Modeste Mignon quotes

Her social value is indisputable when you look at the caps she wears, bristling with flowers, the false fronts plastered on her temples, and the gowns she chooses.

How could the shops get rid of such goods if it were not for such as Madame Latournelle?

This worthy woman’s absurdities might have passed almost unremarked, for she was essentially charitable and pious, but that Nature, which sometimes has its little jest by turning these grotesque creations, gave her the figure of a drum-major so as to display the devices of her …

Dumay is indeed a Breton whom fate has planted out in Normandy. Imagine the hatred for his tenants worked up in Vilquin, a Norman with a fortune of three million francs.

What high treason to wealth to dare prove to the rich the impotence of gold!

Vilquin, whose desperation made him the talk of le Havre, had first offered Dumay the absolute freehold of another pretty house, but Dumay again refused.

and it was the outcome of one of those compacts of which, in the event of fatal issues, none but God can be the judge.

Most dramas lie in the ideas we form of things.

The events which seem to us dramatic are only such as our soul turns to tragedy or comedy, as our own nature tends.

and it was the outcome of one of those compacts of which, in the event of fatal issues, none but God can be the judge. Most dramas lie in the ideas we form of things.

The events which seem to us dramatic are only such as our soul turns to tragedy or comedy, as our own nature tends.

Madame Latournelle and Madame Dumay, charged with keeping watch over Modeste, both had an indescribable artificial manner, a quaver in their voice, which the object of their suspicions did not notice, she seemed so much absorbed by her work.

That evening the sky was cloudless, the mild air caressed the earth, flowers breathed their fragrance, the grinding gravel could be heard under the feet of persons returning from their walk.

The sea shone like a mirror.

There was so little wind that the candles on the table burned with a steady flame though the windows were half open.

Melody is to music what imagery and feeling are to poetry, a flower that may blossom spontaneously. All nations have had popular melodies before the introduction of harmony.

Botany came after flowers.

Thus Modeste, without having learned anything of the technique of painting beyond what she had gathered from seeing her sister work in watercolors, could stand enchanted before a picture by Raphael, Titian, Eubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Dürer, or Holbein, that is to say, the highest …

What dramatic interest hung round Bettina in the eyes of her innocent sister! Bettina knew passion only as misfortune; she was dying because she had loved. Between two girls every man, wretch though he be, is a lover.

Passion is the one thing really absolute in human life; it will always have its own.

Georges d’Estourny, a gambler, dissipated and guilty, always dwelt in the memory of these two young things as the Parisian dandy of the Havre parties, the cynosure of every woman—Bettina believed that she had snatched him from Madame Vilquin’s flirtations—and, to crown all, Bettina’s successful …

… d’Estourny, a gambler, dissipated and guilty, always dwelt in the memory of these two young things as the Parisian dandy of the Havre parties, the cynosure of every woman—Bettina believed that she had snatched him from Madame Vilquin’s flirtations—and, to crown all, Bettina’s successful lover.

In a young girl her worship is stronger than social reprobation.

In Bettina’s mind, justice had erred; how should she have condemned a young man by whom she had been loved for six months, loved with passion in the mysterious retreat where Georges hid her in Paris, that he might preserve his liberty?

And her mind was beautiful in its cold guilelessness, its repressed virginal instincts, from which sprang forth, flashing, armed, sincere, and powerful, an intense admiration for genius.

To Modeste, a new book was a great event; she was so happy over a great work as to alarm Madame Latournelle, as we have seen, and saddened when it failed to take her heart by storm.

But no gleam of this lurid flame ever appeared on the surface; it escaped the eye of Lieutenant Dumay and his wife as well as of the Latournelles; but the ear of the blind mother could not fail to hear its crackling.

for her ruling idea was to give wealth and happiness to a Tasso, a Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher Columbus. Vulgar sorrows appealed but little to this soul, which longed to extinguish the stake of such martyrs unrecognized during their lifetime.

Modeste thirsted for unconfessed suffering, the great anguish of the mind.

Sometimes she imagined the balm, she elaborated the tenderness, the music, the thousand devices by which she would have soothed the fierce misanthropy of Jean-Jacques.

… trivial tasks of daily life at the Chalet, using them as a check to hold in the poem of her ideal existence, like the Carthusians, who order their material life by rule and occupy their time to allow the soul to develop itself in prayer.

