alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too
  much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it,
  tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII. BLADE TO BLADE

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

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

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

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

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

Your humble servant, O. d'Este M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six days later, Modeste received the following letter:

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

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

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

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

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

  Your servant,       O. d'Este M.

"The little mischief! how she abuses her privileges," cried La Briere;
"but isn't she frank!"

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

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

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

"Yes, mademoiselle, I have one."

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

"That?" said the man, nodding to the villa.

"Yes, my friend."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX. THE POWER OF THE UNSEEN

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O. d'Este M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER X. THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS

  To Monsieur de Canalis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Your handmaiden,

  O. d'Este M.

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

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

  Your Friend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O. d'Este M.

CHAPTER XI. WHAT COMES OF CORRESPONDENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why did you leave me?" demanded Madame Mignon.

"You made me cry, mamma," answered Modeste.

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

"No, my dear mamma," said the little Jesuit.

"Can you swear it?"

"Oh, yes!" cried Modeste.

Madame Mignon said no more; but she still doubted.

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

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

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

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

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

  To Monsieur Jean Dumay:

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

  I told you that no new was to be good news. But the first words of
  this letter ought to make you a happy man. I have made seven
  millions at the least. I am bringing back a large part of it in
  indigo, one third in safe London securities, and another third in
  good solid gold. Your remittances helped me to make the sum I had
  settled in my own mind much sooner than I expected. I wanted two
  millions for my daughters and a competence for myself.

  I have been engaged in the opium trade with the largest houses in
  Canton, all ten times richer than ever I was. You have no idea, in
  Europe, what these rich East India merchants are. I went to Asia
  Minor and purchased opium at low prices, and from thence to Canton
  where I delivered my cargoes to the companies who control the
  trade. My last expedition was to the Philippine Islands where I
  exchanged opium for indigo of the first quality. In fact, I may
  have half a million more than I stated, for I reckoned the indigo
  at what it cost me. I have always been well in health; not the
  slightest illness. That is the result of working for one's
  children. Since the second year I have owned a pretty little brig
  of seven hundred tons, called the "Mignon." She is built of oak,
  double-planked, and copper-fastened; and all the interior fittings
  were done to suit me. She is, in fact, an additional piece of
  property.

  A sea-life and the active habits required by my business have kept
  me in good health. To tell you all this is the same as telling it
  to my two daughters and my dear wife. I trust that the wretched
  man who took away my Bettina deserted her when he heard of my
  ruin; and that I shall find the poor lost lamb at the Chalet. My
  three dear women and my Dumay! All four of you have been ever
  present in my thoughts for the last three years. You are a rich
  man, now, Dumay. Your share, outside of my own fortune, amounts to
  five hundred and sixty thousand francs, for which I send you
  herewith a check, which can only be paid to you in person by the
  Mongenods, who have been duly advised from New York.

  A few short months, and I shall see you all again, and all well, I
  trust. My dear Dumay, if I write this letter to you it is because
  I am anxious to keep my fortune a secret for the present. I
  therefore leave to you the happiness of preparing my dear angels
  for my return. I have had enough of commerce; and I am resolved to
  leave Havre. My intention is to buy back the estate of La Bastie,
  and to entail it, so as to establish an estate yielding at least a
  hundred thousand francs a year, and then to ask the king to grant
  that one of my sons-in-law may succeed to my name and title. You
  know, my poor Dumay, what a terrible misfortune overtook us
  through the fatal reputation of a large fortune,--my daughter's
  honor was lost. I have therefore resolved that the amount of my
  present fortune shall not be known. I shall not disembark at
  Havre, but at Marseilles. I shall sell my indigo, and negotiate
  for the purchase of La Bastie through the house of Mongenod in
  Paris. I shall put my funds in the Bank of France and return to
  the Chalet giving out that I have a considerable fortune in
  merchandise. My daughters will be supposed to have two or three
  hundred thousand francs. To choose which of my sons-in-law is
  worthy to succeed to my title and estates and to live with us, is
  now the object of my life; but both of them must be, like you and
  me, honest, loyal, and firm men, and absolutely honorable.

  My dear old fellow, I have never doubted you for a moment. We have
  gone through wars and commerce together and now we will undertake
  agriculture; you shall be my bailiff. You will like that, will you
  not? And so, old friend, I leave it to your discretion to tell
  what you think best to my wife and daughters; I rely upon your
  prudence. In four years great changes may have taken place in
  their characters.

  Adieu, my old Dumay. Say to my daughters and to my wife that I
  have never failed to kiss them in my thoughts morning and evening
  since I left them. The second check for forty thousand francs
  herewith enclosed is for my wife and children.

  Till we meet.--Your colonel and friend,

  Charles Mignon.

"Your father is coming," said Madame Mignon to her daughter.

