"A girl worth six millions," he thought to himself, "and my eyes were not able to see that gold shining in the darkness! With such a fortune I could be peer of France, count, marquis, ambassador. I've replied to middle-class women and silly women, and crafty creatures who wanted autographs; I've tired myself to death with masked-ball intrigues,—at the very moment when God was sending me a soul of price, an angel with golden wings! Bah! I'll make a poem on it, and perhaps the chance will come again. Heavens! the luck of that little La Briere,—strutting about in my lustre—plagiarism! I'm the cast and he's to be the statue, is he? It is the old fable of Bertrand and Raton. Six millions, a beauty, a Mignon de La Bastie, an aristocratic divinity loving poetry and the poet! And I, who showed my muscle as man of the world, who did those Alcide exercises to silence by moral force the champion of physical force, that old soldier with a heart, that friend of this very young girl, whom he'll now go and tell that I have a heart of iron!—I, to play Napoleon when I ought to have been seraphic! Good heavens! True, I shall have my friend. Friendship is a beautiful thing. I have kept him, but at what a price! Six millions, that's the cost of it; we can't have many friends if we pay all that for them."

La Briere entered the room as Canalis reached this point in his meditations. He was gloom personified.

"Well, what's the matter?" said Canalis.

"The father exacts that his daughter shall choose between the two Canalis—"

"Poor boy!" cried the poet, laughing, "he's a clever fellow, that father."

"I have pledged my honor that I will take you to Havre," said La Briere, piteously.

"My dear fellow," said Canalis, "if it is a question of your honor you may count on me. I'll ask for leave of absence for a month."

"Modeste is so beautiful!" exclaimed La Briere, in a despairing tone. "You will crush me out of sight. I wondered all along that fate should be so kind to me; I knew it was all a mistake."

"Bah! we will see about that," said Canalis with inhuman gaiety.

That evening, after dinner, Charles Mignon and Dumay, were flying, by virtue of three francs to each postilion, from Paris to Havre. The father had eased the watch-dog's mind as to Modeste and her love affairs; the guard was relieved, and Butscha's innocence established.

"It is all for the best, my old Dumay," said the count, who had been making certain inquiries of Mongenod respecting Canalis and La Briere. "We are going to have two actors for one part!" he cried gaily.

Nevertheless, he requested his old comrade to be absolutely silent about the comedy which was now to be played at the Chalet,—a comedy it might be, but also a gentle punishment, or, if you prefer it, a lesson given by the father to the daughter.

The two friends kept up a long conversation all the way from Paris to Havre, which put the colonel in possession of the facts relating to his family during the past four years, and informing Dumay that Desplein, the great surgeon, was coming to Havre at the end of the present month to examine the cataract on Madame Mignon's eyes, and decide if it were possible to restore her sight.

A few moments before the breakfast-hour at the Chalet, the clacking of a postilion's whip apprised the family that the two soldiers were arriving; only a father's joy at returning after long absence could be heralded with such clatter, and it brought all the women to the garden gate. There is many a father and many a child—perhaps more fathers than children—who will understand the delights of such an arrival, and that happy fact shows that literature has no need to depict it. Perhaps all gentle and tender emotions are beyond the range of literature.

Not a word that could trouble the peace of the family was uttered on this joyful day. Truce was tacitly established between father, mother, and child as to the so-called mysterious love which had paled Modeste's cheeks,—for this was the first day she had left her bed since Dumay's departure for Paris. The colonel, with the charming delicacy of a true soldier, never left his wife's side nor released her hand; but he watched Modeste with delight, and was never weary of noting her refined, elegant, and poetic beauty. Is it not by such seeming trifles that we recognize a man of feeling? Modeste, who feared to interrupt the subdued joy of the husband and wife kept at a little distance, coming from time to time to kiss her father's forehead, and when she kissed it overmuch she seemed to mean that she was kissing it for two,—for Bettina and herself.

"Oh, my darling, I understand you," said the colonel, pressing her hand as she assailed him with kisses.

"Hush!" whispered the young girl, glancing at her mother.

Dumay's rather sly and pregnant silence made Modeste somewhat uneasy as to the upshot of his journey to Paris. She looked at him furtively every now and then, without being able to get beneath his epidermis. The colonel, like a prudent father, wanted to study the character of his only daughter, and above all consult his wife, before entering on a conference upon which the happiness of the whole family depended.

"To-morrow, my precious child," he said as they parted for the night, "get up early, and we will go and take a walk on the seashore. We have to talk about your poems, Mademoiselle de La Bastie."

His last words, accompanied by a smile, which reappeared like an echo on Dumay's lips, were all that gave Modeste any clew to what was coming; but it was enough to calm her uneasiness and keep her awake far into the night with her head full of suppositions; this, however, did not prevent her from being dressed and ready in the morning long before the colonel.

"You know all, my kind papa?" she said as soon as they were on the road to the beach.

"I know all, and a good deal more than you do," he replied.

After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.

"Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a stranger without consulting her."

"Oh, papa! because mamma would never have allowed it."

"And do you think, my daughter, that that was proper? Though you have been educating your mind in this fatal way, how is it that your good sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a man's head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should lack pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two hours in hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has been the same as Bettina's without the excuse of a heart's seduction; you were a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is head-love, the worst vice of French women."

"I, without pride!" said Modeste, weeping; "but he has not yet seen me."

"He knows your name."

"I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had spoken to each other."

"Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your family."

"But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity," she said, pouting.

"Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?"

"A temerity that my mother practised before me," she retorted quickly.

"Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me. Be honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily conceived, I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad action of writing to a stranger?"

"A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose character and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to detraction, to calumny,—a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear father, I was a mere literary and dramatic personage, one of Shakespeare's women, until the moment when I wished to know if the man himself were as beautiful as his soul."

"Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But if, from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of their families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke of parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the misfortunes that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and which you are therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them. Poetry is indeed one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life itself."

"Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of family."

"Alas for the child that finds her happiness in resisting them," said the colonel, gravely. "In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis d'Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and the pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl took for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage."

"My poet has told me all that," she answered. "He played Orgon for some time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of poets."

"I have read your letters," said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, "and I ought to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any woman, even a Julie d'Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!"

"We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or not; I think it is better to read them. There are not so many adventures in these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., and so they publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those letters, you must know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the most sternly upright man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen that we love one another at least as much as you and mamma love each other. Well, I admit that it was not all exactly conventional; I did, if you will have me say so, wrong—"

"I have read your letters," said her father, interrupting her, "and I know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood life, and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young girl of twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing."

"Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways to act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering, or we must go to him frankly. Isn't the last way grand and noble? We French girls are delivered over by our families like so much merchandise, at sixty days' sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle Vilquin; but in England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow very much the plan I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to that? Am I not half German?"

"Child!" cried the colonel, looking at her; "the supremacy of France comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble language constrains her mind. France is the reason of the whole world. England and Germany are romantic in their marriage customs,—though even there noble families follow our customs. You certainly do not mean to deny that your parents, who know life, who are responsible for your soul and for your happiness, have no right to guard you from the stumbling-blocks that are in your way? Good heavens!" he continued, speaking half to himself, "is it their fault, or is it ours? Ought we to hold our children under an iron yoke? Must we be punished for the tenderness that leads us to make them happy, and teaches our hearts how to do so?"

Modeste watched her father out of the corner of her eye as she listened to this species of invocation, uttered in a broken voice.

"Was it wrong," she said, "in a girl whose heart was free, to choose for her husband not only a charming companion, but a man of noble genius, born to an honorable position, a gentleman; the equal of myself, a gentlewoman?"

"You love him?" asked her father.

"Father!" she said, laying her head upon his breast, "would you see me die?"

"Enough!" said the old soldier. "I see your love is inextinguishable."

"Yes, inextinguishable."

"Can nothing change it?"

"Nothing."

"No circumstances, no treachery, no betrayal? You mean that you will love him in spite of everything, because of his personal attractions? Even though he proved a D'Estourny, would you love him still?"

"Oh, my father! you do not know your daughter. Could I love a coward, a man without honor, without faith?"

"But suppose he had deceived you?"

"He? that honest, candid soul, half melancholy? You are joking, father, or else you have never met him."

"But you see now that your love is not inextinguishable, as you chose to call it. I have already made you admit that circumstances could alter your poem; don't you now see that fathers are good for something?"

"You want to give me a lecture, papa; it is positively l'Ami des Enfants over again."

"Poor deceived girl," said her father, sternly; "it is no lecture of mine, I count for nothing in it; indeed, I am only trying to soften the blow."

"Father, don't play tricks with my life," exclaimed Modeste, turning pale.

"Then, my daughter, summon all your courage. It is you who have been playing tricks with your life, and life is now tricking you."

Modeste looked at her father in stupid amazement.

"Suppose that young man whom you love, whom you saw four days ago at church in Havre, was a deceiver?"

"Never!" she cried; "that noble head, that pale face full of poetry—"

"—was a lie," said the colonel interrupting her. "He was no more Monsieur de Canalis than I am that sailor over there putting out to sea."

"Do you know what you are killing in me?" she said in a low voice.

"Comfort yourself, my child; though accident has put the punishment of your fault into the fault itself, the harm done is not irreparable. The young man whom you have seen, and with whom you exchanged hearts by correspondence, is a loyal and honorable fellow; he came to me and confided everything. He loves you, and I have no objection to him as a son-in-law."

"If he is not Canalis, who is he then?" said Modeste in a changed voice.

"The secretary; his name is Ernest de La Briere. He is not a nobleman; but he is one of those plain men with fixed principles and sound morality who satisfy parents. However, that is not the point; you have seen him and nothing can change your heart; you have chosen him, comprehend his soul, it is as beautiful as he himself."

The count was interrupted by a heavy sigh from Modeste. The poor girl sat with her eyes fixed on the sea, pale and rigid as death, as if a pistol shot had struck her in those fatal words, a plain man, with fixed principles and sound morality.

"Deceived!" she said at last.

"Like your poor sister, but less fatally."

"Let us go home, father," she said, rising from the hillock on which they were sitting. "Papa, hear me, I swear before God to obey your wishes, whatever they may be, in the affair of my marriage."

"Then you don't love him any longer?" asked her father.

"I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the paint of another man's glory on his cheeks."

"You said nothing could change you"; remarked the colonel, ironically.

"Ah, do not trifle with me!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands and looking at her father in distressful anxiety; "don't you see that you are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes."

"God forbid! I have told you the exact truth."

"You are very kind, father," she said after a pause, and with a sort of solemnity.

"He has kept your letters," resumed the colonel; "now suppose the rash caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?"

"Oh!—you are going too far."

"Canalis told him so."

"Has Dumay seen Canalis?"

"Yes," answered her father.

The two walked along in silence.

"So that is why that gentleman," resumed Modeste, "told me so much harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said—Why," she added, interrupting herself, "his virtues, his noble qualities, his fine sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who steals glory and a name may very likely—"

"—break locks, steal purses, and cut people's throats on the highway," cried the colonel. "Ah, you young girls, that's just like you,—with your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man who once deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he ought to die."

This ridicule stopped Modeste's effervescence for a moment and least, and again there was silence.

"My child," said the colonel, presently, "men in society, as in nature everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must defend themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise? Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman; it is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences, short of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he does deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her wanting in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a queen, an actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems to him a queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame—and for a young girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given her that is sacred and lovely and noble,—no matter with what grace or what poetry or what precautions she surrounds her fault."

"To seek the master and find the servant!" she said bitterly, "oh! I can never recover from it!"

"Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a heart, and he adores you, but—he does not write verses. No, I admit, he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry. At any rate, my dear girl," added her father, as Modeste made a gesture of disgust, "you are to see both of them, the sham and the true Canalis—"

"Oh, papa!—"

"Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the affair of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall finish with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character of these gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing excursions."

Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to what he said but replying only in monosyllables.



CHAPTER XVI. DISENCHANTED

The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality, Imagination—which in that delicate bosom united the whole of womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to the passionate desires of the sex—had led her into enchanted gardens where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora." Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,—in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent, aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall? Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the boards. She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to see. The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no longer spoke to her. Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes, she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion. She fought against reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing. She would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the utmost.

"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.

The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality. Sadness, when caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,—sometimes a fatal one. It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in what ways and by what means Thought produces the same internal disorganization as poison; and how it is that despair affects the appetite, destroys the pylorus, and changes all the physical conditions of the strongest life. Such was the case with Modeste. In three short days she became the image of morbid melancholy; she did not sing, she could not be made to smile. Charles Mignon, becoming uneasy at the non-arrival of the two friends, thought of going to fetch them, when, on the evening of the fifth day, he received news of their movements through Latournelle.