All great intellects subject themselves to some mechanical employment to obtain control of thought.

Spinoza ground lenses, Bayle counted the tiles in a roof, Montesquieu worked in his garden. The body being thus under control, the spirit spreads its wings in perfect security. So Madame Mignon, who read her daughter’s soul, was right. Modeste was in love;

All great intellects subject themselves to some mechanical employment to obtain control of thought. Spinoza ground lenses, Bayle counted the tiles in a roof, Montesquieu worked in his garden.

The body being thus under control, the spirit spreads its wings in perfect security.

So Madame Mignon, who read her daughter’s soul, was right. Modeste was in love; she loved with that Platonic sentiment which is so rare, so little understood—the first illusion of girlhood, the subtlest of feelings, the heart’s daintiest morsel.

its magical colors, like the sparkling of gems, dazzle the eye, but it is never more seen when once reality appears—the hideous Harpy bringing witnesses and the Maire in her train.

To have all the poetry of love without the presence of the lover! How exquisite an orgy!

What a fair chimera of all colors and every plumage!

“The last edition of the works of Canalis, printed on handmade paper, large 8vo, with vignettes by Bixiou, Joseph Bridau, Schinner, Sommervieux, and others, printed by Didot, is in five volumes, price nine francs, post paid.”

This letter fell like a paving-stone on a tulip.

A poet as Master of Appeals, in the immediate circle of a Minister, drawing a pension, aiming at the red rosette, adored of the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain!

Canalis was anxious to become a political personage, and as a beginning made capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid when the Duc de Chaulieu was ambassador, accompanying him as attaché—but to the Duchess, as the jest went in fashionable drawing-rooms.

How often has a jest sealed a man’s fate!

Colla, the erewhile President of the Cisalpine Republic, and the greatest advocate in Piémont, is told by a friend, at the age of forty, that he knows nothing of botany;

Many, deluded by their self-conceit, think themselves as clever as their Great Man.

Devotion is rare, especially without reward and without hope, as Modeste conceived of it.

Nevertheless, a Menneval is occasionally to be met with; and, in Paris more than anywhere, men love to live in the shade and to work in silence, Benedictines who have lost their way in a world which has no monastery for them.

but it is also almost proved that Virgil, the poet of love, never loved a Dido; and that Rousseau, the pattern citizen, had pride enough to furnish forth a whole aristocracy. Nevertheless, Michelangelo and Raphael showed the happy concord of talent and character.

Hence talent is in men, as far as the individual is concerned, what beauty is in women⁠—a promise.

Let us give twofold admiration to the man whose heart and character are equally perfect with his talent.

The truth of the homely proverb, “The cowl does not make the monk,” is especially applicable in literature.

It is most rare to find a talent and character in harmony.

A man’s faculties are not the sum-total of the man. This discord, of which the manifestations are startling, is the outcome of an unexplored—a perhaps unexplorable—mystery.

The truth of the homely proverb, “The cowl does not make the monk,” is especially applicable in literature. It is most rare to find a talent and character in harmony.

A man’s faculties are not the sum-total of the man.

This discord, of which the manifestations are startling, is the outcome of an unexplored—a perhaps unexplorable—mystery.

Ernest, when he detected under the poet an ambitious egoist—the worst species of egoist, for some are amiable—felt a singular diffidence about leaving him.

Honest souls do not easily break their bonds, especially those they have voluntarily accepted.

The secretary, then, was on very good terms with the poet when Modeste’s letter was flying through the mail, but on the good terms of constant self-effacement. La Brière felt he owed Canalis something for the frankness with which he had revealed himself.

But for his vanity, his pretentious conceit, he might not have been gifted with that sonorous verbiage which is a necessary instrument in the political life of the day. His shallowness is part of his rectitude and loyalty; his ostentation is paired with liberality.

Society profits by the results; the motives may be left to God.

Still, when Modeste’s letter arrived, Ernest had no illusions left as to Canalis. The two friends had just breakfasted, and were chatting in the poet’s study; he was at that time living in ground-floor rooms looking out on a garden, beyond a courtyard.

… but when the angel—by post—turns into a poor creature, moderately good-looking, in search of a husband! … Well, then, the effervescence subsides.”