"What makes you think so, mamma?" asked Modeste.

"Nothing else could make Dumay hurry himself."

"Victory! victory!" cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the
garden gate. "Madame, the colonel has not been ill a moment; he is
coming back--coming back on the 'Mignon,' a fine ship of his own, which
together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine hundred
thousand francs. But he requires secrecy from all of us; his heart is
still wrung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl."

"He has still to learn her death," said Madame Mignon.

"He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right, to the rapacity of
young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the lost
sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to any
one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle," he
whispered in Modeste's ear, "write to your father and tell him of his
loss and also the terrible results on your mother's health and eyesight;
prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to get the
letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will have to pass
through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter; you have plenty of
time. I will take the letter on Monday; Monday I shall probably go to
Paris."

Modeste was so afraid that Canalis and Dumay would meet that she started
hastily for the house to write to her poet and put off the rendezvous.

"Mademoiselle," said Dumay, in a very humble manner and barring
Modeste's way, "may your father find his daughter with no other feelings
in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother before he was
obliged to leave her."

"I have sworn to myself, to my sister, and to my mother to be the
joy, the consolation, and the glory of my father, and _I shall keep my
oath_!" replied Modeste with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumay.
"Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father's return
with insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl's heart from
beating--you don't want me to be a mummy, do you?" she said. "My hand
belongs to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my
father and my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, monsieur?"

"Thank you, mademoiselle; you restore me to life," said Dumay, "but you
might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!"

"Swear to me," said her mother, "that you have not engaged a word or a
look with any young man."

"I can swear that, my dear mother," said Modeste, laughing, and looking
at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a mischievous
girl.

"She must be false indeed if you are right," cried Dumay, when Modeste
had left them and gone into the house.

"My daughter Modeste may have faults," said her mother, "but falsehood
is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true."

"Well! then let us feel easy," continued Dumay, "and believe that
misfortune has closed his account with us."

"God grant it!" answered Madame Mignon. "You will see _him_, Dumay; but
I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy."

CHAPTER XII. A DECLARATION OF LOVE,--SET TO MUSIC

At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father,
was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing
her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much larger
fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her new-found
ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the six millions
she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated by her two joys
and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she seated herself at
the piano, that confidant of so many young girls, who tell out their
wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing them by the notes and
tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his wife in the garden
under the windows, telling her the secret of their own wealth, and
questioning her as to her desires and her intentions. Madame Dumay had,
like her husband, no other family than the Mignons. Husband and wife
agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the Comte de La Bastie
really meant to live in Provence, and to leave their money to whichever
of Modeste's children might need it most.

"Listen to Modeste," said Madame Mignon, addressing them. "None but a
girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music."

Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant
lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a
maiden's love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming
acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently eat
through the globe, if nothing stops it.

Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting to
music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here--albeit
they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had
mentioned--because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the
inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste
had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the
admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too precise,
of his measures.

  THE MAIDEN'S SONG

  Hear, arise! the lark is shaking
    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
  Sleep no more; the violet, waking,
    Wafts her incense to the skies.

  Flowers revived, their eyes unclosing,
    See themselves in drops of dew
  In each calyx-cup reposing,
    Pearls of a day their mirror true.

  Breeze divine, the god of roses,
    Passed by night to bless their bloom;
  See! for him each bud uncloses,
    Glows, and yields its rich perfume.

  Then arise! the lark is shaking
    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
  Nought is sleeping--Heart, awaking,
    Lift thine incense to the skies.

"It is very pretty," said Madame Dumay. "Modeste is a musician, and
that's the whole of it."

"The devil is in her!" cried the cashier, into whose heart the suspicion
of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.

"She loves," persisted Madame Mignon.

By succeeding, through the undeniable testimony of the song, in making
the cashier a sharer in her belief as to the state of Modeste's heart,
Madame Mignon destroyed the happiness the return and the prosperity of
his master had brought him. The poor Breton went down the hill to Havre
and to his desk in Gobenheim's counting-room with a heavy heart; then,
before returning to dinner, he went to see Latournelle, to tell his
fears, and beg once more for the notary's advice and assistance.

"Yes, my dear friend," said Dumay, when they parted on the steps of the
notary's door, "I now agree with madame; she loves,--yes, I am sure of
it; and the devil knows the rest. I am dishonored."

"Don't make yourself unhappy, Dumay," answered the little notary. "Among
us all we can surely get the better of the little puss; sooner or later,
every girl in love betrays herself,--you may be sure of that. But we
will talk about it this evening."

