“Those two young men,” said Madame Latournelle, on the Saturday evening,
“have no idea how many spies they have on their tracks. We are eight in
all, on the watch.”
“Don’t say two young men, wife; say three!” cried little Latournelle,
looking round him. “Gobenheim is not here, so I can speak out.”
Modeste raised her head, and everybody, imitating Modeste, raised theirs
and looked at the notary.
“Yes, a third lover--and he is something like a lover--offers himself as
a candidate.”
“Bah!” exclaimed the colonel.
“I speak of no less a person,” said Latournelle, pompously, “than
Monsieur le Duc d’Herouville, Marquis de Saint-Sever, Duc de Nivron,
Comte de Bayeux, Vicomte d’Essigny, grand equerry and peer of France,
knight of the Spur and the Golden Fleece, grandee of Spain, and son of
the last governor of Normandy. He saw Mademoiselle Modeste at the time
when he was staying with the Vilquins, and he regretted then--as his
notary, who came from Bayeux yesterday, tells me--that she was not
rich enough for him; for his father recovered nothing but the estate of
Herouville on his return to France, and that is saddled with a sister.
The young duke is thirty-three years old. I am definitively charged to
lay these proposals before you, Monsieur le comte,” added the notary,
turning respectfully to the colonel.
“Ask Modeste if she wants another bird in her cage,” replied the count;
“as far as I am concerned, I am willing that my lord the grand equerry
shall pay her attention.”
Notwithstanding the care with which Charles Mignon avoided seeing
people, and though he stayed in the Chalet and never went out without
Modeste, Gobenheim had reported Dumay’s wealth; for Dumay had said to
him when giving up his position as cashier: “I am to be bailiff for my
colonel, and all my fortune, except what my wife needs, is to go to
the children of our little Modeste.” Every one in Havre had therefore
propounded the same question that the notary had already put to himself:
“If Dumay’s share in the profits is six hundred thousand francs, and
he is going to be Monsieur Mignon’s bailiff, then Monsieur Mignon must
certainly have a colossal fortune. He arrived at Marseilles on a ship of
his own, loaded with indigo; and they say at the Bourse that the cargo,
not counting the ship, is worth more than he gives out as his whole
fortune.”
The colonel was unwilling to dismiss the servants he had brought back
with him, whom he had chosen with care during his travels; and he
therefore hired a house for them in the lower part of Ingouville, where
he installed his valet, cook, and coachman, all Negroes, and three
mulattos on whose fidelity he could rely. The coachman was told to
search for saddle-horses for Mademoiselle and for his master, and for
carriage-horses for the caleche in which the colonel and the lieutenant
had returned to Havre. That carriage, bought in Paris, was of the
latest fashion, and bore the arms of La Bastie, surmounted by a count’s
coronet. These things, insignificant in the eyes of a man who for four
years had been accustomed to the unbridled luxury of the Indies and of
the English merchants at Canton, were the subject of much comment
among the business men of Havre and the inhabitants of Ingouville and
Graville. Before five days had elapsed the rumor of them ran from one
end of Normandy to the other like a train of gunpowder touched by fire.
“Monsieur Mignon has come back from China with millions,” some one said
in Rouen; “and it seems he was made a count in mid-ocean.”
“But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution,” answered
another.
“So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon for
twenty-five years! What are we coming to?” said a third.
Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her
parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes
began once more to see her merits. The aunt and sister of the Duc
d’Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur
Charles Mignon’s right to the title and arms of count, derived from
Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal’s hat and tassels were added as a
crest. They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were staying
at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished head of their
house now became active.
“If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,”
said the aunt of the young duke, “she is the best match in the province.
_She_ at least is noble.”
The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been
able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in
that bourgeois household.
Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle
and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our
story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this
late arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own
diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more space here than
he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d’Herouville, offspring of the
matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born during the
emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of the present
duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819, before he was
able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast chateau of
Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which he had bought
back with some difficulty; all of which returned a rental of about
fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the post of grand
equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the usual pension of
twelve thousand francs which was granted to the pauper peers of France.
But what were these twenty-seven thousand francs a year and the salary
of grand equerry to such a family? In Paris, of course, the young duke
used the king’s coaches, and had a mansion provided for him in the rue
Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the royal stables; his salary paid for
his winters in the city, and his twenty-seven thousand francs for the
summers in Normandy. If this noble personage was still a bachelor he was
less to blame than his aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine’s fables.
Mademoiselle d’Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of
keeping with the spirit of the times; for great names, without the money
to keep them up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French
nobility, who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under
the new law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc
d’Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses;
but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these
people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration,
from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d’Herouville, though in quest of
millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker,
with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.
