curiosity, barely veiled by the commonplace salutations and inquiries
of the visitors, would have revealed even to an indifferent person the
existence of the domestic plot to which Modeste was expected to fall
a victim; but Gobenheim, more than indifferent, noticed nothing, and
proceeded to light the candles on the card-table. The behavior of Dumay
made the whole scene terrifying to Butscha, to the Latournelles, and
above all to Madame Dumay, who knew her husband to be capable of firing
a pistol at Modeste’s lover as coolly as though he were a mad dog.

After dinner that day the cashier had gone to walk followed by two
magnificent Pyrenees hounds, whom he suspected of betraying him, and
therefore left in charge of a farmer, a former tenant of Monsieur
Mignon. On his return, just before the arrival of the Latournelles,
he had taken his pistols from his bed’s head and placed them on the
chimney-piece, concealing this action from Modeste. The young girl took
no notice whatever of these preparations, singular as they were.

Though short, thick-set, pockmarked, and speaking always in a low voice
as if listening to himself, this Breton, a former lieutenant in the
Guard, showed the evidence of such resolution, such sang-froid on his
face that throughout life, even in the army, no one had ever ventured
to trifle with him. His little eyes, of a calm blue, were like bits of
steel. His ways, the look on his face, his speech, his carriage, were
all in keeping with the short name of Dumay. His physical strength,
well-known to every one, put him above all danger of attack. He was able
to kill a man with a blow of his fist, and had performed that feat at
Bautzen, where he found himself, unarmed, face to face with a Saxon
at the rear of his company. At the present moment the usually firm
yet gentle expression of the man’s face had risen to a sort of tragic
sublimity; his lips were pale as the rest of his face, indicating a
tumult within him mastered by his Breton will; a slight sweat, which
every one noticed and guessed to be cold, moistened his brow. The notary
knew but too well that these signs might result in a drama before the
criminal courts. In fact the cashier was playing a part in connection
with Modeste Mignon, which involved to his mind sentiments of honor and
loyalty of far greater importance than mere social laws; and his present
conduct proceeded from one of those compacts which, in case disaster
came of it, could be judged only in a higher court than one of earth.
The majority of dramas lie really in the ideas which we make to
ourselves about things. Events which seem to us dramatic are nothing
more than subjects which our souls convert into tragedy or comedy
according to the bent of our characters.

Madame Latournelle and Madame Dumay, who were appointed to watch
Modeste, had a certain assumed stiffness of demeanor and a quiver in
their voices, which the suspected party did not notice, so absorbed
was she in her embroidery. Modeste laid each thread of cotton with a
precision that would have made an ordinary workwoman desperate. Her face
expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the flower
she was working. The dwarf, seated between his mistress and Gobenheim,
restrained his emotion, trying to find means to approach Modeste and
whisper a word of warning in her ear.

By taking a position in front of Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle, with
the diabolical intelligence of conscientious duty, had isolated Modeste.
Madame Mignon, whose blindness always made her silent, was even paler
than usual, showing plainly that she was aware of the test to which
her daughter was about to be subjected. Perhaps at the last moment she
revolted from the stratagem, necessary as it might seem to her. Hence
her silence; she was weeping inwardly. Exupere, the spring of the
trap, was wholly ignorant of the piece in which he was to play a
part. Gobenheim, by reason of his character, remained in a state of
indifference equal to that displayed by Modeste. To a spectator who
understood the situation, this contrast between the ignorance of some
and the palpitating interest of others would have seemed quite poetic.
Nowadays romance-writers arrange such effects; and it is quite within
their province to do so, for nature in all ages takes the liberty to be
stronger than they. In this instance, as you will see, nature, social
nature, which is a second nature within nature, amused herself by making
truth more interesting than fiction; just as mountain torrents describe
curves which are beyond the skill of painters to convey, and accomplish
giant deeds in displacing or smoothing stones which are the wonder of
architects and sculptors.

It was eight o’clock. At that season twilight was still shedding its
last gleams; there was not a cloud in the sky; the balmy air caressed
the earth, the flowers gave forth their fragrance, the steps of
pedestrians turning homeward sounded along the gravelly road, the sea
shone like a mirror, and there was so little wind that the wax candles
upon the card-tables sent up a steady flame, although the windows were
wide open. This salon, this evening, this dwelling--what a frame for the
portrait of the young girl whom these persons were now studying with the
profound attention of a painter in presence of the Margharita Doni, one
of the glories of the Pitti palace. Modeste,--blossom enclosed, like
that of Catullus,--was she worth all these precautions?

You have seen the cage; behold the bird! Just twenty years of age,
slender and delicate as the sirens which English designers invent for
their “Books of Beauty,” Modeste was, like her mother before her, the
captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France, where
we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German women is
the poetry of the heart coming to the surface of the being and spending
itself--in affectations if the owner is silly, in divine charms of
manner if she is “spirituelle” and intelligent. Remarkable for her pale
golden hair, Modeste belonged to the type of woman called, perhaps in
memory of Eve, the celestial blonde; whose satiny skin is like a silk
paper applied to the flesh, shuddering at the winter of a cold look,
expanding in the sunshine of a loving glance,--teaching the hand to be
jealous of the eye. Beneath her hair, which was soft and feathery and
worn in many curls, the brow, which might have been traced by a compass
so pure was its modelling, shone forth discreet, calm to placidity,
and yet luminous with thought: when and where could another be found so
transparently clear or more exquisitely smooth? It seemed, like a pearl,
to have its orient. The eyes, of a blue verging on gray and limpid
as the eyes of a child, had all the mischief, all the innocence of
childhood, and they harmonized well with the arch of the eyebrows,
faintly indicated by lines like those made with a brush on Chinese
faces. This candor of the soul was still further evidenced around the
eyes, in their corners, and about the temples, by pearly tints threaded
with blue, the special privilege of these delicate complexions. The
face, whose oval Raphael so often gave to his Madonnas, was remarkable
for the sober and virginal tone of the cheeks, soft as a Bengal rose,
upon which the long lashes of the diaphanous eyelids cast shadows that
were mingled with light. The throat, bending as she worked, too delicate
perhaps, and of milky whiteness, recalled those vanishing lines that
Leonardo loved. A few little blemishes here and there, like the patches
of the eighteenth century, proved that Modeste was indeed a child of
earth, and not a creation dreamed of in Italy by the angelic school. Her
lips, delicate yet full, were slightly mocking and somewhat sensuous;
the waist, which was supple and yet not fragile, had no terrors for
maternity, like those of girls who seek beauty by the fatal pressure of
a corset. Steel and dimity and lacings defined but did not create the
serpentine lines of the elegant figure, graceful as that of a young
poplar swaying in the wind.

A pearl-gray dress with crimson trimmings, made with a long waist,
modestly outlined the bust and covered the shoulders, still rather thin,
with a chemisette which left nothing to view but the first curves of
the throat where it joined the shoulders. From the aspect of the young
girl’s face, at once ethereal and intelligent, where the delicacy of a
Greek nose with its rosy nostrils and firm modelling marked something
positive and defined; where the poetry enthroned upon an almost mystic
brow seemed belied at times by the pleasure-loving expression of the
mouth; where candor claimed the depths profound and varied of the
eye, and disputed them with a spirit of irony that was trained and
educated,--from all these signs an observer would have felt that this
young girl, with the keen, alert ear that waked at every sound, with
a nostril open to catch the fragrance of the celestial flower of the
Ideal, was destined to be the battle-ground of a struggle between
the poesies of the dawn and the labors of the day; between fancy
and reality, the spirit and the life. Modeste was a pure young girl,
inquisitive after knowledge, understanding her destiny, and filled with
chastity,--the Virgin of Spain rather than the Madonna of Raphael.

She raised her head when she heard Dumay say to Exupere, “Come here,
young man.” Seeing them together in the corner of the salon she supposed
they were talking of some commission in Paris. Then she looked at
the friends who surrounded her, as if surprised by their silence, and
exclaimed in her natural manner, “Why are you not playing?”--with a
glance at the green table which the imposing Madame Latournelle called
the “altar.”

“Yes, let us play,” said Dumay, having sent off Exupere.

“Sit there, Butscha,” said Madame Latournelle, separating the head-clerk
from the group around Madame Mignon and her daughter by the whole width
of the table.

“And you, come over here,” said Dumay to his wife, making her sit close
by him.

Madame Dumay, a little American about thirty-six years of age, wiped her
eyes furtively; she adored Modeste, and feared a catastrophe.

“You are not very lively this evening,” remarked Modeste.

“We are playing,” said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.

No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made
still more so by explaining Dumay’s position towards Modeste. If the
brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must
pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these
preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating the
main circumstances which govern all dramas.




CHAPTER III. PRELIMINARIES


Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office
that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor.
On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe
occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the
age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to
yield. On the way he met a young man in the department of Var, who
for reasons analogous to his own was in search of glory, believing a
battle-field less perilous than his own Provence. Charles Mignon, the
last scion of an ancient family, which gave its name to a street in
Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal Mignon, had a shrewd and
calculating father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La
Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution. Like all timid
folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it
more wholesome to cut off other people’s heads than to let his own be
cut off. The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was
then inscribed on the list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold;
the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen
Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his
wife and all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a
refuge for the family in the Upper Alps.

Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley of
Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his fine
presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches perfection,
may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of Adrian, is the
type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity--taking it, like
many another youth, for a vocation--on the red cloth of war. On his
way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton. The pair became
intimate, partly from the contrasts in their characters; they drank from
the same cup at the wayside torrents, broke the same biscuit, and were
both made sergeants at the peace which followed the battle of Marengo.

When the war recommenced, Charles Mignon was promoted into the cavalry
and lost sight of his comrade. In 1812 the last of the Mignon de La
Bastie was an officer of the Legion of honor and major of a regiment
of cavalry. Taken prisoner by the Russians he was sent, like so
many others, to Siberia. He made the journey in company with another
prisoner, a poor lieutenant, in whom he recognized his old friend Jean
Dumay, brave, neglected, undecorated, unhappy, like a million of other
woollen epaulets, rank and file--that canvas of men on which
Napoleon painted the picture of the Empire. While in Siberia, the
lieutenant-colonel, to kill time, taught writing and arithmetic to the
Breton, whose early education had seemed a useless waste of time to Pere
Scevola. Charles found in the old comrade of his marching days one of
those rare hearts into which a man can pour his griefs while telling his
joys.

The young Provencal had met the fate which attends all handsome
bachelors. In 1804, at Frankfort on the Main, he was adored by Bettina
Wallenrod, only daughter of a banker, and he married her with all the
more enthusiasm because she was rich and a noted beauty, while he was
only a lieutenant with no prospects but the extremely problematical
future of a soldier of fortune of that day. Old Wallenrod, a decayed
German baron (there is always a baron in a German bank) delighted to
know that the handsome lieutenant was the sole representative of the
Mignon de La Bastie, approved the love of the blonde Bettina, whose
beauty an artist (at that time there really was one in Frankfort) had
lately painted as an ideal head of Germany. Wallenrod invested enough
money in the French funds to give his daughter thirty thousand francs a
year, and settled it on his anticipated grandsons, naming them counts of
La Bastie-Wallenrod. This “dot” made only a small hole in his cash-box,
the value of money being then very low. But the Empire, pursuing a
policy often attempted by other debtors, rarely paid its dividends; and
Charles was rather alarmed at this investment, having less faith than
his father-in-law in the imperial eagle. The phenomenon of belief, or of
admiration which is ephemeral belief, is not so easily maintained when
in close quarters with the idol. The mechanic distrusts the machine
which the traveller admires; and the officers of the army might be
called the stokers of the Napoleonic engine,--if, indeed, they were not
its fuel.

However, the Baron Wallenrod-Tustall-Bartenstild promised to come if
necessary to the help of the household. Charles loved Bettina Wallenrod
as much as she loved him, and that is saying a good deal; but when a
Provencal is moved to enthusiasm all his feelings and attachments are
genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore that blonde beauty,
escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer, gifted with an angelic
nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The pair had four children, of
whom only two daughters survived at the time when he poured his griefs
into the Breton’s heart. Dumay loved these little ones without having
seen them, solely through the sympathy so well described by Charlet,
which makes a soldier the father of every child. The eldest, named
Bettina Caroline, was born in 1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808.
The unfortunate lieutenant-colonel, long without tidings of these
cherished darlings, was sent, at the peace of 1814, across Russia
and Prussia on foot, accompanied by the lieutenant. No difference of
epaulets could count between the two friends, who reached Frankfort just
as Napoleon was disembarking at Cannes.

Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who had
always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even by
his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of the
Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying on the
genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite as often
beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had purchased
nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men during his
magnificent campaign in France. “I tie in goddon,” said the father to
the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet a grief
which distressed him. “I owe no mann anything--” and he died, still
trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.

Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general
wreck, Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him
lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of the
Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general
after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of
Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and left
Tours before the disbandment of the army.

In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife’s property out of the funds
to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending to seek
his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where persecution
was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of Napoleon. He went
to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had saved at Waterloo
by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the hurly-burly of the
retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the anxieties of his colonel; the
poor fellow idolized the two little girls and followed Charles like
a spaniel. The latter, confident that the habit of obedience, the
discipline of subordination, and the honesty and affection of the
lieutenant would make him a useful as well as a faithful retainer,
proposed to take him with him in a civil capacity. Dumay was only too
happy to be adopted into the family, to which he resolved to cling like
the mistletoe to an oak.

While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making
choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various
ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the
brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he
listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the
means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself
the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He
bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New York
freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He sent Dumay
on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned, after making a
double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase of cottons at
a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his family in
the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the principles of
banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of a native of
Provence.

