Modeste Mignon

CHAPTER XXIV. THE POET FEELS THAT HE IS LOVED TOO WELL

An hour later, Modeste, charmingly equipped in a bottle-green cassimere habit, a small hat with a green veil, buckskin gloves, and velvet boots which met the lace frills of her drawers, and mounted on an elegantly caparisoned little horse, was exhibiting to her father and the Duc d’Herouville the beautiful present she had just received; she was evidently delighted with an attention of a kind that particularly flatters women.

“Did it come from you, Monsieur le duc?” she said, holding the sparkling handle toward him. “There was a card with it, saying, ‘Guess if you can,’ and some asterisks. Francoise and Dumay credit Butscha with this charming surprise; but my dear Butscha is not rich enough to buy such rubies. And as for papa (to whom I said, as I remember, on Sunday evening, that I had no whip), he sent to Rouen for this one,”—pointing to a whip in her father’s hand, with a top like a cone of turquoise, a fashion then in vogue which has since become vulgar.

“I would give ten years of my old age, mademoiselle, to have the right to offer you that beautiful jewel,” said the duke, courteously.

“Ah, here comes the audacious giver!” cried Modeste, as Canalis rode up. “It is only a poet who knows where to find such choice things. Monsieur,” she said to Melchior, “my father will scold you, and say that you justify those who accuse you of extravagance.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Canalis, with apparent simplicity, “so that is why La Briere rode at full gallop from Havre to Paris?”

“Does your secretary take such liberties?” said Modeste, turning pale, and throwing the whip to Francoise with an impetuosity that expressed scorn. “Give me your whip, papa.”

“Poor Ernest, who lies there on his bed half-dead with fatigue!” said Canalis, overtaking the girl, who had already started at a gallop. “You are pitiless, mademoiselle. ‘I have’ (the poor fellow said to me) ‘only this one chance to remain in her memory.’”

“And should you think well of a woman who could take presents from half the parish?” said Modeste.

She was surprised to receive no answer to this inquiry, and attributed the poet’s inattention to the noise of the horse’s feet.

“How you delight in tormenting those who love you,” said the duke. “Your nobility of soul and your pride are so inconsistent with your faults that I begin to suspect you calumniate yourself, and do those naughty things on purpose.”

“Ah! have you only just found that out, Monsieur le duc?” she exclaimed, laughing. “You have the sagacity of a husband.”

They rode half a mile in silence. Modeste was a good deal astonished not to receive the fire of the poet’s eyes. The evening before, as she was pointing out to him an admirable effect of setting sunlight across the water, she had said, remarking his inattention, “Well, don’t you see it?”—to which he replied, “I can see only your hand”; but now his admiration for the beauties of nature seemed a little too intense to be natural.

“Does Monsieur de La Briere know how to ride?” she asked, for the purpose of teasing him.

“Not very well, but he gets along,” answered the poet, cold as Gobenheim before the colonel’s return.

At a cross-road, which Monsieur Mignon made them take through a lovely valley to reach a height overlooking the Seine, Canalis let Modeste and the duke pass him, and then reined up to join the colonel.

“Monsieur le comte,” he said, “you are an open-hearted soldier, and I know you will regard my frankness as a title to your esteem. When proposals of marriage, with all their brutal,—or, if you please, too civilized—discussions, are carried on by third parties, it is an injury to all. We are both gentlemen, and both discreet; and you, like myself, have passed beyond the age of surprises. Let us therefore speak as intimates. I will set you the example. I am twenty-nine years old, without landed estates, and full of ambition. Mademoiselle Modeste, as you must have perceived, pleases me extremely. Now, in spite of the little defects which your dear girl likes to assume—”

“—not counting those she really possesses,” said the colonel, smiling,—

“—I should gladly make her my wife, and I believe I could render her happy. The question of money is of the utmost importance to my future, which hangs to-day in the balance. All young girls expect to be loved whether or no—fortune or no fortune. But you are not the man to marry your dear Modeste without a ‘dot,’ and my situation does not allow me to make a marriage of what is called love unless with a woman who has a fortune at least equal to mine. I have, from my emoluments and sinecures, from the Academy and from my works, about thirty thousand francs a year, a large income for a bachelor. If my wife brought me as much more, I should still be in about the same condition that I am now. Shall you give Mademoiselle a million?”

“Ah, monsieur, we have not reached that point as yet,” said the colonel, Jesuitically.

“Then suppose,” said Canalis, quickly, “that we go no further; we will let the matter drop. You shall have no cause to complain of me, Monsieur le comte; the world shall consider me among the unfortunate suitors of your charming daughter. Give me your word of honor to say nothing on the subject to any one, not even to Mademoiselle Modeste, because,” he added, throwing a word of promise to the ear, “my circumstances may so change that I can ask you for her without ‘dot.’”

