 Section 7 of Modest Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Translated by Catherine Prescott Wormley. Section 7 of Modest Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Recorded by Don W. Jenkins. Chapter 7 A Poet of the Angelic School All young girls, romantic or otherwise, can imagine the impatience in which Modest lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues of fire. The trees were like plumage. She was not conscious of a body. She hovered in space. She melted away under her feet. Full of admiration for the post office, she followed her little sheet of paper on its way. She was happy, as we all are happy at twenty years of age in the first exercise of our will. She was possessed as in the Middle Ages. She made pictures in her mind of the poets abode of his study. She saw him unsealing her letter and then followed myriads of suppositions. After sketching the poetry, we cannot do less than give the profile of the poet. Canalus is a short spare man with an air of good breeding, a dark complexion, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like that of a man who is more vanity than pride. He loves luxury, rank, and splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men. Out of his birth, even more than of his talent, he destroys the value of his ancestors by making too much of them in the present day. After all, the Canalans are not Navarans nor Cadignans nor Grandalus. Nature, however, helps him out in his pretensions. He has those eyes of eastern effulgence which we demand in a poet, a delicate charm of manner and a vibrant voice. Yet a taint of natural charlatanism destroys the effect of nearly all these advantages. He is a born comedian. If he puts forward his well-shaped foot, it is because the attitude has become a habit. If he uses exclamatory terms, they are part of himself. If he poses with high dramatic action, he has made that deportment his second nature. Such defects as these are not incompatible with a general benevolence and a certain quality of errant and purely ideal chivalry which distinguishes the paladin from the knight. Canalus has not devotion enough for Don Quixote, but he has too much elevation of thought not to put himself on the nobler side of questions and things. His poetry, which takes the town by storm on all profitable occasions, really injures the man as a poet. For he is not without mind, but his talent prevents him from developing it. He is over-weighted by his reputation and is always aiming to make himself a pair greater than he has the credit of being. Thus, as often happens, the man is entirely out of keeping with the products of his thought. The author of these naive, caressing, tender little lyrics, these calm idols, pure and cold as the surface of a lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious little creature in a tightly buttoned frock coat, with the air of a diplomat seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of aristocracy, full of pretension, thirsting for money already spoiled by success in two directions, and wearing the double wreath of Myrtle and Laurel. A government situation worth 8,000 francs, 3,000 francs annuity from the literary fund, 2,000 from the academy, 3,000 more than the paternal estate, less than the taxes and the cost of keeping it in order, a total fixed income of 15,000 francs, plus the 10,000 brought in one year with another by his poetry, and all 25,000 francs. This from Edest's hero was so precarious and insufficient in income that he usually spent 5,000 or 6,000 francs more every year. But the king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had hitherto supplied the deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's coronation which earned him a whole silver service, having refused a sum of money on the ground that a cannulus owed his duty to his sovereign. But about this time cannulus had, as the journalists say, exhausted his budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry. His lyre did not have seven strings, it had one. And having played on that one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to hang himself with it or to hold his tongue. De Marseille, who did not like cannulus, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to the quick of his vanity. Cannulus, he said, always reminds me of that brave man whom Frederick the Great called up and commended after a battle because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little tune. Cannulus' ambition was to enter political life, and he made capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary of the embassy of the Duke de Chaleau, though it was really made according to Parisian gossip in the capacity of attaché to the Duchess. How many times a sarcasm or a single speech has decided the whole course of a man's life. Colà, the late president of the Cisale Spine Republic, and the best lawyer in Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was forty years of age that he knew nothing of botany. He was ticked, became a second Jésus, cultivated flowers, and compiled and published The Flora of Piedmont in Latin, a labor of ten years. I'll master De Marseille some of these days, thought the crushed poet. After all, Canning and Chateaubriand are both in politics. Cannulus would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but he was afraid of the French press, whose criticisms are savage upon any writer who takes four Alexandreans to express one idea. Of all the poets of our day, only three, Hugo, the Apolligatier, and Divigny, have been able to win the double glory of poet and prose writer like Racine and Voltaire, Mollier, and Rabelais, a rare distinction in the literature of