This double operation of Dumay’s was worth a fortune to the house of
Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his
agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature. Miss
Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand francs),
which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now became an alter
ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron’s books, a science
which, to use his own expression, pertains to the sergeant-majors of
commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune had forgotten for
twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in the world as the owner
of the little house (which his master’s liberality had furnished), with
twelve hundred francs a year from money in the funds, and a salary of
three thousand six hundred. Never in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay
hoped for a situation so good as this; but greater still was the
satisfaction he derived from the knowledge that his lucky enterprise had
been the pivot of good fortune to the richest commercial house in Havre.

Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,
or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of
economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay
laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added something
to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier’s services,
until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight thousand francs. In
was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie, a title he never used,
crowned his cashier with the final happiness of residing at the Chalet,
where at the time when this story begins Madame Mignon and her daughter
were living in obscurity.

The deplorable state of Madame Mignon’s health was caused in part by the
catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had taken
three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a grief
that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound fruit. It
is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying in infancy,
had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The exile of her
husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The failure of
the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father, leaving his
coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the fate of her
husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles’s return came near killing
the tender German flower. After that the second fall of the Empire and
the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a renewed attack
of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of continual
prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest in Havre,
the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the splendors of
the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration enjoyed by her
husband, his absolute affection, giving her an unrivalled love in return
for her single-minded love for him,--all these things brought the woman
back to life. At the moment when her doubts and fears at last left her,
when she could look forward to the bright evening of her stormy life, a
hidden catastrophe, buried in the heart of the family, and of which we
shall presently make mention, came as the precursor of renewed trials.

In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles
Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris, and
London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal palace
of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped down upon
their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the grand army in
Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon his course,
and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All he owned, not
excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his creditors.

“Havre shall never see me doing nothing,” said the colonel to the
lieutenant. “Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per cent.”

“Three, my colonel.”

“At nothing, then,” cried Mignon, peremptorily; “you shall have your
share in the profits of what I now undertake. The ‘Modeste,’ which is no
longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my wife
and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good news.”

Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. “I think,”
 he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, “that my colonel
has a plan laid out.”

The following day at dawn he accompanied his master on board the
“Modeste” bound for Constantinople. There, on the poop of the vessel,
the Breton said to the Provencal,--

“What are your last commands, my colonel?”

“That no man shall enter the Chalet,” cried the father with strong
emotion. “Dumay, guard my last child as though you were a bull-dog.
Death to the man who seduces another daughter! Fear nothing, not even
the scaffold--I will be with you.”

“My colonel, go in peace. I understand you. You shall find Mademoiselle
Mignon on your return such as you now give her to me, or I shall be
dead. You know me, and you know your Pyrenees hounds. No man shall reach
your daughter. Forgive me for troubling you with words.”

The two soldiers clasped arms like men who had learned to understand
each other in the solitudes of Siberia.

On the same day the Havre “Courier” published the following terrible,
simple, energetic, and honorable notice:--

  “The house of Charles Mignon suspends payment. But the
  undersigned, assignees of the estate, undertake to pay all
  liabilities. On and after this date, holders of notes may obtain
  the usual discount. The sale of the landed estates will fully
  cover all current indebtedness.

  “This notice is issued for the honor of the house, and to prevent
  any disturbance in the money-market of this town.

  “Monsieur Charles Mignon sailed this morning on the ‘Modeste’ for
  Asia Minor, leaving full powers with the undersigned to sell his
  whole property, both landed and personal.

    “DUMAY, assignee of the Bank accounts,
    LATOURNELLE, notary, assignee of the city and villa property,
    GOBENHEIM, assignee of the commercial property.”

Latournelle owed his prosperity to the kindness of Monsieur Mignon,
who lent him one hundred thousand francs in 1817 to buy the finest law
practice in Havre. The poor man, who had no pecuniary means, was nearly
forty years of age and saw no prospect of being other than head-clerk
for the rest of his days. He was the only man in Havre whose devotion
could be compared with Dumay’s. As for Gobenheim, he profited by the
liquidation to get a part of Monsieur Mignon’s business, which lifted
his own little bank into prominence.

While unanimous regrets for the disaster were expressed in
counting-rooms, on the wharves, and in private houses, where praises of
a man so irreproachable, honorable, and beneficent filled every mouth,
Latournelle and Dumay, silent and active as ants, sold land, turned
property into money, paid the debts, and settled up everything.
Vilquin showed a good deal of generosity in purchasing the villa, the
town-house, and a farm; and Latournelle made the most of his liberality
by getting a good price out of him. Society wished to show civilities to
Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon; but they had already obeyed the father’s
last wishes and taken refuge in the Chalet, where they went on the very
morning of his departure, the exact hour of which had been concealed
from them. Not to be shaken in his resolution by his grief at parting,
the brave man said farewell to his wife and daughter while they slept.
Three hundred visiting cards were left at the house. A fortnight later,
just as Charles had predicted, complete forgetfulness settled down upon
the Chalet, and proved to these women the wisdom and dignity of his
command.

Dumay sent agents to represent his master in New York, Paris, and
London, and followed up the assignments of the three banking-houses
whose failure had caused the ruin of the Havre house, thus realizing
five hundred thousand francs between 1826 and 1828, an eighth of
Charles’s whole fortune; then, according to the latter’s directions
given on the night of his departure, he sent that sum to New York
through the house of Mongenod to the credit of Monsieur Charles Mignon.
All this was done with military obedience, except in a matter of
withholding thirty thousand francs for the personal expenses of Madame
and Mademoiselle Mignon as the colonel had ordered him to do, but
which Dumay did not do. The Breton sold his own little house for twenty
thousand francs, which sum he gave to Madame Mignon, believing that the
more capital he sent to his colonel the sooner the latter would return.

“He might perish for the want of thirty thousand francs,” Dumay remarked
to Latournelle, who bought the little house at its full value, where an
apartment was always kept ready for the inhabitants of the Chalet.




CHAPTER IV. A SIMPLE STORY


Such was the result to the celebrated house of Mignon at Havre of
the crisis of 1825-26, which convulsed many of the principal business
centres in Europe and caused the ruin of several Parisian bankers, among
them (as those who remember that crisis will recall) the president of
the chamber of commerce.

We can now understand how this great disaster, coming suddenly at the
close of ten years of domestic happiness, might well have been the death
of Bettina Mignon, again separated from her husband and ignorant of his
fate,--to her as adventurous and perilous as the exile to Siberia. But
the grief which was dragging her to the grave was far other than these
visible sorrows. The caustic that was slowly eating into her heart lay
beneath a stone in the little graveyard of Ingouville, on which was
inscribed:--

                      BETTINA CAROLINE MIGNON

                       Died aged twenty-two.

                           Pray for her.

This inscription is to the young girl whom it covered what many another
epitaph has been for the dead lying beneath them,--a table of contents
to a hidden book. Here is the book, in its dreadful brevity; and it will
explain the oath exacted and taken when the colonel and the lieutenant
bade each other farewell.

A young man of charming appearance, named Charles d’Estourny, came to
Havre for the commonplace purpose of being near the sea, and there he
saw Bettina Mignon. A “soi-disant” fashionable Parisian is never without
introductions, and he was invited at the instance of a friend of the
Mignons to a fete given at Ingouville. He fell in love with Bettina and
with her fortune, and in three months he had done the work of seduction
and enticed her away. The father of a family of daughters should no more
allow a young man whom he does not know to enter his home than he should
leave books and papers lying about which he has not read. A young girl’s
innocence is like milk, which a small matter turns sour,--a clap of
thunder, an evil odor, a hot day, a mere breath.

When Charles Mignon read his daughter’s letter of farewell he instantly
despatched Madame Dumay to Paris. The family gave out that a journey
to another climate had suddenly been advised for Caroline by their
physician; and the physician himself sustained the excuse, though unable
to prevent some gossip in the society of Havre. “Such a vigorous young
girl! with the complexion of a Spaniard, and that black hair!--she
consumptive!” “Yes, they say she committed some imprudence.” “Ah, ah!”
 cried a Vilquin. “I am told she came back bathed in perspiration after
riding on horseback, and drank iced water; at least, that is what Dr.
Troussenard says.”

By the time Madame Dumay returned to Havre the catastrophe of the
failure had taken place, and society paid no further attention to the
absence of Bettina or the return of the cashier’s wife. At the beginning
of 1827 the newspapers rang with the trial of Charles d’Estourny, who
was found guilty of cheating at cards. The young corsair escaped into
foreign parts without taking thought of Mademoiselle Mignon, who was of
little value to him since the failure of the bank. Bettina heard of his
infamous desertion and of her father’s ruin almost at the same time. She
returned home struck by death, and wasted away in a short time at the
Chalet. Her death at least protected her reputation. The illness that
Monsieur Mignon alleged to be the cause of her absence, and the doctor’s
order which sent her to Nice were now generally believed. Up to the last
moment the mother hoped to save her daughter’s life. Bettina was her
darling and Modeste was the father’s. There was something touching in
the two preferences. Bettina was the image of Charles, just as Modeste
was the reproduction of her mother. Both parents continued their love
for each other in their children. Bettina, a daughter of Provence,
inherited from her father the beautiful hair, black as a raven’s wing,
which distinguishes the women of the South, the brown eye, almond-shaped
and brilliant as a star, the olive tint, the velvet skin as of some
golden fruit, the arched instep, and the Spanish waist from which the
short basque skirt fell crisply. Both mother and father were proud of
the charming contrast between the sisters. “A devil and an angel!” they
said to each other, laughing, little thinking it prophetic.

After weeping for a month in the solitude of her chamber, where she
admitted no one, the mother came forth at last with injured eyes. Before
losing her sight altogether she persisted, against the wishes of her
friends, in visiting her daughter’s grave, on which she riveted her gaze
in contemplation. That image remained vivid in the darkness which now
fell upon her, just as the red spectrum of an object shines in our eyes
when we close them in full daylight. This terrible and double misfortune
made Dumay, not less devoted, but more anxious about Modeste, now the
only daughter of the father who was unaware of his loss. Madame Dumay,
idolizing Modeste, like other women deprived of their children, cast her
motherliness about the girl,--yet without disregarding the commands
of her husband, who distrusted female intimacies. Those commands were
brief. “If any man, of any age, or any rank,” Dumay said, “speaks to
Modeste, ogles her, makes love to her, he is a dead man. I’ll blow his
brains out and give myself to the authorities; my death may save her. If
you don’t wish to see my head cut off, do you take my place in watching
her when I am obliged to go out.”

For the last three years Dumay had examined his pistols every night. He
seemed to have put half the burden of his oath upon the Pyrenean hounds,
two animals of uncommon sagacity. One slept inside the Chalet, the
other was stationed in a kennel which he never left, and where he never
barked; but terrible would have been the moment had the pair made their
teeth meet in some unknown adventurer.

We can now imagine the sort of life led by mother and daughter at the
Chalet. Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, often accompanied by Gobenheim,
came to call and play whist with Dumay nearly every evening. The
conversation turned on the gossip of Havre and the petty events of
provincial life. The little company separated between nine and ten
o’clock. Modeste put her mother to bed, and together they said their
prayers, kept up each other’s courage, and talked of the dear absent
one, the husband and father. After kissing her mother for good-night,
the girl went to her own room about ten o’clock. The next morning she
prepared her mother for the day with the same care, the same prayers,
the same prattle. To her praise be it said that from the day when the
terrible infirmity deprived her mother of a sense, Modeste had been like
a servant to her, displaying at all times the same solicitude; never
wearying of the duty, never thinking it monotonous. Such constant
devotion, combined with a tenderness rare among young girls, was
thoroughly appreciated by those who witnessed it. To the Latournelle
family, and to Monsieur and Madame Dumay, Modeste was, in soul, the
pearl of price.

On sunny days, between breakfast and dinner, Madame Mignon and Madame
Dumay took a little walk toward the sea. Modeste accompanied them, for
two arms were needed to support the blind mother. About a month before
the scene to which this explanation is a parenthesis, Madame Mignon
had taken counsel with her friends, Madame Latournelle, the notary, and
Dumay, while Madame Dumay carried Modeste in another direction for a
longer walk.

“Listen to what I have to say,” said the blind woman. “My daughter is in
love. I feel it; I see it. A singular change has taken place within her,
and I do not see how it is that none of you have perceived it.”

“In the name of all that’s honorable--” cried the lieutenant.

“Don’t interrupt me, Dumay. For the last two months Modeste has taken as
much care of her personal appearance as if she expected to meet a lover.
She has grown extremely fastidious about her shoes; she wants to set off
her pretty feet; she scolds Madame Gobet, the shoemaker. It is the
same thing with her milliner. Some days my poor darling is absorbed in
thought, evidently expectant, as if waiting for some one. Her voice has
curt tones when she answers a question, as though she were interrupted
in the current of her thoughts and secret expectations. Then, if this
awaited lover has come--”

“Good heavens!”

“Sit down, Dumay,” said the blind woman. “Well, then Modeste is gay. Oh!
she is not gay to your sight; you cannot catch these gradations; they
are too delicate for eyes that see only the outside of nature. Her
gaiety is betrayed to me by the tones of her voice, by certain accents
which I alone can catch and understand. Modeste then, instead of sitting
still and thoughtful, gives vent to a wild, inward activity by impulsive
movements,--in short, she is happy. There is a grace, a charm in the
very ideas she utters. Ah, my friends, I know happiness as well as I
know sorrow; I know its signs. By the kiss my Modeste gives me I can
guess what is passing within her. I know whether she has received what
she was looking for, or whether she is uneasy or expectant. There are
many gradations in a kiss, even in that of an innocent young girl, and
Modeste is innocence itself; but hers is the innocence of knowledge,
not of ignorance. I may be blind, but my tenderness is all-seeing, and I
charge you to watch over my daughter.”

