The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows
which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his
daughter’s letter of Bettina’s death and of his wife’s infirmity, and
Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to
Modeste’s love affairs.
“Leave me to myself,” he said to his faithful friend.
As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on a
sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears which
suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon dried,
yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn.
“To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to have
many hearts and bare them to a dagger?” he cried, springing up with the
bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. “To be a father is
to give one’s self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I meet that
D’Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives her life to a
scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom? a coward, who
deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If it were Canalis himself
it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!--I will strangle him
with my two hands,” he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious
determination. “And what then? suppose my Modeste were to die of grief?”
He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and
then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of
six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he
had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles
Mignon’s head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now
bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air
of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.
“Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to
ask me for my daughter,” he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest
de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La
Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.
“You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as
sombre as Othello’s. “My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the
family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during
his term of office. On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the Court
of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly succeed
as chief--”
“And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?” asked the
count.
“Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being
loved by her. Hear me, monsieur,” cried Ernest, checking a violent
movement on the part of the angry father. “I have the strangest
confession to make to you, a shameful one for a man of honor; but the
worst punishment of my conduct, natural enough in itself, is not
the telling of it to you; no, I fear the daughter even more than the
father.”
Ernest then related simply, and with the nobleness that comes of
sincerity, all the facts of his little drama, not omitting the twenty or
more letters, which he had brought with him, nor the interview which he
had just had with Canalis. When Monsieur Mignon had finished reading the
letters, the unfortunate lover, pale and suppliant, actually trembled
under the fiery glance of the Provencal.
“Monsieur,” said the latter, “in this whole matter there is but one
error, but that is cardinal. My daughter will not have six millions;
at the utmost, she will have a marriage portion of two hundred thousand
francs, and very doubtful expectations.”
“Ah, monsieur!” cried Ernest, rising and grasping Monsieur Mignon’s
hand; “you take a load from my breast. Nothing can now hinder my
happiness. I have friends, influence; I shall certainly be chief of
the Court of Claims. Had Mademoiselle Mignon no more than ten thousand
francs, if I had even to make a settlement on her, she should still be
my wife; and to make her happy as you, monsieur, have made your wife
happy, to be to you a real son (for I have no father), are the deepest
desires of my heart.”
Charles Mignon stepped back three paces and fixed upon La Briere a look
which entered the eyes of the young man as a dagger enters its sheath;
he stood silent a moment, recognizing the absolute candor, the pure
truthfulness of that open nature in the light of the young man’s
inspired eyes. “Is fate at last weary of pursuing me?” he asked himself.
“Am I to find in this young man the pearl of sons-in-law?” He walked up
and down the room in strong agitation.
“Monsieur,” he said at last, “you are bound to submit wholly to the
judgment which you have come here to seek, otherwise you are now playing
a farce.”
“Oh, monsieur!”
“Listen to me,” said the father, nailing La Briere where he stood with a
glance. “I shall be neither harsh, nor hard, nor unjust. You shall have
the advantages and the disadvantages of the false position in which you
have placed yourself. My daughter believes that she loves one of the
great poets of the day, whose fame is really that which has attracted
her. Well, I, her father, intend to give her the opportunity to choose
between the celebrity which has been a beacon to her, and the poor
reality which the irony of fate has flung at her feet. Ought she not
to choose between Canalis and yourself? I rely upon your honor not to
repeat what I have told you as to the state of my affairs. You may each
come, I mean you and your friend the Baron de Canalis, to Havre for the
last two weeks of October. My house will be open to both of you, and my
daughter must have an opportunity to study you. You must yourself bring
your rival, and not disabuse him as to the foolish tales he will hear
about the wealth of the Comte de La Bastie. I go to Havre to-morrow, and
I shall expect you three days later. Adieu, monsieur.”
Poor La Briere went back to Canalis with a dragging step. The poet,
meantime, left to himself, had given way to a current of thought out
of which had come that secondary impulse which Monsieur de Talleyrand
valued so much. The first impulse is the voice of nature, the second
that of society.
