Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

into vulgar hands, and they will tear its diaphanous wings and rend its veil under the miserable pretext of enlightening me, of discovering whether genius is as prudent as a banker, whether my Melchior has saved his money, or whether he has some entanglement to shake off; they want to find out if he is guilty to bourgeois eyes of youthful indiscretions,--which to the sun of our love are like the clouds of the dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See! feel my hand, it burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it."

And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to Paris,--to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our drama for a moment.

Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste's letter. Could it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This flattery is the flattery supreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it is the divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to create it by the power of an inward look,--is not that the highest reach of love? And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture of an applauded author, "At last I am beloved!" When a woman, be she maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, "Thou art handsome," the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince. Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter, full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to him, "Modeste is right." He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:--

"She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!"

Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the pavement.

"Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes," he cried; "what a maddening situation I have put myself in!"

La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of honor. He at once resolved to find Modeste's father, if he were in Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious results of their Parisian jest. To a sensitive nature like his, Modeste's large fortune was in itself a determining reason. He could not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a "dot." Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed his start in life.

At the hour when La Briere was inquiring about the father of his beloved from the head of the house of Mongenod, and getting information that might be useful to him in his strange position, a scene was taking place in Canalis's study which the ex-lieutenant's hasty departure from Havre may have led the reader to foresee.

Like a true soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,--a buffoon addicted to choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he had tumbled from the moon, except when scribbling at a desk, like Butscha. But the seething of the Breton's heart and brain received a violent application of cold water when he entered the courtyard of the pretty house occupied by the poet and saw a groom washing a carriage, and also, through the windows of a handsome dining-room, a valet dressed like a banker, to whom the groom referred him, and who answered, looking the stranger over from head to foot, that Monsieur le baron was not visible. "There is," added the man, "a meeting of the council of state to-day, at which Monsieur le baron is obliged to be present."

"Is this really the house of Monsieur Canalis," said Dumay, "a writer of poetry?"

"Monsieur le baron de Canalis," replied the valet, "is the great poet of whom you speak; but he is also the president of the court of Claims attached to the ministry of foreign affairs."

Dumay, who had come to box the ears of a scribbling nobody, found himself confronted by a high functionary of the state. The salon where he was told to wait offered, as a topic for his meditations, the insignia of the Legion of honor glittering on a black coat which the valet had left upon a chair. Presently his eyes were attracted by the beauty and brilliancy of a silver-gilt cup bearing the words "Given by _Madame_." Then he beheld before him, on a pedestal, a Sevres vase on which was engraved, "The gift of Madame la _Dauphine_."

These mute admonitions brought Dumay to his senses while the valet went to ask his master if he would receive a person who had come from Havre expressly to see him,--a stranger named Dumay.

"What sort of a man?" asked Canalis.

"He is well-dressed, and wears the ribbon of the Legion of honor."

Canalis made a sign of assent, and the valet retreated, and then returned and announced, "Monsieur Dumay."

When he heard himself announced, when he was actually in presence of Canalis, in a study as gorgeous as it was elegant, with his feet on a carpet far handsomer than any in the house of Mignon, and when he met the studied glance of the poet who was playing with the tassels of a sumptuous dressing-gown, Dumay was so completely taken aback that he allowed the great poet to have the first word.

"To what do I owe the honor of your visit, monsieur?"

"Monsieur," began Dumay, who remained standing.

"If you have a good deal to say," interrupted Canalis, "I must ask you to be seated."

And Canalis himself plunged into an armchair a la Voltaire, crossed his legs, raised the upper one to the level of his eye and looked fixedly at Dumay, who became, to use his own martial slang, "bayonetted."

"I am listening, monsieur," said the poet; "my time is precious,--the ministers are expecting me."

"Monsieur," said Dumay, "I shall be brief. You have seduced--how, I do not know--a young lady in Havre, young, beautiful, and rich; the last and only hope of two noble families; and I have come to ask your intentions."

Canalis, who had been busy during the last three months with serious matters of his own, and was trying to get himself made commander of the Legion of honor and minister to a German court, had completely forgotten Modeste's letter."

"I!" he exclaimed.

"You!" repeated Dumay.

"Monsieur," answered Canalis, smiling; "I know no more of what you are talking about than if you had said it in Hebrew. I seduce a young girl! I, who--" and a superb smile crossed his features. "Come, come, monsieur, I'm not such a child as to steal fruit over the hedges when I have orchards and gardens of my own where the finest peaches ripen. All Paris knows where my affections are set. Very likely there may be some young girl in Havre full of enthusiasm for my verses,--of which they are not worthy; that would not surprise me at all; nothing is more common. See! look at that lovely coffer of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and edged with that iron-work as fine as lace. That coffer belonged to Pope Leo X., and was given to me by the Duchesse de Chaulieu, who received it from the king of Spain. I use it to hold the letters I receive from ladies and young girls living in every quarter of Europe. Oh! I assure you I feel the utmost respect for these flowers of the soul, cut and sent in moments of enthusiasm that are worthy of all reverence. Yes, to me the impulse of a heart is a noble and sublime thing! Others--scoffers--light their cigars with such letters, or give them to their wives for curl-papers; but I, who am a bachelor, monsieur, I have too much delicacy not to preserve these artless offerings--so fresh, so disinterested--in a tabernacle of their own. In fact, I guard them with a species of veneration, and at my death they will be burned before my eyes. People may call that ridiculous, but I do not care. I am grateful; these proofs of devotion enable me to bear the criticisms and annoyances of a literary life. When I receive a shot in the back from some enemy lurking under cover of a daily paper, I look at that casket and think,--here and there in this wide world there are hearts whose wounds have been healed, or soothed, or dressed by me!"

This bit of poetry, declaimed with all the talent of a great actor, petrified the lieutenant, whose eyes opened to their utmost extent, and whose astonishment delighted the poet.

"I will permit you," continued the peacock, spreading his tail, "out of respect for your position, which I fully appreciate, to open that coffer and look for the letter of your young lady. Though I know I am right, I remember names, and I assure you you are mistaken in thinking--"

"And this is what a poor child comes to in this gulf of Paris!" cried Dumay,--"the darling of her parents, the joy of her friends, the hope of all, petted by all, the pride of a family, who has six persons so devoted to her that they would willingly make a rampart of their lives and fortunes between her and sorrow. Monsieur," Dumay remarked after a pause, "you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier. For fifteen years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of many a bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner there; the Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I suffered. I have seen thousands of my comrades die,--but you, you have given me a chill to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt before."

Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only flattered him,--a thing which at this period of his life had become almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the first perfumed phial that praise