Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

deadly poison; it acts instantaneously, my love dies. I believe--contrary to the mass of men, who delight in trembling, hoping, expecting--that love can only exist in perfect, infantile, and infinite security. The exquisite purgatory, where women delight to send us by their coquetry, is a base happiness to which I will not submit: to me, love is either heaven or hell. If it is hell, I will have none of it. I feel an affinity with the azure skies of Paradise within my soul. I can give myself without reserve, without secrets, doubts or deceptions, in the life to come; and I demand reciprocity. Perhaps I offend you by these doubts. Remember, however, that I am only talking of myself--"

"--a good deal, but never too much," said Modeste, offended in every hole and corner of her pride by this discourse, in which the Duchesse de Chaulieu served as a dagger. "I am so accustomed to admire you, my dear poet."

"Well, then, can you promise me the same canine fidelity which I offer to you? Is it not beautiful? Is it not just what you have longed for?"

"But why, dear poet, do you not marry a deaf-mute, and one who is also something of an idiot? I ask nothing better than to please my husband. But you threaten to take away from a girl the very happiness you so kindly arrange for her; you are tearing away every gesture, every word, every look; you cut the wings of your bird, and then expect it to hover about you. I know poets are accused of inconsistency--oh! very unjustly," she added, as Canalis made a gesture of denial; "that alleged defect which comes from the brilliant activity of their minds which commonplace people cannot take into account. I do not believe, however, that a man of genius can invent such irreconcilable conditions and call his invention life. You are requiring the impossible solely for the pleasure of putting me in the wrong,--like the enchanters in fairy-tales, who set tasks to persecuted young girls whom the good fairies come and deliver."

"In this case the good fairy would be true love," said Canalis in a curt tone, aware that his elaborate excuse for a rupture was seen through by the keen and delicate mind which Butscha had piloted so well.

"My dear poet, you remind me of those fathers who inquire into a girl's 'dot' before they are willing to name that of their son. You are quarrelling with me without knowing whether you have the slightest right to do so. Love is not gained by such dry arguments as yours. The poor duke on the contrary abandons himself to it like my Uncle Toby; with this difference, that I am not the Widow Wadman,--though widow indeed of many illusions as to poetry at the present moment. Ah, yes, we young girls will not believe in anything that disturbs our world of fancy! I was warned of all this beforehand. My dear poet, you are attempting to get up a quarrel which is unworthy of you. I no longer recognize the Melchior of yesterday."

"Because Melchior has discovered a spirit of ambition in you which--"

Modeste looked at him from head to foot with an imperial eye.

"But I shall be peer of France and ambassador as well as he," added Canalis.

"Do you take me for a bourgeois," she said, beginning to mount the steps of the portico; but she instantly turned back and added, "That is less impertinent than to take me for a fool. The change in your conduct comes from certain silly rumors which you have heard in Havre, and which my maid Francoise has repeated to me."

"Ah, Modeste, how can you think it?" said Canalis, striking a dramatic attitude. "Do you think me capable of marrying you only for your money?"

"If I do you that wrong after your edifying remarks on the banks of the Seine can you easily undeceive me," she said, annihilating him with her scorn.

"Ah!" thought the poet, as he followed her into the house, "if you think, my little girl, that I'm to be caught in that net, you take me to be younger than I am. Dear, dear, what a fuss about an artful little thing whose esteem I value about as much as that of the king of Borneo. But she has given me a good reason for the rupture by accusing me of such unworthy sentiments. Isn't she sly? La Briere will get a burden on his back--idiot that he is! And five years hence it will be a good joke to see them together."

The coldness which this altercation produced between Modeste and Canalis was visible to all eyes that evening. The poet went off early, on the ground of La Briere's illness, leaving the field to the grand equerry. About eleven o'clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste's ear, "Was I right?"

"Alas, yes," she said.

"But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come back; we agreed upon that, you know."

"Anger got the better of me," said Modeste. "Such meanness sent the blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him."

"Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can't speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself."

"Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a man of intellect."

"Your father's eight millions are more to him than all that."

"Eight millions!" exclaimed Modeste.

"My master, who has sold his practice, is going to Provence to attend to the purchase of lands which your father's agent has suggested to him. The sum that is to be paid for the estate of La Bastie is four millions; your father has agreed to it. You are to have a 'dot' of two millions and another million for an establishment in Paris, a hotel and furniture. Now, count up."

