"Anger got the better of me," said Modeste. "Such meanness sent the blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him."

"Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can't speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself."

"Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a man of intellect."

"Your father's eight millions are more to him than all that."

"Eight millions!" exclaimed Modeste.

"My master, who has sold his practice, is going to Provence to attend to the purchase of lands which your father's agent has suggested to him.

The sum that is to be paid for the estate of La Bastie is four millions; your father has agreed to it. You are to have a 'dot' of two millions and another million for an establishment in Paris, a hotel and furniture. Now, count up."

"Ah! then I can be d.u.c.h.esse d'Herouville!" cried Modeste, glancing at Butscha.

"If it hadn't been for that comedian of a Ca.n.a.lis you would have kept HIS whip, thinking it came from me," said the dwarf, indirectly pleading La Briere's cause.

"Monsieur Butscha, may I ask if I am to marry to please you?" said Modeste, laughing.

"That fine fellow loves you as well as I do,--and you loved him for eight days," retorted Butscha; "and HE has got a heart."

"Can he compete, pray, with an office under the Crown? There are but six, grand almoner, chancellor, grand chamberlain, grand master, high constable, grand admiral,--but they don't appoint high constables any longer."

"In six months, mademoiselle, the ma.s.ses--who are made up of wicked Butschas--could send all those grand dignities to the winds. Besides, what signifies n.o.bility in these days? There are not a thousand real n.o.blemen in France. The d'Herouvilles are descended from a tipstaff in the time of Robert of Normandy. You will have to put up with many a vexation from the old aunt with the furrowed face. Look here,--as you are so anxious for the t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess,--you belong to the Comtat, and the Pope will certainly think as much of you as he does of all those merchants down there; he'll sell you a duchy with some name ending in 'ia' or 'agno.' Don't play away your happiness for an office under the Crown."

CHAPTER XXV. A DIPLOMATIC LETTER

The poet's reflections during the night were thoroughly matter of fact.

He sincerely saw nothing worse in life than the situation of a married man without money. Still trembling at the danger he had been led into by his vanity, his desire to get the better of the duke, and his belief in the Mignon millions, he began to ask himself what the d.u.c.h.ess must be thinking of his stay in Havre, aggravated by the fact that he had not written to her for fourteen days, whereas in Paris they exchanged four or five letters a week.

"And that poor woman is working hard to get me appointed commander of the Legion and amba.s.sador to the Court of Baden!" he cried.

Thereupon, with that prompt.i.tude of decision which results--in poets as well as in speculators--from a lively intuition of the future, he sat down and composed the following letter:--

To Madame la d.u.c.h.esse de Chaulieu:

My dear Eleonore,--You have doubtless been surprised at not hearing from me; but the stay I am making in this place is not altogether on account of my health. I have been trying to do a good turn to our little friend La Briere. The poor fellow has fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie, a rather pale, insignificant, and thread-papery little thing, who, by the way, has the vice of liking literature, and calls herself a poet to excuse the caprices and humors of a rather sullen nature.

You know Ernest,--he is so easy to catch that I have been afraid to leave him to himself. Mademoiselle de La Bastie was inclined to coquet with your Melchior, and was only too ready to become your rival, though her arms are thin, and she has no more bust than most girls; moreover, her hair is as dead and colorless as that of Madame de Rochefide, and her eyes small, gray, and very suspicious. I put a stop--perhaps rather brutally--to the attentions of Mademoiselle Immodeste; but love, such as mine for you, demanded it. What care I for all the women on earth, --compared to you, what are they?

The people with whom I pa.s.s my time, and who form the circle round the heiress, are so thoroughly bourgeois that they almost turn my stomach. Pity me; imagine! I pa.s.s my evenings with notaries, notaresses, cashiers, provincial money-lenders--ah! what a change from my evenings in the rue de Grenelle. The alleged fortune of the father, lately returned from China, has brought to Havre that indefatigable suitor, the grand equerry, hungry after the millions, which he wants, they say, to drain his marshes. The king does not know what a fatal present he made the duke in those waste lands. His Grace, who has not yet found out that the lady had only a small fortune, is jealous of _me_; for La Briere is quietly making progress with his idol under cover of his friend, who serves as a blind.

Notwithstanding Ernest's romantic ecstasies, I myself, a poet, think chiefly of the essential thing, and I have been making some inquiries which darken the prospects of our friend. If my angel would like absolution for some of our little sins, she will try to find out the facts of the case by sending for Mongenod, the banker, and questioning him, with the dexterity that characterizes her, as to the father's fortune? Monsieur Mignon, formerly colonel of cavalry in the Imperial guard, has been for the last seven years a correspondent of the Mongenods. It is said that he gives his daughter a "dot" of two hundred thousand francs, and before I make the offer on Ernest's behalf I am anxious to get the rights of the story. As soon as the affair is arranged I shall return to Paris. I know a way to settle everything to the advantage of our young lover,--simply by the transmission of the father-in-law's t.i.tle, and no one, I think, can more readily obtain that favor than Ernest, both on account of his own services and the influence which you and I and the duke can exert for him. With his tastes, Ernest, who of course will step into my office when I go to Baden, will be perfectly happy in Paris with twenty-five thousand francs a year, a permanent place, and a wife--luckless fellow!

