Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

a question of marriage, all men disguise themselves," remarked Latournelle, "and women set them the example. I've heard it said ever since I came into the world that 'Monsieur this or Mademoiselle that has made a good marriage,'--meaning that the other side had made a bad one."

"Marriage," said Butscha, "is like a lawsuit; there's always one side discontented. If one dupes the other, certainly half the husbands in the world are playing a comedy at the expense of the other half."

"From which you conclude, Sieur Butscha?" inquired Modeste.

"To pay the utmost attention to the manoeuvres of the enemy," answered the clerk.

"What did I tell you, my darling?" said Charles Mignon, alluding to their conversation on the seashore.

"Men play as many parts to get married as mothers make their daughters play to get rid of them," said Latournelle.

"Then you approve of stratagems?" said Modeste.

"On both sides," cried Gobenheim, "and that brings it even."

This conversation was carried on by fits and starts, as they say, in the intervals of cutting and dealing the cards; and it soon turned chiefly on the merits of the Duc d'Herouville, who was thought very good-looking by little Latournelle, little Dumay, and little Butscha. Without the foregoing discussion on the lawfulness of matrimonial tricks, the reader might possibly find the forthcoming account of the evening so impatiently awaited by Butscha, somewhat too long.

Desplein, the famous surgeon, arrived the next morning, and stayed only long enough to send to Havre for fresh horses and have them put-to, which took about an hour. After examining Madame Mignon's eyes, he decided that she could recover her sight, and fixed a suitable time, a month later, to perform the operation. This important consultation took place before the assembled members of the Chalet, who stood trembling and expectant to hear the verdict of the prince of science. That illustrious member of the Academy of Sciences put about a dozen brief questions to the blind woman as he examined her eyes in the strong light from a window. Modeste was amazed at the value which a man so celebrated attached to time, when she saw the travelling-carriage piled with books which the great surgeon proposed to read during the journey; for he had left Paris the evening before, and had spent the night in sleeping and travelling. The rapidity and clearness of Desplein's judgment on each answer made by Madame Mignon, his succinct tone, his decisive manner, gave Modeste her first real idea of a man of genius. She perceived the enormous difference between a second-rate man, like Canalis, and Desplein, who was even more than a superior man. A man of genius finds in the consciousness of his talent and in the solidity of his fame an arena of his own, where his legitimate pride can expand and exercise itself without interfering with others. Moreover, his perpetual struggle with men and things leave them no time for the coxcombry of fashionable genius, which makes haste to gather in the harvests of a fugitive season, and whose vanity and self-love are as petty and exacting as a custom-house which levies tithes on all that comes in its way.

Modeste was the more enchanted by this great practical genius, because he was evidently charmed with the exquisite beauty of Modeste,--he, through whose hands so many women had passed, and who had long since examined the sex, as it were, with magnifier and scalpel.

"It would be a sad pity," he said, with an air of gallantry which he occasionally put on, and which contrasted with his assumed brusqueness, "if a mother were deprived of the sight of so charming a daughter."

Modeste insisted on serving the simple breakfast which was all the great surgeon would accept. She accompanied her father and Dumay to the carriage stationed at the garden-gate, and said to Desplein at parting, her eyes shining with hope,--

"And will my dear mamma really see me?"

"Yes, my little sprite, I'll promise you that," he answered, smiling; "and I am incapable of deceiving you, for I, too, have a daughter."

The horses started and carried him off as he uttered the last words with unexpected grace and feeling. Nothing is more charming than the peculiar unexpectedness of persons of talent.


CHAPTER XX. THE POET DOES HIS EXERCISES

This visit of the great surgeon was the event of the day, and it left a luminous trace in Modeste's soul. The young enthusiast ardently admired the man whose life belonged to others, and in whom the habit of studying physical suffering had destroyed the manifestations of egoism. That evening, when Gobenheim, the Latournelles, and Butscha, Canalis, Ernest, and the Duc d'Herouville were gathered in the salon, they all congratulated the Mignon family on the hopes which Desplein encouraged. The conversation, in which the Modeste of her letters was once more in the ascendant, turned naturally on the man whose genius, unfortunately for his fame, was appreciable only by the faculty and men of science. Gobenheim contributed a phrase which is the sacred chrism of genius as interpreted in these days by public economists and bankers,--

"He makes a mint of money."

"They say he is very grasping," added Canalis.

The praises which Modeste showered on Desplein had annoyed the poet. Vanity acts like a woman,--they both think they are defrauded when love or praise is bestowed on others. Voltaire was jealous of the wit of a roue whom Paris admired for two days; and even a duchess takes offence at a look bestowed upon her maid. The avarice excited by these two sentiments is such that a fraction of them given to the poor is thought robbery.

"Do you think, monsieur," said Modeste, smiling, "that we should judge genius by ordinary standards?"