Canalis, excessively delighted at the idea of a rich marriage, was determined to neglect nothing that might help him to cut out La Briere, without, however, giving La Briere a chance to reproach him for having violated the laws of friendship. The poet felt that nothing would lower a lover so much in the eyes of a young girl as to exhibit him in a subordinate position; and he therefore proposed to La Briere, in the most natural manner, to take a little country-house at Ingouville for a month, and live there together on pretence of requiring sea-air. As soon as La Briere, who at first saw nothing amiss in the proposal, had consented, Canalis declared that he should pay all expenses, and he sent his valet to Havre, telling him to see Monsieur Latournelle and get his assistance in choosing the house,—well aware that the notary would repeat all particulars to the Mignons. Ernest and Canalis had, as may well be supposed, talked over all the aspects of the affair, and the rather prolix Ernest had given a good many useful hints to his rival. The valet, understanding his master's wishes, fulfilled them to the letter; he trumpeted the arrival of the great poet, for whom the doctors advised sea-air to restore his health, injured as it was by the double toils of literature and politics. This important personage wanted a house, which must have at least such and such a number of rooms, as he would bring with him a secretary, cook, two servants, and a coachman, not counting himself, Germain Bonnet, the valet. The carriage, selected and hired for a month by Canalis, was a pretty one; and Germain set about finding a pair of fine horses which would also answer as saddle-horses,—for, as he said, monsieur le baron and his secretary took horseback exercise. Under the eyes of little Latournelle, who went with him to various houses, Germain made a good deal of talk about the secretary, rejecting two or three because there was no suitable room for Monsieur de La Briere.

"Monsieur le baron," he said to the notary, "makes his secretary quite his best friend. Ah! I should be well scolded if Monsieur de La Briere was not as well treated as monsieur le baron himself; and after all, you know, Monsieur de La Briere is a lawyer in my master's court."

Germain never appeared in public unless punctiliously dressed in black, with spotless gloves, well-polished boots, and otherwise as well apparelled as a lawyer. Imagine the effect he produced in Havre, and the idea people took of the great poet from this sample of him! The valet of a man of wit and intellect ends by getting a little wit and intellect himself which has rubbed off from his master. Germain did not overplay his part; he was simple and good-humored, as Canalis had instructed him to be. Poor La Briere was in blissful ignorance of the harm Germain was doing to his prospects, and the depreciation his consent to the arrangement had brought upon him; it is, however, true that some inkling of the state of things rose to Modeste's ears from these lower regions.

Canalis had arranged to bring his secretary in his own carriage, and Ernest's unsuspicious nature did not perceive that he was putting himself in a false position until too late to remedy it. The delay in the arrival of the pair which had troubled Charles Mignon was caused by the painting of the Canalis arms on the panels of the carriage, and by certain orders given to a tailor; for the poet neglected none of the innumerable details which might, even the smallest of them, influence a young girl.

"It is all right," said Latournelle to Mignon on the sixth day. "The baron's valet has hired Madame Amaury's villa at Sanvic, all furnished, for seven hundred francs; he has written to his master that he may start, and that all will be ready on his arrival. So the two gentlemen will be here Sunday. I have also had a letter from Butscha; here it is; it's not long: 'My dear master,—I cannot get back till Sunday. Between now and then I have some very important inquiries to make which concern the happiness of a person in whom you take an interest.'"

The announcement of this arrival did not rouse Modeste from her gloom; the sense of her fall and the bewilderment of her mind were still too great, and she was not nearly as much of a coquette as her father thought her to be. There is, in truth, a charming and permissible coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness. Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,—the thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true colonel of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read, only the young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but in the letters which we were forced to lack of space to suppress, a better judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve which Modeste had substituted for the rather aggressive and light-minded tone of her first letters. The father, however, was only too cruelly right on one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have read, had indeed spoken as though the marriage were a settled fact, and the remembrance of that letter filled her with shame; she thought her father very harsh and cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy of her, yet to whom her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She questioned Dumay about his interview with the poet, she inveigled him into relating its every detail, and she did not think Canalis as barbarous as the lieutenant had declared him. The thought of the beautiful casket which held the letters of the thousand and one women of this literary Don Juan made her smile, and she was strongly tempted to say to her father: "I am not the only one to write to him; the elite of my sex send their leaves for the laurel wreath of the poet."

During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation. The catastrophe—and it was a great one to her poetic nature—roused a faculty of discernment and also the malice latent in her girlish heart, in which her suitors were about to encounter a formidable adversary. It is a fact that when a young woman's heart is chilled her head becomes clear; she observes with great rapidity of judgment, and with a tinge of pleasantry which Shakespeare's Beatrice so admirably represents in "Much Ado about Nothing." Modeste was seized with a deep disgust for men, now that the most distinguished among them had betrayed her hopes. When a woman loves, what she takes for disgust is simply the ability to see clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is never, especially if she is a young girl, in a condition to see clearly. If she cannot admire, she despises. And so, after passing through terrible struggles of the soul, Modeste necessarily put on the armor on which, as she had once declared, the word "Disdain" was engraved. After reaching that point she was able, in the character of uninterested spectator, to take part in what she was pleased to call the "farce of the suitors," a performance in which she herself was about to play the role of heroine. She particularly set before her mind the satisfaction of humiliating Monsieur de La Briere.

"Modeste is saved," said Madame Mignon to her husband; "she wants to revenge herself on the false Canalis by trying to love the real one."

Such in truth was Modeste's plan. It was so utterly commonplace that her mother, to whom she confided her griefs, advised her on the contrary to treat Monsieur de La Briere with extreme politeness.



CHAPTER XVII. A THIRD SUITOR

"Those two young men," said Madame Latournelle, on the Saturday evening, "have no idea how many spies they have on their tracks. We are eight in all, on the watch."

"Don't say two young men, wife; say three!" cried little Latournelle, looking round him. "Gobenheim is not here, so I can speak out."

Modeste raised her head, and everybody, imitating Modeste, raised theirs and looked at the notary.

"Yes, a third lover—and he is something like a lover—offers himself as a candidate."

"Bah!" exclaimed the colonel.