Thus it happened that all those devoted to the Mignon family were fully
as disquieted and uncertain as they were before the old soldier tried
the experiment which he expected would be so decisive. The ill-success
of his past efforts so stimulated Dumay's sense of duty, that he
determined not to go to Paris to see after his own fortune as announced
by his patron, until he had guessed the riddle of Modeste's heart. These
friends, to whom feelings were more precious than interests, well knew
that unless the daughter were pure and innocent, the father would die of
grief when he came to know the death of Bettina and the blindness of
his wife. The distress of poor Dumay made such an impression on the
Latournelles that they even forgot their parting with Exupere, whom they
had sent off that morning to Paris. During dinner, while the three were
alone, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle and Butscha turned the problem
over and over in their minds, and discussed every aspect of it.

"If Modeste loved any one in Havre she would have shown some fear
yesterday," said Madame Latournelle; "her lover, therefore, lives
somewhere else."

"She swore to her mother this morning," said the notary, "in presence
of Dumay, that she had not exchanged a look or a word with any living
soul."

"Then she loves after my fashion!" exclaimed Butscha.

"And how is that, my poor lad?" asked Madame Latournelle.

"Madame," said the little cripple, "I love alone and afar--oh! as far as
from here to the stars."

"How do you manage it, you silly fellow?" said Madame Latournelle,
laughing.

"Ah, madame!" said Butscha, "what you call my hump is the socket of my
wings."

"So that is the explanation of your seal, is it?" cried the notary.

Butscha's seal was a star, and under it the words "Fulgens,
sequar,"--"Shining One, I follow thee,"--the motto of the house of
Chastillonest.

"A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest," said
Butscha, as if speaking to himself; "Modeste is clever enough to fear
she may be loved only for her beauty."

Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for,
according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish.
The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these
outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where
the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal
conditions,--where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say,
in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being. From this, forces
result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism, though they
are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the spiritual world.
It is rare to find a deformed person who is not gifted with some special
faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety perhaps, an utter malignity,
or an almost sublime goodness. Like instruments which the hand of art
can never fully waken, these beings, highly privileged though they know
it not, live within themselves, as Butscha lived, provided their natural
forces so magnificently concentrated have not been spent in the struggle
they have been forced to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep
alive. This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes,
frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as
Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.

Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With
all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to
die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who
still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to capture
Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking, he followed
his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his
brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful
eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which he should entrap
his lady. It would have to be, he thought, by some intercepted glance,
some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon lays his finger on a
hidden sore. That evening Gobenheim did not appear, and Butscha was
Dumay's partner against Monsieur and Madame Latournelle. During the few
moment's of Modeste's absence, about nine o'clock, to prepare for her
mother's bedtime, Madame Mignon and her friends spoke openly to one
another; but the poor clerk, depressed by the conviction of Modeste's
love, which had now seized upon him as upon the rest, seemed as remote
from the discussion as Gobenheim had been the night before.

"Well, what's the matter with you, Butscha?" cried Madame Latournelle;
"one would really think you hadn't a friend in the world."

Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a Swedish
sailor, and whose mother was dead.

"I have no one in the world but you," he answered with a troubled voice;
"and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I can never
lose it--and I will never deserve to lose it."

This answer struck the sensitive chord of true delicacy in the minds of
all present.

"We love you, Monsieur Butscha," said Madame Mignon, with much feeling
in her voice.

"I've six hundred thousand francs of my own, this day," cried Dumay,
"and you shall be a notary and the successor of Latournelle."

The American wife took the hand of the poor hunchback and pressed it.

"What! you have six hundred thousand francs!" exclaimed Latournelle,
pricking up his ears as Dumay let fall the words; "and you allow these
ladies to live as they do! Modeste ought to have a fine horse; and why
doesn't she continue to take lessons in music, and painting, and--"

"Why, he has only had the money a few hours!" cried the little wife.

"Hush!" murmured Madame Mignon.

While these words were exchanged, Butscha's august mistress turned
towards him, preparing to make a speech:--

"My son," she said, "you are so surrounded by true affection that I
never thought how my thoughtless use of that familiar phrase might be
construed; but you must thank me for my little blunder, because it has
served to show you what friends your noble qualities have won."

"Then you must have news from Monsieur Mignon," resumed the notary.

"He is on his way home," said Madame Mignon; "but let us keep the secret
to ourselves. When my husband learns how faithful Butscha has been
to us, how he has shown us the warmest and the most disinterested
friendship when others have given us the cold shoulder, he will not let
you alone provide for him, Dumay. And so, my friend," she added, turning
her blind face toward Butscha; "you can begin at once to negotiate with
Latournelle."

"He's of legal age, twenty-five and a half years. As for me, it will
be paying a debt, my boy, to make the purchase easy for you," said the
notary.

Butscha was kissing Madame Mignon's hand, and his face was wet with
tears as Modeste opened the door of the salon.

"What are you doing to my Black Dwarf?" she demanded. "Who is making him
unhappy?"

