Modeste Mignon Part 18

"Does Monsieur le baron know," he said to Ca.n.a.lis in a low voice, "that Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of the same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur le baron to the sea-sh.o.r.e?"

"What, the little Duc d'Herouville?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"Is he coming for Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked La Briere, coloring.

"So it appears, monsieur."

"We are cheated!" cried Ca.n.a.lis looking at La Briere.

"Ah!" retorted Ernest quickly, "that is the first time you have said, 'we' since we left Paris: it has been 'I' all along."

"You understood me," cried Ca.n.a.lis, with a burst of laughter. "But we are not in a position to struggle against a ducal coronet, nor the duke's t.i.tle, nor against the waste lands which the Council of State have just granted, on my report, to the house of Herouville."

"His grace," said La Briere, with a spice of malice that was nevertheless serious, "will furnish you with compensation in the person of his sister."

At this instant, the Comte de La Bastie was announced; the two young men rose at once, and La Briere hastened forward to present Ca.n.a.lis.

"I wished to return the visit that you paid me in Paris," said the count to the young lawyer, "and I knew that by coming here I should have the double pleasure of greeting one of our great living poets."

"Great!--Monsieur," replied the poet, smiling, "no one can be great in a century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of would-be great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius nowadays, and renders real distinction impossible."

"Is that the reason why you have thrown yourself into politics?" asked the count.

"It is the same thing in that sphere," said the poet; "there are no statesmen in these days, only men who handle events more or less. Look at it, monsieur; under the system of government that we derive from the Charter, which makes a tax-list of more importance than a coat-of-arms, there is absolutely nothing solid except that which you went to seek in China,--wealth."

Satisfied with himself and with the impression he was making on the prospective father-in-law, Ca.n.a.lis turned to Germain.

"Serve the coffee in the salon," he said, inviting Monsieur de La Bastie to leave the dining-room.

"I thank you for this visit, monsieur le comte," said La Briere; "it saves me from the embarra.s.sment of presenting my friend to you in your own house. You have a heart, and you have also a quick mind."

"Bah! the ready wit of Provence, that is all," said Charles Mignon.

"Ah, do you come from Provence?" cried Ca.n.a.lis.

"You must pardon my friend," said La Briere; "he has not studied, as I have, the history of La Bastie."

At the word _friend_ Ca.n.a.lis threw a searching glance at Ernest.

"If your health will allow," said the count to the poet, "I shall hope to receive you this evening under my roof; it will be a day to mark, as the old writer said 'albo notanda lapillo.' Though we cannot duly receive so great a fame in our little house, yet your visit will gratify my daughter, whose admiration for your poems has even led her to set them to music."

"You have something better than fame in your house," said Ca.n.a.lis; "you have beauty, if I am to believe Ernest."

"Yes, a good daughter; but you will find her rather countrified," said Charles Mignon.

"A country girl sought by the Duc d'Herouville," remarked Ca.n.a.lis, dryly.

"Oh!" replied Monsieur Mignon, with the perfidious good-humor of a Southerner, "I leave my daughter free. Dukes, princes, commoners,--they are all the same to me, even men of genius. I shall make no pledges, and whoever my Modeste chooses will be my son-in-law, or rather my son," he added, looking at La Briere. "It could not be otherwise. Madame de La Bastie is German. She has never adopted our etiquette, and I let my two women lead me their own way. I have always preferred to sit in the carriage rather than on the box. I can make a joke of all this at present, for we have not yet seen the Duc d'Herouville, and I do not believe in marriages arranged by proxy, any more than I believe in choosing my daughter's husband."

"That declaration is equally encouraging and discouraging to two young men who are searching for the philosopher's stone of happiness in marriage," said Ca.n.a.lis.

"Don't you consider it useful, necessary, and even politic to stipulate for perfect freedom of action for parents, daughters, and suitors?"

asked Charles Mignon.

Ca.n.a.lis, at a sign from La Briere, kept silence. The conversation presently became unimportant, and after a few turns round the garden the count retired, urging the visit of the two friends.

"That's our dismissal," cried Ca.n.a.lis; "you saw it as plainly as I did.

Well, in his place, I should not hesitate between the grand equerry and either of us, charming as we are."

"I don't think so," said La Briere. "I believe that frank soldier came here to satisfy his desire to see you, and to warn us of his neutrality while receiving us in his house. Modeste, in love with your fame, and misled by my person, stands, as it were, between the real and the ideal, between poetry and prose. I am, unfortunately, the prose."

"Germain," said Ca.n.a.lis to the valet, who came to take away the coffee, "order the carriage in half an hour. We will take a drive before we go to the Chalet."

CHAPTER XVIII. A SPLENDID FIRST APPEARANCE

The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere dreaded the interview, while Ca.n.a.lis approached it with the confidence of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the ex-merchant, showed Ca.n.a.lis his own maladroitness, and determined him to select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend indifference, though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to appear to disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love. Trained by the handsome d.u.c.h.esse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be worthy of his reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he did not know them at all,--which is often the case with those who are the happy victims of an exclusive pa.s.sion. While poor Ernest, gloomily ensconced in his corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of genuine love, and foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and disdain of an injured and offended young girl, Ca.n.a.lis was preparing himself, not less silently, like an actor making ready for an important part in a new play; certainly neither of them presented the appearance of a happy man.

Important interests were involved for Ca.n.a.lis. The mere suggestion of his desire to marry would bring about a rupture of the tie which had bound him for the last ten years to the d.u.c.h.esse de Chaulieu. Though he had covered the purpose of his journey with the vulgar pretext of needing rest,--in which, by the bye, women never believe, even when it is true,--his conscience troubled him somewhat; but the word "conscience" seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere that he shrugged his shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.

"Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than a dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real advantages and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de Chaulieu; for, if you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would renounce without the slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a pa.s.sion that has been mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If you simply mean that you are afraid of displeasing your protectress, should she find out the object of your stay here, I believe you. To renounce the d.u.c.h.ess and yet not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a risk. You take the anxiety of this alternative for remorse."

"You have no comprehension of feelings," said the poet, irritably, like a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.

"That is what a bigamist should tell the jury," retorted La Briere, laughing.

This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Ca.n.a.lis. He began to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.

The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Ca.n.a.lis livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors were expected, and all the personages of this history were a.s.sembled to receive them, except the duke and Butscha.

"Which is the poet?" asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she heard the wheels.

"The one who walks like a drum-major," answered the lieutenant.

"Ah!" said the notary's wife, examining Ca.n.a.lis, who was swinging his body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,--as all women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Ca.n.a.lis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is accustomed. c.o.xcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Ca.n.a.lis, taken young by the handsome d.u.c.h.ess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself that they pleased that "grande dame," whose taste was law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of the green-room, Ca.n.a.lis "dragged the time." He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call "balancoires,"--the picturesque phrase of an artistic people.

Ca.n.a.lis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing att.i.tudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.

These airs and graces, which started in life with a pa.s.sport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the d.u.c.h.ess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,--without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Ca.n.a.lis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool a.s.surance of its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as minister of foreign affairs, "Your excellency was truly sublime!" Many men like Ca.n.a.lis are purged of their affectations by the administration of non-success in little doses.

These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected diction--magniloquence, if you please to call it so--are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type.

Ca.n.a.lis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the d.u.c.h.ess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France.

Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character,--as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic; it lends itself to circ.u.mstances; it is in harmony with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-cla.s.s vulgarity. Now Ca.n.a.lis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went,--an error shared by several of the great men of Paris.

While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.

"Ha! do I see my soldier?" said Ca.n.a.lis, perceiving Dumay, after addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women.