Dumay, now actually ferocious, the notary, in the character of a
man bound to ferret out a mystery, Madame Latournelle, the deceived
chaperone, and Madame Dumay, alarmed for her husband’s safety, became
at once a set of spies, and Modeste from this day forth was never left
alone for an instant. Dumay passed nights under her window wrapped in
his cloak like a jealous Spaniard; but with all his military sagacity
he was unable to detect the least suspicious sign. Unless she loved the
nightingales in the villa park, or some fairy prince, Modeste could have
seen no one, and had neither given nor received a signal. Madame Dumay,
who never went to bed till she knew Modeste was asleep, watched the
road from the upper windows of the Chalet with a vigilance equal to her
husband’s. Under these eight Argus eyes the blameless child, whose
every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the ordeal so fully
acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four friends declared
to each other privately that Madame Mignon was foolishly over-anxious.
Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to church and brought her
back again, was commissioned to tell the mother that she was mistaken
about her daughter.

“Modeste,” she said, “is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
that scaffold symphony, ‘The Last Hours of a Convict’” (the saying was
Butscha’s, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
“she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
I’m sure I don’t know where such people” (Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Byron
being _such people_ to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie) “get
their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as I did
not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to try
to read the thing. Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but it
actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn’t possibly finish it.
Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint, and
waves of war! However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we must
expect absurdities,--though his are really inexcusable. He takes you to
Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the torrents
talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins! Did you
ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon’s campaigns, the lines are full
of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling along from page to
page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put in by the translator,
and that I ought to read the book in English. But I certainly sha’n’t
learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn’t learn it to teach
Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these
English romances. I’m too good a Norman to fall in love with foreign
things,--above all when they come from England.”

Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling at
the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold. The stern scion of
a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of her doctrine.

“And, therefore, my dear Madame Mignon,” she went on, “you have taken
Modeste’s fancies, which are nothing but the results of her reading,
for a love-affair. Remember, she is just twenty. Girls fall in love with
themselves at that age; they dress to see themselves well-dressed. I
remember I used to make my little sister, now dead, put on a man’s hat
and pretend we were monsieur and madame. You see, you had a very happy
youth in Frankfort; but let us be just,--Modeste is living here without
the slightest amusement. Although, to be sure, her every wish is
attended to, still she knows she is shut up and watched, and the life
she leads would give her no pleasure at all if it were not for the
amusement she gets out of her books. Come, don’t worry yourself; she
loves nobody but you. You ought to be very glad that she goes into these
enthusiasms for the corsairs of Byron and the heroes of Walter Scott and
your own Germans, Egmont, Goethe, Werther, Schiller, and all the other
‘ers.’”

“Well, madame, what do you say to that?” asked Dumay, respectfully,
alarmed at Madame Mignon’s silence.

“Modeste is not only inclined to love, but she loves some man,” answered
the mother, obstinately.

“Madame, my life is at stake, and you must allow me--not for my sake,
but for my wife, my colonel, for all of us--to probe this matter to the
bottom, and find out whether it is the mother or the watch-dog who is
deceived.”

“It is you who are deceived, Dumay. Ah! if I could but see my daughter!”
 cried the poor woman.

“But whom is it possible for her to love?” asked the notary. “I’ll
answer for my Exupere.”

“It can’t be Gobenheim,” said Dumay, “for since the colonel’s departure
he has not spent nine hours a week in this house. Besides, he doesn’t
even notice Modeste--that five-franc piece of a man! His uncle
Gobenheim-Keller is all the time writing him, ‘Get rich enough to marry
a Keller.’ With that idea in his mind you may be sure he doesn’t know
which sex Modeste belongs to. No other men ever come here,--for of
course I don’t count Butscha, poor little fellow; I love him! He is your
Dumay, madame,” said the cashier to Madame Latournelle. “Butscha knows
very well that a mere glance at Modeste would cost him a Breton ducking.
Not a soul has any communication with this house. Madame Latournelle who
takes Modeste to church ever since your--your misfortune, madame, has
carefully watched her on the way and all through the service, and has
seen nothing suspicious. In short, if I must confess the truth, I have
myself raked all the paths about the house every evening for the last
month, and found no trace of footsteps in the morning.”

“Rakes are neither costly nor difficult to handle,” remarked the
daughter of Germany.

“But the dogs?” cried Dumay.

“Lovers have philters even for dogs,” answered Madame Mignon.

“If you are right, my honor is lost! I may as well blow my brains out,”
 exclaimed Dumay.

“Why so, Dumay?” said the blind woman.

“Ah, madame, I could never meet my colonel’s eye if he did not find his
daughter--now his only daughter--as pure and virtuous as she was when
he said to me on the vessel, ‘Let no fear of the scaffold hinder you,
Dumay, if the honor of my Modeste is at stake.’”

“Ah! I recognize you both,” said Madame Mignon in a voice of strong
emotion.

“I’ll wager my salvation that Modeste is as pure as she was in her
cradle,” exclaimed Madame Dumay.

“Well, I shall make certain of it,” replied her husband, “if Madame
la Comtesse will allow me to employ certain means; for old troopers
understand strategy.”

“I will allow you to do anything that shall enlighten us, provided it
does no injury to my last child.”

“What are you going to do, Jean?” asked Madame Dumay; “how can you
discover a young girl’s secret if she means to hide it?”

“Obey me, all!” cried the lieutenant, “I shall need every one of you.”

If this rapid sketch were clearly developed it would give a whole
picture of manners and customs in which many a family could recognize
the events of their own history; but it must suffice as it is to explain
the importance of the few details heretofore given about persons and
things on the memorable evening when the old soldier had made ready his
plot against the young girl, intending to wrench from the recesses of
her heart the secret of a love and a lover seen only by a blind mother.




CHAPTER V. THE PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED


An hour went by in solemn stillness broken only by the cabalistic
phrases of the whist-players: “Spades!” “Trumped!” “Cut!” “How are
honors?” “Two to four.” “Whose deal?”--phrases which represent in these
days the higher emotions of the European aristocracy. Modeste continued
to work, without seeming to be surprised at her mother’s silence.
Madame Mignon’s handkerchief slipped from her lap to the floor; Butscha
precipitated himself upon it, picked it up, and as he returned it
whispered in Modeste’s ear, “Take care!” Modeste raised a pair of
wondering eyes, whose puzzled glance filled the poor cripple with joy
unspeakable. “She is not in love!” he whispered to himself, rubbing his
hands till the skin was nearly peeled off. At this moment Exupere
tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon like an
avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, “The young man is
here!” Dumay sprang for his pistols and rushed out.

“Good God! suppose he kills him!” cried Madame Dumay, bursting into
tears.

“What is the matter?” asked Modeste, looking innocently at her friends
and not betraying the slightest fear.

“It is all about a young man who is hanging round the house,” cried
Madame Latournelle.

“Well!” said Modeste, “why should Dumay kill him?”

“Sancta simplicita!” ejaculated Butscha, looking at his master as
proudly as Alexander is made to contemplate Babylon in Lebrun’s great
picture.

“Where are you going, Modeste?” asked the mother as her daughter rose to
leave the room.

“To get ready for your bedtime, mamma,” answered Modeste, in a voice as
pure as the tones of an instrument.

“You haven’t paid your expenses,” said the dwarf to Dumay when he
returned.

“Modeste is as pure as the Virgin on our altar,” cried Madame
Latournelle.

“Good God! such excitements wear me out,” said Dumay; “and yet I’m a
strong man.”

“May I lose that twenty-five sous if I have the slightest idea what you
are about,” remarked Gobenheim. “You seem to me to be crazy.”

“And yet it is all about a treasure,” said Butscha, standing on tiptoe
to whisper in Gobenheim’s ear.

“Dumay, I am sorry to say that I am still almost certain of what I told
you,” persisted Madame Mignon.

“The burden of proof is now on you, madame,” said Dumay, calmly; “it is
for you to prove that we are mistaken.”

Discovering that the matter in question was only Modeste’s honor,
Gobenheim took his hat, made his bow, and walked off, carrying his ten
sous with him,--there being evidently no hope of another rubber.

“Exupere, and you too, Butscha, may leave us,” said Madame Latournelle.
“Go back to Havre; you will get there in time for the last piece at the
theatre. I’ll pay for your tickets.”

When the four friends were alone with Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle,
after looking at Dumay, who being a Breton understood the mother’s
obstinacy, and at her husband who was fingering the cards, felt herself
authorized to speak up.

“Madame Mignon, come now, tell us what decisive thing has struck your
mind.”

“Ah, my good friend, if you were a musician you would have heard, as I
have, the language of love that Modeste speaks.”

The piano of the demoiselles Mignon was among the few articles of
furniture which had been moved from the town-house to the Chalet.
Modeste often conjured away her troubles by practising, without a
master. Born a musician, she played to enliven her mother. She sang
by nature, and loved the German airs which her mother taught her. From
these lessons and these attempts at self-instruction came a phenomenon
not uncommon to natures with a musical vocation; Modeste composed, as
far as a person ignorant of the laws of harmony can be said to compose,
tender little lyric melodies. Melody is to music what imagery and
sentiment are to poetry, a flower that blossoms spontaneously.
Consequently, nations have had melodies before harmony,--botany comes
later than the flower. In like manner, Modeste, who knew nothing of
the painter’s art except what she had seen her sister do in the way of
water-color, would have stood subdued and fascinated before the
pictures of Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Durer,
Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands. Lately,
for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of nightingales,
musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused the attention of
her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness for composition
and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.

“If your suspicions have no other foundation,” said Latournelle to
Madame Mignon, “I pity your susceptibilities.”

“When a Breton girl sings,” said Dumay gloomily, “the lover is not far
off.”

“I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising,” said the mother,
“and you shall judge for yourselves--”

“Poor girl!” said Madame Dumay, “If she only knew our anxiety she would
be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially if she
thought it would save Dumay.”

“My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow,” said Madame Mignon;
“perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have discovered by
trickery.”

Was the comedy of the “Fille mal Gardee” being played here,--as it is
everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies, these
honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being able to
ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-affair, or
the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the result of a
struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the despotism of
a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the never-ending
repetition of the first scene played by man when the curtain of the
Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.

And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right of
it?

None of the persons who were about Modeste could understand that maiden
heart--for the soul and the face we have described were in harmony. The
girl had transported her existence into another world, as much denied
and disbelieved in in these days of ours as the new world of Christopher
Columbus in the sixteenth century. Happily, she kept her own counsel,
or they would have thought her crazy. But first we must explain the
influence of the past upon her nature.

Two events had formed the soul and developed the mind of this young
girl. Monsieur and Madame Mignon, warned by the fate that overtook
Bettina, had resolved, just before the failure, to marry Modeste. They
chose the son of a rich banker, formerly of Hamburg, but established in
Havre since 1815,--a man, moreover, who was under obligations to them.
The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of Havre,
blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle classes
delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion, abandoned
his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father’s failure that neither
Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen him since.
Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob Althor, the
father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I really don’t
know what you mean.”

This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was
a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle
and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardly desertion. The
daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their wishes
gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and grooms, and
otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in possession of
an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to kiss her hand, and
take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted his flowers and all the
little proofs of tenderness with which it is proper to surround the
lady of our choice; she even worked him a purse, believing in such
ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the
Vilquins, and the Althors.

Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame Mignon
and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine with
the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot of the
lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the eldest
Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful, and of high
birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of her engagement
she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million. Her poverty, well
known to all, became a sentinel defending the approaches to the Chalet
fully as well as the prudence of the Latournelles or the vigilance of
Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a time on Mademoiselle Mignon’s
position only to insult her.

“Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course.”

“What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the chance
to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take her!”

“After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--”

And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste’s
imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and
the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing that
Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of them as
they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed surprise that
the mother and daughter were willing to live on among the scenes of
their former splendor. From her open window behind the closed blinds
Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--

“I am sure I can’t think how they can live there,” some one would say
as he paced the villa lawn,--perhaps to assist Vilquin in getting rid of
his tenant.

“What do you suppose they live on? they haven’t any means of earning
money.”

“I am told the old woman has gone blind.”

“Is Mademoiselle Mignon still pretty? Dear me, how dashing she used to
be! Well, she hasn’t any horses now.”

Most young girls on hearing these spiteful and silly speeches, born of
an envy that now rushed, peevish and drivelling, to avenge the past,
would have felt the blood mount to their foreheads; others would have
wept; some would have undergone spasms of anger; but Modeste smiled, as
we smile at the theatre while watching the actors. Her pride could not
descend so low as the level of such speeches.

The other event was more serious than these mercenary meannesses.
Bettina Caroline died in the arms of her younger sister, who had nursed
her with the devotion of girlhood, and the curiosity of an untainted
imagination. In the silence of long nights the sisters exchanged many a
confidence. With what dramatic interest was poor Bettina invested in the
eyes of the innocent Modeste? Bettina knew love through sorrow only, and
she was dying of it. Among young girls every man, scoundrel though he
be, is still a lover. Passion is the one thing absolutely real in the
things of life, and it insists on its supremacy. Charles d’Estourny,
gambler, criminal, and debauchee, remained in the memory of the
sisters, the elegant Parisian of the fetes of Havre, the admired of the
womenkind. Bettina believed she had carried him off from the coquettish
Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he was her sister’s happy lover. Such
adoration in young girls is stronger than all social condemnations. To
Bettina’s thinking, justice had been deceived; if not, how could it
have sentenced a man who had loved her for six months?--loved her to
distraction in the hidden retreat to which he had taken her,--that he
might, we may add, be at liberty to go his own way. Thus the dying girl
inoculated her sister with love. Together they talked of the great drama
which imagination enhances; and Bettina carried with her to the grave
her sister’s ignorance, leaving her, if not informed, at least thirsting
for information.

