Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

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 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."


CHAPTER XVIII. A SPLENDID FIRST APPEARANCE

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