"Ah! Mademoiselle Mignon, do we luckless fellows, cradled in misfortune,
ever weep for grief? They have just shown me as much affection as I
could feel for them if they were indeed my own relations. I'm to be a
notary; I shall be rich. Ha! ha! the poor Butscha may become the rich
Butscha. You don't know what audacity there is in this abortion," he
cried.

With that he gave himself a resounding blow on the cavity of his chest
and took up a position before the fireplace, after casting a glance at
Modeste, which slipped like a ray of light between his heavy half-closed
eyelids. He perceived, in this unexpected incident, a chance of
interrogating the heart of his sovereign. Dumay thought for a moment
that the clerk dared to aspire to Modeste, and he exchanged a rapid
glance with the others, who understood him, and began to eye the little
man with a species of terror mingled with curiosity.

"I, too, have my dreams," said Butscha, not taking his eyes from
Modeste.

The young girl lowered her eyelids with a movement that was a revelation
to the young man.

"You love romance," he said, addressing her. "Let me, in this moment of
happiness, tell you mine; and you shall tell me in return whether the
conclusion of the tale I have invented for my life is possible. To me
wealth would bring greater happiness than to other men; for the highest
happiness I can imagine would be to enrich the one I loved. You,
mademoiselle, who know so many things, tell me if it is possible for a
man to make himself beloved independently of his person, be it handsome
or ugly, and for his spirit only?"

Modeste raised her eyes and looked at Butscha. It was a piercing and
questioning glance; for she shared Dumay's suspicion of Butscha's
motive.

"Let me be rich, and I will seek some beautiful poor girl, abandoned
like myself, who has suffered, who knows what misery is. I will write
to her and console her, and be her guardian spirit; she shall read my
heart, my soul; she shall possess by double wealth, my two wealths,--my
gold, delicately offered, and my thought robed in all the splendor which
the accident of birth has denied to my grotesque body. But I myself
shall remain hidden like the cause that science seeks. God himself may
not be glorious to the eye. Well, naturally, the maiden will be curious;
she will wish to see me; but I shall tell her that I am a monster of
ugliness; I shall picture myself hideous."

At these words Modeste gave Butscha a glance that looked him through and
through. If she had said aloud, "What do you know of my love?" she could
not have been more explicit.

"If I have the honor of being loved for the poem of my heart, if some
day such love may make a woman think me only slightly deformed, I
ask you, mademoiselle, shall I not be happier than the handsomest of
men,--as happy as a man of genius beloved by some celestial being like
yourself."

The color which suffused the young girl's face told the cripple nearly
all he sought to know.

"Well, if that be so," he went on, "if we enrich the one we love, if
we please the spirit and withdraw the body, is not that the way to make
one's self beloved? At any rate it is the dream of your poor dwarf,--a
dream of yesterday; for to-day your mother gives me the key to future
wealth by promising me the means of buying a practice. But before I
become another Gobenheim, I seek to know whether this dream could be
really carried out. What do you say, mademoiselle, _you_?"

Modeste was so astonished that she did not notice the question. The trap
of the lover was much better baited than that of the soldier, for the
poor girl was rendered speechless.

"Poor Butscha!" whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband. "Do you
think he is going mad?"

"You want to realize the story of Beauty and the Beast," said Modeste at
length; "but you forget that the Beast turned into Prince Charming."

"Do you think so?" said the dwarf. "Now I have always thought that
that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible,
obliterating the form under the light of the spirit. If I were not loved
I should stay hidden, that is all. You and yours, madame," he continued,
addressing his mistress, "instead of having a dwarf at your service,
will now have a life and a fortune."

So saying, Butscha resumed his seat, remarking to the three
whist-players with an assumption of calmness, "Whose deal is it?" but
within his soul he whispered sadly to himself: "She wants to be loved
for herself; she corresponds with some pretended great man; how far has
it gone?"

"Dear mamma, it is nearly ten o'clock," said Modeste.

Madame Mignon said good-night to her friends, and went to bed.

They who wish to love in secret may have Pyrenean hounds, mothers,
Dumays, and Latournelles to spy upon them, and yet not be in any danger;
but when it comes to a lover!--ah! that is diamond cut diamond, flame
against flame, mind to mind, an equation whose terms are mutual.

On Sunday morning Butscha arrived at the Chalet before Madame
Latournelle, who always came to take Modeste to church, and he proceeded
to blockade the house in expectation of the postman.

"Have you a letter for Mademoiselle Mignon?" he said to that humble
functionary when he appeared.

"No, monsieur, none."

"This house has been a good customer to the post of late," remarked the
clerk.

"You may well say that," replied the man.

Modeste both heard and saw the little colloquy from her chamber window,
where she always posted herself behind the blinds at this particular
hour to watch for the postman. She ran downstairs, went into the little
garden, and called in an imperative voice:--

"Monsieur Butscha!"