"I speak of no less a person," said Latournelle, pompously, "than Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, Marquis de Saint-Sever, Duc de Nivron, Comte de Bayeux, Vicomte d'Essigny, grand equerry and peer of France, knight of the Spur and the Golden Fleece, grandee of Spain, and son of the last governor of Normandy. He saw Mademoiselle Modeste at the time when he was staying with the Vilquins, and he regretted then—as his notary, who came from Bayeux yesterday, tells me—that she was not rich enough for him; for his father recovered nothing but the estate of Herouville on his return to France, and that is saddled with a sister. The young duke is thirty-three years old. I am definitively charged to lay these proposals before you, Monsieur le comte," added the notary, turning respectfully to the colonel.

"Ask Modeste if she wants another bird in her cage," replied the count; "as far as I am concerned, I am willing that my lord the grand equerry shall pay her attention."

Notwithstanding the care with which Charles Mignon avoided seeing people, and though he stayed in the Chalet and never went out without Modeste, Gobenheim had reported Dumay's wealth; for Dumay had said to him when giving up his position as cashier: "I am to be bailiff for my colonel, and all my fortune, except what my wife needs, is to go to the children of our little Modeste." Every one in Havre had therefore propounded the same question that the notary had already put to himself: "If Dumay's share in the profits is six hundred thousand francs, and he is going to be Monsieur Mignon's bailiff, then Monsieur Mignon must certainly have a colossal fortune. He arrived at Marseilles on a ship of his own, loaded with indigo; and they say at the Bourse that the cargo, not counting the ship, is worth more than he gives out as his whole fortune."

The colonel was unwilling to dismiss the servants he had brought back with him, whom he had chosen with care during his travels; and he therefore hired a house for them in the lower part of Ingouville, where he installed his valet, cook, and coachman, all Negroes, and three mulattos on whose fidelity he could rely. The coachman was told to search for saddle-horses for Mademoiselle and for his master, and for carriage-horses for the caleche in which the colonel and the lieutenant had returned to Havre. That carriage, bought in Paris, was of the latest fashion, and bore the arms of La Bastie, surmounted by a count's coronet. These things, insignificant in the eyes of a man who for four years had been accustomed to the unbridled luxury of the Indies and of the English merchants at Canton, were the subject of much comment among the business men of Havre and the inhabitants of Ingouville and Graville. Before five days had elapsed the rumor of them ran from one end of Normandy to the other like a train of gunpowder touched by fire.

"Monsieur Mignon has come back from China with millions," some one said in Rouen; "and it seems he was made a count in mid-ocean."

"But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution," answered another.

"So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon for twenty-five years! What are we coming to?" said a third.

Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes began once more to see her merits. The aunt and sister of the Duc d'Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur Charles Mignon's right to the title and arms of count, derived from Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal's hat and tassels were added as a crest. They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were staying at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished head of their house now became active.

"If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful," said the aunt of the young duke, "she is the best match in the province. She at least is noble."

The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in that bourgeois household.

Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this late arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more space here than he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, offspring of the matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born during the emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of the present duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819, before he was able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast chateau of Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which he had bought back with some difficulty; all of which returned a rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the pauper peers of France. But what were these twenty-seven thousand francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family? In Paris, of course, the young duke used the king's coaches, and had a mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy. If this noble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables. Mademoiselle d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French nobility, who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under the new law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses; but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration, from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d'Herouville, though in quest of millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker, with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.

At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen, who wished to make her daughter a duchess. The king, anxious to restore the d'Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle d'Herouville of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When great things disappear they leave crumbs, "frusteaux," Rabelais would say, behind them; and the French nobility of this century has left us too many such fragments. Neither the clergy nor the nobility have anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,—in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very nobleness of the nobility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation, cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished qualities,—forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.

The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face, was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty. The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed upon him,—very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed itself when he felt at ease. Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him "a sound wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews." The beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only worship, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious sayings.

"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."

Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of grand equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh,—although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed through her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the circumstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the courtship of the Duc d'Herouville would save her from being at the mercy of either Canalis.

"I see no reason," she said to Latournelle, "why the Duc d'Herouville should not be received. I have passed, in spite of our indigence," she continued, with a mischievous look at her father, "to the condition of heiress. Haven't you observed Gobenheim's glances? They have quite changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my charms."

"Hush, my darling!" cried Madame Latournelle, "here he comes."

"Old Althor is in despair," said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he entered.

"Why?" asked the count.

"Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several millions. What ill-luck for his son!"

"No one knows," said Charles Mignon, coldly, "what my liabilities in India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence as to my private affairs. Dumay," he whispered to his friend, "if Vilquin is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what he gave for it."

Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc d'Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at Graville. This assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at Ingouville. "If this goes on, she will have a hospital here," said the younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a duchess.

The everlasting comedy of "The Heiress," about to be played at the Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste's frame of mind, "The Designs of a Young Girl"; for since the overthrow of her illusions she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man whose qualifications did not fully satisfy her.

The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their arrival. They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and arranging Madame Amaury's house for a month's stay. The poet, always calculating effects, wished to make the most of the probable excitement which his arrival would case in Havre, and which would of course echo up to the Mignons. Therefore, in his role of a man needing rest, he did not leave the house. La Briere went twice to walk past the Chalet, though always with a sense of despair, for he feared to displease Modeste, and the future seemed to him dark with clouds. The two friends came down to dinner on Monday dressed for the momentous visit. La Briere wore the same clothes he had so carefully selected for the famous Sunday; but he now felt like the satellite of planet, and resigned himself to the uncertainties of his situation. Canalis, on the other hand, had carefully attended to his black coat, his orders, and all those little drawing-room elegancies, which his intimacy with the Duchesse de Chaulieu and the fashionable world of the faubourg had brought to perfection. He had gone into the minutiae of dandyism, while poor La Briere was about to present himself with the negligence of a man without hope. Germain, as he waited at dinner could not help smiling to himself at the contrast. After the second course, however, the valet came in with a diplomatic, that is to say, uneasy air.

"Does Monsieur le baron know," he said to Canalis in a low voice, "that Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of the same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur le baron to the sea-shore?"

"What, the little Duc d'Herouville?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"Is he coming for Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked La Briere, coloring.

"So it appears, monsieur."

"We are cheated!" cried Canalis looking at La Briere.

"Ah!" retorted Ernest quickly, "that is the first time you have said, 'we' since we left Paris: it has been 'I' all along."