France, which ought to give a man a right to the crowning title of poet. So then the part of the favorisant Jermain was doing a wise thing in trying to house his little chariot under the protecting roof of the present government. When he became president of the Court of Claims at the Foreign Office, he stood in need of a secretary, a friend who could take his place in various ways, cook up his interests with publishers, see to his glory in the newspapers, help him if need be in politics, and short a cat's paw and satellite. In Paris, many men of celebrity in art, science, and literature had one or more train-bearers, captains of the guard, chamberlains as it were who lived in the sunshine of their presence. AIDS decamped and trusted with delicate missions, allowing themselves to be compromised if necessary, workers around the pedestal of the idol. Not exactly his servants, nor yet his equals, bold in his defense, first in the breach covering all retreats, busy with his business, and devoted to him just so long as their illusions last, or until the moment when they have got all they wanted. Some of these satellites perceived the ingratitude of their great men. Others feel that they are simply made tools of, many weary of the life. Very few remain contended with that sweet equality of feeling and sentiment, which is the only reward that should be looked for in an intimacy with a superior man. A reward that contented Ali when Muhammad raised him to himself. Many of these men, misled by vanity, think themselves quite as capable as their patron. Pure devotion, such as Modest, conceived it without money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare. Nevertheless, there are men of alls to be found, more perhaps in paris than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its peaceful toil. These are the wandering Benedictines of our social world, which offers them no other monastery. These brave meek hearts live by their actions and in their hidden lives the poetry that poets utter. They are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in their lonely vigils and meditations, as truly poets as others of the name on paper who fatten in the fields of literature at so much averse, like Lord Byron, like all who live alas by ink, the hypocrene water of today, for want of a better. Attracted by the fame of Canales, also by the prospect of political interest and advised there too by Madame Despard, who acted in the matter for the Duchess de Chaloux, a young lawyer of the court of claims became secretary and confidential friend of the poet, who welcomed and petted him very much as a broker caresses his first dabbler in the funds. The beginning of this companionship bore a very fair resemblance to friendship. The young man had already held the same relation to a minister who went out of office in 1827, taking care before he did so to appoint his young secretary to a place in the foreign office. Ernest de la Breire, then about twenty-seven years of age, was decorated with a legion of honor, but was without other means than his salary. He was accustomed to the management of business and had learned a good deal of life during his four years in a minister's cabinet. Kindly, amiable and overmodest with a heart full of pure and sound feelings, he was averse to putting himself in the foreground. He loved his country and wished to serve her, but notoriety abashed him. To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was far more desirable than that of the minister himself. As soon as he became the friend and secretary of Canales he did a great amount of labor for him. By the end of eighteen months he had learned to understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary expression only. The truth of the old proverb, the cowl doesn't make the monk, is eminently shown in literature. It is extremely rare to find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect accord. The faculties are not the man himself. This disconnection, whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds from an unexplored, possibly an unexplorable mystery. The brain and its products of all kinds, for an art the hand of man is a continuation of his brain, are a world apart, which flourishes beneath the cranium in absolute independence of sentiments, feelings, and all that is called virtue, the virtue of citizens, fathers, and private life. This, however true, is not absolutely so. Nothing is absolutely true of man. It is certain that a debauched man will dissipate his talent, that a drunkard will waste it in libations. While, on the other hand, no man can give himself talent by wholesome living. Nevertheless, it is all but proved that Virgil, the painter of love, never loved a daito, and that Rousseau, a model citizen, had enough pride to have furnished forth an aristocracy. On the other hand, Raphael and Michelangelo do represent the glorious conjunction of genius with the lines of character. Talent in men is therefore, in all moral points, very much what beauty is in women, simply a promise. Let us therefore doubly admire the man in whom both heart and character equal the perfection of his genius. When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst species of egoist, or there are some amiable forms of device, he felt a delicacy in leaving him. Honest natures cannot easily break the ties that bind them, especially if they have tied them voluntarily. The secretary was therefore still living in domestic relations with the poet when Modeste's letter arrived, and such relations, via set, is involved a perpetual sacrifice of his feelings. La Breire admitted the frankness with which Canolese had laid himself bare before him. Moreover, the defects