"Here am I, mademoiselle," said the cripple, reaching the gate as
Modeste herself opened it.

"Will you be good enough to tell me whether among your various titles to
a woman's affection you count that of the shameless spying in which you
are now engaged?" demanded the girl, endeavoring to crush her slave with
the glance and gesture of a queen.

"Yes, mademoiselle," he answered proudly. "Ah! I never expected,"
he continued in a low tone, "that the grub could be of service to a
star,--but so it is. Would you rather that your mother and Monsieur
Dumay and Madame Latournelle had guessed your secret than one, excluded
as it were from life, who seeks to be to you one of those flowers that
you cut and wear for a moment? They all know you love; but I, I alone,
_know how_. Use me as you would a vigilant watch-dog; I will obey you,
protect you, and never bark; neither will I condemn you. I ask only
to be of service to you. Your father has made Dumay keeper of the
hen-roost, take Butscha to watch outside,--poor Butscha, who doesn't ask
for anything, not so much as a bone."

"Well, I've give you a trial," said Modeste, whose strongest desire was
to get rid of so clever a watcher. "Please go at once to all the hotels
in Graville and in Havre, and ask if a gentleman has arrived from
England named Monsieur Arthur--"

"Listen to me, mademoiselle," said Butscha, interrupting Modeste
respectfully. "I will go and take a walk on the seashore, for you don't
want me to go to church to-day; that's what it is."

Modeste looked at her dwarf with a perfectly stupid astonishment.

"Mademoiselle, you have wrapped your face in cotton-wool and a silk
handkerchief, but there's nothing the matter with you; and you have put
that thick veil on your bonnet to see some one yourself without being
seen."

"Where did you acquire all that perspicacity?" cried Modeste, blushing.

"Moreover, mademoiselle, you have not put on your corset; a cold in the
head wouldn't oblige you to disfigure your waist and wear half a dozen
petticoats, nor hide your hands in these old gloves, and your pretty
feet in those hideous shoes, nor dress yourself like a beggar-woman,
nor--"

"That's enough," she said. "How am I to be certain that you will obey
me?"

"My master is obliged to go to Sainte-Adresse. He does not like it, but
he is so truly good he won't deprive me of my Sunday; I will offer to go
for him."

"Go, and I will trust you."

"You are sure I can do nothing for you in Havre?"

"Nothing. Hear me, mysterious dwarf,--look," she continued, pointing to
the cloudless sky; "can you see a single trace of that bird that flew
by just now? No; well then, my actions are pure as the air is pure, and
leave no stain behind them. You may reassure Dumay and the Latournelles,
and my mother. That hand," she said, holding up a pretty delicate hand,
with the points of the rosy fingers, through which the light shone,
slightly turning back, "will never be given, it will never even be
kissed by what people call a lover until my father has returned."

"Why don't you want me in the church to-day?"

"Do you venture to question me after all I have done you the honor to
say, and to ask of you?"

Butscha bowed without another word, and departed to find his master, in
all the rapture of being taken into the service of his goddess.

Half an hour later, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle came to fetch
Modeste, who complained of a horrible toothache.

"I really have not had the courage to dress myself," she said.

"Well then," replied the worthy chaperone, "stay at home."

"Oh, no!" said Modeste. "I would rather not. I have bundled myself up,
and I don't think it will do me any harm to go out."

And Mademoiselle Mignon marched off beside Latournelle, refusing to take
his arm lest she should be questioned about the outward trembling which
betrayed her inward agitation at the thought of at last seeing her great
poet. One look, the first,--was it not about to decide her fate?

CHAPTER XIII. A FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF MONSIEUR DE LA BRIERE

Is there in the life of man a more delightful moment than that of a
first rendezvous? Are the sensations then hidden at the bottom of our
hearts and finding their first expression ever renewed? Can we feel
again the nameless pleasures that we felt when, like Ernest de
La Briere, we looked up our sharpest razors, our finest shirt, an
irreproachable collar, and our best clothes? We deify the garments
associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic
fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either party
guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away. Are not such
things like the flower of wild fruits, bitter-sweet, grown in the heart
of a forest, the joy of the scant sun-rays, the joy, as Canalis says in
the "Maiden's Song," of the plant itself whose eyes unclosing see its
own image within its breast?

Such emotions, now taking place in La Briere, tend to show that, like
other poor fellows for whom life begins in toil and care, he had never
yet been loved. Arriving at Havre overnight, he had gone to bed at once,
like a true coquette, to obliterate all traces of fatigue; and now,
after taking his bath, he had put himself into a costume carefully
adapted to show him off to the best advantage. This is, perhaps, the
right moment to exhibit a full-length portrait of him, if only to
justify the last letter that Modeste was still to write to him.