Nevertheless, remorse had set its fangs too sharply in Bettina’s heart
not to force her to warn her sister. In the midst of her own confessions
she had preached duty and implicit obedience to Modeste. On the evening
of her death she implored her to remember the tears that soaked her
pillow, and not to imitate a conduct which even suffering could not
expiate. Bettina accused herself of bringing a curse upon the family,
and died in despair at being unable to obtain her father’s pardon.
Notwithstanding the consolations which the ministers of religion,
touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she cried in heartrending
tones with her latest breath: “Oh father! father!” “Never give your
heart without your hand,” she said to Modeste an hour before she died;
“and above all, accept no attentions from any man without telling
everything to papa and mamma.”

These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the hour
of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had exacted a
solemn oath. The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from beneath her
pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid, Francoise Cochet,
to be engraved in Havre with these words, “Think of Bettina, 1827,” and
placed it on her sister’s finger, begging her to keep it there until
she married. Thus there had been between these two young girls a strange
commingling of bitter remorse and the artless visions of a fleeting
spring-time too early blighted by the keen north wind of desertion; yet
all their tears, regrets and memories were always subordinate to their
horror of evil.

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die under
a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the baseness of
her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by grief, had touched
the surface only of Modeste’s life, by which alone the Dumays and the
Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends can take the place
of a mother’s eye. The monotonous life in the dainty little Chalet,
surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay cultivated; the family
customs, as regular as clock-work, the provincial decorum, the games
at whist while the mother knitted and the daughter sewed, the silence,
broken only by the roar of the sea in the equinoctial storms,--all this
monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the
life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how
it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no
blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the
subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste
opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,--the
man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him
and ride away under the fire of Dumay’s pistols.

During the depression caused by her sister’s death Modeste flung herself
into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in it. Born
to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German quite as
well as French; she had also, together with her sister, learned English
from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the matter of reading
by the people about her, who had no literary knowledge, Modeste fed her
soul on the modern masterpieces of three literatures, English, French,
and German. Lord Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine,
Crabbe, Moore, the great works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history,
drama, and fiction, from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne’s
Essays to Diderot, from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short,
the thought of three lands crowded with confused images that girlish
head, august in its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from
which there sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an
overwhelming admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event;
a masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her
happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her
heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the
beautiful illusions of its youth. But of this radiant existence not a
gleam reached the surface of daily life; it escaped the ken of Dumay and
his wife and the Latournelles; the ears of the blind mother alone caught
the crackling of its flame.

The profound disdain which Modeste now conceived for ordinary men gave
to her face a look of pride, an inexpressible untamed shyness, which
tempered her Teutonic simplicity, and accorded well with a peculiarity
of her head. The hair growing in a point above the forehead seemed the
continuation of a slight line which thought had already furrowed between
the eyebrows, and made the expression of untameability perhaps a
shade too strong. The voice of this charming child, whom her father,
delighting in her wit, was wont to call his “little proverb of Solomon,”
 had acquired a precious flexibility of organ through the practice of
three languages. This advantage was still further enhanced by a
natural bell-like tone both sweet and fresh, which touched the heart as
delightfully as it did the ear. If the mother could no longer see the
signs of a noble destiny upon her daughter’s brow, she could study
the transitions of her soul’s development in the accents of that voice
attuned to love.




CHAPTER VI. A MAIDEN’S FIRST ROMANCE


To this period of Modeste’s eager rage for reading succeeded the
exercise of a strange faculty given to vigorous imaginations,--the
power, namely, of making herself an actor in a dream-existence; of
representing to her own mind the things desired, with so vivid a
conception that they seemed actually to attain reality; in short, to
enjoy by thought,--to live out her years within her mind; to marry;
to grow old; to attend her own funeral like Charles V.; to play within
herself the comedy of life and, if need be, that of death. Modeste was
indeed playing, but all alone, the comedy of Love. She fancied herself
adored to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of
social life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the
executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or,
like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles
were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men
amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress,
exhausting in her own behalf the luck of Gil Blas, or the triumphs
of Pasta, Malibran, and Florine. Then, weary of the horrors and
excitements, she returned to actual life. She married a notary, she ate
the plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a Madame
Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials
of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances:
she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric,
artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the
genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned,
possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers
to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); she
owned a magnificent estate and castle, servants, horses, carriages, the
choicest of everything that luxury could bestow, and kept her suitors
uncertain until she was forty years old, at which age she made her
choice.

This edition of the Arabian Nights in a single copy lasted nearly a
year, and taught Modeste the sense of satiety through thought. She held
her life too often in her hand, she said to herself philosophically and
with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too often, “Well, what
is it, after all?” not to have plunged to her waist in the deep disgust
which all men of genius feel when they try to complete by intense toil
the work to which they have devoted themselves. Her youth and her rich
nature alone kept Modeste at this period of her life from seeking to
enter a cloister. But this sense of satiety cast her, saturated as
she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love of Good, the
infinite of heaven. She conceived of charity, service to others, as the
true occupation of life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of
finding in it no food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like
an insect at the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing
garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the
grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card
or drew out his last trump.

Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a singular track
of thought. She imagined that if she became sinless (speaking
ecclesiastically) she would attain to such a condition of sanctity that
God would hear her and accomplish her desires. “Faith,” she thought,
“can move mountains; Christ has said so. The Saviour led his apostle
upon the waters of the lake Tiberias; and I, all I ask of God is a
husband to love me; that is easier than walking upon the sea.” She
fasted through the next Lent, and did not commit a single sin; then she
said to herself that on a certain day coming out of church she should
meet a handsome young man who was worthy of her, whom her mother would
accept, and who would fall madly in love with her. When the day came on
which she had, as it were, summoned God to send her an angel, she was
persistently followed by a rather disgusting beggar; moreover, it rained
heavily, and not a single young man was in the streets. On another
occasion she went to walk on the jetty to see the English travellers
land; but each Englishman had an Englishwoman, nearly as handsome as
Modeste herself, who saw no one at all resembling a wandering Childe
Harold. Tears overcame her, as she sat down like Marius on the ruins of
her imagination. But on the day when she subpoenaed God for the third
time she firmly believed that the Elect of her dreams was within the
church, hiding, perhaps out of delicacy, behind one of the pillars,
round all of which she dragged Madame Latournelle on a tour of
inspection. After this failure, she deposed the Deity from omnipotence.
Many were her conversations with the imaginary lover, for whom she
invented questions and answers, bestowing upon him a great deal of wit
and intelligence.

The high ambitions of her heart hidden within these romances were
the real explanation of the prudent conduct which the good people who
watched over Modeste so much admired; they might have brought her any
number of young Althors or Vilquins, and she would never have stooped to
such clowns. She wanted, purely and simply, a man of genius,--talent she
cared little for; just as a lawyer is of no account to a girl who aims
for an ambassador. Her only desire for wealth was to cast it at the feet
of her idol. Indeed, the golden background of these visions was far less
rich than the treasury of her own heart, filled with womanly delicacy;
for its dominant desire was to make some Tasso, some Milton, a
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher Columbus happy.

Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who
longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in
their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing melodies
which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau. Or she
fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively his
contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry
of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
Modeste attributed Moliere’s melancholy to the women of the seventeenth
century. “Why is there not some one woman,” she asked herself, “loving,
beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be
his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?” She had, as the reader
perceives, fully understood “il pianto,” which the English poet chanted
by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly admired the behavior of
the young Englishwoman who offered herself to Crebillon, the son, who
married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza Draper was her life and her
happiness for several months. She made herself ideally the heroine of a
like romance, and many a time she rehearsed in imagination the
sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that
delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said,
were lacking in those of the wittiest of English writers.

Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the works,
but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the author
of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most suffering
among them were her deities; she guessed their trials, initiated herself
into a destitution where the thoughts of genius brooded, and poured upon
it the treasures of her heart; she fancied herself the giver of material
comfort to these great men, martyrs to their own faculty. This noble
compassion, this intuition of the struggles of toilers, this worship
of genius, are among the choicest perceptions that flutter through the
souls of women. They are, in the first place, a secret between the woman
and God, for they are hidden; in them there is nothing striking, nothing
that gratifies the vanity,--that powerful auxiliary to all action among
the French.

Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came to
Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these
abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the
hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what it
was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy,
these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth into
the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find
its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her
mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the
marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to
herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father’s hearth and
bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and sentiment had lately
come to a climax and taken shape. Modeste wished to be the friend and
companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way superior to the crowd
of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to give him her heart, her
life, her infinite tenderness freed from the trammels of passion, until
she had carefully and deeply studied him.

She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it. Profound
tranquillity settled down upon her soul. Her cheeks took on a soft
color; and she became the beautiful and noble image of Germany, such as
we have lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of Madame
Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double existence. She
performed with humble, loving care all the minute duties of the homely
life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide the poetry of her
ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor methodically on material
things to leave their souls the freer to develop in prayer. All great
minds have bound themselves to some form of mechanical toil to obtain
greater mastery of thought. Spinosa ground glasses for spectacles; Bayle
counted the tiles on the roof; Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus
subdued, the soul could spread its wings in all security.

Madame Mignon, reading her daughter’s soul, was therefore right. Modeste
loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little understood, the
first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of all sentiments, a
very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts from the chalice of
the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired the blue plumage of
the bird that sings afar in the paradise of young girls, which no hand
can touch, no gun can cover, as it flits across the sight; she loved
those magic colors, like sparkling jewels dazzling to the eye, which
youth can see, and never sees again when Reality, the hideous hag,
appears with witnesses accompanied by the mayor. To live the very poetry
of love and not to see the lover--ah, what sweet intoxication! what
visionary rapture! a chimera with flowing man and outspread wings!

The following is the puerile and even silly event which decided the
future life of this young girl.

Modeste happened to see in a bookseller’s window a lithographic portrait
of one of her favorites, Canalis. We all know what lies such pictures
tell,--being as they are the result of a shameless speculation, which
seizes upon the personality of celebrated individuals as if their faces
were public property.

In this instance Canalis, sketched in a Byronic pose, was offering to
public admiration his dark locks floating in the breeze, a bare throat,
and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess. Victor
Hugo’s forehead will make more persons shave their heads than the
number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory of Napoleon.
This portrait of Canalis (poetic through mercantile necessity) caught
Modeste’s eye. The day on which it caught her eye one of Arthez’s best
books happened to be published. We are compelled to admit, though it may
be to Modeste’s injury, that she hesitated long between the illustrious
poet and the illustrious prose-writer. Which of these celebrated men was
free?--that was the question.

Modeste began by securing the co-operation of Francoise Cochet, a maid
taken from Havre and brought back again by poor Bettina, whom Madame
Mignon and Madame Dumay now employed by the day, and who lived in Havre.
Modeste took her to her own room and assured her that she would never
cause her parents any grief, never pass the bounds of a young girl’s
propriety, and that as to Francoise herself she would be well provided
for after the return of Monsieur Mignon, on condition that she would do
a certain service and keep it an inviolable secret. What was it? Why, a
nothing--perfectly innocent. All that Modeste wanted of her accomplice
was to put certain letters into the post at Havre and to bring some
back which would be directed to herself, Francoise Cochet. The treaty
concluded, Modeste wrote a polite note to Dauriat, publisher of the
poems of Canalis, asking, in the interest of that great poet, for some
particulars about him, among others if he were married. She requested
the publisher to address his answer to Mademoiselle Francoise, “poste
restante,” Havre.

Dauriat, incapable of taking the epistle seriously, wrote a reply in
presence of four or five journalists who happened to be in his office
at the time, each of whom added his particular stroke of wit to the
production.

  Mademoiselle,--Canalis (Baron of), Constant Cys Melchior, member
  of the French Academy, born in 1800, at Canalis (Correze), five
  feet four inches in height, of good standing, vaccinated, spotless
  birth, has given a substitute to the conscription, enjoys perfect
  health, owns a small patrimonial estate in the Correze, and wishes
  to marry, but the lady must be rich.

  He beareth per pale, gules an axe or, sable three escallops
  argent, surmounted by a baron’s coronet; supporters, two larches,
  vert. Motto: “Or et fer” (no allusion to Ophir or auriferous).

  The original Canalis, who went to the Holy Land with the First
  Crusade, is cited in the chronicles of Auvergne as being armed
  with an axe on account of the family indigence, which to this day
  weighs heavily on the race. This noble baron, famous for
  discomfiting a vast number of infidels, died, without “or” or
  “fer,” as naked as a worm, near Jerusalem, on the plains of
  Ascalon, ambulances not being then invented.

  The chateau of Canalis (the domain yields a few chestnuts)
  consists of two dismantled towers, united by a piece of wall
  covered by a fine ivy, and is taxed at twenty-two francs.

  The undersigned (publisher) calls attention to the fact that he
  pays ten thousand francs for every volume of poetry written by
  Monsieur de Canalis, who does not give his shells, or his nuts
  either, for nothing.

  The chanticler of the Correze lives in the rue de
  Paradis-Poissoniere, number 29, which is a highly suitable
  location for a poet of the angelic school. Letters must be
  _post-paid_.

  Noble dames of the faubourg Saint-Germain are said to take the
  path to Paradise and protect its god. The king, Charles X., thinks
  so highly of this great poet as to believe him capable of
  governing the country; he has lately made him officer of the
  Legion of honor, and (what pays him better) president of the court
  of Claims at the foreign office. These functions do not hinder
  this great genius from drawing an annuity out of the fund for the
  encouragement of the arts and belles letters.

  The last edition of the works of Canalis, printed on vellum, royal
  8vo, from the press of Didot, with illustrations by Bixiou, Joseph
  Bridau, Schinner, Sommervieux, etc., is in five volumes, price,
  nine francs post-paid.

This letter fell like a cobble-stone on a tulip. A poet, secretary
of claims, getting a stipend in a public office, drawing an
annuity, seeking a decoration, adored by the women of the faubourg
Saint-Germain--was that the muddy minstrel lingering along the quays,
sad, dreamy, worn with toil, and re-entering his garret fraught with
poetry? However, Modeste perceived the irony of the envious bookseller,
who dared to say, “I invented Canalis; I made Nathan!” Besides, she
re-read her hero’s poems,--verses extremely seductive, insincere, and
hypocritical, which require a word of analysis, were it only to explain
her infatuation.