"You understood me," cried Canalis, with a burst of laughter. "But we are not in a position to struggle against a ducal coronet, nor the duke's title, nor against the waste lands which the Council of State have just granted, on my report, to the house of Herouville."

"His grace," said La Briere, with a spice of malice that was nevertheless serious, "will furnish you with compensation in the person of his sister."

At this instant, the Comte de La Bastie was announced; the two young men rose at once, and La Briere hastened forward to present Canalis.

"I wished to return the visit that you paid me in Paris," said the count to the young lawyer, "and I knew that by coming here I should have the double pleasure of greeting one of our great living poets."

"Great!—Monsieur," replied the poet, smiling, "no one can be great in a century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of would-be great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius nowadays, and renders real distinction impossible."

"Is that the reason why you have thrown yourself into politics?" asked the count.

"It is the same thing in that sphere," said the poet; "there are no statesmen in these days, only men who handle events more or less. Look at it, monsieur; under the system of government that we derive from the Charter, which makes a tax-list of more importance than a coat-of-arms, there is absolutely nothing solid except that which you went to seek in China,—wealth."

Satisfied with himself and with the impression he was making on the prospective father-in-law, Canalis turned to Germain.

"Serve the coffee in the salon," he said, inviting Monsieur de La Bastie to leave the dining-room.

"I thank you for this visit, monsieur le comte," said La Briere; "it saves me from the embarrassment of presenting my friend to you in your own house. You have a heart, and you have also a quick mind."

"Bah! the ready wit of Provence, that is all," said Charles Mignon.

"Ah, do you come from Provence?" cried Canalis.

"You must pardon my friend," said La Briere; "he has not studied, as I have, the history of La Bastie."

At the word friend Canalis threw a searching glance at Ernest.

"If your health will allow," said the count to the poet, "I shall hope to receive you this evening under my roof; it will be a day to mark, as the old writer said 'albo notanda lapillo.' Though we cannot duly receive so great a fame in our little house, yet your visit will gratify my daughter, whose admiration for your poems has even led her to set them to music."

"You have something better than fame in your house," said Canalis; "you have beauty, if I am to believe Ernest."

"Yes, a good daughter; but you will find her rather countrified," said Charles Mignon.

"A country girl sought by the Duc d'Herouville," remarked Canalis, dryly.

"Oh!" replied Monsieur Mignon, with the perfidious good-humor of a Southerner, "I leave my daughter free. Dukes, princes, commoners,—they are all the same to me, even men of genius. I shall make no pledges, and whoever my Modeste chooses will be my son-in-law, or rather my son," he added, looking at La Briere. "It could not be otherwise. Madame de La Bastie is German. She has never adopted our etiquette, and I let my two women lead me their own way. I have always preferred to sit in the carriage rather than on the box. I can make a joke of all this at present, for we have not yet seen the Duc d'Herouville, and I do not believe in marriages arranged by proxy, any more than I believe in choosing my daughter's husband."

"That declaration is equally encouraging and discouraging to two young men who are searching for the philosopher's stone of happiness in marriage," said Canalis.

"Don't you consider it useful, necessary, and even politic to stipulate for perfect freedom of action for parents, daughters, and suitors?" asked Charles Mignon.

Canalis, at a sign from La Briere, kept silence. The conversation presently became unimportant, and after a few turns round the garden the count retired, urging the visit of the two friends.

"That's our dismissal," cried Canalis; "you saw it as plainly as I did. Well, in his place, I should not hesitate between the grand equerry and either of us, charming as we are."

"I don't think so," said La Briere. "I believe that frank soldier came here to satisfy his desire to see you, and to warn us of his neutrality while receiving us in his house. Modeste, in love with your fame, and misled by my person, stands, as it were, between the real and the ideal, between poetry and prose. I am, unfortunately, the prose."

"Germain," said Canalis to the valet, who came to take away the coffee, "order the carriage in half an hour. We will take a drive before we go to the Chalet."



CHAPTER XVIII. A SPLENDID FIRST APPEARANCE

The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere dreaded the interview, while Canalis approached it with the confidence of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the ex-merchant, showed Canalis his own maladroitness, and determined him to select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend indifference, though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to appear to disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love. Trained by the handsome Duchesse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be worthy of his reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he did not know them at all,—which is often the case with those who are the happy victims of an exclusive passion. While poor Ernest, gloomily ensconced in his corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of genuine love, and foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and disdain of an injured and offended young girl, Canalis was preparing himself, not less silently, like an actor making ready for an important part in a new play; certainly neither of them presented the appearance of a happy man. Important interests were involved for Canalis. The mere suggestion of his desire to marry would bring about a rupture of the tie which had bound him for the last ten years to the Duchesse de Chaulieu. Though he had covered the purpose of his journey with the vulgar pretext of needing rest,—in which, by the bye, women never believe, even when it is true,—his conscience troubled him somewhat; but the word "conscience" seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere that he shrugged his shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.

"Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than a dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real advantages and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de Chaulieu; for, if you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would renounce without the slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a passion that has been mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If you simply mean that you are afraid of displeasing your protectress, should she find out the object of your stay here, I believe you. To renounce the duchess and yet not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a risk. You take the anxiety of this alternative for remorse."

"You have no comprehension of feelings," said the poet, irritably, like a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.

"That is what a bigamist should tell the jury," retorted La Briere, laughing.

This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Canalis. He began to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.

The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Canalis livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors were expected, and all the personages of this history were assembled to receive them, except the duke and Butscha.

"Which is the poet?" asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she heard the wheels.

"The one who walks like a drum-major," answered the lieutenant.

"Ah!" said the notary's wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,—as all women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself that they pleased that "grande dame," whose taste was law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis "dragged the time." He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call "balancoires,"—the picturesque phrase of an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.

These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,—without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!" Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration of non-success in little doses.

These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected diction—magniloquence, if you please to call it so—are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type. Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France. Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character,—as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic; it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-class vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went,—an error shared by several of the great men of Paris.

While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.

"Ha! do I see my soldier?" said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women. "Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?" he said, offering his hand effusively; "I comprehend them to their fullest extent after seeing mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of angels."

All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this speech.

"I shall always consider it a triumph," resumed the poet, observing that everybody wished for an explanation, "to have stirred to mention on of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal to be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this triumph—why should I be proud of it?—I count for nothing. It was the triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay, your heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form in which Napoleon's idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what remains? The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go without revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian, the writer, futurity would have no knowledge of those heroic days. Therefore your fifteen years of war are now ideas and nothing more; that which preserves the Empire forever is the poem that the poets make of them. A nation that can win such battles must know how to sing them."