Born of a good family in Toulouse, and allied by marriage to the
minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air of
good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and the
habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness which
was not pedantic,--though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of premature
gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon all who saw
him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-tints, though
without color, and relieved by a small moustache and imperial a la
Mazarin. Without this evidence of virility he might have resembled a
young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of his face and the
cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of a set of teeth,
regular enough to have seemed artificial. Add to these womanly points a
habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the face; as gentle,
too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and you will readily
understand how it was that the minister occasionally called his young
secretary Mademoiselle de La Briere. The full, clear forehead, well
framed by abundant black hair, was dreamy, and did not contradict the
character of the face, which was altogether melancholy. The prominent
arch of the upper eyelid, though very beautifully cut, overshadowed
the glance of the eye, and added a physical sadness,--if we may so call
it,--produced by the droop of the lid over the eyeball. This inward
doubt or eclipse--which is put into language by the word modesty--was
expressed in his whole person. Perhaps we shall be able to make his
appearance better understood if we say that the logic of design required
greater length in the oval of his head, more space between the chin,
which ended abruptly, and the forehead, which was reduced in height
by the way in which the hair grew. The face had, in short, a rather
compressed appearance. Hard work had already drawn furrows between the
eyebrows, which were somewhat too thick and too near together, like
those of a jealous nature. Though La Briere was then slight, he belonged
to the class of temperaments which begin, after they are thirty, to take
on an unexpected amount of flesh.

The young man would have seemed to a student of French history a very
fair representative of the royal and almost inconceivable figure of
Louis XIII.,--that historical figure of melancholy modesty without
known cause; pallid beneath the crown; loving the dangers of war and
the fatigues of hunting, but hating work; timid with his mistress to the
extent of keeping away from her; so indifferent as to allow the head
of his friend to be cut off,--a figure that nothing can explain but his
remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a Catholic
Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the undying worm
which gnawed at the king's vitals was in Ernest's case simply distrust
of himself,--the timidity of a man to whom no woman had ever said, "Ah,
how I love thee!" and, above all, the spirit of self-devotion without
an object. After hearing the knell of the monarchy in the fall of his
patron's ministry, the poor fellow had next fallen upon a rock covered
with exquisite mosses, named Canalis; he was, therefore, still seeking
a power to love, and this spaniel-like search for a master gave him
outwardly the air of a king who has met with his. This play of feeling,
and a general tone of suffering in the young man's face made it more
really beautiful than he was himself aware of; for he had always
been annoyed to find himself classed by women among the "handsome
disconsolate,"--a class which has passed out of fashion in these days,
when every man seeks to blow his own trumpet and put himself in the
advance.

The self-distrustful Ernest now rested his immediate hopes on the
fashionable clothes he intended to wear. He put on, for this sacred
interview, where everything depended on a first impression, a pair
of black trousers and carefully polished boots, a sulphur-colored
waistcoat, which left to sight an exquisitely fine shirt with opal
buttons, a black cravat, and a small blue surtout coat which seemed
glued to his back and shoulders by some newly-invented process.
The ribbon of the Legion of honor was in his buttonhole. He wore a
well-fitting pair of kid gloves of the Florentine bronze color, and
carried his cane and hat in the left hand with a gesture and air that
was worthy of the Grand Monarch, and enabled him to show, as the
sacred precincts required, his bare head with the light falling on his
carefully arranged hair. He stationed himself before the service began
in the church porch, from whence he could examine the church, and the
Christians--more particularly the female Christians--who dipped their
fingers in the holy water.

An inward voice cried to Modeste as she entered, "It is he!" That
surtout, and indeed the whole bearing of the young man were essentially
Parisian; the ribbon, the gloves, the cane, the very perfume of his hair
were not of Havre. So when La Briere turned about to examine the
tall and imposing Madame Latournelle, the notary, and the bundled-up
(expression sacred to women) figure of Modeste, the poor child, though
she had carefully tutored herself for the event, received a violent blow
on her heart when her eyes rested on this poetic figure, illuminated by
the full light of day as it streamed through the open door. She could
not be mistaken; a small white rose nearly hid the ribbon of the Legion.
Would he recognize his unknown mistress muffled in an old bonnet with
a double veil? Modeste was so in fear of love's clairvoyance that she
began to stoop in her walk like an old woman.

"Wife," said little Latournelle as they took their seats, "that
gentleman does not belong to Havre."

"So many strangers come here," answered his wife.

"But," said the notary, "strangers never come to look at a church like
ours, which is less than two centuries old."

