Modeste's duplicity and Butscha's connivance.

"Madame," he cried, "he is a serpent whom we have warmed in our
bosoms; there's no place in his contorted little body for a soul!"

Modeste put the letter for her father into the pocket of her apron,
supposing it to be that for Canalis, and came downstairs with the

letter for her lover in her hand, to see Dumay before he started for
Paris.

"What has happened to my Black Dwarf? why are you talking so loud!"
she said, appearing at the door.

"Mademoiselle, Butscha has gone to Paris, and you, no doubt, know why,
--to carry on that affair of the little architect with the sulphur

waistcoat, who, unluckily for the hunchback's lies, has never been
here."

Modeste was struck dumb; feeling sure that the dwarf had departed on a
mission of inquiry as to her poet's morals, she turned pale, and sat

down.
"I'm going after him; I shall find him," continued Dumay. "Is that the

letter for your father, mademoiselle?" he added, holding out his hand.
"I will take it to the Mongenods. God grant the colonel and I may not

pass each other on the road."
Modeste gave him the letter. Dumay looked mechanically at the address.

"'Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, No. 29'!"
he cried out; "what does that mean?"

"Ah, my daughter! that is the man you love," exclaimed Madame Mignon;
"the stanzas you set to music were his--"

"And that's his portrait that you have in a frame upstairs," added
Dumay.

"Give me back that letter, Monsieur Dumay," said Modeste, erecting
herself like a lioness defending her cubs.

"There it is, mademoiselle," he replied.
Modeste put it into the bosom of her dress, and gave Dumay the one

intended for her father.
"I know what you are capable of, Dumay," she said; "and if you take

one step against Monsieur de Canalis, I shall take another out of this
house, to which I will never return."

"You will kill your mother, mademoiselle," replied Dumay, who left the
room and called his wife.

The poor mother was indeed half-fainting,--struck to the heart by
Modeste's words.

"Good-bye, wife," said the Breton, kissing the American. "Take care of
the mother; I go to save the daughter."

He made his preparations for the journey in a few minutes, and started
for Havre. An hour later he was travelling post to Paris, with the

haste that nothing but passion or speculation can get out of wheels.
Recovering herself under Modeste's tender care, Madame Mignon went up

to her bedroom leaning on the arm of her daughter, to whom she said,
as her sole reproach, when they were alone:--

"My unfortunate child, see what you have done! Why did you conceal
anything from me? Am I so harsh?"

"Oh! I was just going to tell it to you comfortably," sobbed Modeste.
She thereuponrelated everything to her mother, read her the letters

and their answers, and shed the rose of her poem petal by petal into
the heart of the kind German woman. When this confidence, which took

half the day, was over, when she saw something that was almost a smile
on the lips of the too indulgent mother, Modeste fell upon her breast

in tears.
"Oh, mother!" she said amid her sobs, "you, whose heart, all gold and

poetry, is a chosen vessel, chosen of God to hold a sacred love, a
single and celestial love that endures for life; you, whom I wish to

imitate by loving no one but my husband,--you will surely understand
what bitter tears I am now shedding. This butterfly, this Psyche of my

thoughts, this dual soul which I have nurtured with maternal care, my
love, my sacred love, this living mystery of mysteries--it is about to

fall into vulgar hands, and they will tear its diaphanous wings and
rend its veil under the miserable pretext of enlightening me, of

discovering whether genius is as prudent as a banker, whether my
Melchior has saved his money, or whether he has some entanglement to

shake off; they want to find out if he is guilty to bourgeois eyes of
youthful indiscretions,--which to the sun of our love are like the

clouds of the dawn. Oh! what will come of it? what will they do? See!
feel my hand, it burns with fever. Ah! I shall never survive it."

And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed,
causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and

Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the
lieutenant to Paris,--to which city the logic of events compels us to

transport our drama for a moment.
Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially

those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither
loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the

young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste's letter. Could
it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his

artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome? This
flattery is the flatterysupreme. And why? Beauty is, undoubtedly, the

signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it
is the divine spirit manifested. And to see it where it is not, to

create it by the power of an inward look,--is not that the highest
reach of love? And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture

of an applauded author, "At last I am beloved!" When a woman, be she
maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, "Thou art

handsome," the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull
to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an

everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived
judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual

testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince.
Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter,

full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to
criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to

him, "Modeste is right." He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw
his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his

ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:--
"She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!"

Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the
peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the

pavement.
"Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes," he cried;

"what a maddening situation I have put myself in!"
La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his

heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of
honor. He at once resolved to find Modeste's father, if he were in

Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious
results of their Parisian jest. To a sensitive nature like his,

Modeste's large fortune was in itself a determining reason. He could
not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the

correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a
"dot." Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue

Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business
connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed

his start in life.
At the hour when La Briere was inquiring about the father of his

beloved from the head of the house of Mongenod, and getting
information that might be useful to him in his strange position, a

scene was taking place in Canalis's study which the ex-lieutenant's
hasty departure from Havre may have led the reader to foresee.

Like a true soldier of the imperial school, Dumay, whose Breton blood
had boiled all the way to Paris, considered a poet to be a poor stick

of a fellow, of no consequence whatever,--a buffoon addicted to
choruses, living in a garret, dressed in black clothes that were white

at every seam, wearing boots that were occasionally without soles, and
linen that was unmentionable, and whose fingers knew more about ink

than soap; in short, one who looked always as if he had tumbled from
the moon, except when scribbling at a desk, like Butscha. But the

seething of the Breton's heart and brain received a violent
application of cold water when he entered the courtyard of the pretty