Modeste Mignon

Butscha shuddered slightly when he caught sight of her, so changed did she seem to him. The wings of love were fastened to her shoulders; she had the air of a nymph, a Psyche; her cheeks glowed with the divine color of happiness.

“Who wrote the words to which you have put that pretty music?” asked her mother.

“Canalis, mamma,” she answered, flushing rosy red from her throat to her forehead.

“Canalis!” cried the dwarf, to whom the inflections of the girl’s voice and her blush told the only thing of which he was still ignorant. “He, that great poet, does he write songs?”

“They are only simple verses,” she said, “which I have ventured to set to German airs.”

“No, no,” interrupted Madame Mignon, “the music is your own, my daughter.”

Modeste, feeling that she grew more and more crimson, went off into the garden, calling Butscha after her.

“You can do me a great service,” she said. “Dumay is keeping a secret from my mother and me as to the fortune which my father is bringing back with him; and I want to know what it is. Did not Dumay send papa when he first went away over five hundred thousand francs? Yes. Well, papa is not the kind of man to stay away four years and only double his capital. It seems he is coming back on a ship of his own, and Dumay’s share amounts to almost six hundred thousand francs.”

“There is no need to question Dumay,” said Butscha. “Your father lost, as you know, about four millions when he went away, and he has doubtless recovered them. He would of course give Dumay ten per cent of his profits; the worthy man admitted the other day how much it was, and my master and I think that in that case the colonel’s fortune must amount to six or seven millions—”

“Oh, papa!” cried Modeste, crossing her hands on her breast and looking up to heaven, “twice you have given me life!”

“Ah, mademoiselle!” said Butscha, “you love a poet. That kind of man is more or less of a Narcissus. Will he know how to love you? A phrase-maker, always busy in fitting words together, must be a bore. Mademoiselle, a poet is no more poetry than a seed is a flower.”

“Butscha, I never saw so handsome a man.”

“Beauty is a veil which often serves to hide imperfections.”

“He has the most angelic heart of heaven—”

“I pray God you may be right,” said the dwarf, clasping his hands, “—and happy! That man shall have, as you have, a servant in Jean Butscha. I will not be notary; I shall give that up; I shall study the sciences.”

“Why?”

“Ah, mademoiselle, to train up your children, if you will deign to make me their tutor. But, oh! if you would only listen to some advice. Let me take up this matter; let me look into the life and habits of this man,—find out if he is kind, or bad-tempered, or gentle, if he commands the respect which you merit in a husband, if he is able to love utterly, preferring you to everything, even his own talent—”

“What does that signify if I love him?”

“Ah, true!” cried the dwarf.

At that instant Madame Mignon was saying to her friends,—

“My daughter saw the man she loves this morning.”

“Then it must have been that sulphur waistcoat which puzzled you so, Latournelle,” said his wife. “The young man had a pretty white rose in his buttonhole.”

“Ah!” sighed the mother, “the sign of recognition.”

“And he also wore the ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor. He is a charming young man. But we are all deceiving ourselves; Modeste never raised her veil, and her clothes were huddled on like a beggar-woman’s—”

“And she said she was ill,” cried the notary; “but she has taken off her mufflings and is just as well as she ever was.”

“It is incomprehensible!” said Dumay.

“Not at all,” said the notary; “it is now as clear as day.”

“My child,” said Madame Mignon to Modeste, as she came into the room, followed by Butscha, “did you see a well-dressed young man at church this morning, with a white rose in his button-hole?”

“I saw him,” said Butscha quickly, perceiving by everybody’s strained attention that Modeste was likely to fall into a trap. “It was Grindot, the famous architect, with whom the town is in treaty for the restoration of the church. He has just come from Paris, and I met him this morning examining the exterior as I was on my way to Sainte-Adresse.”

“Oh, an architect, was he? he puzzled me,” said Modeste, for whom Butscha had thus gained time to recover herself.

Dumay looked askance at Butscha. Modeste, fully warned, recovered her impenetrable composure. Dumay’s distrust was now thoroughly aroused, and he resolved to go the mayor’s office early in the morning and ascertain if the architect had really been in Havre the previous day. Butscha, on the other hand, was equally determined to go to Paris and find out something about Canalis.

Gobenheim came to play whist, and by his presence subdued and compressed all this fermentation of feelings. Modeste awaited her mother’s bedtime with impatience. She intended to write, but never did so except at night. Here is the letter which love dictated to her while all the world was sleeping:—

Modeste.

