Modeste Mignon Part 17

Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,--in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent, aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall? Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the boards. She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to see. The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no longer spoke to her. Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes, she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion. She fought against reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crus.h.i.+ng. She would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the utmost.

"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.

The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short s.p.a.ce of time and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality. Sadness, when caused by the overgrowth of hope, is a disease,--sometimes a fatal one.

It would be no mean object for physiology to search out in what ways and by what means Thought produces the same internal disorganization as poison; and how it is that despair affects the appet.i.te, destroys the pylorus, and changes all the physical conditions of the strongest life.

Such was the case with Modeste. In three short days she became the image of morbid melancholy; she did not sing, she could not be made to smile.

Charles Mignon, becoming uneasy at the non-arrival of the two friends, thought of going to fetch them, when, on the evening of the fifth day, he received news of their movements through Latournelle.

Ca.n.a.lis, excessively delighted at the idea of a rich marriage, was determined to neglect nothing that might help him to cut out La Briere, without, however, giving La Briere a chance to reproach him for having violated the laws of friends.h.i.+p. The poet felt that nothing would lower a lover so much in the eyes of a young girl as to exhibit him in a subordinate position; and he therefore proposed to La Briere, in the most natural manner, to take a little country-house at Ingouville for a month, and live there together on pretence of requiring sea-air. As soon as La Briere, who at first saw nothing amiss in the proposal, had consented, Ca.n.a.lis declared that he should pay all expenses, and he sent his valet to Havre, telling him to see Monsieur Latournelle and get his a.s.sistance in choosing the house,--well aware that the notary would repeat all particulars to the Mignons. Ernest and Ca.n.a.lis had, as may well be supposed, talked over all the aspects of the affair, and the rather prolix Ernest had given a good many useful hints to his rival.

The valet, understanding his master's wishes, fulfilled them to the letter; he trumpeted the arrival of the great poet, for whom the doctors advised sea-air to restore his health, injured as it was by the double toils of literature and politics. This important personage wanted a house, which must have at least such and such a number of rooms, as he would bring with him a secretary, cook, two servants, and a coachman, not counting himself, Germain Bonnet, the valet. The carriage, selected and hired for a month by Ca.n.a.lis, was a pretty one; and Germain set about finding a pair of fine horses which would also answer as saddle-horses,--for, as he said, monsieur le baron and his secretary took horseback exercise. Under the eyes of little Latournelle, who went with him to various houses, Germain made a good deal of talk about the secretary, rejecting two or three because there was no suitable room for Monsieur de La Briere.

"Monsieur le baron," he said to the notary, "makes his secretary quite his best friend. Ah! I should be well scolded if Monsieur de La Briere was not as well treated as monsieur le baron himself; and after all, you know, Monsieur de La Briere is a lawyer in my master's court."

Germain never appeared in public unless punctiliously dressed in black, with spotless gloves, well-polished boots, and otherwise as well apparelled as a lawyer. Imagine the effect he produced in Havre, and the idea people took of the great poet from this sample of him! The valet of a man of wit and intellect ends by getting a little wit and intellect himself which has rubbed off from his master. Germain did not overplay his part; he was simple and good-humored, as Ca.n.a.lis had instructed him to be. Poor La Briere was in blissful ignorance of the harm Germain was doing to his prospects, and the depreciation his consent to the arrangement had brought upon him; it is, however, true that some inkling of the state of things rose to Modeste's ears from these lower regions.

Ca.n.a.lis had arranged to bring his secretary in his own carriage, and Ernest's unsuspicious nature did not perceive that he was putting himself in a false position until too late to remedy it. The delay in the arrival of the pair which had troubled Charles Mignon was caused by the painting of the Ca.n.a.lis arms on the panels of the carriage, and by certain orders given to a tailor; for the poet neglected none of the innumerable details which might, even the smallest of them, influence a young girl.

"It is all right," said Latournelle to Mignon on the sixth day. "The baron's valet has hired Madame Amaury's villa at Sanvic, all furnished, for seven hundred francs; he has written to his master that he may start, and that all will be ready on his arrival. So the two gentlemen will be here Sunday. I have also had a letter from Butscha; here it is; it's not long: 'My dear master,--I cannot get back till Sunday. Between now and then I have some very important inquiries to make which concern the happiness of a person in whom you take an interest.'"

The announcement of this arrival did not rouse Modeste from her gloom; the sense of her fall and the bewilderment of her mind were still too great, and she was not nearly as much of a coquette as her father thought her to be. There is, in truth, a charming and permissible coquetry, that of the soul, which may claim to be love's politeness.