Canalis may be distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the angelic
school, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous
sweetness, and a delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with
his strident cry is an eagle, Canalis, rose and white, is a flamingo.
In him women find the friend they seek, their interpreter, a being who
understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe confidant.
The wide margins given by Didot to the last edition were crowded with
Modeste’s pencilled sentiments, expressing her sympathy with this tender
and dreamy spirit. Canalis does not possess the gift of life; he cannot
breathe existence into his creations; but he knows how to calm vague
sufferings like those which assailed Modeste. He speaks to young girls
in their own language; he can allay the anguish of a bleeding wound
and lull the moans, even the sobs of woe. His gift lies not in stirring
words, nor in the remedy of strong emotions, he contents himself with
saying in harmonious tones which compel belief, “I suffer with you; I
understand you; come with me; let us weep together beside the brook,
beneath the willows.” And they follow him! They listen to his empty and
sonorous poetry like infants to a nurse’s lullaby. Canalis, like Nodier,
enchants the reader by an artlessness which is genuine in the prose
writer and artificial in the poet, by his tact, his smile, the shedding
of his rose-leaves, in short by his infantile philosophy. He imitates
so well the language of our early youth that he leads us back to
the prairie-land of our illusions. We can be pitiless to the eagles,
requiring from them the quality of the diamond, incorruptible
perfection; but as for Canalis, we take him for what he is and let the
rest go. He seems a good fellow; the affectations of the angelic school
have answered his purpose and succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when
she plays the ingenue cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth, innocence
betrayed, in short, the wounded angel.

Modeste, recovering her first impression, renewed her confidence in
that soul, in that countenance as ravishing as the face of Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre. She paid no further attention to the publisher. And so,
about the beginning of the month of August she wrote the following
letter to this Dorat of the sacristy, who still ranks as a star of the
modern Pleiades.

  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Many a time, monsieur, I have wished to
  write to you; and why? Surely you guess why,--to tell you how much
  I admire your genius. Yes, I feel the need of expressing to you
  the admiration of a poor country girl, lonely in her little
  corner, whose only happiness is to read your thoughts. I have read
  Rene, and I come to you. Sadness leads to reverie. How many other
  women are sending you the homage of their secret thoughts? What
  chance have I for notice among so many? This paper, filled with my
  soul,--can it be more to you than the perfumed letters which
  already beset you. I come to you with less grace than others, for
  I wish to remain unknown and yet to receive your entire confidence
  --as though you had long known me.

  Answer my letter and be friendly with me. I cannot promise to make
  myself known to you, though I do not positively say I will not
  some day do so.

  What shall I add? Read between the lines of this letter, monsieur,
  the great effort which I am making: permit me to offer you my
  hand,--that of a friend, ah! a true friend.

  Your servant,       O. d’Este M.


  P.S.--If you do me the favor to answer this letter address your
  reply, if you please, to Mademoiselle F. Cochet, “poste restante,”
   Havre.




CHAPTER VII. A POET OF THE ANGELIC SCHOOL


All young girls, romantic or otherwise, can imagine the impatience in
which Modeste lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues
of fire. The trees were like a plumage. She was not conscious of a body;
she hovered in space, the earth melted away under her feet. Full of
admiration for the post-office, she followed her little sheet of paper
on its way; she was happy, as we all are happy at twenty years of age,
in the first exercise of our will. She was possessed, as in the middle
ages. She made pictures in her mind of the poet’s abode, of his
study; she saw him unsealing her letter; and then followed myriads of
suppositions.

After sketching the poetry we cannot do less than give the profile of
the poet. Canalis is a short, spare man, with an air of good-breeding, a
dark-complexioned, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like that
of a man who has more vanity than pride. He loves luxury, rank, and
splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men. Proud of
his birth, even more than of his talent, he destroys the value of his
ancestors by making too much of them in the present day,--after all,
the Canalis are not Navarreins, nor Cadignans, nor Grandlieus. Nature,
however, helps him out in his pretensions. He has those eyes of Eastern
effulgence which we demand in a poet, a delicate charm of manner, and a
vibrant voice; yet a taint of natural charlatanism destroys the effect
of nearly all these advantages; he is a born comedian. If he puts
forward his well-shaped foot, it is because the attitude has become
a habit; if he uses exclamatory terms they are part of himself; if he
poses with high dramatic action he has made that deportment his second
nature. Such defects as these are not incompatible with a general
benevolence and a certain quality of errant and purely ideal chivalry,
which distinguishes the paladin from the knight. Canalis has not
devotion enough for a Don Quixote, but he has too much elevation of
thought not to put himself on the nobler side of questions and things.
His poetry, which takes the town by storm on all profitable occasions,
really injures the man as a poet; for he is not without mind, but
his talent prevents him from developing it; he is overweighted by his
reputation, and is always aiming to make himself appear greater than he
has the credit of being. Thus, as often happens, the man is entirely out
of keeping with the products of his thought. The author of these naive,
caressing, tender little lyrics, these calm idylls pure and cold as the
surface of a lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious
little creature in a tightly buttoned frock-coat, with the air of
a diplomat seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of
aristocracy, full of pretension, thirsting for money, already spoiled by
success in two directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and
of laurel. A government situation worth eight thousand francs, three
thousand francs’ annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the
Academy, three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes
and the cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with another,
by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for Modeste’s
hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he usually spent
five or six thousand francs more every year; but the king’s privy purse
and the secret funds of the foreign office had hitherto supplied the
deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king’s coronation which earned him a
whole silver service,--having refused a sum of money on the ground that
a Canalis owed his duty to his sovereign.

But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his
lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to
hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue. De Marsay, who did not
like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to
the quick of his vanity. “Canalis,” he said, “always reminds me of that
brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a battle
because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little tune.”
 Canalis’s ambition was to enter political life, and he made capital of a
journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the embassy of the Duc
de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according to Parisian gossip, in
the capacity of “attache to the duchess.” How many times a sarcasm or a
single speech has decided the whole course of a man’s life. Colla,
the late president of the Cisalpine republic, and the best lawyer in
Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was forty years of age that
he knew nothing of botany. He was piqued, became a second Jussieu,
cultivated flowers, and compiled and published “The Flora of Piedmont,”
 in Latin, a labor of ten years. “I’ll master De Marsay some of these
days!” thought the crushed poet; “after all, Canning and Chateaubriand
are both in politics.”

Canalis would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but
he was afraid of the French press, whose criticisms are savage upon any
writer who takes four alexandrines to express one idea. Of all the poets
of our day only three, Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and De Vigny, have been
able to win the double glory of poet and prose-writer, like Racine and
Voltaire, Moliere, and Rabelais,--a rare distinction in the literature
of France, which ought to give a man a right to the crowning title of
poet.

So then, the bard of the faubourg Saint-Germain was doing a wise thing
in trying to house his little chariot under the protecting roof of the
present government. When he became president of the court of Claims at
the foreign office, he stood in need of a secretary,--a friend who could
take his place in various ways; cook up his interests with publishers,
see to his glory in the newspapers, help him if need be in politics,--in
short, a cat’s paw and satellite. In Paris many men of celebrity in art,
science, and literature have one or more train-bearers, captains of
the guard, chamberlains as it were, who live in the sunshine of their
presence,--aides-de-camp entrusted with delicate missions, allowing
themselves to be compromised if necessary; workers round the pedestal
of the idol; not exactly his servants, nor yet his equals; bold in
his defence, first in the breach, covering all retreats, busy with his
business, and devoted to him just so long as their illusions last,
or until the moment when they have got all they wanted. Some of these
satellites perceive the ingratitude of their great man; others feel that
they are simply made tools of; many weary of the life; very few remain
contented with that sweet equality of feeling and sentiment which is
the only reward that should be looked for in an intimacy with a superior
man,--a reward that contented Ali when Mohammed raised him to himself.

Many of these men, misled by vanity, think themselves quite as capable
as their patron. Pure devotion, such as Modeste conceived it, without
money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare.
Nevertheless there are Mennevals to be found, more perhaps in Paris
than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its peaceful
toil; these are the wandering Benedictines of our social world, which
offers them no other monastery. These brave, meek hearts live, by their
actions and in their hidden lives, the poetry that poets utter. They
are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in their lonely vigils and
meditations,--as truly poets as others of the name on paper, who fatten
in the fields of literature at so much a verse; like Lord Byron, like
all who live, alas, by ink, the Hippocrene water of to-day, for want of
a better.

Attracted by the fame of Canalis, also by the prospect of political
interest, and advised thereto by Madame d’Espard, who acted in the
matter for the Duchesse de Chaulieu, a young lawyer of the court
of Claims became secretary and confidential friend of the poet, who
welcomed and petted him very much as a broker caresses his first dabbler
in the funds. The beginning of this companionship bore a very fair
resemblance to friendship. The young man had already held the same
relation to a minister, who went out of office in 1827, taking care
before he did so to appoint his young secretary to a place in the
foreign office. Ernest de La Briere, then about twenty-seven years of
age, was decorated with the Legion of honor but was without other means
than his salary; he was accustomed to the management of business and
had learned a good deal of life during his four years in a minister’s
cabinet. Kindly, amiable, and over-modest, with a heart full of pure and
sound feelings, he was averse to putting himself in the foreground. He
loved his country, and wished to serve her, but notoriety abashed him.
To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was far more desirable
than that of the minister himself. As soon as he became the friend and
secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of labor for him, but by the
end of eighteen months he had learned to understand the barrenness of
a nature that was poetic through literary expression only. The truth of
the old proverb, “The cowl doesn’t make the monk,” is eminently shown in
literature. It is extremely rare to find among literary men a nature
and a talent that are in perfect accord. The faculties are not the man
himself. This disconnection, whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds
from an unexplored, possibly an unexplorable mystery. The brain and its
products of all kinds (for in art the hand of man is a continuation of
his brain) are a world apart, which flourishes beneath the cranium in
absolute independence of sentiments, feelings, and all that is called
virtue, the virtue of citizens, fathers, and private life. This, however
true, is not absolutely so; nothing is absolutely true of man. It is
certain that a debauched man will dissipate his talent, that a drunkard
will waste it in libations; while, on the other hand, no man can give
himself talent by wholesome living: nevertheless, it is all but proved
that Virgil, the painter of love, never loved a Dido, and that
Rousseau, the model citizen, had enough pride to had furnished forth an
aristocracy. On the other hand Raphael and Michael Angelo do present the
glorious conjunction of genius with the lines of character. Talent
in men is therefore, in all moral points, very much what beauty is in
women,--simply a promise. Let us, therefore, doubly admire the man in
whom both heart and character equal the perfection of his genius.

When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst
species of egoist (for there are some amiable forms of the vice), he
felt a delicacy in leaving him. Honest natures cannot easily break the
ties that bind them, especially if they have tied them voluntarily. The
secretary was therefore still living in domestic relations with the
poet when Modeste’s letter arrived,--in such relations, be it said, as
involved a perpetual sacrifice of his feelings. La Briere admitted the
frankness with which Canalis had laid himself bare before him. Moreover,
the defects of the man, who will always be considered a great poet
during his lifetime and flattered as Martmontel was flattered, were only
the wrong side of his brilliant qualities. Without his vanity and his
magniloquence it is possible that he might never have acquired the
sonorous elocution which is so useful and even necessary an instrument
in political life. His cold-bloodedness touched at certain points on
rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation had a lining of generosity.
Results, we must remember, are to the profit of society; motives concern
God.

But after the arrival of Modeste’s letter Ernest deceived himself no
longer as to Canalis. The pair had just finished breakfast and were
talking together in the poet’s study, which was on the ground-floor of a
house standing back in a court-yard, and looked into a garden.

“There!” exclaimed Canalis, “I was telling Madame de Chaulieu the
other day that I ought to bring out another poem; I knew admiration was
running short, for I have had no anonymous letters for a long time.”

“Is it from an unknown woman?”

“Unknown? yes!--a D’Este, in Havre; evidently a feigned name.”

Canalis passed the letter to La Briere. The little poem, with all its
hidden enthusiasms, in short, poor Modeste’s heart, was disdainfully
handed over, with the gesture of a spoiled dandy.

“It is a fine thing,” said the lawyer, “to have the power to attract
such feelings; to force a poor woman to step out of the habits which
nature, education, and the world dictate to her, to break through
conventions. What privileges genius wins! A letter such as this, written
by a young girl--a genuine young girl--without hidden meanings, with
real enthusiasm--”

“Well, what?” said Canalis.

“Why, a man might suffer as much as Tasso and yet feel recompensed,”
 cried La Briere.

“So he might, my dear fellow, by a first letter of that kind, and even a
second; but how about the thirtieth? And suppose you find out that these
young enthusiasts are little jades? Or imagine a poet rushing along the
brilliant path in search of her, and finding at the end of it an old
Englishwoman sitting on a mile-stone and offering you her hand! Or
suppose this post-office angel should really be a rather ugly girl in
quest of a husband? Ah, my boy! the effervescence then goes down.”

“I begin to perceive,” said La Briere, smiling, “that there is something
poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling flowers.”

“And then,” resumed Canalis, “all these women, even when they are
simple-minded, have ideals, and you can’t satisfy them. They never say
to themselves that a poet is a vain man, as I am accused of being; they
can’t conceive what it is for an author to be at the mercy of a feverish
excitement, which makes him disagreeable and capricious; they want him
always grand, noble; it never occurs to them that genius is a disease,
or that Nathan lives with Florine; that D’Arthez is too fat, and Joseph
Bridau is too thin; that Beranger limps, and that their own particular
deity may have the snuffles! A Lucien de Rubempre, poet and cupid, is a
phoenix. And why should I go in search of compliments only to pull the
string of a shower-bath of horrid looks from some disillusioned female?”