“What are you doing, up at this hour, Mademoiselle Modeste?” said the voice of Dumay at her door.

“Writing to my father,” she answered; “did you not tell me you should start in the morning?”

Dumay had nothing to say to that, and he went to bed, while Modeste wrote another long letter, this time to her father.

On the morrow, Francois Cochet, terrified at seeing the Havre postmark on the envelope which Ernest had mailed the night before, brought her young mistress the following letter and took away the one which Modeste had written:—

This letter made Modeste terribly uneasy. She could not get back the one which Francoise had carried away before she came to the last words, whose meaning she now sought by reading them again and again; but she went to her own room and wrote an answer in which she demanded an immediate explanation.

CHAPTER XIV. MATTERS GROWN COMPLICATED

During these little events other little events were going on in Havre, which caused Modeste to forget her present uneasiness. Dumay went down to Havre early in the morning, and soon discovered that no architect had been in town the day before. Furious at Butscha’s lie, which revealed a conspiracy of which he was resolved to know the meaning, he rushed from the mayor’s office to his friend Latournelle.

“Where’s your Master Butscha?” he demanded of the notary, when he saw that the clerk was not in his place.

“Butscha, my dear fellow, has gone to Paris. He heard some news of his father this morning on the quays, from a Swedish sailor. It seems the father went to the Indies and served a prince, or something, and he is now in Paris.”

“Lies! it’s all a trick! infamous! I’ll find that damned cripple if I’ve got to go express to Paris for him,” cried Dumay. “Butscha is deceiving us; he knows something about Modeste, and hasn’t told us. If he meddles in this thing he shall never be a notary. I’ll roll him in the mud from which he came, I’ll—”

“Come, come, my friend; never hang a man before you try him,” said Latournelle, frightened at Dumay’s rage.

After stating the facts on which his suspicions were founded, Dumay begged Madame Latournelle to go and stay at the Chalet during his absence.

“You will find the colonel in Paris,” said the notary. “In the shipping news quoted this morning in the Journal of Commerce, I found under the head of Marseilles—here, see for yourself,” he said, offering the paper. “‘The Bettina Mignon, Captain Mignon, arrived October 6’; it is now the 17th, and the colonel is sure to be in Paris.”

Dumay requested Gobenheim to do without him in future, and then went back to the Chalet, which he reached just as Modeste was sealing her two letters, to her father and Canalis. Except for the address the letters were precisely alike both in weight and appearance. Modeste thought she had laid that to her father over that to her Melchior, but had, in fact, done exactly the reverse. This mistake, so often made in the little things of life, occasioned the discovery of her secret by Dumay and her mother. The former was talking vehemently to Madame Mignon in the salon, and revealing to her his fresh fears caused by Modeste’s duplicity and Butscha’s connivance.

“Madame,” he cried, “he is a serpent whom we have warmed in our bosoms; there’s no place in his contorted little body for a soul!”

Modeste put the letter for her father into the pocket of her apron, supposing it to be that for Canalis, and came downstairs with the letter for her lover in her hand, to see Dumay before he started for Paris.

“What has happened to my Black Dwarf? why are you talking so loud!” she said, appearing at the door.

“Mademoiselle, Butscha has gone to Paris, and you, no doubt, know why,—to carry on that affair of the little architect with the sulphur waistcoat, who, unluckily for the hunchback’s lies, has never been here.”

Modeste was struck dumb; feeling sure that the dwarf had departed on a mission of inquiry as to her poet’s morals, she turned pale, and sat down.

“I’m going after him; I shall find him,” continued Dumay. “Is that the letter for your father, mademoiselle?” he added, holding out his hand. “I will take it to the Mongenods. God grant the colonel and I may not pass each other on the road.”

Modeste gave him the letter. Dumay looked mechanically at the address.

“‘Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, No. 29’!” he cried out; “what does that mean?”

“Ah, my daughter! that is the man you love,” exclaimed Madame Mignon; “the stanzas you set to music were his—”

“And that’s his portrait that you have in a frame upstairs,” added Dumay.

“Give me back that letter, Monsieur Dumay,” said Modeste, erecting herself like a lioness defending her cubs.

“There it is, mademoiselle,” he replied.

Modeste put it into the bosom of her dress, and gave Dumay the one intended for her father.

“I know what you are capable of, Dumay,” she said; “and if you take one step against Monsieur de Canalis, I shall take another out of this house, to which I will never return.”