of the man, who will always be considered a great poet during his lifetime, and flattered as Marc Montel was flattered, were only the wrong side of his brilliant qualities. Without his vanity and his magniliquence, it is possible that he might never have acquired the sonorous elocution which is so useful and even necessary an instrument in political life. His cold-bloodedness touched at certain points on rectitude and loyalty. His ostentation had a lining of generosity. Results, we must remember, are to the profit of society, motives concern God. But after the arrival of Modeste's letter, Ernest deceived himself no longer as to Canolese. The pair had just finished breakfast and were talking together in the poet's study which was on the ground floor of a house standing back in a courtyard and looked into a garden. There, exclaimed Canolese, I was telling Madame de Chaloux the other day that I ought to bring out another poem. I knew admiration was running short, for I have had no anonymous letters for a long time. Is it from an unknown woman? Unknown? Yes. A de Este and Havre evidently a feigned name. Canolese passed the letter to Labriere. The little poem, with all its hidden enthousiasms, in short, poor Modeste's heart, was disdainfully handed over with the gesture of a spoiled dandy. It is a fine thing, said the lawyer, to have the power to attract such feelings, to force a poor woman to step out of the habits which nature, education, and the world dictate to her, to break through conventions. What privileges genius wins? A letter such as this, written by a young girl, a genuine young girl without hidden meanings, with real enthusiasm? Well, what, said Canolese? Why a man might suffer as much as Tasso, and yet feel recompensed, cried Labriere? Oh, he might, my dear fellow, by a first letter of that kind, and even a second, but what about the thirtieth? And suppose you find out that these young enthousiasms are little jades, or imagine a poet rushing along the brilliant path in search of her, and finding at the end of it an old English woman sitting on a milestone and offering you her hand? Or suppose this post-office angel should really be a rather ugly girl in quest of a husband? Ah, my boy, the effervescence then goes down. I begin to perceive, said Labriere, smiling, that there is something poisonous in glory, as there is in certain dazzling flowers. And then, resumed Canolese, all these women, even when they are simple-minded, have ideals, and you can't satisfy them. They never say to themselves that a poet is a vain man, as I am accused of being. They can't conceive what it is for an author to be at the mercy of a feverish excitement, which makes him disagreeable and capricious. They want him always grand, noble, that never occurs to them that a genius is a disease, or that Nathan lives with Florine, that Vartez is too fat, and Joseph Vardau is too thin, the barangère Olympus, that their own particular deity might have thus knuffles. A Lucien de Rapembre, poet and cupid, is a phoenix. And why should I go in search of compliments only to pull the string of a shower-bath of horrid looks from some disillusioned female? Then the true poet, said Labriere, ought to remain hidden, like God, in the center of his worlds, and be only seen in his own creations. Vori would cost too dear, in that case, answered Canales. There is some good in life. As for that letter he added, taking a cup of tea, I assure you that when a noble and beautiful woman loves a poet, she does not hide in the corner-boxes like a duchess in love with an actor. She feels that her beauty, her fortune, her name are protection enough, and she dares to say openly, like an epic poem, I am the nymph Calypso, enamored of Telemachus. Mystery and faint names are the resources of little minds. For my part I no longer answer masks. I should love a woman who came to seek me, cried Labriere. To all you say, I reply, my dear Canales, that it cannot be an ordinary girl who aspires to a distinguished man. Such a girl has too little trust, too much vanity, she is too faint-hearted. Only a star, a— Princess, cried Canales, bursting into a shot of laughter. Only a princess can descend to him. My dear fellow, that doesn't happen once in a hundred years. Such love is like that flower that blossoms every century. Princesses, let me tell you, if they are young, rich, and beautiful, have something else to think of. They are surrounded like rare plants by a hedge of fools, well-bred idiots as hollow as elder bushes. My dream, alas, the crystal of my dream, garlanded from hence to the correse with roses. Ah, I cannot speak of it. It is in fragments at my feet, and has been long so. No, no, all anonymous letters are begging letters. And what sort of begging? Write yourself to that young woman if you suppose her young and pretty, and you'll find out. There is nothing like experience. As for me, I can't reasonably be expected to love every woman. Apollo, at any rate, he of Belvedere, is a delicate consumptive who must take care of his health. But when a woman writes to you in this way, her excuse must certainly be in her consciousness that she is able to eclipse in tenderness and beauty every other woman, so to nest. And I should think you might feel some curiosity. Ah, so kind of these. Permit me, my juvenile friend, to abide by the beautiful Duchess who is all my joy. You are right, you are right, cryjournist. However, the young secretary read and reread Modeste's letter striving to guess the mind of its hidden writer. There is not the least fine writing here, he said. She does not even talk of your genius. She speaks to your heart. In your place, I should feel tempted by this fragrance of