Modeste Mignon

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV. A SIMPLE STORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good heavens!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But the dogs?” cried Dumay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V. THE PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI. A MAIDEN’S FIRST ROMANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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