“You will kill your mother, mademoiselle,” replied Dumay, who left the room and called his wife.

The poor mother was indeed half-fainting,—struck to the heart by Modeste’s words.

“Good-bye, wife,” said the Breton, kissing the American. “Take care of the mother; I go to save the daughter.”

He made his preparations for the journey in a few minutes, and started for Havre. An hour later he was travelling post to Paris, with the haste that nothing but passion or speculation can get out of wheels.

Recovering herself under Modeste’s tender care, Madame Mignon went up to her bedroom leaning on the arm of her daughter, to whom she said, as her sole reproach, when they were alone:—

“My unfortunate child, see what you have done! Why did you conceal anything from me? Am I so harsh?”

“Oh! I was just going to tell it to you comfortably,” sobbed Modeste.

She thereupon related everything to her mother, read her the letters and their answers, and shed the rose of her poem petal by petal into the heart of the kind German woman. When this confidence, which took half the day, was over, when she saw something that was almost a smile on the lips of the too indulgent mother, Modeste fell upon her breast in tears.

“Oh, mother!” she said amid her sobs, “you, whose heart, all gold and poetry, is a chosen vessel, chosen of God to hold a sacred love, a single and celestial love that endures for life; you, whom I wish to imitate by loving no one but my husband,—you will surely understand what bitter tears I am now shedding. This butterfly, this Psyche of my thoughts, this dual soul which I have nurtured with maternal care, my love, my sacred love, this living mystery of mysteries—it is about to fall into vulgar hands, and they will tear its diaphanous wings and rend its veil under the miserable pretext of enlightening me, of discovering whether genius is as prudent as a banker, whether my Melchior has saved his money, or whether he has some entanglement to shake off; they want to find out if he is guilty to bourgeois eyes of youthful indiscretions,—which to the sun of our love are like the clouds of the dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See! feel my hand, it burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it.”

And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to Paris,—to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our drama for a moment.

Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste’s letter. Could it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This flattery is the flattery supreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it is the divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to create it by the power of an inward look,—is not that the highest reach of love? And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture of an applauded author, “At last I am beloved!” When a woman, be she maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, “Thou art handsome,” the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince. Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter, full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to him, “Modeste is right.” He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:—

“She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!”

Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the pavement.

“Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes,” he cried; “what a maddening situation I have put myself in!”

La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of honor. He at once resolved to find Modeste’s father, if he were in Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious results of their Parisian jest. To a sensitive nature like his, Modeste’s large fortune was in itself a determining reason. He could not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a “dot.” Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed his start in life.

At the hour when La Briere was inquiring about the father of his beloved from the head of the house of Mongenod, and getting information that might be useful to him in his strange position, a scene was taking place in Canalis’s study which the ex-lieutenant’s hasty departure from Havre may have led the reader to foresee.

Like a true soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,—a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he had tumbled from the moon, except when scribbling at a desk, like Butscha. But the seething of the Breton’s heart and brain received a violent application of cold water when he entered the courtyard of the pretty house occupied by the poet and saw a groom washing a carriage, and also, through the windows of a handsome dining-room, a valet dressed like a banker, to whom the groom referred him, and who answered, looking the stranger over from head to foot, that Monsieur le baron was not visible. “There is,” added the man, “a meeting of the council of state to-day, at which Monsieur le baron is obliged to be present.”

“Is this really the house of Monsieur Canalis,” said Dumay, “a writer of poetry?”

“Monsieur le baron de Canalis,” replied the valet, “is the great poet of whom you speak; but he is also the president of the court of Claims attached to the ministry of foreign affairs.”

Dumay, who had come to box the ears of a scribbling nobody, found himself confronted by a high functionary of the state. The salon where he was told to wait offered, as a topic for his meditations, the insignia of the Legion of honor glittering on a black coat which the valet had left upon a chair. Presently his eyes were attracted by the beauty and brilliancy of a silver-gilt cup bearing the words “Given by Madame.” Then he beheld before him, on a pedestal, a Sevres vase on which was engraved, “The gift of Madame la Dauphine.”

These mute admonitions brought Dumay to his senses while the valet went to ask his master if he would receive a person who had come from Havre expressly to see him,—a stranger named Dumay.

“What sort of a man?” asked Canalis.

“He is well-dressed, and wears the ribbon of the Legion of honor.”

Canalis made a sign of assent, and the valet retreated, and then returned and announced, “Monsieur Dumay.”