modesty, this proposed agreement. Then sign it, cried canalist, laughing. Answer the letter and go to the end of the adventure yourself. You shall tell me the results three months hence, if the affair lasts so long. Four days later, Modeste received the following letter written on extremely fine paper protected by two envelopes and sealed with the arms of canalists. Manzel, the admiration for fine works, allowing that my books are such, implies something so lofty and sincere as to protect you from all light-gesting, and to justify before the sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me. But first I must thank you for the pleasure of which such proofs of sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them, for the maker of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic worth of their writings. So readily does self-esteem lend itself to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of criticism is to share with her the harvest of my own experience, even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions. Manzel, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels. They have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish, ambitious, dissipated, and, believe me, no matter how imposing innocence may be, how shovelless a poet is, you will meet with many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought that is not in it, which you and your innocence have not suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding you, but had you perchance fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer, one whose books might be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green rooms, perhaps a hero of some gay resort, in the bower of Climatis where you dream of poets can you smell the odor of the cigar which drives all poetry from the manuscript? But let us look still further. How could the dreamy solitary life you lead doubtless by the seashore interest a poet whose mission it is to imagine all and to paint all? What reality can equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me, what will you gain? You, a young girl, brought up to be the virtuous mother of a family. If you learn to comprehend the terrible agitations of a poet's life in this dreadful capital, which may be defined by one sentence, the hell in which men love. If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one of a rejected caste and do you seek a friend far away from you? Or are you afflicted with personal ugliness yet feeling within you a noble soul which can give and receive confidence? Alas, alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too much or too little. You have gone too far or not far enough. Either let us drop this correspondence or, if you continue it, tell me more than in the letter you have now written me. But, ma'am Zell, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you have a home, a family, if you have the precious ointment, the spikner to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you. Become what every pure young girl should be, a good woman, the virtuous mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can make. He is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound a woman's proper pride and kill a tenderness which has no experience of life. The wife of a poet is long before she marries him. She must train herself to the charity of angels, to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such qualities, ma'am Zell, are but germs in a young girl. Hear the whole truth. Do I not owe it to you in return for your intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man to be in all that makes a man like other men. He therefore poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He becomes like a woman whose beauty is overpraised, of whom we say, I thought her far more lovely. She has not warranted the portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter, a fairy whose name is imagination. Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a sphere invisible, not in daily life. The wife of a poet bears the burden. She sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears them. Yet the glory of the position fascinates you. Hear me now when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a distance, you thought equitable and such coldness at the shining summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it. I close with the last thought in which there is no disguised entreaty. It is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea. Dane to accept Menzel the homage which we owe to all women, even those who are disguised and masked. So this was the letter she had worn between her flesh and her corset above her palpitating heart throughout one whole day. For this she had postponed the reading until the midnight hour when the household slept, waiting for the solemn silence with the eager anxiety of an imagination of fire. For this she had blessed the poet by anticipation, reading a thousand letters ere she opened one, fancying all things except this drop of cold water falling upon the vaporous forms of her illusion, and dissolving them as presic acid dissolves life. What could she do but hide herself in her bed, blow out her candle, bury her face in the sheets and weep? All this happened during the first days of July, but Modeste presently got up, walked across the room and opened the window. She wanted air. The fragrance of the flowers came to her with the peculiar freshness of the odors of the night. The sea, the moon sparkled like a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. Ah, there is the poet, thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the quick. She wished to reread the letter