“I promise you that,” said the colonel. “You know, monsieur, with what assurance the public, both in Paris and the provinces, talk of fortunes that they make and unmake. People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are. There is nothing sure and certain in business except investments in land. I am awaiting the accounts of my agents with very great impatience. The sale of my merchandise and my ship, and the settlement of my affairs in China, are not yet concluded; and I cannot know the full amount of my fortune for at least six months. I did, however, say to Monsieur de La Briere in Paris that I would guarantee a ‘dot’ of two hundred thousand francs in ready money. I wish to entail my estates, and enable my grandchildren to inherit my arms and title.”

Canalis did not listen to this statement after the opening sentence. The four riders, having now reached a wider road, went abreast and soon reached a stretch of table-land, from which the eye took in on one side the rich valley of the Seine toward Rouen, and on the other an horizon bounded only by the sea.

“Butscha was right, God is the greatest of all landscape painters,” said Canalis, contemplating the view, which is unique among the many fine scenes that have made the shores of the Seine so justly celebrated.

“Above all do we feel that, my dear baron,” said the duke, “on hunting-days, when nature has a voice, and a lively tumult breaks the silence; at such times the landscape, changing rapidly as we ride through it, seems really sublime.”

“The sun is the inexhaustible palette,” said Modeste, looking at the poet in a species of bewilderment.

A remark that she presently made on his absence of mind gave him an opportunity of saying that he was just then absorbed in his own thoughts,—an excuse that authors have more reason for giving than other men.

“Are we really made happy by carrying our lives into the midst of the world, and swelling them with all sorts of fictitious wants and over-excited vanities?” said Modeste, moved by the aspect of the fertile and billowy country to long for a philosophically tranquil life.

“That is a bucolic, mademoiselle, which is only written on tablets of gold,” said the poet.

“And sometimes under garret-roofs,” remarked the colonel.

Modeste threw a piercing glance at Canalis, which he was unable to sustain; she was conscious of a ringing in her ears, darkness seemed to spread before her, and then she suddenly exclaimed in icy tones:—

“Ah! it is Wednesday!”

“I do not say this to flatter your passing caprice, mademoiselle,” said the duke, to whom the little scene, so tragical for Modeste, had left time for thought; “but I declare I am so profoundly disgusted with the world and the Court and Paris that had I a Duchesse d’Herouville, gifted with the wit and graces of mademoiselle, I would gladly bind myself to live like a philosopher at my chateau, doing good around me, draining my marshes, educating my children—”

“That, Monsieur le duc, will be set to the account of your great goodness,” said Modeste, letting her eyes rest steadily on the noble gentleman. “You flatter me in not thinking me frivolous, and in believing that I have enough resources within myself to be able to live in solitude. It is perhaps my lot,” she added, glancing at Canalis, with an expression of pity.

“It is the lot of all insignificant fortunes,” said the poet. “Paris demands Babylonian splendor. Sometimes I ask myself how I have ever managed to keep it up.”

“The king does that for both of us,” said the duke, candidly; “we live on his Majesty’s bounty. If my family had not been allowed, after the death of Monsieur le Grand, as they call Cinq-Mars, to keep his office among us, we should have been obliged to sell Herouville to the Black Brethren. Ah, believe me, mademoiselle, it is a bitter humiliation to me to have to think of money in marrying.”

The simple honesty of this confession came from his heart, and the regret was so sincere that it touched Modeste.

“In these days,” said the poet, “no man in France, Monsieur le duc, is rich enough to marry a woman for herself, her personal worth, her grace, or her beauty—”

The colonel looked at Canalis with a curious eye, after first watching Modeste, whose face no longer expressed the slightest astonishment.

“For persons of high honor,” he said slowly, “it is a noble employment of wealth to repair the ravages of time and destiny, and restore the old historic families.”

“Yes, papa,” said Modeste, gravely.

The colonel invited the duke and Canalis to dine with him sociably in their riding-dress, promising them to make no change himself. When Modeste went to her room to make her toilette, she looked at the jewelled whip she had disdained in the morning.

“What workmanship they put into such things nowadays!” she said to Francoise Cochet, who had become her waiting-maid.

“That poor young man, mademoiselle, who has got a fever—”

“Who told you that?”

“Monsieur Butscha. He came here this afternoon and asked me to say to you that he hoped you would notice he had kept his word on the appointed day.”

Modeste came down into the salon dressed with royal simplicity.

