The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere
dreaded the interview, while Canalis approached it with the confidence
of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the
father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the
ex-merchant, showed Canalis his own maladroitness, and determined him to
select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend indifference,
though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to appear to
disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love. Trained by
the handsome Duchesse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be worthy of his
reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he did not know them
at all,--which is often the case with those who are the happy victims
of an exclusive passion. While poor Ernest, gloomily ensconced in his
corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of genuine love, and
foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and disdain of an injured and
offended young girl, Canalis was preparing himself, not less silently,
like an actor making ready for an important part in a new play;
certainly neither of them presented the appearance of a happy man.
Important interests were involved for Canalis. The mere suggestion of
his desire to marry would bring about a rupture of the tie which had
bound him for the last ten years to the Duchesse de Chaulieu. Though
he had covered the purpose of his journey with the vulgar pretext of
needing rest,--in which, by the bye, women never believe, even when
it is true,--his conscience troubled him somewhat; but the word
“conscience” seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere that he shrugged his
shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.
“Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than a
dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real advantages
and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de Chaulieu; for, if
you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would renounce without the
slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a passion that has been
mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If you simply mean that
you are afraid of displeasing your protectress, should she find out the
object of your stay here, I believe you. To renounce the duchess and yet
not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a risk. You take the anxiety of
this alternative for remorse.”
“You have no comprehension of feelings,” said the poet, irritably, like
a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.
“That is what a bigamist should tell the jury,” retorted La Briere,
laughing.
This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Canalis. He began
to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.
The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Canalis
livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors
were expected, and all the personages of this history were assembled to
receive them, except the duke and Butscha.
“Which is the poet?” asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the embrasure
of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she heard the
wheels.
“The one who walks like a drum-major,” answered the lieutenant.
“Ah!” said the notary’s wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his
body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the
great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,--as all women
older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in
his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age
wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so
as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the
first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is
accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when
they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by the handsome
duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself
that they pleased that “grande dame,” whose taste was law. Such shades
of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the
historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a
talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious
praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor
actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always
through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses;
lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of
the green-room, Canalis “dragged the time.” He was fond of exchanging
glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of
self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors
call “balancoires,”--the picturesque phrase of an artistic people.
Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of
his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his
conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment
the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet
ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively
at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular
pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the
effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet
once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any
moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails
of his coats.
These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery
youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself
was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men
as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess
exceeded her lover’s age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her;
for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,--without rouge,
without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have
friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the
fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is
but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from
sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their
rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the
matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never
grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now
Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of
his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes
to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in
which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying
compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to
others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of
its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a
courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made
no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as
minister of foreign affairs, “Your excellency was truly sublime!” Many
men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration
of non-success in little doses.
These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of
absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech
and affected diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so--are
surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to
some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the
provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type.
Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his
form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the
duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if
you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything
everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France.
Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the
customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character,--as
did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic; it
lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social centres;
it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by
its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-class
vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much
more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere,
such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he carried his own
public with him wherever he went,--an error shared by several of the
great men of Paris.
While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of
the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.
“Ha! do I see my soldier?” said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after
addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women.
“Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?” he said, offering his hand
effusively; “I comprehend them to their fullest extent after seeing
mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of angels.”
All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this speech.
“I shall always consider it a triumph,” resumed the poet, observing that
everybody wished for an explanation, “to have stirred to mention one
of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the
supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal
to be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this
triumph--why should I be proud of it?--I count for nothing. It was the
triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay, your
heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form in which
Napoleon’s idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what remains?
The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go without
revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian, the
writer, futurity would have no knowledge of those heroic days. Therefore
your fifteen years of war are now ideas and nothing more; that which
preserves the Empire forever is the poem that the poets make of them. A
nation that can win such battles must know how to sing them.”
Canalis paused, to gather by a glance that ran round the circle the
tribute of amazement which he expected of provincials.
“You must be aware, monsieur, of the regret I feel at not seeing you,”
said Madame Mignon, “since you compensate me with the pleasure of
hearing you.”
Modeste, determined to think Canalis sublime, sat motionless with
amazement; the embroidery slipped from her fingers, which held it only
by the needleful of thread.
“Modeste, this is Monsieur Ernest de La Briere. Monsieur Ernest, my
daughter,” said the count, thinking the secretary too much in the
background.
The young girl bowed coldly, giving Ernest a glance that was meant to
prove to every one present that she saw him for the first time.
“Pardon me, monsieur,” she said without blushing; “the great admiration
I feel for the greatest of our poets is, in the eyes of my friends, a
sufficient excuse for seeing only him.”
The pure, fresh voice, with accents like that of Mademoiselle Mars,
charmed the poor secretary, already dazzled by Modeste’s beauty, and
in his sudden surprise he answered by a phrase that would have been
sublime, had it been true.
“He is my friend,” he said.
“Ah, then you do pardon me,” she replied.
“He is more than a friend,” cried Canalis taking Ernest by the shoulder
and leaning upon it like Alexander on Hephaestion, “we love each other
as though we were brothers--”
Madame Latournelle cut short the poet’s speech by pointing to Ernest
and saying aloud to her husband, “Surely that is the gentleman we saw at
church.”
“Why not?” said Charles Mignon, quickly, observing that Ernest reddened.
Modeste coldly took up her embroidery.