and lit a candle. She studied the sentences so carefully studied when written and ended by hearing the wheezing voice of the outer world. He is right and I am wrong, she said to herself, but who could ever believe that under the environmental of a poet I should find nothing but one of Mollier's old men. When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, flagrante delicto, she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author or the object of her fall. And so the true, the single-minded, that the untamed and untameable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit to drive him into some fatal inconsistency and so return this girl, this child as we may call her, so pure whose head alone had been misguided, partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face. She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of doubt. Nights like these are never forgotten. Modeste walked into her mother and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the hearts of young girls. End of Section 7 Read by Don W. Jenkins Rancho San Diego, California shaggybark.blogspot.com Section 8 of Modeste Mignon by Henri de Balzac translated by Catherine Prescott Wormley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 8 of Modeste Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Chapter 8 Blade to Blade Timon Sir de Kali's Mon Sir, you are certainly a great poet and you are something more an honest man. After showing such loyal frankness to a young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following question? Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine? Would your ideas, your language have been the same? Had someone whispered in your ear what may prove true? Mamzelle O. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a master. Admit the supposition for a minute. Be with me what you are with yourself. Fear nothing. I am wiser than my twenty years. Nothing that is frank can hurt you in my mind. When I have read your confidence if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an answer to your first letter. Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me in your integrity which forced me to remain always your humble servant. O. de este am. When Ernest de Libriere had held this letter in his hands for some little time he went to walk along the boulevard tossed in mind like a tiny vessel in a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the compass. Most young men, especially true Parisians, would have settled the matter in a single phrase. The girl but for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him as it were upon his oath, this appeal to truth had the power to awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, truth, and justice getting on their feet right out in their several ways energetically. O. my dear Ernest said truth, you never would have read that lesson to a rich heiress. No, my boy, you would have gone away, and you would have been very unhappy indeed at her preference for genius. And if you could have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her affections, mam zaldesta would have been a divinity. What! cried justice. Are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail a man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry you make about it. Yet here is a young woman who revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold, the poet replies with a blow at her heart. Rich or poor, young or old, uglier handsome, the girl is right, she has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slew of self-interest and lets you know it, cried on her. She deserves an answer, but examine yourself, sound your heart and purge it of its meannesses. What would Molié's Alceste to say? And Labrière, having started from the boulevard Poissonnier, walked so slowly, absorbed in these reflections that he was more than an hour in reaching the boulevard de Capucines. Then he followed the quays which led Molié's Alceste as he should have done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities. One thing is evident, he said to himself. She hasn't six millions, but that's not the point. Six days later Modeste received the following letter. Mamzelle, you are not a de Estes. The name is Saphane when to conceal your own. A class family. Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change. They are one. But obligations vary in the different states of life. Just as the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position. The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in general for the girl who sews at fifteen sews a day for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for the young bourgeois, for the child of a rich merchant, for the heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Estes. A king must not stoop to pick up a piece of gold, but a laborer ought to retrace his steps to find ten sews. Though both are equally bound to obey laws of economy, a daughter of art and plume to flourish her whip press the flanks of her barb and ride like an Amazon decked in gold lace with a lackey behind her into the presence of a poet and say I love poetry and I would feign expiate Lenora's cruelty to Tassau but a daughter of the people would cover herself with ridicule by imitating her to what class do you belong? Answer sincerely and I will answer the question yet I am bound to you in a measure by the ties of poetic communion I am unwilling to offer any commonplace compliments perhaps you have already won a malicious victory by thus embarrassing a maker of books The young man was certainly not wanting in the sort of shrewdness which is permissible to a man of honor By return courier he received an answer