“My dear father,” she said aloud, taking the colonel by the arm, “please go and ask after Monsieur de La Briere’s health, and take him back his present. You can say that my small means, as well as my natural tastes, forbid my wearing ornaments which are only fit for queens or courtesans. Besides, I can only accept gifts from a bridegroom. Beg him to keep the whip until you know whether you are rich enough to buy it back.”

“My little girl has plenty of good sense,” said the colonel, kissing his daughter on the forehead.

Canalis took advantage of a conversation which began between the duke and Madame Mignon to escape to the terrace, where Modeste joined him, influenced by curiosity, though the poet believed her desire to become Madame de Canalis had brought her there. Rather alarmed at the indecency with which he had just executed what soldiers call a “volte-face,” and which, according to the laws of ambition, every man in his position would have executed quite as brutally, he now endeavored, as the unfortunate Modeste approached him, to find plausible excuses for his conduct.

“Dear Modeste,” he began, in a coaxing tone, “considering the terms on which we stand to each other, shall I displease you if I say that your replies to the Duc d’Herouville were very painful to a man in love,—above all, to a poet whose soul is feminine, nervous, full of the jealousies of true passion. I should make a poor diplomatist indeed if I had not perceived that your first coquetries, your little premeditated inconsistencies, were only assumed for the purpose of studying our characters—”

Modeste raised her head with the rapid, intelligent, half-coquettish motion of a wild animal, in whom instinct produces such miracles of grace.

“—and therefore when I returned home and thought them over, they never misled me. I only marvelled at a cleverness so in harmony with your character and your countenance. Do not be uneasy, I never doubted that your assumed duplicity covered an angelic candor. No, your mind, your education, have in no way lessened the precious innocence which we demand in a wife. You are indeed a wife for a poet, a diplomatist, a thinker, a man destined to endure the chances and changes of life; and my admiration is equalled only by the attachment I feel to you. I now entreat you—if yesterday you were not playing a little comedy when you accepted the love of a man whose vanity will change to pride if you accept him, one whose defects will become virtues under your divine influence—I entreat you do not excite a passion which, in him, amounts to vice. Jealousy is a noxious element in my soul, and you have revealed to me its strength; it is awful, it destroys everything—Oh! I do not mean the jealousy of an Othello,” he continued, noticing Modeste’s gesture. “No, no; my thoughts were of myself: I have been so indulged on that point. You know the affection to which I owe all the happiness I have ever enjoyed,—very little at the best” (he sadly shook his head). “Love is symbolized among all nations as a child, because it fancies the world belongs to it, and it cannot conceive otherwise. Well, Nature herself set the limit to that sentiment. It was still-born. A tender, maternal soul guessed and calmed the painful constriction of my heart,—for a woman who feels, who knows, that she is past the joys of love becomes angelic in her treatment of others. The duchess has never made me suffer in my sensibilities. For ten years not a word, not a look, that could wound me! I attach more value to words, to thoughts, to looks, than ordinary men. If a look is to me a treasure beyond all price, the slightest doubt is deadly poison; it acts instantaneously, my love dies. I believe—contrary to the mass of men, who delight in trembling, hoping, expecting—that love can only exist in perfect, infantile, and infinite security. The exquisite purgatory, where women delight to send us by their coquetry, is a base happiness to which I will not submit: to me, love is either heaven or hell. If it is hell, I will have none of it. I feel an affinity with the azure skies of Paradise within my soul. I can give myself without reserve, without secrets, doubts or deceptions, in the life to come; and I demand reciprocity. Perhaps I offend you by these doubts. Remember, however, that I am only talking of myself—”

“—a good deal, but never too much,” said Modeste, offended in every hole and corner of her pride by this discourse, in which the Duchesse de Chaulieu served as a dagger. “I am so accustomed to admire you, my dear poet.”

“Well, then, can you promise me the same canine fidelity which I offer to you? Is it not beautiful? Is it not just what you have longed for?”

“But why, dear poet, do you not marry a deaf-mute, and one who is also something of an idiot? I ask nothing better than to please my husband. But you threaten to take away from a girl the very happiness you so kindly arrange for her; you are tearing away every gesture, every word, every look; you cut the wings of your bird, and then expect it to hover about you. I know poets are accused of inconsistency—oh! very unjustly,” she added, as Canalis made a gesture of denial; “that alleged defect which comes from the brilliant activity of their minds which commonplace people cannot take into account. I do not believe, however, that a man of genius can invent such irreconcilable conditions and call his invention life. You are requiring the impossible solely for the pleasure of putting me in the wrong,—like the enchanters in fairy-tales, who set tasks to persecuted young girls whom the good fairies come and deliver.”

“In this case the good fairy would be true love,” said Canalis in a curt tone, aware that his elaborate excuse for a rupture was seen through by the keen and delicate mind which Butscha had piloted so well.