Canalis paused, to gather by a glance that ran round the circle the tribute of amazement which he expected of provincials.

"You must be aware, monsieur, of the regret I feel at not seeing you," said Madame Mignon, "since you compensate me with the pleasure of hearing you."

Modeste, determined to think Canalis sublime, sat motionless with amazement; the embroidery slipped from her fingers, which held it only by the needleful of thread.

"Modeste, this is Monsieur Ernest de La Briere. Monsieur Ernest, my daughter," said the count, thinking the secretary too much in the background.

The young girl bowed coldly, giving Ernest a glance that was meant to prove to every one present that she saw him for the first time.

"Pardon me, monsieur," she said without blushing; "the great admiration I feel for the greatest of our poets is, in the eyes of my friends, a sufficient excuse for seeing only him."

The pure, fresh voice, with accents like that of Mademoiselle Mars, charmed the poor secretary, already dazzled by Modeste's beauty, and in his sudden surprise he answered by a phrase that would have been sublime, had it been true.

"He is my friend," he said.

"Ah, then you do pardon me," she replied.

"He is more than a friend," cried Canalis taking Ernest by the shoulder and leaning upon it like Alexander on Hephaestion, "we love each other as though we were brothers—"

Madame Latournelle cut short the poet's speech by pointing to Ernest and saying aloud to her husband, "Surely that is the gentleman we saw at church."

"Why not?" said Charles Mignon, quickly, observing that Ernest reddened.

Modeste coldly took up her embroidery.

"Madame may be right; I have been twice in Havre lately," replied La Briere, sitting down by Dumay.

Canalis, charmed with Modeste's beauty, mistook the admiration she expressed, and flattered himself he had succeeded in producing his desired effects.

"I should think a man without heart, if he had no devoted friend near him," said Modeste, to pick up the conversation interrupted by Madame Latournelle's awkwardness.

"Mademoiselle, Ernest's devotion makes me almost think myself worth something," said Canalis; "for my dear Pylades is full of talent; he was the right hand of the greatest minister we have had since the peace. Though he holds a fine position, he is good enough to be my tutor in the science of politics; he teaches me to conduct affairs and feeds me with his experience, when all the while he might aspire to a much better situation. Oh! he is worth far more than I." At a gesture from Modeste he continued gracefully: "Yes, the poetry that I express he carries in his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is because he has the modesty of a nun."

"Enough, oh, enough!" cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to look. "My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to marry off her daughter."

"How is it, monsieur," said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, "that you can even think of becoming a political character?"

"It is abdication," said Modeste, "for a poet; politics are the resource of matter-of-fact men."

"Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the rallying-point of courage."

Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day the orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A poet may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever cease to be himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he would one day be greater on the political side than on the literary. "The forum of France was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles supplanted fields of battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer than any Austerlitz, and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals; they spent their lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as those who went to war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal outlets of the vital fluid that man had ever known," etc.

This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at the theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,—very much like that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all these high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as it were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had created as he read her letters and answered them.

This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an invitation to dinner on the following Monday.

"We shall not be at the Chalet," said the Comte de La Bastie. "Dumay will have sole possession of it. I return to the villa, having bought it back under a deed of redemption within six months, which I have to-day signed with Monsieur Vilquin."

"I hope," said Dumay, "that Vilquin will not be able to return to you the sum you have just lent him, and that the villa will remain yours."

"It is an abode in keeping with your fortune," said Canalis.

"You mean the fortune that I am supposed to have," replied Charles Mignon, hastily.

"It would be too sad," said Canalis, turning to Modeste with a charming little bow, "if this Madonna were not framed in a manner worthy of her divine perfections."

That was the only thing Canalis said to Modeste. He affected not to look at her, and behaved like a man to whom all idea of marriage was interdicted.

"Ah! my dear Madame Mignon," cried the notary's wife, as soon as the gravel was heard to grit under the feet of the Parisians, "what an intellect!"

"Is he rich?—that is the question," said Gobenheim.

Modeste was at the window, not losing a single movement of the great poet, and paying no attention to his companion. When Monsieur Mignon returned to the salon, and Modeste, having received a last bow from the two friends as the carriage turned, went back to her seat, a weighty discussion took place, such as provincials invariably hold over Parisians after a first interview. Gobenheim repeated his phrase, "Is he rich?" as a chorus to the songs of praise sung by Madame Latournelle, Modeste, and her mother.

"Rich!" exclaimed Modeste; "what can that signify! Do you not see that Monsieur de Canalis is one of those men who are destined for the highest places in the State. He has more than fortune; he possesses that which gives fortune."

"He will be minister or ambassador," said Monsieur Mignon.

"That won't hinder tax-payers from having to pay the costs of his funeral," remarked the notary.

"How so?" asked Charles Mignon.

"He strikes me as a man who will waste all the fortunes with whose gifts Mademoiselle Modeste so liberally endows him," answered Latournelle.

"Modeste can't avoid being liberal to a poet who called her a Madonna," said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with which Canalis had originally inspired him.

Gobenheim arranged the whist-table with all the more persistency because, since the return of Monsieur Mignon, Latournelle and Dumay had allowed themselves to play for ten sous points.

"Well, my little darling," said the father to the daughter in the embrasure of a window. "Admit that papa thinks of everything. If you send your orders this evening to your former dressmaker in Paris, and all your other furnishing people, you shall show yourself eight days hence in all the splendor of an heiress. Meantime we will install ourselves in the villa. You already have a pretty horse, now order a habit; you owe that amount of civility to the grand equerry."

"All the more because there will be a number of us to ride," said Modeste, who was recovering the colors of health.

"The secretary did not say much," remarked Madame Mignon.

"A little fool," said Madame Latournelle; "the poet has an attentive word for everybody. He thanked Monsieur Latournelle for his help in choosing the house; and said he must have taken counsel with a woman of good taste. But the other looked as gloomy as a Spaniard, and kept his eyes fixed on Modeste as though he would like to swallow her whole. If he had even looked at me I should have been afraid of him."

"He had a pleasant voice," said Madame Mignon.

"No doubt he came to Havre to inquire about the Mignons in the interests of his friend the poet," said Modeste, looking furtively at her father. "It was certainly he whom we saw in church."