“A girl worth six millions,” he thought to himself, “and my eyes were
not able to see that gold shining in the darkness! With such a fortune
I could be peer of France, count, marquis, ambassador. I’ve replied
to middle-class women and silly women, and crafty creatures who wanted
autographs; I’ve tired myself to death with masked-ball intrigues,--at
the very moment when God was sending me a soul of price, an angel with
golden wings! Bah! I’ll make a poem on it, and perhaps the chance will
come again. Heavens! the luck of that little La Briere,--strutting about
in my lustre--plagiarism! I’m the cast and he’s to be the statue, is
he? It is the old fable of Bertrand and Raton. Six millions, a beauty,
a Mignon de La Bastie, an aristocratic divinity loving poetry and the
poet! And I, who showed my muscle as man of the world, who did those
Alcide exercises to silence by moral force the champion of physical
force, that old soldier with a heart, that friend of this very young
girl, whom he’ll now go and tell that I have a heart of iron!--I, to
play Napoleon when I ought to have been seraphic! Good heavens! True, I
shall have my friend. Friendship is a beautiful thing. I have kept him,
but at what a price! Six millions, that’s the cost of it; we can’t have
many friends if we pay all that for them.”
La Briere entered the room as Canalis reached this point in his
meditations. He was gloom personified.
“Well, what’s the matter?” said Canalis.
“The father exacts that his daughter shall choose between the two
Canalis--”
“Poor boy!” cried the poet, laughing, “he’s a clever fellow, that
father.”
“I have pledged my honor that I will take you to Havre,” said La Briere,
piteously.
“My dear fellow,” said Canalis, “if it is a question of your honor you
may count on me. I’ll ask for leave of absence for a month.”
“Modeste is so beautiful!” exclaimed La Briere, in a despairing tone.
“You will crush me out of sight. I wondered all along that fate should
be so kind to me; I knew it was all a mistake.”
“Bah! we will see about that,” said Canalis with inhuman gaiety.
That evening, after dinner, Charles Mignon and Dumay, were flying,
by virtue of three francs to each postilion, from Paris to Havre.
The father had eased the watch-dog’s mind as to Modeste and her love
affairs; the guard was relieved, and Butscha’s innocence established.
“It is all for the best, my old Dumay,” said the count, who had been
making certain inquiries of Mongenod respecting Canalis and La Briere.
“We are going to have two actors for one part!” he cried gaily.
Nevertheless, he requested his old comrade to be absolutely silent about
the comedy which was now to be played at the Chalet,--a comedy it might
be, but also a gentle punishment, or, if you prefer it, a lesson given
by the father to the daughter.
The two friends kept up a long conversation all the way from Paris to
Havre, which put the colonel in possession of the facts relating to his
family during the past four years, and informing Dumay that Desplein,
the great surgeon, was coming to Havre at the end of the present month
to examine the cataract on Madame Mignon’s eyes, and decide if it were
possible to restore her sight.
A few moments before the breakfast-hour at the Chalet, the clacking of
a postilion’s whip apprised the family that the two soldiers were
arriving; only a father’s joy at returning after long absence could be
heralded with such clatter, and it brought all the women to the garden
gate. There is many a father and many a child--perhaps more fathers than
children--who will understand the delights of such an arrival, and that
happy fact shows that literature has no need to depict it. Perhaps all
gentle and tender emotions are beyond the range of literature.
Not a word that could trouble the peace of the family was uttered on
this joyful day. Truce was tacitly established between father, mother,
and child as to the so-called mysterious love which had paled Modeste’s
cheeks,--for this was the first day she had left her bed since Dumay’s
departure for Paris. The colonel, with the charming delicacy of a
true soldier, never left his wife’s side nor released her hand; but he
watched Modeste with delight, and was never weary of noting her refined,
elegant, and poetic beauty. Is it not by such seeming trifles that we
recognize a man of feeling? Modeste, who feared to interrupt the subdued
joy of the husband and wife kept at a little distance, coming from time
to time to kiss her father’s forehead, and when she kissed it overmuch
she seemed to mean that she was kissing it for two,--for Bettina and
herself.
“Oh, my darling, I understand you,” said the colonel, pressing her hand
as she assailed him with kisses.
“Hush!” whispered the young girl, glancing at her mother.
Dumay’s rather sly and pregnant silence made Modeste somewhat uneasy as
to the upshot of his journey to Paris. She looked at him furtively
every now and then, without being able to get beneath his epidermis.
The colonel, like a prudent father, wanted to study the character of
his only daughter, and above all consult his wife, before entering on a
conference upon which the happiness of the whole family depended.