“My dear poet, you remind me of those fathers who inquire into a girl’s ‘dot’ before they are willing to name that of their son. You are quarrelling with me without knowing whether you have the slightest right to do so. Love is not gained by such dry arguments as yours. The poor duke on the contrary abandons himself to it like my Uncle Toby; with this difference, that I am not the Widow Wadman,—though widow indeed of many illusions as to poetry at the present moment. Ah, yes, we young girls will not believe in anything that disturbs our world of fancy! I was warned of all this beforehand. My dear poet, you are attempting to get up a quarrel which is unworthy of you. I no longer recognize the Melchior of yesterday.”

“Because Melchior has discovered a spirit of ambition in you which—”

Modeste looked at him from head to foot with an imperial eye.

“But I shall be peer of France and ambassador as well as he,” added Canalis.

“Do you take me for a bourgeois,” she said, beginning to mount the steps of the portico; but she instantly turned back and added, “That is less impertinent than to take me for a fool. The change in your conduct comes from certain silly rumors which you have heard in Havre, and which my maid Francoise has repeated to me.”

“Ah, Modeste, how can you think it?” said Canalis, striking a dramatic attitude. “Do you think me capable of marrying you only for your money?”

“If I do you that wrong after your edifying remarks on the banks of the Seine can you easily undeceive me,” she said, annihilating him with her scorn.

“Ah!” thought the poet, as he followed her into the house, “if you think, my little girl, that I’m to be caught in that net, you take me to be younger than I am. Dear, dear, what a fuss about an artful little thing whose esteem I value about as much as that of the king of Borneo. But she has given me a good reason for the rupture by accusing me of such unworthy sentiments. Isn’t she sly? La Briere will get a burden on his back—idiot that he is! And five years hence it will be a good joke to see them together.”

The coldness which this altercation produced between Modeste and Canalis was visible to all eyes that evening. The poet went off early, on the ground of La Briere’s illness, leaving the field to the grand equerry. About eleven o’clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste’s ear, “Was I right?”

“Alas, yes,” she said.

“But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come back; we agreed upon that, you know.”

“Anger got the better of me,” said Modeste. “Such meanness sent the blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him.”

“Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can’t speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself.”

“Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a man of intellect.”

“Your father’s eight millions are more to him than all that.”

“Eight millions!” exclaimed Modeste.

“My master, who has sold his practice, is going to Provence to attend to the purchase of lands which your father’s agent has suggested to him. The sum that is to be paid for the estate of La Bastie is four millions; your father has agreed to it. You are to have a ‘dot’ of two millions and another million for an establishment in Paris, a hotel and furniture. Now, count up.”

“Ah! then I can be Duchesse d’Herouville!” cried Modeste, glancing at Butscha.

“If it hadn’t been for that comedian of a Canalis you would have kept HIS whip, thinking it came from me,” said the dwarf, indirectly pleading La Briere’s cause.

“Monsieur Butscha, may I ask if I am to marry to please you?” said Modeste, laughing.

“That fine fellow loves you as well as I do,—and you loved him for eight days,” retorted Butscha; “and HE has got a heart.”

“Can he compete, pray, with an office under the Crown? There are but six, grand almoner, chancellor, grand chamberlain, grand master, high constable, grand admiral,—but they don’t appoint high constables any longer.”

“In six months, mademoiselle, the masses—who are made up of wicked Butschas—could send all those grand dignities to the winds. Besides, what signifies nobility in these days? There are not a thousand real noblemen in France. The d’Herouvilles are descended from a tipstaff in the time of Robert of Normandy. You will have to put up with many a vexation from the old aunt with the furrowed face. Look here,—as you are so anxious for the title of duchess,—you belong to the Comtat, and the Pope will certainly think as much of you as he does of all those merchants down there; he’ll sell you a duchy with some name ending in ‘ia’ or ‘agno.’ Don’t play away your happiness for an office under the Crown.”

CHAPTER XXV. A DIPLOMATIC LETTER

The poet’s reflections during the night were thoroughly matter of fact. He sincerely saw nothing worse in life than the situation of a married man without money. Still trembling at the danger he had been led into by his vanity, his desire to get the better of the duke, and his belief in the Mignon millions, he began to ask himself what the duchess must be thinking of his stay in Havre, aggravated by the fact that he had not written to her for fourteen days, whereas in Paris they exchanged four or five letters a week.

“And that poor woman is working hard to get me appointed commander of the Legion and ambassador to the Court of Baden!” he cried.

Thereupon, with that promptitude of decision which results—in poets as well as in speculators—from a lively intuition of the future, he sat down and composed the following letter:—

The concluding idea served as a text for two pages of reminiscences and aspirations a little too confidential for publication.