Madame Dumay and Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, accepted this as the natural explanation of Ernest's journey.



CHAPTER XIX. OF WHICH THE AUTHOR THINKS A GOOD DEAL

"Do you know, Ernest," cried Canalis, when they had driven a short distance from the house, "I don't see any marriageable woman in society in Paris who compares with that adorable girl."

"Ah, that ends it!" replied Ernest. "She loves you, or she will love you if you desire it. Your fame won half the battle. Well, you may now have it all your own way. You shall go there alone in future. Modeste despises me; she is right to do so; and I don't see any reason why I should condemn myself to see, to love, desire, and adore that which I can never possess."

After a few consoling remarks, dashed with his own satisfaction at having made a new version of Caesar's phrase, Canalis divulged a desire to break with the Duchesse de Chaulieu. La Briere, totally unable to keep up the conversation, made the beauty of the night an excuse to be set down, and then rushed like one possessed to the seashore, where he stayed till past ten, in a half-demented state, walking hurriedly up and down, talking aloud in broken sentences, sometimes standing still or sitting down, without noticing the uneasiness of two custom-house officers who were on the watch. After loving Modeste's wit and intellect and her aggressive frankness, he now joined adoration of her beauty—that is to say, love without reason, love inexplicable—to all the other reasons which had drawn him ten days earlier, to the church in Havre.

He returned to the Chalet, where the Pyrenees hounds barked at him till he was forced to relinquish the pleasure of gazing at Modeste's windows. In love, such things are of no more account to the lover than the work which is covered by the last layer of color is to an artist; yet they make up the whole of love, just as the hidden toil is the whole of art. Out of them arise the great painter and the true lover whom the woman and the public end, sometimes too late, by adoring.

"Well then!" he cried aloud, "I will stay, I will suffer, I will love her for myself only, in solitude. Modeste shall be my sun, my life; I will breathe with her breath, rejoice in her joys and bear her griefs, be she even the wife of that egoist, Canalis."

"That's what I call loving, monsieur," said a voice which came from a shrub by the side of the road. "Ha, ha, so all the world is in love with Mademoiselle de La Bastie?"

And Butscha suddenly appeared and looked at La Briere. La Briere checked his anger when, by the light of the moon, he saw the dwarf, and he made a few steps without replying.

"Soldiers who serve in the same company ought to be good comrades," remarked Butscha. "You don't love Canalis; neither do I."

"He is my friend," replied Ernest.

"Ha, you are the little secretary?"

"You are to know, monsieur, that I am no man's secretary. I have the honor to be of counsel to a supreme court of this kingdom."

"I have the honor to salute Monsieur de La Briere," said Butscha. "I myself have the honor to be head clerk to Latournelle, chief councillor of Havre, and my position is a better one than yours. Yes, I have had the happiness of seeing Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie nearly every evening for the last four years, and I expect to live near her, as a king's servant lives in the Tuileries. If they offered me the throne of Russia I should answer, 'I love the sun too well.' Isn't that telling you, monsieur, that I care more for her than for myself? I am looking after her interests with the most honorable intentions. Do you believe that the proud Duchesse de Chaulieu would cast a favorable eye on the happiness of Madame de Canalis if her waiting-woman, who is in love with Monsieur Germain, not liking that charming valet's absence in Havre, were to say to her mistress while brushing her hair—"

"Who do you know about all this?" said La Briere, interrupting Butscha.

"In the first place, I am clerk to a notary," answered Butscha. "But haven't you seen my hump? It is full of resources, monsieur. I have made myself cousin to Mademoiselle Philoxene Jacmin, born at Honfleur, where my mother was born, a Jacmin,—there are eight branches of the Jacmins at Honfleur. So my cousin Philoxene, enticed by the bait of a highly improbable fortune, has told me a good many things."

"The duchess is vindictive?" said La Briere.

"Vindictive as a queen, Philoxene says; she has never yet forgiven the duke for being nothing more than her husband," replied Butscha. "She hates as she loves. I know all about her character, her tastes, her toilette, her religion, and her manners; for Philoxene stripped her for me, soul and corset. I went to the opera expressly to see her, and I didn't grudge the ten francs it cost me—I don't mean the play. If my imaginary cousin had not told me the duchess had seen her fifty summers, I should have thought I was over-generous in giving her thirty; she has never known a winter, that duchess!"

"Yes," said La Briere, "she is a cameo—preserved because it is stone. Canalis would be in a bad way if the duchess were to find out what he is doing here; and I hope, monsieur, that you will go no further in this business of spying, which is unworthy of an honest man."

"Monsieur," said Butscha, proudly; "for me Modeste is my country. I do not spy; I foresee, I take precautions. The duchess will come here if it is desirable, or she will stay tranquilly where she is, according to what I judge best."

"You?"

"I."

"And how, pray?"

"Ha, that's it!" said the little hunchback, plucking a blade of grass. "See here! this herb believes that men build palaces for it to grow in; it wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble, and brings them down, just as the masses forced into the edifice of feudality have brought it to the ground. The power of the feeble life that can creep everywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons. I am one of three who have sworn that Modeste shall be happy, and we would sell our honor for her. Adieu, monsieur. If you truly love Mademoiselle de La Bastie, forget this conversation and shake hands with me, for I think you've got a heart. I longed to see the Chalet, and I got here just as SHE was putting out her light. I saw the dogs rush at you, and I overheard your words, and that is why I take the liberty of saying we serve in the same regiment—that of loyal devotion."

"Monsieur," said La Briere, wringing the hunchback's hand, "would you have the friendliness to tell me if Mademoiselle Modeste ever loved any one WITH LOVE before she wrote to Canalis?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Butscha in an altered voice; "that thought is an insult. And even now, who knows if she really loves? does she know herself? She is enamored of genius, of the soul and intellect of that seller of verses, that literary quack; but she will study him, we shall all study him; and I know how to make the man's real character peep out from under that turtle-shell of fine manners,—we'll soon see the petty little head of his ambition and his vanity!" cried Butscha, rubbing his hands. "So, unless mademoiselle is desperately taken with him—"

"Oh! she was seized with admiration when she saw him, as if he were something marvellous," exclaimed La Briere, letting the secret of his jealousy escape him.

"If he is a loyal, honest fellow, and loves her; if he is worthy of her; if he renounces his duchess," said Butscha,—"then I'll manage the duchess! Here, my dear sir, take this road, and you will get home in ten minutes."