“I am beginning to think,” said la Brière, smiling, “that glory has something poisonous in it, like certain gorgeous flowers.”

“Besides, my dear fellow,” Canalis went on, “all these women, even when they are sincere, have an ideal to which we rarely correspond. They never tell themselves that a poet is a man, and a tolerably vain one, as I am accused of being;

that the divinity may foam at the mouth. A Lucien de Rubempré, a verse-writer, and a pretty fellow, is a Phenix. So why go out of your way to receive bad compliments and sit under the cold shower-bath of a disillusioned woman’s helpless stare?”

“Then the true poet,” said la Brière, “ought to remain hidden, like God, in the centre of his universe, and be visible only in his creations!”

“Then glory would be too dearly paid for,” replied Canalis. “There is some good in life, I tell you,” said he, taking a cup of tea.

she feels strong enough and sufficiently protected by her beauty, by her fortune, by her name, to say, as in every epic poem, ‘I am the nymph Calypso, and I love Telemachus.’

Mystification is the resource of small minds.

For some time now I have never answered such masqueraders—”

Our young girls here are so highly accomplished, that no daughter of Eve can vie with them!

What reality was ever so good as a dream?

And you now, you, a young girl brought up to be the duteous mother of a family, what would you gain by an initiation into the terrible excitement of a poet’s life in this appalling capital, to be defined only as a hell we love.

“I will conclude with a last reflection, which you will do wrong to misread as an entreaty in disguise; it is the advice of a friend.

A communion of souls cannot be complete excepting between two persons who are prepared to conceal nothing.

Could you show yourself as you really are to a stranger? I pause before the consequences of such a notion.

She had lain for three hours tacking about on the immense ocean of doubt.

Such nights are never forgotten.

Modeste went at once to her little lacquer table, her father’s gift, and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of revenge which disports itself at the bottom of a young girl’s heart.

Modeste, by a commonplace mistake, had escaped the most innocent espionage, for which Ernest already blamed himself. But what Parisian could endure to be the dupe of a little country girl?

Never be duped! This odious maxim is a solvent for all man’s noble sentiments.

From the letter he wrote, where every lash of the scourge of conscience has left its mark, the reader may easily imagine the conflict of feelings to which the honest youth was a prey.

Most certainly. Your action would, sooner or later, have resumed its true character; your husband, however great you might deem him, would at last have reproached you for having humiliated him; and you, sooner or later, might have learned to despise him.

An ordinary man cuts the Gordian knot of a marriage for money with the sword of tyranny. A strong man forgives.

The poet bewails himself. This, mademoiselle, is the answer given by my honesty.

The family, silly and cruel as it is, is in its rights as against Lovelace.

The family is society.

“Believe me, for a girl, as for a wife, her glory will always consist in restraining her ardent whims within the strictest limits of propriety.

So love poetry still, as you doubtless love flowers and music, the sumptuous grandeur of the sea, the beauties of Nature—all as ornaments of the soul; but remember all I have had the honor of telling you about poets.

Be sure you do not marry an ass; seek with care for the mate God has created for you.

There are, take my word for it, many clever men capable of appreciating you and of making you happy.

Ernest was fascinated by the abyss of the unknown.

The unknown is dark infinitude, and nothing is more enthralling.

From that murky vastness flash fires which rend it from time to time, and light up visions like those of Martin.

Good heavens! is it impossible that there should be two harps, which, though at a distance, respond to each other as in a symphony, and vibrate so as to produce delicious harmony?

Man alone, in all creation, is at once the harp, the musician, and the hearer.

“Do you see me fretting after the manner of ordinary women? Do not I know that you go into society and see the handsomest and cleverest women in Paris?

I, for my part, shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a motherhood by beneficence, and by secretly sharing the existence of a great man, to whom I shall dedicate all my thoughts and all my earthly efforts.

I have the utmost horror of the commonplace.

If I should be free and rich—and I know I am young and handsome—I will never become the property of some simpleton under the excuse of his being the son of a peer of France;

Under such conditions a man dresses his mind as carefully as his person, and the girl on her side does the same.

This miserable farce, carried on with gifts of flowers and jewels and places at the play, is what is called courting a girl.