The evening before the day on which Canalis put the above epistle into the post, Butscha, under the name of Jean Jacmin, had received a letter from his fictitious cousin, Philoxene, and had mailed his answer, which thus preceded the letter of the poet by about twelve hours. Terribly anxious for the last two weeks, and wounded by Melchior’s silence, the duchess herself dictated Philoxene’s letter to her cousin, and the moment she had read the answer, rather too explicit for her quinquagenary vanity, she sent for the banker and made close inquiries as to the exact fortune of Monsieur Mignon. Finding herself betrayed and abandoned for the millions, Eleonore gave way to a paroxysm of anger, hatred, and cold vindictiveness. Philoxene knocked at the door of the sumptuous room, and entering found her mistress with her eyes full of tears,—so unprecedented a phenomenon in the fifteen years she had waited upon her that the woman stopped short stupefied.

“We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes,” she heard the duchess say.

“A letter from Havre, madame.”

Eleonore read the poet’s prose without noticing the presence of Philoxene, whose amazement became still greater when she saw the dawn of fresh serenity on the duchess’s face as she read further and further into the letter. Hold out a pole no thicker than a walking-stick to a drowning man, and he will think it a high-road of safety. The happy Eleonore believed in Canalis’s good faith when she had read through the four pages in which love and business, falsehood and truth, jostled each other. She who, a few moments earlier, had sent for her husband to prevent Melchior’s appointment while there was still time, was now seized with a spirit of generosity that amounted almost to the sublime.

“Poor fellow!” she thought; “he has not had one faithless thought; he loves me as he did on the first day; he tells me all—Philoxene!” she cried, noticing her maid, who was standing near and pretending to arrange the toilet-table.

“Madame la duchesse?”

“A mirror, child!”

Eleonore looked at herself, saw the fine razor-like lines traced on her brow, which disappeared at a little distance; she sighed, and in that sigh she felt she bade adieu to love. A brave thought came into her mind, a manly thought, outside of all the pettiness of women,—a thought which intoxicates for a moment, and which explains, perhaps, the clemency of the Semiramis of Russia when she married her young and beautiful rival to Momonoff.

“Since he has not been faithless, he shall have the girl and her millions,” she thought,—“provided Mademoiselle Mignon is as ugly as he says she is.”

Three raps, circumspectly given, announced the duke, and his wife went herself to the door to let him in.

“Ah! I see you are better, my dear,” he cried, with the counterfeit joy that courtiers assume so readily, and by which fools are so readily taken in.

“My dear Henri,” she answered, “why is it you have not yet obtained that appointment for Melchior,—you who sacrificed so much to the king in taking a ministry which you knew could only last one year.”

The duke glanced at Philoxene, who showed him by an almost imperceptible sign the letter from Havre on the dressing-table.

“You would be terribly bored at Baden and come back at daggers drawn with Melchior,” said the duke.

“Pray why?”

“Why, you would always be together,” said the former diplomat, with comic good-humor.

“Oh, no,” she said; “I am going to marry him.”

“If we can believe d’Herouville, our dear Canalis stands in no need of your help in that direction,” said the duke, smiling. “Yesterday Grandlieu read me some passages from a letter the grand equerry had written him. No doubt they were dictated by the aunt for the express purpose of their reaching you, for Mademoiselle d’Herouville, always on the scent of a ‘dot,’ knows that Grandlieu and I play whist nearly every evening. That good little d’Herouville wants the Prince de Cadignan to go down and give a royal hunt in Normandy, and endeavor to persuade the king to be present, so as to turn the head of the damozel when she sees herself the object of such a grand affair. In short, two words from Charles X. would settle the matter. D’Herouville says the girl has incomparable beauty—”

“Henri, let us go to Havre!” cried the duchess, interrupting him.

“Under what pretext?” said her husband, gravely; he was one of the confidants of Louis XVIII.

“I never saw a hunt.”

“It would be all very well if the king went; but it is a terrible bore to go so far, and he will not do it; I have just been speaking with him about it.”

“Perhaps Madame would go?”

“That would be better,” returned the duke, “I dare say the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse would help you to persuade her from Rosny. If she goes the king will not be displeased at the use of his hunting equipage. Don’t go to Havre, my dear,” added the duke, paternally, “that would be giving yourself away. Come, here’s a better plan, I think. Gaspard’s chateau of Rosembray is on the other side of the forest of Brotonne; why not give him a hint to invite the whole party?”

“He invite them?” said Eleonore.

“I mean, of course, the duchess; she is always engaged in pious works with Mademoiselle d’Herouville; give that old maid a hint, and get her to speak to Gaspard.”