“Then the true poet,” said La Briere, “ought to remain hidden, like God,
in the centre of his worlds, and be only seen in his own creations.”

“Glory would cost too dear in that case,” answered Canalis. “There is
some good in life. As for that letter,” he added, taking a cup of tea,
“I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet she
does not hide in the corner boxes, like a duchess in love with an actor;
she feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection enough,
and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem: ‘I am the nymph Calypso,
enamored of Telemachus.’ Mystery and feigned names are the resources of
little minds. For my part I no longer answer masks--”

“I should love a woman who came to seek me,” cried La Briere. “To all
you say I reply, my dear Canalis, that it cannot be an ordinary girl who
aspires to a distinguished man; such a girl has too little trust, too
much vanity; she is too faint-hearted. Only a star, a--”

“--princess!” cried Canalis, bursting into a shout of laughter; “only a
princess can descend to him. My dear fellow, that doesn’t happen once
in a hundred years. Such a love is like that flower that blossoms every
century. Princesses, let me tell you, if they are young, rich, and
beautiful, have something else to think of; they are surrounded
like rare plants by a hedge of fools, well-bred idiots as hollow as
elder-bushes! My dream, alas! the crystal of my dream, garlanded from
hence to the Correze with roses--ah! I cannot speak of it--it is in
fragments at my feet, and has long been so. No, no, all anonymous
letters are begging letters; and what sort of begging? Write yourself to
that young woman, if you suppose her young and pretty, and you’ll find
out. There is nothing like experience. As for me, I can’t reasonably be
expected to love every woman; Apollo, at any rate he of Belvedere, is a
delicate consumptive who must take care of his health.”

“But when a woman writes to you in this way her excuse must certainly
be in her consciousness that she is able to eclipse in tenderness and
beauty every other woman,” said Ernest, “and I should think you might
feel some curiosity--”

“Ah,” said Canalis, “permit me, my juvenile friend, to abide by the
beautiful duchess who is all my joy.”

“You are right, you are right!” cried Ernest. However, the young
secretary read and re-read Modeste’s letter, striving to guess the mind
of its hidden writer.

“There is not the least fine-writing here,” he said, “she does not even
talk of your genius; she speaks to your heart. In your place I should
feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty,--this proposed agreement--”

“Then, sign it!” cried Canalis, laughing; “answer the letter and go to
the end of the adventure yourself. You shall tell me the results three
months hence--if the affair lasts so long.”

Four days later Modeste received the following letter, written on
extremely fine paper, protected by two envelopes, and sealed with the
arms of Canalis.

  Mademoiselle,--The admiration for fine works (allowing that my
  books are such) implies something so lofty and sincere as to
  protect you from all light jesting, and to justify before the
  sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me.

  But first I must thank you for the pleasure which such proofs of
  sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them,--for the maker
  of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic
  worth of their writings,--so readily does self-esteem lend itself
  to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an
  unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of
  criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience,
  even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.

  Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower
  of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in
  the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you
  have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that
  might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet
  of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;
  they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish,
  ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing
  innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with
  many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your
  affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be
  interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought
  that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not
  suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am
  deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding
  you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,
  one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual
  carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous
  imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,
  perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where
  you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which
  drives all poetry from the manuscript?

  But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life
  you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose
  mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can
  equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that
  no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me,
  what will you gain,--you, a young girl, brought up to be the
  virtuous mother of a family,--if you learn to comprehend the
  terrible agitations of a poet’s life in this dreadful capital,
  which may be defined by one sentence,--the hell in which men love.

  If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl
  thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and
  write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of
  degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one
  of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?
  Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within
  you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas,
  alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too
  much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,
  tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

  But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you
  have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious
  ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet
  of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what
  every pure young girl should be,--a good woman, the virtuous
  mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can
  make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound
  a woman’s proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no
  experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before
  she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels,
  to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such
  qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.

  Hear the whole truth,--do I not owe it to you in return for your
  intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great
  renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man
  to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore
  poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He
  becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we
  say: “I thought her far more lovely.” She has not warranted the
  portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter,--the
  fairy whose name is Imagination.

  Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a
  sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the
  burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears
  them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now
  when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will
  suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a
  distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining
  summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world
  of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once
  admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it.

  I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised
  entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can
  take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing
  from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an
  unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea.

  Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all
  women, even those who are disguised and masked.

So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset
above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day! For this she had
postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household slept,
waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an imagination
on fire! For this she had blessed the poet by anticipation, reading a
thousand letters ere she opened one,--fancying all things, except this
drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous forms of her illusion, and
dissolving them as prussic acid dissolves life. What could she do but
hide herself in her bed, blow out her candle, bury her face in the
sheets and weep?

All this happened during the first days of July. But Modeste presently
got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air.
The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness of
the odors of the night. The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like a
mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. “Ah, there is the poet!”
 thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter reflections chased
each other through her mind. She was cut to the quick; she wished to
re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied the sentences so
carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing the wheezing voice
of the outer world.

“He is right, and I am wrong,” she said to herself. “But who could ever
believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but
one of Moliere’s old men?”

When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, “flagrante delicto,” she
conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of
her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable
Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get
the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal
inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this
child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been
misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister’s sorrows, and
more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was
suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She had
been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt.
Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked straight to
her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a letter
dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the
hearts of young girls.




CHAPTER VIII. BLADE TO BLADE

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

  Monsieur,--You are certainly a great poet, and you are something
  more,--an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a
  young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you
  enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following
  question?

  Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine,
  --would your ideas, your language have been the same,--had some
  one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O.
  d’Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a
  master?

  Admit the supposition for a moment. Be with me what you are with
  yourself; fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing
  that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your
  confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an
  answer to your first letter.

  Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do
  homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to
  remain always,

Your humble servant, O. d’Este M.


When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some
little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like a
tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the
compass. Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have settled
the matter in a single phrase, “The girl is a little hussy.” But for
a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it
were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the
three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, Truth,
and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways
energetically.

“Ah, my dear Ernest,” said Truth, “you never would have read that lesson
to a rich heiress. No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste to Havre
to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have been very
unhappy indeed at her preference for genius; and if you could
have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her affections,
Mademoiselle d’Este would have been a divinity.”

“What?” cried Justice, “are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you
penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you
wouldn’t take as your servants? You rail against the materialism of the
century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some
fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry
you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against
that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet replies with a blow at
her heart!”

“Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she
has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of
self-interest and lets you know it,” cried Honor. “She deserves an
answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the honest
expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart and purge
it of its meannesses. What would Moliere’s Alceste say?”

And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked so
slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an hour in
reaching the boulevard des Capucines. Then he followed the quays, which
led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time close to the
Saint-Chapelle. Instead of beginning on the accounts as he should have
done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities.

“One thing is evident,” he said to himself; “she hasn’t six millions;
but that’s not the point--”

Six days later, Modeste received the following letter:

  Mademoiselle,--You are not a D’Este. The name is a feigned one to
  conceal your own. Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a
  person who is untruthful about herself? Question for question: Are
  you of an illustrious family? or a noble family? or a middle-class
  family? Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change; they are
  one: but obligations vary in the different states of life. Just as
  the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which
  we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position.
  The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in a general, and
  vice-versa. Observances are not alike in all cases. They are not
  the same for the gleaner in the field, for the girl who sews at
  fifteen sous a day, for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for
  the young bourgoise, for the child of a rich merchant, for the
  heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Este. A
  king must not stoop to pick up a piece of gold, but a laborer
  ought to retrace his steps to find ten sous; though both are
  equally bound to obey the laws of economy. A daughter of Este, who
  is worth six millions, has the right to wear a broad-brimmed hat
  and plume, to flourish her whip, press the flanks of her barb, and
  ride like an amazon decked in gold lace, with a lackey behind her,
  into the presence of a poet and say: “I love poetry; and I would
  fain expiate Leonora’s cruelty to Tasso!” but a daughter of the
  people would cover herself with ridicule by imitating her. To what
  class do you belong? Answer sincerely, and I will answer the
  question you have put to me.

  As I have not the honor of knowing you personally, and yet am
  bound to you, in a measure, by the ties of poetic communion, I am
  unwilling to offer any commonplace compliments. Perhaps you have
  already won a malicious victory by thus embarrassing a maker of
  books.

The young man was certainly not wanting in the sort of shrewdness which
is permissible to a man of honor. By return courier he received an
answer:--

  To Monsieur de Canalis,--You grow more and more sensible, my dear
  poet. My father is a count. The chief glory of our house was a
  cardinal, in the days when cardinals walked the earth by the side
  of kings. I am the last of our family, which ends in me; but I
  have the necessary quarterings to make my entry into any court or
  chapter-house in Europe. We are quite the equals of the Canalis.
  You will be so kind as to excuse me from sending you our arms.

  Endeavor to answer me as truthfully as I have now answered you. I
  await your response to know if I can then sign myself as I do now,

  Your servant,       O. d’Este M.


“The little mischief! how she abuses her privileges,” cried La Briere;
“but isn’t she frank!”

No young man can be four years private secretary to a cabinet minister,
and live in Paris and observe the carrying on of many intrigues, with
perfect impunity; in fact, the purest soul is more or less intoxicated
by the heady atmosphere of the imperial city. Happy in the thought
that he was not Canalis, our young secretary engaged a place in the
mail-coach for Havre, after writing a letter in which he announced that
the promised answer would be sent a few days later,--excusing the delay
on the ground of the importance of the confession and the pressure of
his duties at the ministry.

He took care to get from the director-general of the post-office a note
to the postmaster at Havre, requesting secrecy and attention to his
wishes. Ernest was thus enabled to see Francoise Cochet when she came
for the letters, and to follow her without exciting observation. Guided
by her, he reached Ingouville and saw Modeste Mignon at the window of
the Chalet.

“Well, Francoise?” he heard the young girl say, to which the maid
responded,--

“Yes, mademoiselle, I have one.”

Struck by the girl’s great beauty, Ernest retraced his steps and asked a
man on the street the name of the owner of that magnificent estate.

“That?” said the man, nodding to the villa.

“Yes, my friend.”

“Oh, that belongs to Monsieur Vilquin, the richest shipping merchant in
Havre, so rich he doesn’t know what he is worth.”

“There is no Cardinal Vilquin that I know of in history,” thought
Ernest, as he walked back to Havre for the night mail to Paris.
Naturally he questioned the postmaster about the Vilquin family, and
learned that it possessed an enormous fortune. Monsieur Vilquin had
a son and two daughters, one of whom was married to Monsieur Althor,
junior. Prudence kept La Briere from seeming anxious about the Vilquins;
the postmaster was already looking at him slyly.

“Is there there any one staying with them at the present moment,” he
asked, “besides the family?”

“The d’Herouville family is there just now. They do talk of a marriage
between the young duke and the remaining Mademoiselle Vilquin.”

“Ha!” thought Ernest; “there was a celebrated Cardinal d’Herouville
under the Valois, and a terrible marshal whom they made a duke in the
time of Henri IV.”

Ernest returned to Paris having seen enough of Modeste to dream of her,
and to think that, whether she were rich or whether she were poor, if
she had a noble soul he would like to make her Madame de La Briere; and
so thinking, he resolved to continue the correspondence.

Ah! you poor women of France, try to remain hidden if you can; try
to weave the least little romance about your lives in the midst of
a civilization which posts in the public streets the hours when the
coaches arrive and depart; which counts all letters and stamps them
twice over, first with the hour when they are thrown into the boxes, and
next with that of their delivery; which numbers the houses, prints the
tax of every tenant on a metal register at the doors (after verifying
its particulars), and will soon possess one vast register of every
inch of its territory down to the smallest parcel of land, and the most
insignificant features of it,--a giant work ordained by a giant. Try,
imprudent young ladies, to escape not only the eye of the police, but
the incessant chatter which takes place in a country town about the
veriest trifles,--how many dishes the prefect has at his dessert,
how many slices of melon are left at the door of some small
householder,--which strains its ear to catch the chink of the gold a
thrifty man lays by, and spends its evenings in calculating the incomes
of the village and the town and the department. It was mere chance
that enabled Modeste to escape discovery through Ernest’s reconnoitring
expedition,--a step which he already regretted; but what Parisian can
allow himself to be the dupe of a little country girl? Incapable of
being duped! that horrid maxim is the dissolvent of all noble sentiments
in man.

We can readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest young
fellow fell a prey when we read the letter that he now indited, in which
every stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will be found to
have left its trace.

This is what Modeste read a few days later, as she sat by her window on
a fine summer’s day:--

  Mademoiselle,--Without hypocrisy or evasion, _yes_, if I had been
  certain that you possessed an immense fortune I should have acted
  differently. Why? I have searched for the reason; here it is. We
  have within us an inborn feeling, inordinately developed by social
  life, which drives us to the pursuit and to the possession of
  happiness. Most men confound happiness with the means that lead to
  it; money in their eyes is the chief element of happiness. I
  should, therefore, have endeavored to win you, prompted by that
  social sentiment which has in all ages made wealth a religion. At
  least, I think I should. It is not to be expected of a man still
  young that he can have the wisdom to substitute sound sense for
  the pleasure of the senses; within sight of a prey the brutal
  instincts hidden in the heart of man drive him on. Instead of that
  lesson, I should have sent you compliments and flatteries. Should
  I have kept my own esteem in so doing? I doubt it. Mademoiselle,
  in such a case success brings absolution; but happiness? That is
  another thing. Should I have distrusted my wife had I won her in
  that way? Most assuredly I should. Your advance on me would sooner
  or later have come between us. Your husband, however grand your
  fancy may make him, would have ended by reproaching you for having
  abased him. You, yourself, might have come, sooner or later, to
  despise him. The strong man forgives, but the poet whines. Such,
  mademoiselle, is the answer which my honesty compels me to make to
  you.