At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her nephew,
entirely through her own fault, she was just considering whether the
property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or whether she
should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen, who wished
to make her daughter a duchess. The king, anxious to restore the
d’Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought about this
marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle d’Herouville
of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew ridiculous, and the
nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When great things disappear
they leave crumbs, “frusteaux,” Rabelais would say, behind them; and
the French nobility of this century has left us too many such fragments.
Neither the clergy nor the nobility have anything to complain of in this
long history of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social
necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce
the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here
depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have
already done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf
(in “The Lily of the Valley”), in the “Duchesse de Langeais,” and the
very nobleness of the nobility in the “Marquis d’Espard.” How then could
it be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud
house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation,
cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis
XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That
is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris
when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the
entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing
the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature
in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past
grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that
fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which
manners alone survive the nobler vanished qualities,--forms, which are
the sole heritage our nobles have preserved. The abandonment in which
Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight
reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.
The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face,
was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized
figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins
and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The
house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the
deed of a deformed being (see the “Enfant Maudit” in “Philosophical
Studies”). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the member
who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty. The
young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them
too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those
whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused him to lead a
double life. He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the
worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like,
the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such habits and his puny
figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning upward in ecstasy,
increased the ridicule already bestowed upon him,--very unjustly
bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of wit and delicacy; but his
wit, which never sparkled, only showed itself when he felt at ease.
Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was supposed to be his nearest friend (at
a price), called him “a sound wine so carefully corked that you break
all your corkscrews.” The beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the
grand equerry could only worship, annihilated him with a speech which,
unfortunately, was repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty
and malicious sayings.
“He always seems to me,” she said, “like one of those jewels of fine
workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool.”
Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of
grand equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him
laugh,--although the Duc d’Herouville justified his appointment in the
matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood
and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his fruitless
visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed through
her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the circumstances in
which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the courtship of
the Duc d’Herouville would save her from being at the mercy of either
Canalis.
“I see no reason,” she said to Latournelle, “why the Duc d’Herouville
should not be received. I have passed, in spite of our indigence,” she
continued, with a mischievous look at her father, “to the condition
of heiress. Haven’t you observed Gobenheim’s glances? They have quite
changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being
able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my charms.”
“Hush, my darling!” cried Madame Latournelle, “here he comes.”
“Old Althor is in despair,” said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he
entered.
“Why?” asked the count.
“Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several
millions. What ill-luck for his son!”
“No one knows,” said Charles Mignon, coldly, “what my liabilities in
India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence as
to my private affairs. Dumay,” he whispered to his friend, “if Vilquin
is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what he gave
for it.”
Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on
Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in advance,
at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc d’Herouville,
his sister, and his aunt were coming the following Tuesday to occupy,
also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at Graville. This
assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse remark that, thanks to
Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at Ingouville. “If this goes on,
she will have a hospital here,” said the younger Mademoiselle Vilquin,
vexed at not becoming a duchess.
The everlasting comedy of “The Heiress,” about to be played at the
Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste’s frame of mind,
“The Designs of a Young Girl”; for since the overthrow of her illusions
she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man whose
qualifications did not fully satisfy her.
The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first
visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their arrival.
They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and arranging
Madame Amaury’s house for a month’s stay. The poet, always calculating
effects, wished to make the most of the probable excitement which his
arrival would case in Havre, and which would of course echo up to the
Mignons. Therefore, in his role of a man needing rest, he did not leave
the house. La Briere went twice to walk past the Chalet, though always
with a sense of despair, for he feared to displease Modeste, and the
future seemed to him dark with clouds. The two friends came down to
dinner on Monday dressed for the momentous visit. La Briere wore the
same clothes he had so carefully selected for the famous Sunday; but
he now felt like the satellite of a planet, and resigned himself to
the uncertainties of his situation. Canalis, on the other hand, had
carefully attended to his black coat, his orders, and all those little
drawing-room elegancies, which his intimacy with the Duchesse de
Chaulieu and the fashionable world of the faubourg had brought to
perfection. He had gone into the minutiae of dandyism, while poor La
Briere was about to present himself with the negligence of a man without
hope. Germain, as he waited at dinner could not help smiling to himself
at the contrast. After the second course, however, the valet came in
with a diplomatic, that is to say, uneasy air.
“Does Monsieur le baron know,” he said to Canalis in a low voice, “that
Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of the
same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur le
baron to the sea-shore?”