“You are a love of a man,” cried Eleonore; “I’ll write to the old maid and to Diane at once, for we must get hunting things made,—a riding hat is so becoming. Did you win last night at the English embassy?”

“Yes,” said the duke; “I cleared myself.”

“Henri, above all things, stop proceedings about Melchior’s two appointments.”

After writing half a dozen lines to the beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse, and a short hint to Mademoiselle d’Herouville, Eleonore sent the following answer like the lash of a whip through the poet’s lies.

“There, Ernest, just look at that!” cried Canalis, tossing the letter at Ernest’s nose across the breakfast-table; “that’s the two thousandth love-letter I have had from that woman, and there isn’t even a ‘thou’ in it. The illustrious Eleonore has never compromised herself more than she does there. Marry, and try your luck! The worst marriage in the world is better than this sort of halter. Ah, I am the greatest Nicodemus that ever tumbled out of the moon! Modeste has millions, and I’ve lost her; for we can’t get back from the poles, where we are to-day, to the tropics, where we were three days ago! Well, I am all the more anxious for your triumph over the grand equerry, because I told the duchess I came here only for your sake; and so I shall do my best for you.”

“Alas, Melchior, Modeste must needs have so noble, so grand, so well-balanced a nature to resist the glories of the Court, and all these splendors cleverly displayed for her honor and glory by the duke, that I cannot believe in the existence of such perfection,—and yet, if she is still the Modeste of her letters, there might be hope!”

“Well, well, you are a happy fellow, you young Boniface, to see the world and your mistress through green spectacles!” cried Canalis, marching off to pace up and down the garden.

Caught between two lies, the poet was at a loss what to do.

“Play by rule, and you lose!” he cried presently, sitting down in the kiosk. “Every man of sense would have acted as I did four days ago, and got himself out of the net in which I saw myself. At such times people don’t disentangle nets, they break through them! Come, let us be calm, cold, dignified, affronted. Honor requires it; English stiffness is the only way to win her back. After all, if I have to retire finally, I can always fall back on my old happiness; a fidelity of ten years can’t go unrewarded. Eleonore will arrange me some good marriage.”

CHAPTER XXVI. TRUE LOVE

The hunt was destined to be not only a meet of the hounds, but a meeting of all the passions excited by the colonel’s millions and Modeste’s beauty; and while it was in prospect there was truce between the adversaries. During the days required for the arrangement of this forestrial solemnity, the salon of the villa Mignon presented the tranquil picture of a united family. Canalis, cut short in his role of injured love by Modeste’s quick perceptions, wished to appear courteous; he laid aside his pretensions, gave no further specimens of his oratory, and became, what all men of intellect can be when they renounce affectation, perfectly charming. He talked finances with Gobenheim, and war with the colonel, Germany with Madame Mignon, and housekeeping with Madame Latournelle,—endeavoring to bias them all in favor of La Briere. The Duc d’Herouville left the field to his rivals, for he was obliged to go to Rosembray to consult with the Duc de Verneuil, and see that the orders of the Royal Huntsman, the Prince de Cadignan, were carried out. And yet the comic element was not altogether wanting. Modeste found herself between the depreciatory hints of Canalis as to the gallantry of the grand equerry, and the exaggerations of the two Mesdemoiselles d’Herouville, who passed every evening at the villa. Canalis made Modeste take notice that, instead of being the heroine of the hunt, she would be scarcely noticed. Madame would be attended by the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, daughter-in-law of the Prince de Cadignan, by the Duchesse de Chaulieu, and other great ladies of the Court, among whom she could produce no sensation; no doubt the officers in garrison at Rouen would be invited, etc. Helene, on the other hand, was incessantly telling her new friend, whom she already looked upon as a sister-in-law, that she was to be presented to Madame; undoubtedly the Duc de Verneuil would invite her father and herself to stay at Rosembray; if the colonel wished to obtain a favor of the king,—a peerage, for instance,—the opportunity was unique, for there was hope of the king himself being present on the third day; she would be delighted with the charming welcome with which the beauties of the Court, the Duchesses de Chaulieu, de Maufrigneuse, de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and other ladies, were prepared to meet her. It was in fact an excessively amusing little warfare, with its marches and countermarches and stratagems,—all of which were keenly enjoyed by the Dumays, the Latournelles, Gobenheim, and Butscha, who, in conclave assembled, said horrible things of these noble personages, cruelly noting and intelligently studying all their little meannesses.

The promises on the d’Herouville side were, however, confirmed by the arrival of an invitation, couched in flattering terms, from the Duc de Verneuil and the Master of the Hunt to Monsieur le Comte de La Bastie and his daughter, to stay at Rosembray and be present at a grand hunt on the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, of November following.