  And now, listen to me. You have the triumph of forcing me to
  reflect deeply,--first on you, whom I do not sufficiently know;
  next, on myself, of whom I knew too little. You have had the power
  to stir up many of the evil thoughts which crouched in my heart,
  as in all hearts; but from them something good and generous has
  come forth, and I salute you with my most fervent benedictions,
  just as at sea we salute the lighthouse which shows the rocks on
  which we were about to perish. Here is my confession, for I would
  not lose your esteem nor my own for all the treasures of earth.

  I wished to know who you are. I have just returned from Havre,
  where I saw Francoise Cochet, and followed her to Ingouville. You
  are as beautiful as the woman of a poet’s dream; but I do not know
  if you are Mademoiselle Vilquin concealed under Mademoiselle
  d’Herouville, or Mademoiselle d’Herouville hidden under
  Mademoiselle Vilquin. Though all is fair in war, I blushed at such
  spying and stopped short in my inquiries. You have roused my
  curiosity; forgive me for being somewhat of a woman; it is, I
  believe, the privilege of a poet.

  Now that I have laid bare my heart and allowed you to read it, you
  will believe in the sincerity of what I am about to add. Though
  the glimpse I had of you was all too rapid, it has sufficed to
  modify my opinion of your conduct. You are a poet and a poem, even
  more than you are a woman. Yes, there is in you something more
  precious than beauty; you are the beautiful Ideal of art, of
  fancy. The step you took, blamable as it would be in an ordinary
  young girl, allotted to an every-day destiny, has another aspect
  if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you. Among the
  crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet
  to make up a generation there are exceptional souls. If your
  letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which
  conventions bring to women, if, constrained by the impulse of a
  lofty and intelligent mind, you have wished to understand the life
  of a man to whom you attribute the gift of genius, to the end that
  you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations
  of life, with a soul in communion with your own, disregarding thus
  the ordinary trammels of your sex,--then, assuredly, you are an
  exception. The law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd
  is too limited for you. But in that case, the remark in my first
  letter returns in greater force,--you have done too much or not
  enough.

  Accept once more my thanks for the service you have rendered me,
  that of compelling me to sound my heart. You have corrected in me
  the false idea, only too common in France, that marriage should be
  a means of fortune. While I struggled with my conscience a sacred
  voice spoke to me. I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself, and
  not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my
  life. I have also reproached myself for the blamable curiosity you
  have excited in me. You have not six millions. There is no
  concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such
  a fortune; you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds
  of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses,
  and who have already sent one, the grand equerry, the young duke,
  among the Vilquins. Therefore, believe me, the sentiments I have
  now expressed are fixed in my mind as a rule of life, from which I
  have abstracted all influences of romance or of actual fact. Prove
  to me, therefore, that you have one of those souls which may be
  forgiven for its disobedience to the common law, by perceiving and
  comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my
  first letter. If you are destined to a middle-class life, obey the
  iron law which holds society together. Lifted in mind above other
  women, I admire you; but if you seek to obey an impulse which you
  ought to repress, I pity you. The all-wise moral of that great
  domestic epic “Clarissa Harlowe” is that legitimate and honorable
  love led the poor victim to her ruin because it was conceived,
  developed, and pursued beyond the boundaries of family restraint.
  The family, however cruel and even foolish it may be, is in the
  right against the Lovelaces. The family is Society. Believe me,
  the glory of a young girl, of a woman, must always be that of
  repressing her most ardent impulses within the narrow sphere of
  conventions. If I had a daughter able to become a Madame de Stael
  I should wish her dead at fifteen. Can you imagine a daughter of
  yours flaunting on the stage of fame, exhibiting herself to win
  the plaudits of a crowd, and not suffer anguish at the thought? No
  matter to what heights a woman can rise by the inward poetry of
  her soul, she must sacrifice the outer signs of superiority on the
  altar of her home. Her impulse, her genius, her aspirations toward
  Good, the whole poem of a young girl’s being, should belong to the
  man she accepts and the children whom she brings into the world. I
  think I perceive in you a secret desire to widen the narrow circle
  of the life to which all women are condemned, and to put love and
  passion into marriage. Ah! it is a lovely dream! it is not
  impossible; it is difficult, but if realized, may it not be to the
  despair of souls--forgive me the hackneyed word--“incompris”?

  If you seek a platonic friendship it will be to your sorrow in
  after years. If your letter was a jest, discontinue it. Perhaps
  this little romance is to end here--is it? It has not been without
  fruit. My sense of duty is aroused, and you, on your side, will
  have learned something of Society. Turn your thoughts to real
  life; throw the enthusiasms you have culled from literature into
  the virtues of your sex.

  Adieu, mademoiselle. Do me the honor to grant me your esteem.
  Having seen you, or one whom I believe to be you, I have known
  that your letter was simply natural; a flower so lovely turns to
  the sun--of poetry. Yes, love poetry as you love flowers, music,
  the grandeur of the sea, the beauties of nature; love them as an
  adornment of the soul, but remember what I have had the honor of
  telling you as to the nature of poets. Be cautious not to marry,
  as you say, a dunce, but seek the partner whom God has made for
  you. There are souls, believe me, who are fit to appreciate you,
  and to make you happy. If I were rich, if you were poor, I would
  lay my heart and my fortunes at your feet; for I believe your soul
  to be full of riches and of loyalty; to you I could confide my
  life and my honor in absolute security.

  Once more, adieu, adieu, fairest daughter of Eve the fair.

The reading of this letter, swallowed like a drop of water in the
desert, lifted the mountain which weighed heavily on Modeste’s heart:
then she saw the mistake she had made in arranging her plan, and
repaired it by giving Francoise some envelopes directed to herself, in
which the maid could put the letters which came from Paris and drop them
again into the box. Modeste resolved to receive the postman herself on
the steps of the Chalet at the hour when he made his delivery.

As to the feelings that this reply, in which the noble heart of poor
La Briere beat beneath the brilliant phantom of Canalis, excited in
Modeste, they were as multifarious and confused as the waves which
rushed to die along the shore while with her eyes fixed on the wide
ocean she gave herself up to the joy of having (if we dare say so)
harpooned an angelic soul in the Parisian Gulf, of having divined that
hearts of price might still be found in harmony with genius, and, above
all, for having followed the magic voice of intuition.

A vast interest was now about to animate her life. The wires of her cage
were broken: the bolts and bars of the pretty Chalet--where were they?
Her thoughts took wings.

“Oh, father!” she cried, looking out to the horizon. “Come back and make
us rich and happy.”

The answer which Ernest de La Briere received some five days later will
tell the reader more than any elaborate disquisition of ours.




CHAPTER IX. THE POWER OF THE UNSEEN

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

  My friend,--Suffer me to give you that name,--you have delighted
  me; I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the
  first--oh, may it not be the last! Who but a poet could have
  excused and understood a young girl so delicately?

  I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines
  of your letter. And first, let me say that most fortunately you do
  not know me. I can joyfully assure you than I am neither that
  hideous Mademoiselle Vilquin nor the very noble and withered
  Mademoiselle d’Herouville who floats between twenty and forty
  years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The
  Cardinal d’Herouville flourished in the history of the Church at
  least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only
  family glory,--for I take no account of lieutenant-generals, and
  abbes who write trumpery little verses.

  Moreover, I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is
  not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that
  chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from
  Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a
  Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am
  noble on my father’s and on my mother’s side. On my mother’s I
  derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short, my
  precautions are well taken. It is not in any man’s power, nor even
  in the power of the law, to unmask my incognito. I shall remain
  veiled, unknown.

  As to my person and as to my “belongings,” as the Normans say,
  make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl
  (ignorantly happy) on whom your eyes chanced to light during your
  visit to Havre; and I do not call myself poverty-stricken,
  although ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks. I
  have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her
  millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even on
  a wager, to reach me. Alas! though free as air, I am watched and
  guarded,--by myself, in the first place, and secondly, by people
  of nerve and courage who would not hesitate to put a knife in your
  heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat. I do not say this to
  excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity; I believe I have
  no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me.

  I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged, of
  your first sermon.

  Will you have a confession? I said to myself when I saw you so
  distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations
  bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had
  already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged
  you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh!
  you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but
  I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are,
  and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered
  with the “Flowers of my Heart” in one or more volumes. And,
  finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word “Come!”
   you will not find--you know it now--an old maid, no, nor a poor
  and ugly one.

  Ah! my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to
  Havre! You have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God
  alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough,
  and trusting enough, and perspicacious enough to come--having
  faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the
  depths of my heart--to come to our first meeting with the
  simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the
  innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my
  treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,
  there is always a man within a poet.

  Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who
  cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and
  wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d’Este received
  your pedantic lesson she said to herself: “No, dear poet, my first
  letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the
  highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a
  net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock
  above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught.”

  All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval.
  The man who is able to please me, and of whom I believe myself
  worthy, will have my heart and my life,--with the consent of my
  parents, for I will neither grieve them, nor take them unawares:
  happily, I am certain of reigning over them; and, besides, they
  are wholly without prejudice. Indeed, in every way, I feel myself
  protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the
  fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the
  boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a
  treasure,--not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if
  need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with
  armor of proof on which is engraved the word “Disdain.” I have the
  deepest horror of all that is calculating,--of all that is not
  pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,
  the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart
  of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various
  things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about
  Society and social life.

  For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why
  seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,
  but your mind, your heart I _know_; they please me, and I feel an
  infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius
  for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be
  wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a
  precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You
  will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl’s
  thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering
  to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good
  fortune of the soul,--the honest confidences of an honest girl.
  Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in
  her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters
  warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await
  you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the
  castle, the palace--I don’t know yet what sort of bower it will
  be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be
  possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and
  that Mademoiselle d’Este has a complying disposition. Has she not
  left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the
  salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high
  emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
  No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me
  when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
  have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear
  friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have
  known through the experience of another all the horrors and the
  delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can
  contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have
  no illusions; but I have something better, something real,--I have
  beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.

  Whoever I marry--provided I choose him for myself--may sleep in
  peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his
  return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
  and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he
  has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
  follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
  divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
  should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
  life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
  woman be who thwarts the man she loves?--an illness, a disease,
  not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
  a pleasure.

  But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
  Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
  expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
  life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
  possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
  women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
  no longer a chimera.

  Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
  reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
  fortress. I have read your last verses in the “Revue,”--ah! with
  what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
  your secret soul.

  Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
  that you are her solitary thought,--without a rival except in her
  father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
  these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
  yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
  that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will
  suffice for the happiness of your

O. d’Este M.


“Good heavens! can I be in love already?” cried the young secretary,
when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more
than an hour after reading it. “What shall I do? She thinks she is
writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman
of forty, or a girl of twenty?”

Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen
is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that
sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies
like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this
kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the
more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom
his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at
the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his
regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself
to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her
last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle,
in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.

  Mademoiselle,--Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in
  the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him
  if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless
  regrets,--showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it
  only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
  I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you
  have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
  can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
  such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
  so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
  first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
  my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
  the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
  little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
  remonstrances.

  Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
  true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
  insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the
  expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
  general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful
  as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
  could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
  intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
  heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
  to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
  at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
  harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
  in passing, is very rare.

  The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
  which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
  flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
  every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
  literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
  But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
  your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
  genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
  not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social
  woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like
  circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt
  only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,--sickly,
  irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold
  more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of
  character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In
  exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The
  dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The
  compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your
  projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,
  like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the
  rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her
  religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
  Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship
  with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was
  the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was
  younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us
  admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a
  man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously
  worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched
  by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,
  when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away
  from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,--let us admit, I
  say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the
  glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of
  our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the
  picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of
  poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed
  verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
  disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am
  still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
  The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me
  sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very
  ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other
  empty-headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not
  roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days,
  of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do
  I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil
  uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are
  worth far more than I,--D’Arthez, for instance.

  Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to
  these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the
  happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been
  to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine
  for  a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode
  of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might
  conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which
  light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their
  duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end
  our tale in the common vulgar way,--marriage, a household,
  children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!--could it be?
  Therefore, adieu.




CHAPTER X. THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

  My Friend,--Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But
  perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to
  each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and
  asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the
  answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of
  Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not
  remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most
  lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that
  of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,--happy to old age. Ah!
  friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist
  as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating
  with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in
  himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to
  find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go
  into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in
  Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has
  deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has
  inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is
  something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian
  coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called
  men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with
  the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to
  cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle
  fragrance can never fail,--it is eternal.

  Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or
  commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude,
  I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of
  Lord Byron’s many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
  You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you
  shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of
  which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the
  roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak,
  and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and
  see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty,
  intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the
  vulgarities of life! it is yours--yours, before any eye has
  blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my
  thoughts,--all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my
  heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If
  you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can
  live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your
  sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your
  friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
  have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my
  future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks
  not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a
  poet,--a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of
  his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden--so
  devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you--is Friendship,
  pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who
  listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of
  the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked
  with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not
  find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile
  alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be
  any the worse if Mademoiselle d’Este does not give it two or three
  sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As
  for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a
  mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in
  the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my
  thoughts and all my earthly efforts.

  I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
  am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never
  belong to any ninny just because he is the son of a peer of
  France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day,
  nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the
  household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty
  times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My
  father adores my wishes; he will never oppose them. If I please my
  poet, and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall
  be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune.
  I am an eaglet; and you will see it in my eyes.