“This is what I rebel against, and I mean to make legal marriage the outcome of a long marriage of souls. In all a girl’s life this is the only moment when she needs reflection, insight, and experience.

“My plan, my dear Chrysale, has at least the advantage of not compromising our persons. I know that love has its illusions, and every illusion has its morrow. Therein lies the reason why so many lovers part who believed themselves bound for life.

The true test lies in suffering and in happiness.

When, after standing this double test of life, two beings have shown all their faults and good qualities, and have learned each other’s characters, they may go to the tomb hand in hand;

they are all the slaves of an idea; and this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman, it absorbs them, it makes them or kills them for its own advantage.

The visible outcome of this concealed life resembles egoism in its effects; but how dare we say that a man who has sold himself for the delight, the instruction, or the greatness of his age, is an egoist?

Is a mother accused of selfishness when she sacrifices everything for her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not discern its teeming maternity, that is all.

The visible outcome of this concealed life resembles egoism in its effects; but how dare we say that a man who has sold himself for the delight, the instruction, or the greatness of his age, is an egoist?

Is a mother accused of selfishness when she sacrifices everything for her child?

Well, the detractors of genius do not discern its teeming maternity, that is all.

I will keep satiety at a distance by refinements and variety. I will be brave for my love as other women are for the world.

I will vary happiness, lend wit to tenderness, and piquancy to faithfulness.

I am ambitious; I will kill my past rivals, dispel superficial troubles by the sweetness, the proud self-devotion of a wife, and, for a whole lifetime, give such care to the nest as a bird gives for only a few days.

“And how do you get there, you great goose?” said Madame Latournelle, smiling at him.

“Ah, madame, what you take to be a hump is the sheath for my wings.”

“Then this explains your seal!” exclaimed the lawyer.

The clerk’s seal was a star, with the motto, Fulgens, sequar—Shine, and I will follow you—the device of the house of Chastillonest.

“A beautiful creature may be as diffident as the most hideous,” said Butscha, as if talking to himself.

“Modeste is quite clever enough to have feared lest she should be loved only for her beauty.”

Madame Mignon bid her friends good night, and went to bed.

Those who insist on loving in secret may be watched over by Pyrenean dogs, mothers, Dumays, Latournelles⁠—they are in no danger from these; but a lover!

It is diamond cut diamond, fire against fire, wit against wit, a perfect equation, of which the terms are equal and interchangeable.

Would you rather have your heart read by your mother, Monsieur Dumay, and Madame Latournelle, than by a poor creature, almost an outcast from life, who is yours as much as one of the flowers you cut to gratify you for a moment?

They all know that you love; I alone know how.

Take me as you would take a watchdog; I will obey you, I will protect you, I will never bark, and I will have no opinions about you. All I ask is that you will let me be of some use to you.

So Mademoiselle Mignon set out alone with Latournelle. She would not take his arm for fear of being questioned as to the internal tremor that agitated her at the idea of so soon seeing her great poet.

One look, the first, was about to decide her future existence.

Is there in the life of man a more exquisite moment than that of the first promised meeting? Can the feelings that lie buried in his heart, and that then burst into life, ever be known again?

Can he ever again feel the pleasure that he finds, as did Ernest de la Brière, in choosing his best razors, his finest shirts, spotless collars, and impeccable clothes?

We deify everything that is associated with that supreme hour.

We imagine poems in our hearts, secret poems as beautiful as the woman’s, and on the day when each reads the other’s soul all is over!

“Oh, mademoiselle, you love a poet! A man of that stamp is more or less of a Narcissus. Will he love you as he ought? A craftsman in words, always absorbed in fitting sentences together, is very fatiguing.

A poet, mademoiselle, is not poetry⁠—no more than the seed is the flower.

”

“

Beauty, mademoiselle, is a veil which often serves to hide many imperfections.

”

“

What can it matter if I love him?

” said she simply.

Ah, we do not feel life like that when our mothers bring us into the world? A blow dealt to you would fall on me at the same instant, and my existence henceforth can only be accounted for by your mind.

I know now the purpose of the divine harmony of music; it was invented by the angels to express love.

“To be a genius and handsome too, my Melchior, is too much. A man should have a choice at his birth.