Charles Mignon, when scolding his daughter, failed to distinguish between the mere desire of pleasing and the love of the mind,--the thirst for love, and the thirst for admiration. Like every true colonel of the Empire he saw in this correspondence, rapidly read, only the young girl who had thrown herself at the head of a poet; but in the letters which we were forced to lack of s.p.a.ce to suppress, a better judge would have admired the dignified and gracious reserve which Modeste had subst.i.tuted for the rather aggressive and light-minded tone of her first letters. The father, however, was only too cruelly right on one point. Modeste's last letter, which we have read, had indeed spoken as though the marriage were a settled fact, and the remembrance of that letter filled her with shame; she thought her father very harsh and cruel to force her to receive a man unworthy of her, yet to whom her soul had flown, as it were, bare. She questioned Dumay about his interview with the poet, she inveigled him into relating its every detail, and she did not think Ca.n.a.lis as barbarous as the lieutenant had declared him. The thought of the beautiful casket which held the letters of the thousand and one women of this literary Don Juan made her smile, and she was strongly tempted to say to her father: "I am not the only one to write to him; the elite of my s.e.x send their leaves for the laurel wreath of the poet."

During this week Modeste's character underwent a transformation. The catastrophe--and it was a great one to her poetic nature--roused a faculty of discernment and also the malice latent in her girlish heart, in which her suitors were about to encounter a formidable adversary. It is a fact that when a young woman's heart is chilled her head becomes clear; she observes with great rapidity of judgment, and with a tinge of pleasantry which Shakespeare's Beatrice so admirably represents in "Much Ado about Nothing." Modeste was seized with a deep disgust for men, now that the most distinguished among them had betrayed her hopes. When a woman loves, what she takes for disgust is simply the ability to see clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is never, especially if she is a young girl, in a condition to see clearly. If she cannot admire, she despises. And so, after pa.s.sing through terrible struggles of the soul, Modeste necessarily put on the armor on which, as she had once declared, the word "Disdain" was engraved. After reaching that point she was able, in the character of uninterested spectator, to take part in what she was pleased to call the "farce of the suitors," a performance in which she herself was about to play the role of heroine. She particularly set before her mind the satisfaction of humiliating Monsieur de La Briere.

"Modeste is saved," said Madame Mignon to her husband; "she wants to revenge herself on the false Ca.n.a.lis by trying to love the real one."

Such in truth was Modeste's plan. It was so utterly commonplace that her mother, to whom she confided her griefs, advised her on the contrary to treat Monsieur de La Briere with extreme politeness.

CHAPTER XVII. A THIRD SUITOR

"Those two young men," said Madame Latournelle, on the Sat.u.r.day evening, "have no idea how many spies they have on their tracks. We are eight in all, on the watch."

"Don't say two young men, wife; say three!" cried little Latournelle, looking round him. "Gobenheim is not here, so I can speak out."

Modeste raised her head, and everybody, imitating Modeste, raised theirs and looked at the notary.

"Yes, a third lover--and he is something like a lover--offers himself as a candidate."

"Bah!" exclaimed the colonel.

"I speak of no less a person," said Latournelle, pompously, "than Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, Marquis de Saint-Sever, Duc de Nivron, Comte de Bayeux, Vicomte d'Essigny, grand equerry and peer of France, knight of the Spur and the Golden Fleece, grandee of Spain, and son of the last governor of Normandy. He saw Mademoiselle Modeste at the time when he was staying with the Vilquins, and he regretted then--as his notary, who came from Bayeux yesterday, tells me--that she was not rich enough for him; for his father recovered nothing but the estate of Herouville on his return to France, and that is saddled with a sister.

The young duke is thirty-three years old. I am definitively charged to lay these proposals before you, Monsieur le comte," added the notary, turning respectfully to the colonel.

"Ask Modeste if she wants another bird in her cage," replied the count; "as far as I am concerned, I am willing that my lord the grand equerry shall pay her attention."

Notwithstanding the care with which Charles Mignon avoided seeing people, and though he stayed in the Chalet and never went out without Modeste, Gobenheim had reported Dumay's wealth; for Dumay had said to him when giving up his position as cas.h.i.+er: "I am to be bailiff for my colonel, and all my fortune, except what my wife needs, is to go to the children of our little Modeste." Every one in Havre had therefore propounded the same question that the notary had already put to himself: "If Dumay's share in the profits is six hundred thousand francs, and he is going to be Monsieur Mignon's bailiff, then Monsieur Mignon must certainly have a colossal fortune. He arrived at Ma.r.s.eilles on a s.h.i.+p of his own, loaded with indigo; and they say at the Bourse that the cargo, not counting the s.h.i.+p, is worth more than he gives out as his whole fortune."