Ah, dearest, how I long for the rue de Grenelle! Fifteen days of absence! when they do not kill love, they revive all the ardor of its earlier days, and you know, better than I, perhaps, the reasons that make my love eternal,--my bones will love thee in the grave! Ah! I cannot bear this separation. If I am forced to stay here another ten days, I shall make a flying visit of a few hours to Paris.

Has the duke obtained for me the thing we wanted; and shall you, my dearest life, be ordered to drink the Baden waters next year?

The billing and cooing of the "handsome disconsolate," compared with the accents of our happy love--so true and changeless for now ten years!--have given me a great contempt for marriage. I had never seen the thing so near. Ah, dearest! what the world calls a "false step" brings two beings nearer together than the law--does it not?

The concluding idea served as a text for two pages of reminiscences and aspirations a little too confidential for publication.

The evening before the day on which Ca.n.a.lis put the above epistle into the post, Butscha, under the name of Jean Jacmin, had received a letter from his fict.i.tious cousin, Philoxene, and had mailed his answer, which thus preceded the letter of the poet by about twelve hours. Terribly anxious for the last two weeks, and wounded by Melchior's silence, the d.u.c.h.ess herself dictated Philoxene's letter to her cousin, and the moment she had read the answer, rather too explicit for her quinquagenary vanity, she sent for the banker and made close inquiries as to the exact fortune of Monsieur Mignon. Finding herself betrayed and abandoned for the millions, Eleonore gave way to a paroxysm of anger, hatred, and cold vindictiveness. Philoxene knocked at the door of the sumptuous room, and entering found her mistress with her eyes full of tears,--so unprecedented a phenomenon in the fifteen years she had waited upon her that the woman stopped short stupefied.

"We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes," she heard the d.u.c.h.ess say.

"A letter from Havre, madame."

Eleonore read the poet's prose without noticing the presence of Philoxene, whose amazement became still greater when she saw the dawn of fresh serenity on the d.u.c.h.ess's face as she read further and further into the letter. Hold out a pole no thicker than a walking-stick to a drowning man, and he will think it a high-road of safety. The happy Eleonore believed in Ca.n.a.lis's good faith when she had read through the four pages in which love and business, falsehood and truth, jostled each other. She who, a few moments earlier, had sent for her husband to prevent Melchior's appointment while there was still time, was now seized with a spirit of generosity that amounted almost to the sublime.

"Poor fellow!" she thought; "he has not had one faithless thought; he loves me as he did on the first day; he tells me all--Philoxene!"

she cried, noticing her maid, who was standing near and pretending to arrange the toilet-table.

"Madame la d.u.c.h.esse?"

"A mirror, child!"

Eleonore looked at herself, saw the fine razor-like lines traced on her brow, which disappeared at a little distance; she sighed, and in that sigh she felt she bade adieu to love. A brave thought came into her mind, a manly thought, outside of all the pettiness of women,--a thought which intoxicates for a moment, and which explains, perhaps, the clemency of the Semiramis of Russia when she married her young and beautiful rival to Momonoff.

"Since he has not been faithless, he shall have the girl and her millions," she thought,--"provided Mademoiselle Mignon is as ugly as he says she is."

Three raps, circ.u.mspectly given, announced the duke, and his wife went herself to the door to let him in.

"Ah! I see you are better, my dear," he cried, with the counterfeit joy that courtiers a.s.sume so readily, and by which fools are so readily taken in.

"My dear Henri," she answered, "why is it you have not yet obtained that appointment for Melchior,--you who sacrificed so much to the king in taking a ministry which you knew could only last one year."

The duke glanced at Philoxene, who showed him by an almost imperceptible sign the letter from Havre on the dressing-table.

"You would be terribly bored at Baden and come back at daggers drawn with Melchior," said the duke.

"Pray why?"

"Why, you would always be together," said the former diplomat, with comic good-humor.

"Oh, no," she said; "I am going to marry him."

"If we can believe d'Herouville, our dear Ca.n.a.lis stands in no need of your help in that direction," said the duke, smiling. "Yesterday Grandlieu read me some pa.s.sages from a letter the grand equerry had written him. No doubt they were dictated by the aunt for the express purpose of their reaching you, for Mademoiselle d'Herouville, always on the scent of a 'dot,' knows that Grandlieu and I play whist nearly every evening. That good little d'Herouville wants the Prince de Cadignan to go down and give a royal hunt in Normandy, and endeavor to persuade the king to be present, so as to turn the head of the damozel when she sees herself the object of such a grand affair. In short, two words from Charles X. would settle the matter. D'Herouville says the girl has incomparable beauty--"

"Henri, let us go to Havre!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess, interrupting him.

"Under what pretext?" said her husband, gravely; he was one of the confidants of Louis XVIII.

"I never saw a hunt."

"It would be all very well if the king went; but it is a terrible bore to go so far, and he will not do it; I have just been speaking with him about it."

"Perhaps _Madame_ would go?"