“What, the little Duc d’Herouville?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Is he coming for Mademoiselle de La Bastie?” asked La Briere, coloring.
“So it appears, monsieur.”
“We are cheated!” cried Canalis looking at La Briere.
“Ah!” retorted Ernest quickly, “that is the first time you have said,
‘we’ since we left Paris: it has been ‘I’ all along.”
“You understood me,” cried Canalis, with a burst of laughter. “But
we are not in a position to struggle against a ducal coronet, nor the
duke’s title, nor against the waste lands which the Council of State
have just granted, on my report, to the house of Herouville.”
“His grace,” said La Briere, with a spice of malice that was
nevertheless serious, “will furnish you with compensation in the person
of his sister.”
At this instant, the Comte de La Bastie was announced; the two young men
rose at once, and La Briere hastened forward to present Canalis.
“I wished to return the visit that you paid me in Paris,” said the count
to the young lawyer, “and I knew that by coming here I should have the
double pleasure of greeting one of our great living poets.”
“Great!--Monsieur,” replied the poet, smiling, “no one can be great in a
century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of would-be
great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius nowadays, and
renders real distinction impossible.”
“Is that the reason why you have thrown yourself into politics?” asked
the count.
“It is the same thing in that sphere,” said the poet; “there are no
statesmen in these days, only men who handle events more or less. Look
at it, monsieur; under the system of government that we derive from the
Charter, which makes a tax-list of more importance than a coat-of-arms,
there is absolutely nothing solid except that which you went to seek in
China,--wealth.”
Satisfied with himself and with the impression he was making on the
prospective father-in-law, Canalis turned to Germain.
“Serve the coffee in the salon,” he said, inviting Monsieur de La Bastie
to leave the dining-room.
“I thank you for this visit, monsieur le comte,” said La Briere; “it
saves me from the embarrassment of presenting my friend to you in your
own house. You have a heart, and you have also a quick mind.”
“Bah! the ready wit of Provence, that is all,” said Charles Mignon.
“Ah, do you come from Provence?” cried Canalis.
“You must pardon my friend,” said La Briere; “he has not studied, as I
have, the history of La Bastie.”
At the word _friend_ Canalis threw a searching glance at Ernest.
“If your health will allow,” said the count to the poet, “I shall hope
to receive you this evening under my roof; it will be a day to mark,
as the old writer said ‘albo notanda lapillo.’ Though we cannot duly
receive so great a fame in our little house, yet your visit will gratify
my daughter, whose admiration for your poems has even led her to set
them to music.”
“You have something better than fame in your house,” said Canalis; “you
have beauty, if I am to believe Ernest.”
“Yes, a good daughter; but you will find her rather countrified,” said
Charles Mignon.
“A country girl sought by the Duc d’Herouville,” remarked Canalis,
dryly.
“Oh!” replied Monsieur Mignon, with the perfidious good-humor of a
Southerner, “I leave my daughter free. Dukes, princes, commoners,--they
are all the same to me, even men of genius. I shall make no pledges, and
whoever my Modeste chooses will be my son-in-law, or rather my son,” he
added, looking at La Briere. “It could not be otherwise. Madame de La
Bastie is German. She has never adopted our etiquette, and I let my
two women lead me their own way. I have always preferred to sit in
the carriage rather than on the box. I can make a joke of all this at
present, for we have not yet seen the Duc d’Herouville, and I do not
believe in marriages arranged by proxy, any more than I believe in
choosing my daughter’s husband.”
“That declaration is equally encouraging and discouraging to two young
men who are searching for the philosopher’s stone of happiness in
marriage,” said Canalis.
“Don’t you consider it useful, necessary, and even politic to stipulate
for perfect freedom of action for parents, daughters, and suitors?”
asked Charles Mignon.
Canalis, at a sign from La Briere, kept silence. The conversation
presently became unimportant, and after a few turns round the garden the
count retired, urging the visit of the two friends.
“That’s our dismissal,” cried Canalis; “you saw it as plainly as I did.
Well, in his place, I should not hesitate between the grand equerry and
either of us, charming as we are.”
“I don’t think so,” said La Briere. “I believe that frank soldier came
here to satisfy his desire to see you, and to warn us of his neutrality
while receiving us in his house. Modeste, in love with your fame, and
misled by my person, stands, as it were, between the real and the ideal,
between poetry and prose. I am, unfortunately, the prose.”
“Germain,” said Canalis to the valet, who came to take away the coffee,
“order the carriage in half an hour. We will take a drive before we go
to the Chalet.”