There are so many fathers, and so many children—more fathers perhaps than children—who can enter into the excitement of such a meeting, that literature is never required to depict it; happily! for the finest words, and poetry itself, are inadequate to such emotions.

Perhaps, indeed, the sweeter emotions have no literary side.

Not a word was spoken that day that could disturb the happiness of the Mignon family. There was a truce between the father, the mother, and the daughter as to the mysterious love affair which had paled Modeste’s cheek.

… law have placed them under the stern yoke of paternal sanction, it is precisely and on purpose to spare them the misfortunes to which the poetry that fascinates you must lead while it dazzles you, and which you therefore cannot estimate at its true worth.

Poetry is one of the graces of life; it is not the whole of life.

”

“

If they were never written, my dear father, we should still enact them. It is better to read them.

There are fewer romantic adventures now than in the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV, when fewer novels were published.—Besides, if you have read our letters, you must have perceived that I have found you for a son-in-law the most respectful son, the most …

“Nay, my child, summon up your courage.

It is you who have trifled with life, and life now laughs you to scorn.

”

Modeste was seized by intense disgust of mankind, since the most distinguished of them had deceived her hopes. In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is simply seeing clearly; but in matters of feeling no woman, especially no young girl, ever sees truly.

When she ceases to admire, she contemns.

So Modeste, after going through fearful tortures of mind, inevitably put on the armor on which, as she declared, she had stamped the word Contempt;

Even his title of Master of the Horse would, by force of contrast, make good King Charles X laugh, though the Duc d’Hérouville was a capital horseman.

Men, like books, are sometimes valued too late.

Modeste had had a glimpse of the Duke during his fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and as he went by, all these remarks involuntarily recurred to her mind;

for her rival cannot at once be in the secret of that subtle flattery to which a man so easily becomes accustomed.

Coxcombs are the product of this feminine industry, when they are not coxcombs by nature.

Hence Canalis, caught young by the beautiful Duchess, justified himself for his airs and graces by telling himself that they pleased a woman whose taste was law. Subtle as these shades of feeling are, it is not impossible to render them.

… women have a friend to warn them at the moment when the fragrance of modesty turns rancid, when a caressing look is like a theatrical trick, when the expressiveness of a face becomes a grimace, when the mechanism of their liveliness shows its rusty skeleton.

Genius alone can renew its youth like the serpent, and in grace, as in all else, only the heart never grows stale.

Persons of genuine feeling are single-hearted. Now in Canalis, as we know, the heart was dry. He wasted the beauty of his gaze by assuming at inappropriate moments the intensity that deep thought gives to the eyes.

Good taste consists in accommodating oneself to the manners of other places without losing too much of one’s native character, as Alcibiades did—the model of a gentleman.

True grace is elastic. It yields to every circumstance, it is in harmony with every social atmosphere, it knows how to walk in the street in a cheap dress, remarkable only for its fitness, instead of parading the feathers and gaudy hues which some vulgar people flaunt.

Now, Canalis, influenced by a woman who loved him for her own sake rather than for his, wanted to be himself a law, and to remain what he was wherever he might go.

“As vengeful as a queen, said Philoxène.

She has not yet forgiven the Duke for being only her husband

,” replied Butscha. “She hates as she loves. I am thoroughly informed as to her temper, her dress, her tastes, her religion, and her meannesses, for Philoxène stripped her body and soul.

He plucked a blade of grass. “This little plant imagines that man builds palaces for its accommodation, and one day it dislodges the most firmly cemented marble, just as the populace, having found a foothold in the structure of the feudal system, overthrew it.

The power of the weakest that can creep in everywhere is greater than that of the strong man who relies on his cannon.

There are three of us, a Swiss league, who have sworn that Modeste shall be happy, and who would sell our honor for her sake.—Good night, monsieur.

… same way, a man who loves a woman while the woman cannot help scorning him for his ugliness or his misshapen person, is at last so qualified in love that he could pass as a seducer, as the sick man at last recovers his health.

Folly alone is incurable.

—Since the age of six, and I am now five-and-twenty, I have had neither father nor mother;

As he reflected on his position as a lover rejected and scorned, the secretary made somewhat such a study of himself as he had been led to make by the question Modeste had put to him at the beginning of their correspondence.