“To-morrow, my precious child,” he said as they parted for the night,
“get up early, and we will go and take a walk on the seashore. We have
to talk about your poems, Mademoiselle de La Bastie.”
His last words, accompanied by a smile, which reappeared like an echo
on Dumay’s lips, were all that gave Modeste any clew to what was coming;
but it was enough to calm her uneasiness and keep her awake far into the
night with her head full of suppositions; this, however, did not prevent
her from being dressed and ready in the morning long before the colonel.
“You know all, my kind papa?” she said as soon as they were on the road
to the beach.
“I know all, and a good deal more than you do,” he replied.
After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.
“Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother
idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a
stranger without consulting her.”
“Oh, papa! because mamma would never have allowed it.”
“And do you think, my daughter, that that was proper? Though you have
been educating your mind in this fatal way, how is it that your good
sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and
show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a man’s
head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should lack
pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two hours in
hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has been the
same as Bettina’s without the excuse of a heart’s seduction; you were
a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is head-love, the
worst vice of French women.”
“I, without pride!” said Modeste, weeping; “but _he_ has not yet seen
me.”
“_He_ knows your name.”
“I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the
correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had spoken
to each other.”
“Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason
with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your
family.”
“But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity,” she
said, pouting.
“Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?”
“A temerity that my mother practised before me,” she retorted quickly.
“Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her
father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me. Be
honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily conceived,
I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad action of writing
to a stranger?”
“A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose character
and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to detraction,
to calumny,--a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear father, I was a
mere literary and dramatic personage, one of Shakespeare’s women, until
the moment when I wished to know if the man himself were as beautiful as
his soul.”
“Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But if,
from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of their
families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke of
parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the misfortunes
that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and which you are
therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them. Poetry is indeed
one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life itself.”
“Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the
struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of
family.”
“Alas for the child that finds her happiness in resisting them,” said
the colonel, gravely. “In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis
d’Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and the
pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl took
for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage.”
“My poet has told me all that,” she answered. “He played Orgon for some
time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of poets.”
“I have read your letters,” said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a
malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, “and I ought
to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any woman,
even a Julie d’Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!”
“We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or not;
I think it is better to read them. There are not so many adventures in
these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., and so they
publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those letters, you must
know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the most sternly upright
man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen that we love one another
at least as much as you and mamma love each other. Well, I admit that it
was not all exactly conventional; I did, if you _will_ have me say so,
wrong--”
“I have read your letters,” said her father, interrupting her, “and I
know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a
proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood life,
and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young girl of
twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing.”
“Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded
Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to
the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways to
act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering, or we
must go to him frankly. Isn’t the last way grand and noble? We French
girls are delivered over by our families like so much merchandise, at
sixty days’ sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle Vilquin; but in
England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow very much the plan
I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to that? Am I not half
German?”
“Child!” cried the colonel, looking at her; “the supremacy of France
comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble
language constrains her mind. France is the reason of the whole world.
England and Germany are romantic in their marriage customs,--though even
there noble families follow our customs. You certainly do not mean to
deny that your parents, who know life, who are responsible for your
soul and for your happiness, have no right to guard you from the
stumbling-blocks that are in your way? Good heavens!” he continued,
speaking half to himself, “is it their fault, or is it ours? Ought we
to hold our children under an iron yoke? Must we be punished for the
tenderness that leads us to make them happy, and teaches our hearts how
to do so?”
Modeste watched her father out of the corner of her eye as she listened
to this species of invocation, uttered in a broken voice.
“Was it wrong,” she said, “in a girl whose heart was free, to choose for
her husband not only a charming companion, but a man of noble genius,
born to an honorable position, a gentleman; the equal of myself, a
gentlewoman?”
“You love him?” asked her father.
“Father!” she said, laying her head upon his breast, “would you see me
die?”
“Enough!” said the old soldier. “I see your love is inextinguishable.”
“Yes, inextinguishable.”
“Can nothing change it?”
“Nothing.”
“No circumstances, no treachery, no betrayal? You mean that you will
love him in spite of everything, because of his personal attractions?
Even though he proved a D’Estourny, would you love him still?”
“Oh, my father! you do not know your daughter. Could I love a coward, a
man without honor, without faith?”