  I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I will put its
  substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to
  you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by
  love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. Ah!
  my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to
  us through the first exercise of my will: listen to its
  argument:--

  A young girl with a lively imagination, locked up in a tower, is
  weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only
  are allowed to rove. She invents a way to loosen her bars; she
  jumps from the casement; she scales the park wall; she frolics
  along the neighbor’s sward--it is the Everlasting comedy. Well,
  that young girl is my soul, the neighbor’s park is your genius. Is
  it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not
  complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to
  my poet to answer.

  But does the lofty reasoner after the fashion of Moliere want
  still better reasons? Well, here they are. My dear Geronte,
  marriages are usually made in defiance of common-sense. Parents
  make inquiries about a young man. If the Leander--who is supplied
  by some friend, or caught in a ball-room--is not a thief, and has
  no visible rent in his reputation, if he has the necessary
  fortune, if he comes from a college or a law-school and so fulfils
  the popular ideas of education, and if he wears his clothes with a
  gentlemanly air, he is allowed to meet the young lady, whose
  mother has ordered her to guard her tongue, to let no sign of her
  heart or soul appear on her face, which must wear the smile of a
  danseuse finishing a pirouette. These commands are coupled with
  instructions as to the danger of revealing her real character, and
  the additional advice of not seeming alarmingly well educated. If
  the settlements have all been agreed upon, the parents are
  good-natured enough to let the pair see each other for a few
  moments; they are allowed to talk or walk together, but always
  without the slightest freedom, and knowing that they are bound by
  rigid rules. The man is as much dressed up in soul as he is in body,
  and so is the young girl. This pitiable comedy, mixed with bouquets,
  jewels, and theatre-parties is called “paying your addresses.” It
  revolts me: I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a
  previous and long marriage of souls. A young girl, a woman, has
  throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second
  sight, and experience are necessary to her. She plays her liberty,
  her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice; she risks
  her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator. I have the right,
  the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as
  did my mother, who, won by beauty and led by instinct, married the
  most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men. I know
  that you are free, a poet, and noble-looking. Be sure that I
  should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo who was
  already married. If my mother was won by beauty, which is perhaps
  the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit
  and the form united? Shall I not know you better by studying you
  in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience
  of “receiving your addresses”? This is the question, as Hamlet
  says.

  But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not
  binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and
  every illusion its to-morrow. That is why there are so many
  partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of
  love lies in two things,--suffering and happiness. When, after
  passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown
  each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when
  they have really observed each other’s character, then they may go
  to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that
  our little drama thus begun was to have no future? In any case
  shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence?

  I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart,

  Your handmaiden,

  O. d’Este M.


  To Mademoiselle O. d’Este M.,--You are a witch, a spirit, and I
  love you! Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls?
  Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with
  the follies which are you able to make a poet commit. If so, you
  have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit
  of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a
  Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future
  depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of
  an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will
  touch you,--if you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety
  enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can
  personally please you. If your reply is favorable I change my
  life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the
  folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown,
  is what you dream it to be,--a fusion of feelings, a perfect
  accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God
  does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round
  of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of
  heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say
  that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good,
  the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the
  entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble
  intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to
  fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar?--for
  to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly
  on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.

  I cannot speak to you any more of myself; not of my past life, nor
  of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side,
  filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed--an
  effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word
  “sacrifice.” You have already rendered me forgetful, if not
  ungrateful; does that satisfy you? Oh, speak! Say to me one word,
  and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de
  Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully.
  Our life will be, for me at least, that “felicity untroubled”
   which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,--a poem far
  superior to his Inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in
  the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of
  a dreamed existence; it is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the
  power to love, and to love endlessly,--to march to the grave with
  gentle slowness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and
  with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls. Yes, I dare to
  face our mutual old age, to see ourselves with whitening heads,
  like the venerable historian of Italy, inspired always with the
  same affection but transformed in soul by our life’s seasons. Hear
  me, I can no longer be your friend only. Though Chrysale, Geronte,
  and Argante re-live, you say, in me, I am not yet old enough to
  drink from the cup held to my lips by the sweet hands of a veiled
  woman without a passionate desire to tear off the domino and the
  mask and see the face. Either write me no more, or give me hope.
  Let me see you, or let me go. Must I bid you adieu? Will you
  permit me to sign myself,

  Your Friend?


  To Monsieur de Canalis,--What flattery! with what rapidity is the
  grave Anselme transformed into a handsome Leander! To what must I
  attribute such a change? to this black which I put upon this
  white? to these ideas which are to the flowers of my soul what a
  rose drawn in charcoal is to the roses in the garden? Or is it to
  a recollection of the young girl whom you took for me, and who is
  personally as like me as a waiting-woman is like her mistress?
  Have we changed roles? Have I the sense? have you the fancy? But a
  truce with jesting.

  Your letter has made me know the elating pleasures of the soul;
  the first that I have known outside of my family affections. What,
  says a poet, are the ties of blood which are so strong in ordinary
  minds, compared to those divinely forged within us by mysterious
  sympathies? Let me thank you--no, we must not thank each other for
  such things--but God bless you for the happiness you have given
  me; be happy in the joy you have shed into my soul. You explain to
  me some of the apparent injustices in social life. There is
  something, I know not what, so dazzling, so virile in glory, that
  it belongs only to man; God forbids us women to wear its halo, but
  he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes
  the brow scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and
  you have now confirmed it.

  Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of
  inexpressible sweetness; a sort of peace, tender and divine, gives
  me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction.
  I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to
  my Southern sunsets, full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fetes
  and ardent poems. Well, after reading your letter, so full of
  feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my
  celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature,
  and fancy that I am destined to die for one I love. One of your
  poems, “The Maiden’s Song,” paints these delicious moments, when
  gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need; it is one of my
  favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one?--well
  then, I think you worthy to be _me_!

  Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I
  have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity,
  your projects; but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy
  your wishes. Hear me, dear; the mystery in which I am shrouded
  allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my
  heart. Hear me: if we once meet, adieu to our mutual
  comprehension! Will you make a compact with me? Was the first
  disadvantageous to you? But remember it won you my esteem, and it
  is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lined throughout
  with esteem. Here is the compact: write me your life in a few
  words; then tell me what you do in Paris, day by day, with no
  reservations, and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well,
  having done that, I will take a step myself--I will see you, I
  promise you that. And it is a great deal.

  This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure; no gallantry, as you men
  say, can come of it, I warn you frankly. It involves my life, and
  more than that,--something that causes me remorse for the many
  thoughts that fly to you in flocks--it involves my father’s and my
  mother’s life. I adore them, and my choice must please them; they
  must find a son in you.

  Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to
  whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding
  their amiability,--how far can they bend under a family yoke, and
  put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated
  upon. Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!
  Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way;
  and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor
  the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my
  long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you
  have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which
  they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in
  their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions
  of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself,
  “Onward!” because I have studied, more than you give me credit
  for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you
  tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were
  the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared
  a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you
  perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to
  escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for
  the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither
  Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any
  inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And
  this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their
  blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The
  visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their
  results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who
  has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to
  his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates
  all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not
  perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is
  so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to
  bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what
  sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the
  life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering
  his personal life, Moliere’s comedy is horrible.

  The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you
  in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found
  self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my
  best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I
  should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was
  sixteen. What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that
  fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in
  my heart was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do
  you know what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the
  recesses of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said,
  “Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,--marry
  me to whom you please.” And the man might have been a notary,
  banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as
  the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without
  two ideas,--he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in
  me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded
  in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have
  revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of
  the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting
  lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
  See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia,
  breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a
  curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have
  taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight
  of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a
  bureau-drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor
  girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,--but ah! I have _you_, I
  believe in _you_, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts
  and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes--see how far
  my frankness leads me--I wish I were in the middle of the book we
  are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments,
  such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by
  reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,--if
  indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.

  If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
  fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the
  dreadful word “folly!” might escape you, and I should be cruelly
  punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring
  of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years
  that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by
  charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
  the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
  into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
  with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
  outside griefs by a wife’s gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
  take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for
  a few weeks.

  Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
  mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
  little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
  hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
  departed for the Crusades, “God wills it.”

  Ah! but you will cry out, “What a chatterbox!” All the people
  round me say, on the contrary, “Mademoiselle is very taciturn.”

O. d’Este M.




CHAPTER XI. WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE

The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom the
author of the “Comedy of Human Life” obtained them; but their interest
in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may not be
shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the battle.
The respect due to the majority in every nation under a constitutional
government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven other letters
exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of September. If,
later on, some flattering majority should arise to claim them, let us
hope that we can then find means to insert them in their proper place.

Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable, the
truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves free
play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more beautiful
than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by a sense of
the communion of two free souls. Ernest’s whole life was now wrapped up
in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what banknotes are to a
miser; while in Modeste’s soul a deep love took the place of her delight
in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite of distance, its
mainspring. Ernest’s heart was the complement of Canalis’s glory. Alas!
it often takes two men to make a perfect lover, just as in literature
we compose a type by collecting the peculiarities of several similar
characters. How many a time a woman has been heard to say in her own
salon after close and intimate conversations:--

“Such a one is my ideal as to soul, and I love the other who is only a
dream of the senses.”

The last letter written by Modeste, which here follows, gives us
a glimpse of the enchanted isle to which the meanderings of this
correspondence had led the two lovers.

  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Be at Havre next Sunday; go to church;
  after the morning service, walk once or twice round the nave, and
  go out without speaking to any one; but wear a white rose in your
  button-hole. Then return to Paris, where you shall receive an
  answer. I warn you that this answer will not be what you wish;
  for, as I told you, the future is not yet mine. But should I not
  indeed be mad and foolish to say yes without having seen you? When
  I have seen you I can say no without wounding you; I can make sure
  that you shall not see me.

This letter had been sent off the evening before the day when the
abortive struggle between Dumay and Modeste had taken place. The happy
girl was impatiently awaiting Sunday, when her eyes were to vindicate or
condemn her heart and her actions,--a solemn moment in the life of any
woman, and which three months of close communion of souls now rendered
as romantic as the most imaginative maiden could have wished. Every one,
except the mother, had taken this torpor of expectation for the calm of
innocence. No matter how firmly family laws and religious precepts may
bind, there will always be the Clarissas and the Julies, whose souls
like flowing cups o’erlap the brim under some spiritual pressure.
Modeste was glorious in the savage energy with which she repressed her
exuberant youthful happiness and remained demurely quiet. Let us say
frankly that the memory of her sister was more potent upon her than any
social conventions; her will was iron in the resolve to bring no grief
upon her father and her mother. But what tumultuous heavings were within
her breast! no wonder that a mother guessed them.

On the following day Modeste and Madame Dumay took Madame Mignon about
mid-day to a seat in the sun among the flowers. The blind woman turned
her wan and blighted face toward the ocean; she inhaled the odors of
the sea and took the hand of her daughter who remained beside her. The
mother hesitated between forgiveness and remonstrance ere she put the
important question; for she comprehended the girl’s love and recognized,
as the pretended Canalis had done, that Modeste was exceptional in
nature.

“God grant that your father return in time! If he delays much longer he
will find none but you to love him. Modeste, promise me once more never
to leave him,” she said in a fond maternal tone.

Modeste lifted her mother’s hands to her lips and kissed them gently,
replying: “Need I say it again?”

“Ah, my child! I did this thing myself. I left my father to follow my
husband; and yet my father was all alone; I was all the child he had. Is
that why God has so punished me? What I ask of you is to marry as your
father wishes, to cherish him in your heart, not to sacrifice him to
your own happiness, but to make him the centre of your home. Before
losing my sight, I wrote him all my wishes, and I know he will execute
them. I enjoined him to keep his property intact and in his own hands;
not that I distrust you, my Modeste, for a moment, but who can be sure
of a son-in-law? Ah! my daughter, look at me; was I reasonable? One
glance of the eye decided my life. Beauty, so often deceitful, in my
case spoke true; but even were it the same with you, my poor child,
swear to me that you will let your father inquire into the character,
the habits, the heart, and the previous life of the man you distinguish
with your love--if, by chance, there is such a man.”

“I will never marry without the consent of my father,” answered Modeste.

“You see, my darling,” said Madame Mignon after a long pause, “that if I
am dying by inches through Bettina’s wrong-doing, your father would not
survive yours, no, not for a moment. I know him; he would put a pistol
to his head,--there could be no life, no happiness on earth for him.”

Modeste walked a few steps away from her mother, but immediately came
back.

“Why did you leave me?” demanded Madame Mignon.

“You made me cry, mamma,” answered Modeste.

“Ah, my little darling, kiss me. You love no one here? you have no
lover, have you?” she asked, holding Modeste on her lap, heart to heart.

“No, my dear mamma,” said the little Jesuit.

“Can you swear it?”

“Oh, yes!” cried Modeste.

Madame Mignon said no more; but she still doubted.

“At least, if you do choose your husband, you will tell your father?”
 she resumed.

“I promised that to my sister, and to you, mother. What evil do you
think I could commit while I wear that ring upon my finger and read
those words: ‘Think of Bettina?’ Poor sister!”

At these words a truce of silence came between the pair; the mother’s
blighted eyes rained tears which Modeste could not check, though she
threw herself upon her knees, and cried: “Forgive me! oh, forgive me,
mother!”

At this instant the excellent Dumay was coming up the hill of Ingouville
on the double-quick,--a fact quite abnormal in the present life of the
cashier.

Three letters had brought ruin to the Mignons; a single letter now
restored their fortunes. Dumay had received from a sea-captain just
arrived from the China Seas the following letter containing the first
news of his patron and friend, Charles Mignon:--

  To Monsieur Jean Dumay:

  My Dear Dumay,--I shall quickly follow, barring the chances of the
  voyage, the vessel which carries this letter. In fact, I should
  have taken it, but I did not wish to leave

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