Though misfortune is supposed to develop virtues, it only does so in virtuous people; for this sort of cleaning up of the conscience takes place only in naturally cleanly persons.

La Brière determined to swallow his griefs with Spartan philosophy, to preserve his dignity, and never allow himself to be betrayed into a mean action; while Canalis, fascinated by such an enormous fortune, vowed to himself that he would neglect nothing that might captivate Modeste.

Though he spoke lightly, the Duke colored and made no reply. Grand folks are always in the wrong to bandy jests with those below them.

Banter is a game, and a game implies equality.

And, indeed, it is to obviate the unpleasant results of such a transient familiarity that, when the game is over, the players have a right not to recognize each other.

The horses whirled him off as he spoke the words, which had an unexpected touch of feeling.

Nothing is more bewitching than the unforeseen peculiar to very clever men.

This visit was the event of the day, and it left a track of light in Modeste’s soul.

The kitchen is indispensable in a house, but you take good care never to stay in it; you live in a drawing-room, ornamented, as this is, with perfectly superfluous things. Of what use are those beautiful pictures and all this carved woodwork?

Nothing is beautiful but what we feel to be useless.

We have called the sixteenth century the age of the Renaissance with admirable accuracy of expression. That century was the dawn of a new world;

For a very moderate sum I can find at Valognes, at Carentan, as in Provence, at Arles, Venuses quite as lovely as Titian’s. The Police News publishes romances, different indeed from Walter Scott’s, but with terrible endings, in real blood, and not in ink.

Happiness and virtue are far above art and genius!

”

… the other speaker meant to say, or merely did not listen, or had the power of listening while thinking of something else, Melchior wore the look of inattention which is as disconcerting to another man’s flow of words as it is wounding to his vanity.

Not to attend to what is said is not merely a lack of politeness; it is an expression of contempt.

And Canalis carries this habit rather too far, for he often neglects to reply to a remark that requires an answer, and goes off to the subject he is absorbed in without any polite transition.

When by any chance Melchior compels himself to listen, he falls into another failing—he only lends himself, he does not give himself up.

Nothing in social intercourse pays better than the bestowal of attention.

“Blessed are they that hear!” is not only a precept of the Gospel, it is also an excellent speculation; act on it, and you will be forgiven everything, even vices. Canalis took much upon him in the intention of charming Modeste;

In a word, the strange charm that is produced by every form of renown, even when justly acquired, has no permanence. To superficial minds, especially to the sarcastic and the envious, it is an impression as swift as a lightning-flash, and never repeated.

Glory, it would seem, like the sun, is hot and luminous from afar, but, when we get near, it is as cold as the peak of an Alp.

Perhaps a man is really great only to his peers; perhaps the defects inherent in the conditions of humanity are more readily lost to their eyes than to those of vulgar admirers.

It was a respectful impulse, full of the eloquence peculiar to action, which surpasses that of the finest speech.

Spoken love is not to be compared with love in action⁠—every girl of twenty is fifty as concerns this axiom; this is the seducer’s strongest argument.

Instead of looking Modeste in the face, as Canalis did, bowing to her as an act of public homage, the disdained lover watched her with a slow side glance, as humble as Butscha’s, almost timid.

“With wine?—That I can quite understand,” replied the clerk. “

You get tipsy with yourself every day!

In the matter of praise, you drink your fill. You are handsome; you are famous during your lifetime; your conversation is on a level with your genius; and you fascinate all the women, even my master’s wife.

Why, the whole town has paid it off in esteem, praise, and admiration, the most precious of all coin. I do not see the virtue that is merely an investment for the benefit of one’s vanity.

Men make a trade of reciprocal services; the word gratitude represents the debit side, that is all.

“As to intrigue, I adore it!—What!”

“Not at all,” said the clerk. “

Forgetting almost always means remembering!

—Now, then, on we go! I am made to be a secretary.”

“I swear it,” said the Colonel. “You know, monsieur, with what exaggerated language the public, in the provinces as in Paris, talk of fortunes made and lost.

Success and failure are alike magnified, and we are never so lucky or so unlucky as report says.

In business there is no real security but investment in land when cash transactions are settled. I am awaiting with anxious impatience the reports of my various agents;

“

Love is depicted as a child by every nation, because it cannot be conceived of but as having all life before it.