“But suppose he had deceived you?”
“He? that honest, candid soul, half melancholy? You are joking, father,
or else you have never met him.”
“But you see now that your love is not inextinguishable, as you chose
to call it. I have already made you admit that circumstances could alter
your poem; don’t you now see that fathers are good for something?”
“You want to give me a lecture, papa; it is positively l’Ami des Enfants
over again.”
“Poor deceived girl,” said her father, sternly; “it is no lecture of
mine, I count for nothing in it; indeed, I am only trying to soften the
blow.”
“Father, don’t play tricks with my life,” exclaimed Modeste, turning
pale.
“Then, my daughter, summon all your courage. It is you who have been
playing tricks with your life, and life is now tricking you.”
Modeste looked at her father in stupid amazement.
“Suppose that young man whom you love, whom you saw four days ago at
church in Havre, was a deceiver?”
“Never!” she cried; “that noble head, that pale face full of poetry--”
“--was a lie,” said the colonel interrupting her. “He was no more
Monsieur de Canalis than I am that sailor over there putting out to
sea.”
“Do you know what you are killing in me?” she said in a low voice.
“Comfort yourself, my child; though accident has put the punishment of
your fault into the fault itself, the harm done is not irreparable.
The young man whom you have seen, and with whom you exchanged hearts
by correspondence, is a loyal and honorable fellow; he came to me and
confided everything. He loves you, and I have no objection to him as a
son-in-law.”
“If he is not Canalis, who is he then?” said Modeste in a changed voice.
“The secretary; his name is Ernest de La Briere. He is not a nobleman;
but he is one of those plain men with fixed principles and sound
morality who satisfy parents. However, that is not the point; you
have seen him and nothing can change your heart; you have chosen him,
comprehend his soul, it is as beautiful as he himself.”
The count was interrupted by a heavy sigh from Modeste. The poor girl
sat with her eyes fixed on the sea, pale and rigid as death, as if a
pistol shot had struck her in those fatal words, _a plain man, with
fixed principles and sound morality_.
“Deceived!” she said at last.
“Like your poor sister, but less fatally.”
“Let us go home, father,” she said, rising from the hillock on which
they were sitting. “Papa, hear me, I swear before God to obey your
wishes, whatever they may be, in the _affair_ of my marriage.”
“Then you don’t love him any longer?” asked her father.
“I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as
yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the paint
of another man’s glory on his cheeks.”
“You said nothing could change you”; remarked the colonel, ironically.
“Ah, do not trifle with me!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands and
looking at her father in distressful anxiety; “don’t you see that you
are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes.”
“God forbid! I have told you the exact truth.”
“You are very kind, father,” she said after a pause, and with a sort of
solemnity.
“He has kept your letters,” resumed the colonel; “now suppose the rash
caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets
who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?”
“Oh!--you are going too far.”
“Canalis told him so.”
“Has Dumay seen Canalis?”
“Yes,” answered her father.
The two walked along in silence.
“So that is why that _gentleman_,” resumed Modeste, “told me so much
harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said--Why,” she
added, interrupting herself, “his virtues, his noble qualities, his fine
sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who steals glory
and a name may very likely--”
“--break locks, steal purses, and cut people’s throats on the highway,”
cried the colonel. “Ah, you young girls, that’s just like you,--with
your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man who once
deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he ought to die.”
This ridicule stopped Modeste’s effervescence for a moment and least,
and again there was silence.
“My child,” said the colonel, presently, “men in society, as in nature
everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must
defend themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise?
Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was
yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman; it
is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences, short
of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he does
deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her wanting
in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a queen, an
actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems to him a
queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame--and for a young
girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given her that is
sacred and lovely and noble,--no matter with what grace or what poetry
or what precautions she surrounds her fault.”
“To seek the master and find the servant!” she said bitterly, “oh! I can
never recover from it!”
“Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the
equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet
minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a heart,
and he adores you, but--he _does not write verses_. No, I admit, he is
not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry. At
any rate, my dear girl,” added her father, as Modeste made a gesture of
disgust, “you are to see both of them, the sham and the true Canalis--”
“Oh, papa!--”
“Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the
_affair_ of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two
you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall finish
with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character of these
gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing excursions.”
Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to
what he said but replying only in monosyllables.