"Ah! then I can be Duchesse d'Herouville!" cried Modeste, glancing at Butscha.

"If it hadn't been for that comedian of a Canalis you would have kept HIS whip, thinking it came from me," said the dwarf, indirectly pleading La Briere's cause.

"Monsieur Butscha, may I ask if I am to marry to please you?" said Modeste, laughing.

"That fine fellow loves you as well as I do,--and you loved him for eight days," retorted Butscha; "and HE has got a heart."

"Can he compete, pray, with an office under the Crown? There are but six, grand almoner, chancellor, grand chamberlain, grand master, high constable, grand admiral,--but they don't appoint high constables any longer."

"In six months, mademoiselle, the masses--who are made up of wicked Butschas--could send all those grand dignities to the winds. Besides, what signifies nobility in these days? There are not a thousand real noblemen in France. The d'Herouvilles are descended from a tipstaff in the time of Robert of Normandy. You will have to put up with many a vexation from the old aunt with the furrowed face. Look here,--as you are so anxious for the title of duchess,--you belong to the Comtat, and the Pope will certainly think as much of you as he does of all those merchants down there; he'll sell you a duchy with some name ending in 'ia' or 'agno.' Don't play away your happiness for an office under the Crown."


CHAPTER XXV. A DIPLOMATIC LETTER

The poet's reflections during the night were thoroughly matter of fact. He sincerely saw nothing worse in life than the situation of a married man without money. Still trembling at the danger he had been led into by his vanity, his desire to get the better of the duke, and his belief in the Mignon millions, he began to ask himself what the duchess must be thinking of his stay in Havre, aggravated by the fact that he had not written to her for fourteen days, whereas in Paris they exchanged four or five letters a week.

"And that poor woman is working hard to get me appointed commander of the Legion and ambassador to the Court of Baden!" he cried.

Thereupon, with that promptitude of decision which results--in poets as well as in speculators--from a lively intuition of the future, he sat down and composed the following letter:--

To Madame la Duchesse de Chaulieu:

My dear Eleonore,--You have doubtless been surprised at not
hearing from me; but the stay I am making in this place is not
altogether on account of my health. I have been trying to do a
good turn to our little friend La Briere. The poor fellow has
fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie, a
rather pale, insignificant, and thread-papery little thing, who,
by the way, has the vice of liking literature, and calls herself a
poet to excuse the caprices and humors of a rather sullen nature.
You know Ernest,--he is so easy to catch that I have been afraid
to leave him to himself. Mademoiselle de La Bastie was inclined to
coquet with your Melchior, and was only too ready to become your
rival, though her arms are thin, and she has no more bust than
most girls; moreover, her hair is as dead and colorless as that of
Madame de Rochefide, and her eyes small, gray, and very
suspicious. I put a stop--perhaps rather brutally--to the
attentions of Mademoiselle Immodeste; but love, such as mine for
you, demanded it. What care I for all the women on earth,
--compared to you, what are they?

The people with whom I pass my time, and who form the circle round
the heiress, are so thoroughly bourgeois that they almost turn my
stomach. Pity me; imagine! I pass my evenings with notaries,
notaresses, cashiers, provincial money-lenders--ah! what a change
from my evenings in the rue de Grenelle. The alleged fortune of
the father, lately returned from China, has brought to Havre that
indefatigable suitor, the grand equerry, hungry after the
millions, which he wants, they say, to drain his marshes. The king
does not know what a fatal present he made the duke in those waste
lands. His Grace, who has not yet found out that the lady had only
a small fortune, is jealous of _me_; for La Briere is quietly making
progress with his idol under cover of his friend, who serves as a
blind.

Notwithstanding Ernest's romantic ecstasies, I myself, a poet,
think chiefly of the essential thing, and I have been making some
inquiries which darken the prospects of our friend. If my angel
would like absolution for some of our little sins, she will try to
find out the facts of the case by sending for Mongenod, the
banker, and questioning him, with the dexterity that characterizes
her, as to the father's fortune? Monsieur Mignon, formerly colonel
of cavalry in the Imperial guard, has been for the last seven
years a correspondent of the Mongenods. It is said that he gives
his daughter a "dot" of two hundred thousand francs, and before I
make