“Madame may be right; I have been twice in Havre lately,” replied La
Briere, sitting down by Dumay.
Canalis, charmed with Modeste’s beauty, mistook the admiration she
expressed, and flattered himself he had succeeded in producing his
desired effects.
“I should think a man without heart, if he had no devoted friend near
him,” said Modeste, to pick up the conversation interrupted by Madame
Latournelle’s awkwardness.
“Mademoiselle, Ernest’s devotion makes me almost think myself worth
something,” said Canalis; “for my dear Pylades is full of talent; he
was the right hand of the greatest minister we have had since the peace.
Though he holds a fine position, he is good enough to be my tutor in the
science of politics; he teaches me to conduct affairs and feeds me with
his experience, when all the while he might aspire to a much better
situation. Oh! he is worth far more than I.” At a gesture from Modeste
he continued gracefully: “Yes, the poetry that I express he carries in
his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is because he has
the modesty of a nun.”
“Enough, oh, enough!” cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to
look. “My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to
marry off her daughter.”
“How is it, monsieur,” said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, “that
you can even think of becoming a political character?”
“It is abdication,” said Modeste, “for a poet; politics are the resource
of matter-of-fact men.”
“Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the
world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the
meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the
rallying-point of courage.”
Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on
political life: “Poetry was but a preface to the statesman.” “To-day the
orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas.” “A poet
may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever cease to be
himself?” He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he would one day be
greater on the political side than on the literary. “The forum of France
was to be the pharos of humanity.” “Oral battles supplanted fields of
battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer than any Austerlitz,
and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals; they spent their
lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as those who went to
war.” “Speech was surely one of the most prodigal outlets of the vital
fluid that man had ever known,” etc.
This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases
and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de
Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made
a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame
Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at the
theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,--very much like
that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all these
high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as it
were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with
her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had
created as he read her letters and answered them.
This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful
not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an
invitation to dinner on the following Monday.
“We shall not be at the Chalet,” said the Comte de La Bastie. “Dumay
will have sole possession of it. I return to the villa, having bought it
back under a deed of redemption within six months, which I have to-day
signed with Monsieur Vilquin.”
“I hope,” said Dumay, “that Vilquin will not be able to return to you
the sum you have just lent him, and that the villa will remain yours.”
“It is an abode in keeping with your fortune,” said Canalis.
“You mean the fortune that I am supposed to have,” replied Charles
Mignon, hastily.
“It would be too sad,” said Canalis, turning to Modeste with a charming
little bow, “if this Madonna were not framed in a manner worthy of her
divine perfections.”
That was the only thing Canalis said to Modeste. He affected not to
look at her, and behaved like a man to whom all idea of marriage was
interdicted.
“Ah! my dear Madame Mignon,” cried the notary’s wife, as soon as the
gravel was heard to grit under the feet of the Parisians, “what an
intellect!”
“Is he rich?--that is the question,” said Gobenheim.
Modeste was at the window, not losing a single movement of the great
poet, and paying no attention to his companion. When Monsieur Mignon
returned to the salon, and Modeste, having received a last bow from the
two friends as the carriage turned, went back to her seat, a weighty
discussion took place, such as provincials invariably hold over
Parisians after a first interview. Gobenheim repeated his phrase, “Is
he rich?” as a chorus to the songs of praise sung by Madame Latournelle,
Modeste, and her mother.
“Rich!” exclaimed Modeste; “what can that signify! Do you not see that
Monsieur de Canalis is one of those men who are destined for the highest
places in the State. He has more than fortune; he possesses that which
gives fortune.”
“He will be minister or ambassador,” said Monsieur Mignon.
“That won’t hinder tax-payers from having to pay the costs of his
funeral,” remarked the notary.
“How so?” asked Charles Mignon.
“He strikes me as a man who will waste all the fortunes with whose gifts
Mademoiselle Modeste so liberally endows him,” answered Latournelle.
“Modeste can’t avoid being liberal to a poet who called her a Madonna,”
said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with which Canalis
had originally inspired him.
Gobenheim arranged the whist-table with all the more persistency
because, since the return of Monsieur Mignon, Latournelle and Dumay had
allowed themselves to play for ten sous points.
“Well, my little darling,” said the father to the daughter in the
embrasure of a window. “Admit that papa thinks of everything. If you
send your orders this evening to your former dressmaker in Paris, and
all your other furnishing people, you shall show yourself eight days
hence in all the splendor of an heiress. Meantime we will install
ourselves in the villa. You already have a pretty horse, now order a
habit; you owe that amount of civility to the grand equerry.”
“All the more because there will be a number of us to ride,” said
Modeste, who was recovering the colors of health.
“The secretary did not say much,” remarked Madame Mignon.
“A little fool,” said Madame Latournelle; “the poet has an attentive
word for everybody. He thanked Monsieur Latournelle for his help in
choosing the house; and said he must have taken counsel with a woman of
good taste. But the other looked as gloomy as a Spaniard, and kept his
eyes fixed on Modeste as though he would like to swallow her whole. If
he had even looked at me I should have been afraid of him.”
“He had a pleasant voice,” said Madame Mignon.
“No doubt he came to Havre to inquire about the Mignons in the interests
of his friend the poet,” said Modeste, looking furtively at her father.
“It was certainly he whom we saw in church.”
Madame Dumay and Monsieur and Madame Latournelle, accepted this as the
natural explanation of Ernest’s journey.