When he heard himself announced, when he was actually in presence of Canalis, in a study as gorgeous as it was elegant, with his feet on a carpet far handsomer than any in the house of Mignon, and when he met the studied glance of the poet who was playing with the tassels of a sumptuous dressing-gown, Dumay was so completely taken aback that he allowed the great poet to have the first word.

“To what do I owe the honor of your visit, monsieur?”

“Monsieur,” began Dumay, who remained standing.

“If you have a good deal to say,” interrupted Canalis, “I must ask you to be seated.”

And Canalis himself plunged into an armchair a la Voltaire, crossed his legs, raised the upper one to the level of his eye and looked fixedly at Dumay, who became, to use his own martial slang, “bayonetted.”

“I am listening, monsieur,” said the poet; “my time is precious,—the ministers are expecting me.”

“Monsieur,” said Dumay, “I shall be brief. You have seduced—how, I do not know—a young lady in Havre, young, beautiful, and rich; the last and only hope of two noble families; and I have come to ask your intentions.”

Canalis, who had been busy during the last three months with serious matters of his own, and was trying to get himself made commander of the Legion of honor and minister to a German court, had completely forgotten Modeste’s letter.”

“I!” he exclaimed.

“You!” repeated Dumay.

“Monsieur,” answered Canalis, smiling; “I know no more of what you are talking about than if you had said it in Hebrew. I seduce a young girl! I, who—” and a superb smile crossed his features. “Come, come, monsieur, I’m not such a child as to steal fruit over the hedges when I have orchards and gardens of my own where the finest peaches ripen. All Paris knows where my affections are set. Very likely there may be some young girl in Havre full of enthusiasm for my verses,—of which they are not worthy; that would not surprise me at all; nothing is more common. See! look at that lovely coffer of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and edged with that iron-work as fine as lace. That coffer belonged to Pope Leo X., and was given to me by the Duchesse de Chaulieu, who received it from the king of Spain. I use it to hold the letters I receive from ladies and young girls living in every quarter of Europe. Oh! I assure you I feel the utmost respect for these flowers of the soul, cut and sent in moments of enthusiasm that are worthy of all reverence. Yes, to me the impulse of a heart is a noble and sublime thing! Others—scoffers—light their cigars with such letters, or give them to their wives for curl-papers; but I, who am a bachelor, monsieur, I have too much delicacy not to preserve these artless offerings—so fresh, so disinterested—in a tabernacle of their own. In fact, I guard them with a species of veneration, and at my death they will be burned before my eyes. People may call that ridiculous, but I do not care. I am grateful; these proofs of devotion enable me to bear the criticisms and annoyances of a literary life. When I receive a shot in the back from some enemy lurking under cover of a daily paper, I look at that casket and think,—here and there in this wide world there are hearts whose wounds have been healed, or soothed, or dressed by me!”

This bit of poetry, declaimed with all the talent of a great actor, petrified the lieutenant, whose eyes opened to their utmost extent, and whose astonishment delighted the poet.

“I will permit you,” continued the peacock, spreading his tail, “out of respect for your position, which I fully appreciate, to open that coffer and look for the letter of your young lady. Though I know I am right, I remember names, and I assure you you are mistaken in thinking—”

“And this is what a poor child comes to in this gulf of Paris!” cried Dumay,—“the darling of her parents, the joy of her friends, the hope of all, petted by all, the pride of a family, who has six persons so devoted to her that they would willingly make a rampart of their lives and fortunes between her and sorrow. Monsieur,” Dumay remarked after a pause, “you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier. For fifteen years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of many a bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner there; the Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I suffered. I have seen thousands of my comrades die,—but you, you have given me a chill to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt before.”

Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only flattered him,—a thing which at this period of his life had become almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the first perfumed phial that praise had broken over his head.

“Ah, my soldier!” he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay’s shoulder, and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier of the empire tremble, “this young girl may be all in all to you, but to society at large what is she? nothing. At this moment the greatest mandarin in China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the universe in mourning, and what is that to you? The English are killing thousands of people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this very moment while I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being burned alive,—did that make you care less for your cup of coffee this morning at breakfast? Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in rags does not cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever finds it; and yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost five louis, and I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy, exclaiming, ‘Divine! delicious! charming! food for the soul!’ Social nature, like Nature herself, is a great forgetter. You will be quite surprised ten years hence at what you have done to-day. You are here in a city where people die, where they marry, where they adore each other at an assignation, where young girls suffocate themselves, where the man of genius with his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane beneficence goes to the bottom,—all side by side, sometimes under the same roof, and yet ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent. And here you come among us and ask us to expire with grief at this commonplace affair.”