to Montserre de Callis you grow the chief glory of our house was a cardinal in the days when cardinals walk the earth by the sight of kings I am the last of our family which ends in me but I have the necessary quarterings to make my entry into any court or chapter house in Europe we are quite the equals of de Callis you will be so kind as to excuse me from sending you our arms endeavor to answer me as truthfully as I have you now your servant oh de Estet M The little mischief how she abuses her privileges cried LeBrier but isn't she frank No young man can be four years private secretary to a cabinet minister and live in Paris and observe their carrying on of many intrigues with perfect impunity in fact the pure soul is more or less he was not canless our young secretary engaged a place in the mail coach for Havre after writing a letter in which he announced that the promised answer would be sent a few days later excusing the delay on the ground of the importance of the confession and the pressure of his duties at the ministry he took care to get from the director general of the post office a note to the postmaster at Havre requesting secrecy and attention when she came for the letters and to follow her without exciting observation guided by her he reached ingoville and saw modeste mignon at the window of the chalet well Francois he heard the young girls say to which the maid responded yes mamzelle I have one struck by the girls great beauty Ernesto traced his steps and asked the man on the street yes my friend oh that belongs to Montcheur Vilquine the richest shipping merchant in Havre so Richie doesn't know what he is worth there is no cardinal Vilquine that I know of in history thought Erneste as he walked back to Havre for the nightmail to Paris naturally he questioned the postmaster about the Vilquine family and learned that it possessed an enormous fortune Prudence kept Labriere from seeming anxious about the Vilquines the postmaster was already looking at him slightly is there anyone staying with them at the present moment he asked besides the family the de Héroville family is there just now they do talk of a marriage between the young Duke and the remaining mamzelle Vilquine at the time of Henri IV Erneste returned to Paris having seen enough of Modeste's dream of her and to think that whether she were rich or whether she were poor if she had a noble soul he would like to make her Madame de Labriere and so thinking he resolved to continue the correspondence Ah you poor women of France trying to remain hidden if you can try to weave public streets the hours when the coaches arrive and depart which counts all letters and stamps then twice over first with the hour when they were thrown into the boxes and next with that of their delivery which numbers the houses prints the tax of every tenant on a metal register at the doors after verifying its particulars and will soon possess one vast register of client try imprudent young ladies to escape not only the eye of the police but the incessant chatter which takes place in a country town about the various trifles how many dishes the prefect has at his dessert how many slices of melon are left at the door of some small householder which strains its ear to catch the chink of the gold thrifty man lays by and spends its evenings in calculating the incomes that enabled modest to escape discovery through Ernest's reconnoitering expedition a step which he already regretted but what Parisien can allow himself to be the dupe of a little country girl incapable of being duped that horrid maxim is the disolvent of all noble sentiments in man we can readily guess the struggle of feeling to which this honest young fellow fellow pray the stroke of the flail which scourged his conscience will be found to have left its trace this is what modeste read a few days later as she sat by her window on a fine summer's day ma'am zeal without hypocrisy or evasion yes if I had been certain that you possessed an immense fortune I should have made wealth a religion at least I think I should it is not to be expected of a man still young that he can have the wisdom to substitute sound sense for the pleasure of the senses within sight of a prey the the the the the the the within sight of a prey the brutal instincts hidden in the heart of man drive him on instead of that lesson I should have sent you compliments and flatteries should I have kept my own esteems in so doing I doubt it ma'am zeal in such a case success brings absolution but happiness that is another thing should I have come between us your husband however grand or fancy you make him would have ended by reproaching you for having abased him you yourself might have come sooner or later to despise him the strong man forgives but the poet whines such ma'am zeal is the answer which my honesty compels me to make to you my new too little you have had the power to stir up many of the evil plots which crouched in my heart as in all hearts but from them something good and generous has come forth and I salute you with my most fervent benedictions just as at sea we salute the lighthouse which shows the rocks on which we are about to perish here is my confession for I have just returned from Habra where I saw Francois Crochet and followed her to Ingeville you are as beautiful as the woman of a poet's dream but I do not know if you are ma'am zeal Wilkeen concealed under ma'am zeal de Haraville or ma'am zeal de Haraville hidden under ma'am zeal Wilkeen though all is fair in war I blushed at such spying and stopped short in sight of a poet now that I have laid bare my heart and allowed you to read it you will believe in the sincerity of what I am about to add though the