This letter fell like a cobble-stone on a tulip. A poet, secretary of
claims, getting a stipend in a public office,
drawing an annuity,
seeking a
decoration, adored by the women of the faubourg Saint-
Germain--was that the muddy
minstrel lingering along the quays, sad,
dreamy, worn with toil, and re-entering his
garretfraught with
poetry? However, Modeste
perceived the irony of the envious
bookseller, who dared to say, "I
invented Canalis; I made Nathan!"
Besides, she re-read her hero's poems,--verses
extremely seductive,
insincere, and hypocritical, which require a word of
analysis, were it
only to explain her infatuation.
Canalis may be
distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the
angelicschool, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous
sweetness, and a
delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with
his strident cry is an eagle, Canalis, rose and white, is a flamingo.
In him women find the friend they seek, their
interpreter, a being who
understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe
confidant. The wide margins given by Didot to the last
edition were
crowded with Modeste's pencilled
sentiments, expressing her sympathy
with this tender and
dreamy spirit. Canalis does not possess the gift
of life; he cannot breathe
existence into his creations; but he knows
how to calm vague sufferings like those which assailed Modeste. He
speaks to young girls in their own language; he can allay the anguish
of a bleeding wound and lull the moans, even the sobs of woe. His gift
lies not in
stirring words, nor in the
remedy of strong emotions, he
contents himself with
saying in
harmonious tones which compel belief,
"I suffer with you; I understand you; come with me; let us weep
together beside the brook, beneath the willows." And they follow him!
They listen to his empty and sonorous
poetry like infants to a nurse's
lullaby. Canalis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness
which is
genuine in the prose
writer and
artificial in the poet, by
his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his
infantile
philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early
youth that he leads us back to the prairie-land of our illusions. We
can be
pitiless to the eagles, requiring from them the quality of the
diamond, incorruptible
perfection; but as for Canalis, we take him for
what he is and let the rest go. He seems a good fellow; the
affectations of the
angelic school have answered his purpose and
succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when she plays the ingenue
cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth,
innocence betrayed, in short,
the wounded angel.
Modeste, recovering her first
impression, renewed her confidence in
that soul, in that
countenance as ravishing as the face of Bernadin de
Saint-Pierre. She paid no further attention to the
publisher. And so,
about the
beginning of the month of August she wrote the following
letter to this Dorat of the sacristy, who still ranks as a star of the
modern Pleiades.
To Monsieur de Canalis,--Many a time,
monsieur, I have wished to
write to you; and why? Surely you guess why,--to tell you how much
I admire your
genius. Yes, I feel the need of expressing to you
the
admiration of a poor country girl,
lonely in her little
corner, whose only happiness is to read your thoughts. I have read
Rene, and I come to you. Sadness leads to reverie. How many other
women are sending you the
homage of their secret thoughts? What
chance have I for notice among so many? This paper, filled with my
soul,--can it be more to you than the perfumed letters which
already beset you. I come to you with less grace than others, for
I wish to remain unknown and yet to receive your entire confidence
--as though you had long known me.
Answer my letter and be friendly with me. I cannot promise to make
myself known to you, though I do not
positively say I will not
some day do so.
What shall I add? Read between the lines of this letter,
monsieur,
the great effort which I am making: permit me to offer you my
hand,--that of a friend, ah! a true friend.
Your servant, O. d'Este M.
P.S.--If you do me the favor to answer this letter address your
reply, if you please, to Mademoiselle F. Cochet, "poste restante,"
Havre.
CHAPTER VII
A POET OF THE ANGELIC SCHOOL
All young girls,
romantic or
otherwise, can imagine the
impatience in
which Modeste lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues
of fire. The trees were like a
plumage. She was not
conscious of a
body; she hovered in space, the earth melted away under her feet. Full
of
admiration for the
post-office, she followed her little sheet of
paper on its way; she was happy, as we all are happy at twenty years
of age, in the first exercise of our will. She was possessed, as in
the middle ages. She made pictures in her mind of the poet's abode, of
his study; she saw him unsealing her letter; and then followed myriads
of suppositions.
After sketching the
poetry we cannot do less than give the
profile of
the poet. Canalis is a short, spare man, with an air of good-breeding,
a dark-complexioned, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like
that of a man who has more
vanity than pride. He loves
luxury, rank,
and
splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men.
Proud of his birth, even more than of his
talent, he destroys the
value of his ancestors by making too much of them in the present day,
--after all, the Canalis are not Navarreins, nor Cadignans, nor
Grandlieus. Nature, however, helps him out in his pretensions. He has
those eyes of Eastern effulgence which we demand in a poet, a delicate
charm of manner, and a vibrant voice; yet a taint of natural
charlatanism destroys the effect of nearly all these advantages; he is
a born
comedian. If he puts forward his well-shaped foot, it is
because the attitude has become a habit; if he uses exclamatory terms
they are part of himself; if he poses with high
dramatic action he has
made that
deportment his second nature. Such defects as these are not
incompatible with a general benevolence and a certain quality of
errant and
purely ideal
chivalry, which distinguishes the paladin from
the
knight. Canalis has not
devotion enough for a Don Quixote, but he
has too much
elevation of thought not to put himself on the nobler
side of questions and things. His
poetry, which takes the town by
storm on all
profitable occasions, really injures the man as a poet;
for he is not without mind, but his
talent prevents him from
developing it; he is overweighted by his
reputation, and is always
aiming to make himself appear greater than he has the credit of being.
Thus, as often happens, the man is entirely out of keeping with the
products of his thought. The author of these naive, caressing, tender
little lyrics, these calm idylls pure and cold as the surface of a
lake, these verses so
essentiallyfeminine, is an
ambitious little
creature in a
tightly buttoned frock-coat, with the air of a diplomat
seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of
aristocracy, full
of pretension, thirsting for money, already spoiled by success in two
directions, and wearing the double
wreath of
myrtle and of
laurel. A
government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand
francs' annuity from the
literary fund, two thousand from the Academy,
three thousand more from the
paternalestate (less the taxes and the
cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed
income of fifteen
thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with
another, by his
poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for
Modeste's hero was so
precarious and
insufficient an
income that he
usually spent five or six thousand francs more every year; but the
king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had
hitherto supplied the
deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's
coronation which earned him a whole silver service,--having refused a
sum of money on the ground that a Canalis owed his duty to his
sovereign.
But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
budget. He felt himself
unable to
invent any new form of
poetry; his
lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
one string so long, the public allowed him no other
alternative but to
hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue. De Marsay, who did not
like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to
the quick of his
vanity. "Canalis," he said, "always reminds me of
that brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a
battle because his
trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little
tune." Canalis's
ambition was to enter political life, and he made
capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the
embassy of the Duc de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according
to Parisian
gossip, in the
capacity of "attache to the duchess." How
many times a sarcasm or a single speech has
decided the whole course
of a man's life. Colla, the late president of the Cisalpine republic,
and the best
lawyer in Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was
forty years of age that he knew nothing of
botany. He was piqued,