“You call yourself a poet!” cried Dumay, “but don’t you feel what you write?”

“Good heavens! if we endured the joys or the woes we sing we should be as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots,” said the poet, smiling. “But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!” (Canalis had the form and action of an Homeric hero) “learn this from the poet: Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a treasure which is his alone, it is—”

“Forgive me for interrupting you,” said Dumay, who was gazing at the poet with horror, “but did you ever come to Havre?”

“I was there for a day and a night in the spring of 1824 on my way to London.”

“You are a man of honor,” continued Dumay; “will you give me your word that you do not know Mademoiselle Modeste Mignon?”

“This is the first time that name ever struck my ear,” replied Canalis.

“Ah, monsieur!” said Dumay, “into what dark intrigue am I about to plunge? Can I count upon you to help me in my inquiries?—for I am certain that some one has been using your name. You ought to have had a letter yesterday from Havre.”

“I received none. Be sure, monsieur, that I will help you,” said Canalis, “so far as I have the opportunity of doing so.”

Dumay withdrew, his heart torn with anxiety, believing that the wretched Butscha had worn the skin of the poet to deceive Modeste; whereas Butscha himself, keen-witted as a prince seeking revenge, and far cleverer than any paid spy, was ferretting out the life and actions of Canalis, escaping notice by his insignificance, like an insect that bores its way into the sap of a tree.

The Breton had scarcely left the poet’s house when La Briere entered his friend’s study. Naturally, Canalis told him of the visit of the man from Havre.

“Ha!” said Ernest, “Modeste Mignon; that is just what I have come to speak of.”

“Ah, bah!” cried Canalis; “have I had a triumph by proxy?”

“Yes; and here is the key to it. My friend, I am loved by the sweetest girl in all the world,—beautiful enough to shine beside the greatest beauties in Paris, with a heart and mind worthy of Clarissa. She has seen me; I have pleased her, and she thinks me the great Canalis. But that is not all. Modeste Mignon is of high birth, and Mongenod has just told me that her father, the Comte de La Bastie, has something like six millions. The father is here now, and I have asked him through Mongenod for an interview at two o’clock. Mongenod is to give him a hint, just a word, that it concerns the happiness of his daughter. But you will readily understand that before seeing the father I feel I ought to make a clean breast of it to you.”

“Among the plants whose flowers bloom in the sunshine of fame,” said Canalis, impressively, “there is one, and the most magnificent, which bears like the orange-tree a golden fruit amid the mingled perfumes of beauty and of mind; a lovely plant, a true tenderness, a perfect bliss, and—it eludes me.” Canalis looked at the carpet that Ernest might not read his eyes. “Could I,” he continued after a pause to regain his self-possession, “how could I have divined that flower from a pretty sheet of perfumed paper, that true heart, that young girl, that woman in whom love wears the livery of flattery, who loves us for ourselves, who offers us felicity? It needed but an angel or a demon to perceive her; and what am I but the ambitious head of a Court of Claims! Ah, my friend, fame makes us the target of a thousand arrows. One of us owes his rich marriage to an hydraulic piece of poetry, while I, more seductive, more a woman’s man than he, have missed mine,—for, do you love her, poor girl?” he said, looking up at La Briere.

“Oh!” ejaculated the young man.

“Well then,” said the poet, taking his secretary’s arm and leaning heavily upon it, “be happy, Ernest. By a mere accident I have been not ungrateful to you. You are richly rewarded for your devotion, and I will generously further your happiness.”

Canalis was furious; but he could not behave otherwise than with propriety, and he made the best of his disappointment by mounting it as a pedestal.

“Ah, Canalis, I have never really known you till this moment.”

“Did you expect to? It takes some time to go round the world,” replied the poet with his pompous irony.

“But think,” said La Briere, “of this enormous fortune.”

“Ah, my friend, is it not well invested in you?” cried Canalis, accompanying the words with a charming gesture.

“Melchior,” said La Briere, “I am yours for life and death.”

He wrung the poet’s hand and left him abruptly, for he was in haste to meet Monsieur Mignon.

CHAPTER XV. A FATHER STEPS IN

The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his daughter’s letter of Bettina’s death and of his wife’s infirmity, and Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to Modeste’s love affairs.

“Leave me to myself,” he said to his faithful friend.