La Briere, full of dark presentiments, craved the presence of Modeste with an eagerness whose bitter joys are known only to lovers who feel that they are parted, and parted fatally from those they love. Flashes of joy came to him intermingled with melancholy meditations on the one theme, “I have lost her,” and made him all the more interesting to those who watched him, because his face and his whole person were in keeping with his profound feeling. There is nothing more poetic than a living elegy, animated by a pair of eyes, walking about, and sighing without rhymes.

The Duc d’Herouville arrived at last to arrange for Modeste’s departure; after crossing the Seine she was to be conveyed in the duke’s caleche, accompanied by the Demoiselles d’Herouville. The duke was charmingly courteous, he begged Canalis and La Briere to be of the party, assuring them, as he did the colonel, that he had taken particular care that hunters should be provided for them. The colonel invited the three lovers to breakfast on the morning of the start. Canalis then began to put into execution a plan that he had been maturing in his own mind for the last few days; namely, to quietly reconquer Modeste, and throw over the duchess, La Briere, and the duke. A graduate of diplomacy could hardly remain stuck in the position in which he found himself. On the other hand La Briere had come to the resolution of bidding Modeste an eternal farewell. Each suitor was therefore on the watch to slip in a last word, like the defendant’s counsel to the court before judgment is pronounced; for all felt that the three weeks’ struggle was approaching its conclusion. After dinner on the evening before the start was to be made, the colonel had taken his daughter by the arm and made her feel the necessity of deciding.

“Our position with the d’Herouville family will be quite intolerable at Rosembray,” he said to her. “Do you mean to be a duchess?”

“No, father,” she answered.

“Then do you love Canalis?”

“No, papa, a thousand times no!” she exclaimed with the impatience of a child.

The colonel looked at her with a sort of joy.

“Ah, I have not influenced you,” cried the true father, “and I will now confess that I chose my son-in-law in Paris when, having made him believe that I had but little fortune, he grasped my hand and told me I took a weight from his mind—”

“Who is it you mean?” asked Modeste, coloring.

“The man of fixed principles and sound moralities,” said her father, slyly, repeating the words which had dissolved poor Modeste’s dream on the day after his return.

“I was not even thinking of him, papa. Please leave me at liberty to refuse the duke myself; I understand him, and I know how to soothe him.”

“Then your choice is not made?”

“Not yet; there is another syllable or two in the charade of my destiny still to be guessed; but after I have had a glimpse of court life at Rosembray I will tell you my secret.”

“Ah! Monsieur de La Briere,” cried the colonel, as the young man approached them along the garden path in which they were walking, “I hope you are going to this hunt?”

“No, colonel,” answered Ernest. “I have come to take leave of you and of mademoiselle; I return to Paris—”

“You have no curiosity,” said Modeste, interrupting, and looking at him.

“A wish—that I cannot expect—would suffice to keep me,” he replied.

“If that is all, you must stay to please me; I wish it,” said the colonel, going forward to meet Canalis, and leaving his daughter and La Briere together for a moment.

“Mademoiselle,” said the young man, raising his eyes to hers with the boldness of a man without hope, “I have an entreaty to make to you.”

“To me?”

“Let me carry away with me your forgiveness. My life can never be happy; it must be full of remorse for having lost my happiness—no doubt by my own fault; but, at least,—”

“Before we part forever,” said Modeste, interrupting a la Canalis, and speaking in a voice of some emotion, “I wish to ask you one thing; and though you once disguised yourself, I think you cannot be so base as to deceive me now.”

The taunt made him turn pale, and he cried out, “Oh, you are pitiless!”

“Will you be frank?”

“You have the right to ask me that degrading question,” he said, in a voice weakened by the violent palpitation of his heart.

“Well, then, did you read my letters to Monsieur de Canalis?”

“No, mademoiselle; and I allowed your father to read them it was to justify my love by showing him how it was born, and how sincere my efforts were to cure you of your fancy.”

“But how came the idea of that unworthy masquerade ever to arise?” she said, with a sort of impatience.

La Briere related truthfully the scene in the poet’s study which Modeste’s first letter had occasioned, and the sort of challenge that resulted from his expressing a favorable opinion of a young girl thus led toward a poet’s fame, as a plant seeks its share of the sun.

“You have said enough,” said Modeste, restraining some emotion. “If you have not my heart, monsieur, you have at least my esteem.”

These simple words gave the young man a violent shock; feeling himself stagger, he leaned against a tree, like a man deprived for a moment of reason. Modest, who had left him, turned her head and came hastily back.

“What is the matter?” she asked, taking his hand to prevent him from falling.

“Forgive me—I thought you despised me.”

“But,” she answered, with a distant and disdainful manner, “I did not say that I loved you.”