"Perhaps we ought first of all to define the man of genius," replied Canalis. "One of the conditions of genius is invention,--invention of a form, a system, a force. Napoleon was an inventor, apart from his other conditions of genius. He invented his method of making war. Walter Scott is an inventor, Linnaeus is an inventor, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier are inventors. Such men are men of genius of the first rank. They renew, increase, or modify both science and art. But Desplein is merely a man whose vast talent consists in properly applying laws already known; in observing, by means of a natural gift, the limits laid down for each temperament, and the time appointed by Nature for an operation. He has not founded, like Hippocrates, the science itself. He has invented no system, as did Galen, Broussais, and Rasori. He is merely an executive genius, like Moscheles on the piano, Paganini on the violin, or Farinelli on his own larynx,--men who have developed enormous faculties, but who have not created music. You must permit me to discriminate between Beethoven and la Catalani: to one belongs the immortal crown of genius and of martyrdom, to the other innumerable five-franc pieces; one we can pay in coin, but the world remains throughout all time a debtor to the other. Each day increases our debt to Moliere, but Baron's comedies have been overpaid."

"I think you make the prerogative of ideas too exclusive," said Ernest de La Briere, in a quiet and melodious voice, which formed a sudden contrast to the peremptory tones of the poet, whose flexible organ had abandoned its caressing notes for the strident and magisterial voice of the rostrum. "Genius must be estimated according to its utility; and Parmentier, who brought potatoes into general use, Jacquart, the inventor of silk looms; Papin, who first discovered the elastic quality of steam, are men of genius, to whom statues will some day be erected. They have changed, or they will change in a certain sense, the face of the State. It is in that sense that Desplein will always be considered a man of genius by thinkers; they see him attended by a generation of sufferers whose pains are stifled by his hand."

That Ernest should give utterance to this opinion was enough to make Modeste oppose it.

"If that be so, monsieur," she said, "then the man who could discover a way to mow wheat without injuring the straw, by a machine that could do the work of ten men, would be a man of genius."

"Yes, my daughter," said Madame Mignon; "and the poor would bless him for cheaper bread,--he that is blessed by the poor is blessed of God."

"That is putting utility above art," said Modeste, shaking her head.

"Without utility what would become of art?" said Charles Mignon. "What would it rest on? what would it live on? Where would you lodge, and how would you pay the poet?"

"Oh! my dear papa, such opinions are fearfully flat and antediluvian! I am not surprised that Gobenheim and Monsieur de La Briere, who are interested in the solution of social problems should think so; but you, whose life has been the most useless poetry of the century,--useless because the blood you shed all over Europe, and the horrible sufferings exacted by your colossus, did not prevent France from losing ten departments acquired under the Revolution,--how can _you_ give in to such excessively pig-tail notions, as the idealists say? It is plain you've just come from China."

The impertinence of Modeste's speech was heightened by a little air of contemptuous disdain which she purposely put on, and which fairly astounded Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle, and Dumay. As for Madame Latournelle, she opened her eyes so wide she no longer saw anything. Butscha, whose alert attention was comparable to that of a spy, looked at Monsieur Mignon, expecting to see him flush with sudden and violent indignation.

"A little more, young lady, and you will be wanting in respect for your father," said the colonel, smiling, and noticing Butscha's look. "See what it is to spoil one's children!"

"I am your only child," she said saucily.

"Child, indeed," remarked the notary, significantly.

"Monsieur," said Modeste, turning upon him, "my father is delighted to have me for his governess; he gave me life and I give him knowledge; he will soon owe me something."

"There seems occasion for it," said Madame Mignon.

"But mademoiselle is right," said Canalis, rising and standing before the fireplace in one of the finest attitudes of his collection. "God, in his providence, has given food and clothing to man, but he has not directly given him art. He says to man: 'To live, thou must bow thyself to earth; to think, thou shalt lift thyself to Me.' We have as much need of the life of the soul as of the life of the body,--hence, there are two utilities. It is true we cannot be shod by books or clothed by poems. An epic song is not, if you take the utilitarian view, as useful as the broth of a charity kitchen. The noblest ideas will not sail a vessel in place of canvas. It is quite true that the cotton-gin gives us calicoes for thirty sous a yard less than we ever paid before; but that machine and all other industrial perfections will not breathe the breath of life into a people, will not tell futurity of a civilization that once existed. Art, on the contrary, Egyptian, Mexican, Grecian, Roman art, with their masterpieces--now called useless!--reveal the existence of races back in the vague immense of time, beyond where the great intermediary nations, denuded of men of genius, have disappeared, leaving not a line nor a trace behind them! The works of genius are the 'summum' of civilization, and presuppose utility. Surely a pair of boots are not as agreeable to your eyes as a fine play at