Ernest remained in the porch throughout the service without seeing any
woman who realized his hopes. Modeste, on her part, could not control
the trembling of her limbs until Mass was nearly over. She was in the
grasp of a joy that none but she herself could depict. At last she heard
the foot-fall of a gentleman on the pavement of the aisle. The service
over, La Briere was making a circuit of the church, where no one now
remained but the punctiliously pious, whom he proceeded to subject to
a shrewd and keen analysis. Ernest noticed that a prayer-book shook
violently in the hands of a veiled woman as he passed her; as she alone
kept her face hidden his suspicions were aroused, and then confirmed by
Modeste's dress, which the lover's eye now scanned and noted. He left
the church with the Latournelles and followed them at a distance to
the rue Royale, where he saw them enter a house accompanied by Modeste,
whose custom it was to stay with her friends till the hour of vespers.
After examining the little house, which was ornamented with scutcheons,
he asked the name of the owner, and was told that he was Monsieur
Latournelle, the chief notary in Havre. As Ernest lounged along the rue
Royale hoping for a glimpse into the house, Modeste caught sight of him,
and thereupon declared herself too ill to go to vespers. Poor
Ernest thus had his trouble for his pains. He dared not wander about
Ingouville; moreover, he made it a point of honor to obey orders, and
he therefore went back to Paris, previously writing a letter which
Francoise Cochet duly delivered on the morrow with the Havre postmark.

It was the custom of Monsieur and Madame Latournelle to dine at the
Chalet every Sunday when they brought back Modeste after vespers. So, as
soon as the invalid felt a little better, they started for Ingouville,
accompanied by Butscha. Once at home, the happy Modeste forgot her
pretended illness and her disguise, and dressed herself charmingly,
humming as she came down to dinner,--

  "Nought is sleeping--Heart! awaking,
  Lift thine incense to the skies."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Butscha, I never saw so handsome a man."

"Beauty is a veil which often serves to hide imperfections."

"He has the most angelic heart of heaven--"

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

"Why?"

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

"What does that signify if I love him?"

"Ah, true!" cried the dwarf.

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

"My daughter saw the man she loves this morning."

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

"Ah!" sighed the mother, "the sign of recognition."

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

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

"It is incomprehensible!" said Dumay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To Monsieur de Canalis,--Ah! my friend, my well-beloved! What
  atrocious falsehoods those portraits in the shop-windows are! And
  I, who made that horrible lithograph my joy!--I am humbled at the
  thought of loving one so handsome. No; it is impossible that those
  Parisian women are so stupid as not to have seen their dreams
  fulfilled in you. You neglected! you unloved! I do not believe a
  word of all that you have written me about your lonely and obscure
  life, your hunger for an idol,--sought in vain until now. You have
  been too well loved, monsieur; your brow, white and smooth as a
  magnolia leaf, reveals it; and it is I who must be neglected,--for
  who am I? Ah! why have you called me to life? I felt for a moment
  as though the heavy burden of the flesh was leaving me; my soul
  had broken the crystal which held it captive; it pervaded my whole
  being; the cold silence of material things had ceased; all things
  in nature had a voice and spoke to me. The old church was
  luminous. It's arched roof, brilliant with gold and azure like
  those of an Italian cathedral, sparkled above my head. Melodies
  such as the angels sang to martyrs, quieting their pains, sounded
  from the organ. The rough pavements of Havre seemed to my feet a
  flowery mead; the sea spoke to me with a voice of sympathy, like
  an old friend whom I had never truly understood. I saw clearly how
  the roses in my garden had long adored me and bidden me love; they
  lifted their heads and smiled as I came back from church. I heard
  your name, "Melchior," chiming in the flower-bells; I saw it
  written on the clouds. Yes, yes, I live, I am living, thanks to
  thee,--my poet, more beautiful than that cold, conventional Lord
  Byron, with a face as dull as the English climate. One glance of
  thine, thine Orient glance, pierced through my double veil and
  sent thy blood to my heart, and from thence to my head and feet.
  Ah! that is not the life our mother gave us. A hurt to thee would
  hurt me too at the very instant it was given,--my life exists by
  thy thought only. I know now the purpose of the divine faculty of
  music; the angels invented it to utter love. Ah, my Melchior, to
  have genius and to have beauty is too much; a man should be made
  to choose between them at his birth.

  When I think of the treasures of tenderness and affection which
  you have given me, and more especially for the last month, I ask
  myself if I dream. No, but you hide some mystery; what woman can
  yield you up to me and not die? Ah! jealousy has entered my heart
  with love,--love in which I could not have believed. How could I
  have imagined so mighty a conflagration? And now--strange and
  inconceivable revulsion!--I would rather you were ugly.

