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 poetry
of 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 genius
brooded, 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