And she left him again. But this time, in spite of her harshness, La Briere thought he walked on air; the earth softened under his feet, the trees bore flowers; the skies were rosy, the air cerulean, as they are in the temples of Hymen in those fairy pantomimes which finish happily. In such situations every woman is a Janus, and sees behind her without turning round; and thus Modeste perceived on the face of her lover the indubitable symptoms of a love like Butscha’s,—surely the “ne plus ultra” of a woman’s hope. Moreover, the great value which La Briere attached to her opinion filled Modeste with an emotion that was inestimably sweet.

“Mademoiselle,” said Canalis, leaving the colonel and waylaying Modeste, “in spite of the little value you attach to my sentiments, my honor is concerned in effacing a stain under which I have suffered too long. Here is a letter which I received from the Duchesse de Chaulieu five days after my arrival in Havre.”

He let Modeste read the first lines of the letter we have seen, which the duchess began by saying that she had seen Mongenod, and now wished to marry her poet to Modeste; then he tore that passage from the body of the letter, and placed the fragment in her hand.

“I cannot let you read the rest,” he said, putting the paper in his pocket; “but I confide these few lines to your discretion, so that you may verify the writing. A young girl who could accuse me of ignoble sentiments is quite capable of suspecting some collusion, some trickery. Ah, Modeste,” he said, with tears in his voice, “your poet, the poet of Madame de Chaulieu, has no less poetry in his heart than in his mind. You are about to see the duchess; suspend your judgment of me till then.”

He left Modeste half bewildered.

“Oh, dear!” she said to herself; “it seems they are all angels—and not marriageable; the duke is the only one that belongs to humanity.”

“Mademoiselle Modeste,” said Butscha, appearing with a parcel under his arm, “this hunt makes me very uneasy. I dreamed your horse ran away with you, and I have been to Rouen to see if I could get a Spanish bit which, they tell me, a horse can’t take between his teeth. I entreat you to use it. I have shown it to the colonel, and he has thanked me more than there is any occasion for.”

“Poor, dear Butscha!” cried Modeste, moved to tears by this maternal care.

Butscha went skipping off like a man who has just heard of the death of a rich uncle.

“My dear father,” said Modeste, returning to the salon; “I should like to have that beautiful whip,—suppose you were to ask Monsieur de La Briere to exchange it for your picture by Van Ostade.”

Modeste looked furtively at Ernest, while the colonel made him this proposition, standing before the picture which was the sole thing he possessed in memory of his campaigns, having bought it of a burgher at Rabiston; and she said to herself as La Briere left the room precipitately, “He will be at the hunt.”

A curious thing happened. Modeste’s three lovers each and all went to Rosembray with their hearts full of hope, and captivated by her many perfections.

Rosembray,—an estate lately purchased by the Duc de Verneuil, with the money which fell to him as his share of the thousand millions voted as indemnity for the sale of the lands of the emigres,—is remarkable for its chateau, whose magnificence compares only with that of Mesniere or of Balleroy. This imposing and noble edifice is approached by a wide avenue of four rows of venerable elms, from which the visitor enters an immense rising court-yard, like that at Versailles, with magnificent iron railings and two lodges, and adorned with rows of large orange-trees in their tubs. Facing this court-yard, the chateau presents, between two fronts of the main building which retreat on either side of this projection, a double row of nineteen tall windows, with carved arches and diamond panes, divided from each other by a series of fluted pilasters surmounted by an entablature which hides an Italian roof, from which rise several stone chimneys masked by carved trophies of arms. Rosembray was built, under Louis XIV., by a “fermier-general” named Cottin. The facade toward the park differs from that on the court-yard by having a narrower projection in the centre, with columns between five windows, above which rises a magnificent pediment. The family of Marigny, to whom the estates of this Cottin were brought in marriage by Mademoiselle Cottin, her father’s sole heiress, ordered a sunrise to be carved on this pediment by Coysevox. Beneath it are two angels unwinding a scroll, on which is cut this motto in honor of the Grand Monarch, “Sol nobis benignus.”

From the portico, reached by two grand circular and balustraded flights of steps, the view extends over an immense fish-pond, as long and wide as the grand canal at Versailles, beginning at the foot of a grass-plot which compares well with the finest English lawns, and bordered with beds and baskets now filled with the brilliant flowers of autumn. On either side of the piece of water two gardens, laid out in the French style, display their squares and long straight paths, like brilliant pages written in the ciphers of Lenotre. These gardens are backed to their whole length by a border of nearly thirty acres of woodland. From the terrace the view is bounded by a forest belonging to Rosembray and contiguous to two other forests, one of which belongs to the Crown, the other to the State. It would be difficult to find a nobler landscape.