  What follies I committed after I came home! The yellow dahlias
  reminded me of your waistcoat, the white roses were my loving
  friends; I bowed to them with a look that belonged to you, like
  all that is of me. The very color of the gloves, moulded to hands
  of a gentleman, your step along the nave,--all, all, is so printed
  on my memory that sixty years hence I shall see the veriest
  trifles of this day of days,--the color of the atmosphere, the ray
  of sunshine that flickered on a certain pillar; I shall hear the
  prayer your step interrupted; I shall inhale the incense of the
  altar; forever I shall feel above our heads the priestly hands
  that blessed us both as you passed by me at the closing
  benediction. The good Abbe Marcelin married us then! The
  happiness, above that of earth, which I feel in this new world of
  unexpected emotions can only be equalled by the joy of telling it
  to you, of sending it back to him who poured it into my heart with
  the lavishness of the sun itself. No more veils, no more
  disguises, my beloved. Come back to me, oh, come back soon. With
  joy I now unmask.

  You have no doubt heard of the house of Mignon in Havre? Well, I
  am, through an irreparable misfortune, its sole heiress. But you
  are not to look down upon us, descendant of an Auvergne knight;
  the arms of the Mignon de La Bastie will do no dishonor to those
  of Canalis. We bear gules, on a bend sable four bezants or;
  quarterly four crosses patriarchal or; a cardinal's hat as crest,
  and the fiocchi for supports. Dear, I will be faithful to our
  motto: "Una fides, unus Dominus!"--the true faith, and one only
  Master.

  Perhaps, my friend, you will find some irony in my name, after all
  that I have done, and all that I herein avow. I am named Modeste.
  Therefore I have not deceived you by signing "O. d'Este M."
  Neither have I misled you about our fortune; it will amount, I
  believe, to the sum which rendered you so virtuous. I know that to
  you money is a consideration of small importance; therefore I
  speak of it without reserve. Let me tell you how happy it makes me
  to give freedom of action to our happiness,--to be able to say,
  when the fancy for travel takes us, "Come, let us go in a
  comfortable carriage, sitting side by side, without a thought of
  money"--happy, in short, to tell the king, "I have the fortune
  which you require in your peers." Thus Modeste Mignon can be of
  service to you, and her gold will have the noblest of uses.

  As to your servant herself,--you did see her once, at her window.
  Yes, "the fairest daughter of Eve the fair" was indeed your
  unknown damozel; but how little the Modeste of to-day resembles
  her of that long past era! That one was in her shroud, this one
  --have I made you know it?--has received from you the life of life.
  Love, pure, and sanctioned, the love my father, now returning
  rich and prosperous, will authorize, has raised me with its
  powerful yet childlike hand from the grave in which I slept. You
  have wakened me as the sun wakens the flowers. The eyes of your
  beloved are no longer those of the little Modeste so daring in her
  ignorance,--no, they are dimmed with the sight of happiness, and
  the lids close over them. To-day I tremble lest I can never
  deserve my fate. The king has come in his glory; my lord has now a
  subject who asks pardon for the liberties she has taken, like the
  gambler with loaded dice after cheating Monsieur de Grammont.

  My cherished poet! I will be thy Mignon--happier far than the
  Mignon of Goethe, for thou wilt leave me in mine own land,--in thy
  heart. Just as I write this pledge of our betrothal a nightingale
  in the Vilquin park answers for thee. Ah, tell me quick that his
  note, so pure, so clear, so full, which fills my heart with joy
  and love like an Annunciation, does not lie to me.

  My father will pass through Paris on his way from Marseilles; the
  house of Mongenod, with whom he corresponds, will know his
  address. Go to him, my Melchior, tell him that you love me; but do
  not try to tell him how I love you,--let that be forever between
  ourselves and God. I, my dear one, am about to tell everything to
  my mother. Her heart will justify my conduct; she will rejoice in
  our secret poem, so romantic, human and divine in one.

  You have the confession of the daughter; you must now obtain the
  consent of the Comte de La Bastie, father of your

Modeste.

  P.S.--Above all, do not come to Havre without having first
  obtained my father's consent. If you love me you will not fail to
  find him on his way through Paris.

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

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

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

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

  To Mademoiselle O. d'Este M.,--My heart tells me that you were the
  woman so carefully veiled and disguised, and seated between
  Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, who have but one child, a son.
  Ah, my love, if you have only a modest station, without
  distinction, without importance, without money even, you do not
  know how happy that would make me. You ought to understand me by
  this time; why will you not tell me the truth? I am no poet,
  --except in heart, through love, through you. Oh! what power of
  affection there is in me to keep me here in this hotel, instead of
  mounting to Ingouville which I can see from my windows. Will you
  ever love me as I love you? To leave Havre in such uncertainty! Am
  I not punished for loving you as if I had committed a crime? But I
  obey you blindly. Let me have a letter quickly, for if you have
  been mysterious, I have returned you mystery for mystery, and I
  must at last throw off my disguise, show you the poet that I am,
  and abdicate my borrowed glory.

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

CHAPTER XIV. MATTERS GROWN COMPLICATED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, No. 29'!" he
cried out; "what does that mean?"

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

"And that's his portrait that you have in a frame upstairs," added
Dumay.

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

"There it is, mademoiselle," he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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