But as they parted, Butscha turned back and hailed poor Ernest, who, as a true lover, would gladly have stayed there all night talking of Modeste.

"Monsieur," said Butscha, "I have not yet had the honor of seeing our great poet. I am very curious to observe that magnificent phenomenon in the exercise of his functions. Do me the favor to bring him to the Chalet to-morrow evening, and stay as long as possible; for it takes more than an hour for a man to show himself for what he is. I shall be the first to see if he loves, if he can love, or if he ever will love Mademoiselle Modeste."

"You are very young to—"

"—to be a professor," said Butscha, cutting short La Briere. "Ha, monsieur, deformed folks are born a hundred years old. And besides, a sick man who has long been sick, knows more than his doctor; he knows the disease, and that is more than can be said for the best of doctors. Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart when the woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his deformity; he ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes seductive, just as the sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone is incurable. I have had neither father nor mother since I was six years old; I am now twenty-five. Public charity has been my mother, the procureur du roi my father. Oh! don't be troubled," he added, seeing Ernest's gesture; "I am much more lively than my situation. Well, for the last six years, ever since a woman's eye first told me I had no right to love, I do love, and I study women. I began with the ugly ones, for it is best to take the bull by the horns. So I took my master's wife, who has certainly been an angel to me, for my first study. Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn't help it. I passed her through my alembic and what did I find? this thought, crouching at the bottom of her heart, 'I am not so ugly as they think me'; and if a man were to work upon that thought he could bring her to the edge of the abyss, pious as she is."

"And have you studied Modeste?"

"I thought I told you," replied Butscha, "that my life belongs to her, just as France belongs to the king. Do you now understand what you called my spying in Paris? No one but me really knows what nobility, what pride, what devotion, what mysterious grace, what unwearying kindness, what true religion, gaiety, wit, delicacy, knowledge, and courtesy there are in the soul and in the heart of that adorable creature!"

Butscha drew out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and La Briere pressed his hand for a long time.

"I live in the sunbeam of her existence; it comes from her, it is absorbed in me; that is how we are united,—as nature is to God, by the Light and by the Word. Adieu, monsieur; never in my life have I talked in this way; but seeing you beneath her windows, I felt in my heart that you loved her as I love her."

Without waiting for an answer Butscha quitted the poor lover, into whose heart his words had put an inexpressible balm. Ernest resolved to make a friend of him, not suspecting that the chief object of the clerk's loquacity was to gain communication with some one connected with Canalis. Ernest was rocked to sleep that night by the ebb and flow of thoughts and resolutions and plans for his future conduct, whereas Canalis slept the sleep of the conqueror, which is the sweetest of slumbers after that of the just.

At breakfast next morning, the friends agreed to spend the evening of the following day at the Chalet and initiate themselves into the delights of provincial whist. To get rid of the day they ordered their horses, purchased by Germain at a large price, and started on a voyage of discovery round the country, which was quite as unknown to them as China; for the most foreign thing to Frenchmen in France is France itself.

By dint of reflecting on his position as an unfortunate and despised lover, Ernest went through something of the same process as Modeste's first letter had forced upon him. Though sorrow is said to develop virtue, it only develops it in virtuous persons; that cleaning-out of the conscience takes place only in persons who are by nature clean. La Briere vowed to endure his sufferings in Spartan silence, to act worthily, and give way to no baseness; while Canalis, fascinated by the enormous "dot," was telling himself to take every means of captivating the heiress. Selfishness and devotion, the key-notes of the two characters, therefore took, by the action of a moral law which is often very odd in its effects, certain measures that were contrary to their respective natures. The selfish man put on self-abnegation; the man who thought chiefly of others took refuge on the Aventinus of pride. That phenomenon is often seen in political life. Men frequently turn their characters wrong side out, and it sometimes happens that the public is unable to tell which is the right side.

After dinner the two friends heard of the arrival of the grand equerry, who was presented at the Chalet the same evening by Latournelle. Mademoiselle d'Herouville had contrived to wound that worthy man by sending a footmen to tell him to come to her, instead of sending her nephew in person; thus depriving the notary of a distinguished visit he would certainly have talked about for the rest of his natural life. So Latournelle curtly informed the grand equerry, when he proposed to drive him to the Chalet, that he was engaged to take Madame Latournelle. Guessing from the little man's sulky manner that there was some blunder to repair, the duke said graciously:—

"Then I shall have the pleasure, if you will allow me, of taking Madame Latournelle also."

Disregarding Mademoiselle d'Herouville's haughty shrug, the duke left the room with the notary. Madame Latournelle, half-crazed with joy at seeing the gorgeous carriage at her door, with footmen in royal livery letting down the steps, was too agitated on hearing that the grand equerry had called for her, to find her gloves, her parasol, her absurdity, or her usual air of pompous dignity. Once in the carriage, however, and while expressing confused thanks and civilities to the little duke, she suddenly exclaimed, from a thought in her kind heart,—

"But Butscha, where is he?"

"Let us take Butscha," said the duke, smiling.

When the people on the quays, attracted in groups by the splendor of the royal equipage, saw the funny spectacle, the three little men with the spare gigantic woman, they looked at one another and laughed.

"If you melt all three together, they might make one man fit to mate with that big cod-fish," said a sailor from Bordeaux.

"Is there any other thing you would like to take with you, madame?" asked the duke, jestingly, while the footman awaited his orders.

"No, monseigneur," she replied, turning scarlet and looking at her husband as much as to say, "What did I do wrong?"

"Monsieur le duc honors me by considering that I am a thing," said Butscha; "a poor clerk is usually thought to be a nonentity."

Though this was said with a laugh, the duke colored and did not answer. Great people are to blame for joking with their social inferiors. Jesting is a game, and games presuppose equality; it is to obviate any inconvenient results of this temporary equality that players have the right, after the game is over, not to recognize each other.

The visit of the grand equerry had the ostensible excuse of an important piece of business; namely, the retrieval of an immense tract of waste land left by the sea between the mouths of the two rivers, which tract had just been adjudged by the Council of State to the house of Herouville. The matter was nothing less than putting flood-gates with double bridges, draining three or four hundred acres, cutting canals, and laying out roadways. When the duke had explained the condition of the land, Charles Mignon remarked that time must be allowed for the soil, which was still moving, to settle and grow solid in a natural way.