The colonel was unwilling to dismiss the servants he had brought back with him, whom he had chosen with care during his travels; and he therefore hired a house for them in the lower part of Ingouville, where he installed his valet, cook, and coachman, all Negroes, and three mulattos on whose fidelity he could rely. The coachman was told to search for saddle-horses for Mademoiselle and for his master, and for carriage-horses for the caleche in which the colonel and the lieutenant had returned to Havre. That carriage, bought in Paris, was of the latest fas.h.i.+on, and bore the arms of La Bastie, surmounted by a count's coronet. These things, insignificant in the eyes of a man who for four years had been accustomed to the unbridled luxury of the Indies and of the English merchants at Canton, were the subject of much comment among the business men of Havre and the inhabitants of Ingouville and Graville. Before five days had elapsed the rumor of them ran from one end of Normandy to the other like a train of gunpowder touched by fire.

"Monsieur Mignon has come back from China with millions," some one said in Rouen; "and it seems he was made a count in mid-ocean."

"But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution," answered another.

"So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon for twenty-five years! What are we coming to?" said a third.

Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes began once more to see her merits. The aunt and sister of the Duc d'Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur Charles Mignon's right to the t.i.tle and arms of count, derived from Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal's hat and ta.s.sels were added as a crest. They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were staying at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished head of their house now became active.

"If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,"

said the aunt of the young duke, "she is the best match in the province.

_She_ at least is n.o.ble."

The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in that bourgeois household.

Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this late arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more s.p.a.ce here than he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, offspring of the matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born during the emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of the present duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819, before he was able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast chateau of Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which he had bought back with some difficulty; all of which returned a rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the pauper peers of France.

But what were these twenty-seven thousand francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family? In Paris, of course, the young duke used the king's coaches, and had a mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy. If this n.o.ble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables.

Mademoiselle d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French n.o.bility, who are themselves embarra.s.sed to provide for their sons under the new law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses; but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration, from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d'Herouville, though in quest of millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker, with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.

At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen, who wished to make her daughter a d.u.c.h.ess. The king, anxious to restore the d'Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle d'Herouville of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When great things disappear they leave crumbs, "frusteaux," Rabelais would say, behind them; and the French n.o.bility of this century has left us too many such fragments.

Neither the clergy nor the n.o.bility have anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the n.o.ble t.i.tle of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of n.o.bles, although we have already done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais," and the very n.o.bleness of the n.o.bility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation, cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which manners alone survive the n.o.bler vanished qualities,--forms, which are the sole heritage our n.o.bles have preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.

The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face, was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty. The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the wors.h.i.+p to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed upon him,--very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed itself when he felt at ease.

f.a.n.n.y Beaupre, an actress who was supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him "a sound wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews." The beautiful d.u.c.h.esse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only wors.h.i.+p, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious sayings.

"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine workmans.h.i.+p which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."

Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting t.i.tle of grand equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh,--although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections pa.s.sed through her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the circ.u.mstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the courts.h.i.+p of the Duc d'Herouville would save her from being at the mercy of either Ca.n.a.lis.

"I see no reason," she said to Latournelle, "why the Duc d'Herouville should not be received. I have pa.s.sed, in spite of our indigence," she continued, with a mischievous look at her father, "to the condition of heiress. Haven't you observed Gobenheim's glances? They have quite changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my charms."

"Hush, my darling!" cried Madame Latournelle, "here he comes."

"Old Althor is in despair," said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he entered.

"Why?" asked the count.

"Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several millions. What ill-luck for his son!"

"No one knows," said Charles Mignon, coldly, "what my liabilities in India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence as to my private affairs. Dumay," he whispered to his friend, "if Vilquin is embarra.s.sed we could get back the villa by paying him what he gave for it."

Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on Sunday morning Ca.n.a.lis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc d'Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at Graville. This a.s.semblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at Ingouville. "If this goes on, she will have a hospital here," said the younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a d.u.c.h.ess.

The everlasting comedy of "The Heiress," about to be played at the Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste's frame of mind, "The Designs of a Young Girl"; for since 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. Ca.n.a.lis, 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 d.u.c.h.esse de Chaulieu and the fas.h.i.+onable 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.