satiety cast her, saturated as she still was with Catholic
spirituality, into the love of Good, the
infinite of heaven. She
conceived of
charity, service to others, as the true
occupation of
life; but she cowered in the
gloomy dreariness of
finding in it no
food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an
insect at
the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly
sewing garments
for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the
grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card
or drew out his last trump.
Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a
singular track of
thought. She imagined that if she became sinless (speaking
ecclesiastically) she would
attain to such a condition of sanctity
that God would hear her and accomplish her desires. "Faith," she
thought, "can move mountains; Christ has said so. The Saviour led his
apostle upon the waters of the lake Tiberias; and I, all I ask of God
is a husband to love me; that is easier than walking upon the sea."
She fasted through the next Lent, and did not
commit a single sin;
then she said to herself that on a certain day coming out of church
she should meet a handsome young man who was
worthy of her, whom her
mother would accept, and who would fall madly in love with her. When
the day came on which she had, as it were, summoned God to send her an
angel, she was persistently followed by a rather disgusting beggar;
moreover, it rained heavily, and not a single young man was in the
streets. On another occasion she went to walk on the jetty to see the
English travellers land; but each Englishman had an Englishwoman,
nearly as handsome as Modeste herself, who saw no one at all
resembling a wandering Childe Harold. Tears
overcame her, as she sat
down like Marius on the ruins of her
imagination. But on the day when
she subpoenaed God for the third time she
firmly believed that the
Elect of her dreams was within the church, hiding, perhaps out of
delicacy, behind one of the pillars, round all of which she dragged
Madame Latournelle on a tour of
inspection. After this
failure, she
deposed the Deity from omnipotence. Many were her conversations with
the
imaginary lover, for whom she invented questions and answers,
bestowing upon him a great deal of wit and intelligence.
The high ambitions of her heart
hidden within these
romances were the
real
explanation of the
prudent conduct which the good people who
watched over Modeste so much admired; they might have brought her any
number of young Althors or Vilquins, and she would never have stooped
to such clowns. She wanted,
purely and simply, a man of
genius,--
talent she cared little for; just as a
lawyer is of no
account to a
girl who aims for an
ambassador. Her only desire for
wealth was to
cast it at the feet of her idol. Indeed, the golden
background of
these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart,
filled with womanly
delicacy; for its
dominant desire was to make some
Tasso, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher
Columbus happy.
Commonplace miseries did not
seriously touch this
youthful soul, who
longed to
extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in
their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing
melodies which might have allayed the
savage misanthropy of Rousseau.
Or she fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively
his
contempt for the real, she made herself as
fantastic as the
poetryof Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
Modeste attributed Moliere's
melancholy to the women of the
seventeenth century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked
herself, "
loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man
of
genius and be his slave, like Lara, the
mysterious page?" She had,
as the reader perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the
English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly
admired the
behavior of the young Englishwoman who offered herself to
Crebillon, the son, who married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza
Draper was her life and her happiness for several months. She made
herself ideally the
heroine of a like
romance, and many a time she
rehearsed in
imagination the
sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so
charmingly expressed in that
delightfulcorrespondence filled her eyes
with tears which, it is said, were
lacking in those of the wittiest of
English writers.
Modeste existed for some time on a
comprehension, not only of the
works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the
author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most
suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials,
initiated herself into a destitution where the thoughts of
geniusbrooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied
herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to
their own
faculty. This noble
passion" target="_blank" title="n.同情;怜悯">
compassion, this intuition of the
struggles of toilers, this
worship of
genius, are among the choicest
perceptions that
flutter through the souls of women. They are, in the
first place, a secret between the woman and God, for they are
hidden;
in them there is nothing
striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity,
--that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.
Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came
to Modeste a
passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的;易怒的">
passionate desire to
penetrate to the heart of one of
these
abnormal beings; to understand the
working of the thoughts and
the
hidden griefs of
genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what
it was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy,
these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth
into the darkness of the future, the
impatience of an ungiven love to
find its goal, the
nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision
of her mind to suffer in a
sphere of higher things rather than
flounder in the marshes of
provincial life like her mother, the pledge
she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her
father's
hearth and bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and
sentiment had
lately come to a
climax and taken shape. Modeste wished
to be the friend and
companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way
superior to the crowd of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to
give him her heart, her life, her
infinitetenderness freed from the
trammels of
passion, until she had carefully and deeply
studied him.
She began this pretty
romance by simply enjoying it. Profound
tranquillity settled down upon her soul. Her cheeks took on a soft
color; and she became the beautiful and noble image of Germany, such
as we have
lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of
Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double
existence. She performed with
humble,
loving care all the minute
duties of the
homely life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide
the
poetry of her ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor
methodically on material things to leave their souls the freer to
develop in prayer. All great minds have bound themselves to some form
of
mechanical toil to
obtain greater
mastery of thought. Spinosa
ground glasses for spectacles; Bayle counted the tiles on the roof;
Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus subdued, the soul could
spread its wings in all security.
Madame Mignon,
reading her daughter's soul, was
therefore right.
Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little
understood, the first
illusion of a young girl, the most
delicate of
all sentiments, a very
dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts
from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired
the blue
plumage of the bird that sings afar in the
paradise of young
girls, which no hand can touch, no gun can cover, as it flits across
the sight; she loved those magic colors, like sparkling jewels
dazzling to the eye, which youth can see, and never sees again when
Reality, the
hideous hag, appears with witnesses accompanied by the
mayor. To live the very
poetry of love and not to see the lover--ah,
what sweet intoxication! what visionary rapture! a chimera with
flowing man and outspread wings!
The following is the puerile and even silly event which
decided the
future life of this young girl.
Modeste happened to see in a bookseller's window a lithographic
portrait of one of her favorites, Canalis. We all know what lies such
pictures tell,--being as they are the result of a shameless
speculation, which seizes upon the
personality of celebrated
individuals as if their faces were public property.
In this
instance Canalis, sketched in a Byronic pose, was
offering to
public
admiration his dark locks floating in the
breeze, a bare
throat, and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess.
Victor Hugo's
forehead will make more persons shave their heads than
the number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory of Napoleon.
This
portrait of Canalis (poetic through mercantile necessity) caught
Modeste's eye. The day on which it caught her eye one of Arthez's best
books happened to be published. We are compelled to admit, though it
may be to Modeste's
injury, that she hesitated long between the
illustrious poet and the
illustrious prose-writer. Which of these