As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on a sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears which suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,—tears soon dried, yet quick to start again,—the last dews of the human autumn.

“To have children, to have a wife, to adore them—what is it but to have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?” he cried, springing up with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. “To be a father is to give one’s self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I meet that D’Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!—one gives her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!—I will strangle him with my two hands,” he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious determination. “And what then? suppose my Modeste were to die of grief?”

He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles Mignon’s head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.

“Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to ask me for my daughter,” he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.

“You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as sombre as Othello’s. “My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during his term of office. On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the Court of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly succeed as chief—”

“And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?” asked the count.

“Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being loved by her. Hear me, monsieur,” cried Ernest, checking a violent movement on the part of the angry father. “I have the strangest confession to make to you, a shameful one for a man of honor; but the worst punishment of my conduct, natural enough in itself, is not the telling of it to you; no, I fear the daughter even more than the father.”

Ernest then related simply, and with the nobleness that comes of sincerity, all the facts of his little drama, not omitting the twenty or more letters, which he had brought with him, nor the interview which he had just had with Canalis. When Monsieur Mignon had finished reading the letters, the unfortunate lover, pale and suppliant, actually trembled under the fiery glance of the Provencal.

“Monsieur,” said the latter, “in this whole matter there is but one error, but that is cardinal. My daughter will not have six millions; at the utmost, she will have a marriage portion of two hundred thousand francs, and very doubtful expectations.”

“Ah, monsieur!” cried Ernest, rising and grasping Monsieur Mignon’s hand; “you take a load from my breast. Nothing can now hinder my happiness. I have friends, influence; I shall certainly be chief of the Court of Claims. Had Mademoiselle Mignon no more than ten thousand francs, if I had even to make a settlement on her, she should still be my wife; and to make her happy as you, monsieur, have made your wife happy, to be to you a real son (for I have no father), are the deepest desires of my heart.”

Charles Mignon stepped back three paces and fixed upon La Briere a look which entered the eyes of the young man as a dagger enters its sheath; he stood silent a moment, recognizing the absolute candor, the pure truthfulness of that open nature in the light of the young man’s inspired eyes. “Is fate at last weary of pursuing me?” he asked himself. “Am I to find in this young man the pearl of sons-in-law?” He walked up and down the room in strong agitation.

“Monsieur,” he said at last, “you are bound to submit wholly to the judgment which you have come here to seek, otherwise you are now playing a farce.”

“Oh, monsieur!”

“Listen to me,” said the father, nailing La Briere where he stood with a glance. “I shall be neither harsh, nor hard, nor unjust. You shall have the advantages and the disadvantages of the false position in which you have placed yourself. My daughter believes that she loves one of the great poets of the day, whose fame is really that which has attracted her. Well, I, her father, intend to give her the opportunity to choose between the celebrity which has been a beacon to her, and the poor reality which the irony of fate has flung at her feet. Ought she not to choose between Canalis and yourself? I rely upon your honor not to repeat what I have told you as to the state of my affairs. You may each come, I mean you and your friend the Baron de Canalis, to Havre for the last two weeks of October. My house will be open to both of you, and my daughter must have an opportunity to study you. You must yourself bring your rival, and not disabuse him as to the foolish tales he will hear about the wealth of the Comte de La Bastie. I go to Havre to-morrow, and I shall expect you three days later. Adieu, monsieur.”

Poor La Briere went back to Canalis with a dragging step. The poet, meantime, left to himself, had given way to a current of thought out of which had come that secondary impulse which Monsieur de Talleyrand valued so much. The first impulse is the voice of nature, the second that of society.

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

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

“Well, what’s the matter?” said Canalis.

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

“Poor boy!” cried the poet, laughing, “he’s a clever fellow, that father.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He knows your name.”

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

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

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

“Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You love him?” asked her father.

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

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

“Yes, inextinguishable.”

“Can nothing change it?”

“Nothing.”

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

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

“But suppose he had deceived you?”

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

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

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

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

“Father, don’t play tricks with my life,” exclaimed Modeste, turning pale.

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

Modeste looked at her father in stupid amazement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Deceived!” she said at last.

“Like your poor sister, but less fatally.”

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

“Then you don’t love him any longer?” asked her father.

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

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

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

“God forbid! I have told you the exact truth.”

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

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

“Oh!—you are going too far.”

“Canalis told him so.”

“Has Dumay seen Canalis?”

“Yes,” answered her father.

The two walked along in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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