Well, this love of mine had its term fixed by nature; it was stillborn. The most intuitive motherliness discerned and soothed this aching spot in my heart, for a woman who feels—who sees—that she is dying to the joys of love, has angelic consideration;

I am quite prepared to please my husband in all things; but you threaten to deprive a girl of the very happiness you promise her, to snatch it from her at the slightest movement, the slightest word, the slightest look!

You cut the bird’s wings and want to see it fly!

I knew that poets were accused of inconsistency—Oh! quite unjustly,” she added, as Canalis protested by a gesture, “for the supposed fault is merely the result of a vulgar misapprehension of the suddenness of their impulses.

“You, at this moment, my dear poet, are like those parents who inquire as to a girl’s fortune before mentioning what their son’s will be. You make difficulties with me, not knowing whether you have any right to do so.

Love cannot be based on agreements discussed in cold blood.

The poor Duke allows himself to be managed with all the submissiveness of Uncle Toby in Sterne’s novel, with this difference, that I am not the widow Wadman, though bereaved at this moment of many illusions concerning poetry.—Yes!

The reflections indulged in by Canalis during the night were all satisfactory.

He could imagine nothing in the world worse than the situation of a married man without a fortune.

Still tremulous at the thought of the danger he had been led into by his vanity, which he had pledged, as it were, to Modeste by his desire to triumph over the Duc d’Hérouville, and by his belief in Monsieur Mignon’s millions, he began to …

Philoxène, knocking at the door of her mistress’ luxurious room, on going in, found her with tears in her eyes, and stood amazed at this unprecedented phenomenon, which she had never before seen during fifteen years of service.

“We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes!” exclaimed the Duchess.

“A letter from le Havre, madame.”

Éléonore read Canalis’ effusion of prose without observing Philoxène’s presence, and the maid’s surprise was heightened as she saw the Duchess’ face recover its serenity as she read the letter.

If you hold out to a drowning man a pole as thick as a walking stick, he will regard it as the king’s highway to safety; and so the happy Éléonore believed in the poet’s good faith as she perused these sheets in which love and business, lies and truth, elbowed each other.

Just now, when the banker had left her, she had sent for her husband to hinder Melchior’s promotion if there were time yet; but a generous regret came over her that rose to a sublime impulse.

The flashes of happiness in his inmost self, mingled with melancholy reflections on the same theme, “She is lost to me!” made the poor youth a pathetic spectacle, all the more touching because his countenance and person were in harmony with this depth of feeling.

There is nothing more poetical than such a living elegy that has eyes, that walks, and sighs without rhyming.

Finally, the Duc d’Hérouville came to arrange for Modeste’s journey. After crossing the Seine, she was to proceed in the Duke’s traveling carriage with his aunt and sister. The Duke was perfect in his courtesy;

Modeste might have disarmed anyone but Éléonore by her amazed and involuntary admiration; for if she had not known her rival’s age, she would have taken her to be a woman of six-and-thirty; but there were greater surprises in store for her!

The poet found himself flung against the wrath of a great lady. Such anger is the most ruthless Sphinx; the face is beaming, all else is savage.

Even kings do not know how to reduce the stronghold of exquisitely cold politeness which a mistress can then hide under steel armor. The lovely woman’s countenance smiles, and at the same time the steel strikes home:

The poet found himself flung against the wrath of a great lady. Such anger is the most ruthless Sphinx; the face is beaming, all else is savage.

Even kings do not know how to reduce the stronghold of exquisitely cold politeness which a mistress can then hide under steel armor.

The lovely woman’s countenance smiles, and at the same time the steel strikes home: the hand is of steel, the arm, the body, all is steel. Canalis tried to clutch this steel, but his fingers slipped over it as his words slipped from her heart.

“You, I hope, will do us the pleasure of remaining at Rosembray,” said the severe Duchess to the young man.

While keeping her ears open to evil-speaking, the pious lady shut her eyes to the peccadilloes of her guests, who were carefully paired by the Duke; for no one knows what such excellent women will tolerate on the plea of bringing a lost sheep back to the fold by treating it with indulgence.

“We reckoned without the Constitutional Government,” said the Duc d’Hérouville, “and Rosembray loses a great honor, Madame la Duchesse—”