glimpse I had of you was all too rapid it has suffice to modify my opinion of your conduct you are a poet and a poem even more than you are a woman yes there allotted to an everyday destiny has another aspect if endowed with the nature which I now attribute to you among the crowd of beings flung by fate into the social life of this planet to make up a generation there are exceptional souls if your letter is the outcome of long poetic reveries on the fate which conventions bring to women if constrained by the impulse of a lofty and intelligent mind to the end that you may create a friendship withdrawn from the ordinary relations of life with a soul and communion with your own disregarding thus the ordinary trammels of your sex then assuredly you are an exception the law which rightly limits the actions of the crowd is too limited for you but in that case the remark in my first letter returns in greater force you have that of compelling me to sound my heart you have corrected in me the false idea only too common in France that marriage should be a means of fortune while I struggled with my conscience a sacred voice spoke to me I swore solemnly to make my fortune myself and not be led by motives of cupidity in choosing the companion of my life I have also reproached myself for the blamable and not six millions there is no concealment possible in Havre for a young lady who possesses such a fortune you would be discovered at once by the pack of hounds of great families whom I see in Paris on the hunt after heiresses and who have already sent one the grand equity the young duke among the bilquins therefore believe me a factual fact prove to me therefore that you have one of those souls which may be forgiven for its disobedience to the common law by perceiving and comprehending the spirit of this letter as you did that of my first letter if you are destined to a middle class life obey the iron law which holds society together lifted in mind above other women I admire you but if you seek to obey an impulse which you ought to repress I pity you Sarah the electric Clarissa Harlow is that legitimate and a honourable love led the poor victim to her ruin because it was conceived developed and persoed beyond the boundaries of family restraint family however cruel and even fulish it may be is in the right against the lovelaces the family is society believe me the glory of a young daughter able to become Madame Lestelle, I would wish her dead at fifteen. Can you imagine a daughter of yours flaunting on the stage of fame, exhibiting herself to win the plaudits of a crowd and not suffer anguish at the thought? No matter to what heights a woman can rise by the inward poetry of her soul, she must sacrifice the outer signs of superiority on the altar of her home. Her impulse, her genius, her aspirations toward good, the whole palm of a young woman's being, should belong to the man she accepts and the children whom she brings into the world. I think I perceive in you a secret desire to widen the narrow circle of the life to which all women are condemned and to put love and passion into marriage. Ah, it is a lovely dream. It is not impossible. It is difficult, but if realized, may it not be to the despair of souls. Forgive me the hackneyed word, incompre. If you seek a platonic friendship, it will be to your sorrow and after years. If your letter was a jest, discontinue it. Perhaps this little romance is to end here, is it? It has not been without fruit. My sense of duty is aroused, and you on your side will have learned something of society. Turn your thoughts to real life. Throw the enthusiasm you have culled from the literature into the virtues of your sex. I do, Mamzell. Do me the honor to grant me your esteem. Having seen you, or one whom I believe you to be, I have known that your letter was simply natural. A flower so lovely turns to the sun of poetry. Yes, love poetry as you love flowers, music the grandeur of the sea, the beauties of nature. Love them as an adornment of the soul. But remember what I have had the honor of telling you as the nature of poets. Be cautious not to marry, as you say, a dunce, but seek the partner whom God has made for you. For our souls, believe me, we are fit to appreciate you and make you happy. If I were rich, if you were poor, I would lay my heart and my fortunes at your feet, for I believe your soul to be full of riches and of loyalty. To you I could confide my life and my honor in absolute security. Once more, adieu, adieu, fairest daughter of Eve, the fair. The reading of this letter swallowed like a drop of water in the desert, lifted the mountain which weighed heavily on Modeste's heart. Then she saw the mistake she had made in arranging her plan and repaired it by giving France while some envelopes directed to herself, in which the maid could put the letters which came from Paris and drop them again into the box. Modeste resolved to receive the postman herself on the steps of the chalet at the hour when he made his delivery. As to the feelings of this reply, in which the noble heart of poor Lebrière beat beneath the brilliant phantom of Cannelly's, excited in Modeste, they were as multifarious and confused as the waves which rushed to die along the shore, while with her eyes fixed on the wide ocean she gave herself up to the joy of having, if we dare say so, harpooned an angelic soul in the Parisian gulf of having to bind that hearts of price might still be found in harmony with genius, and above all for having followed the magic voice of intuition. A vast interest was now about to animate her life. The wires of her cage were broken. The bolts and bars of the pretty chalet where were they? Her thoughts took wings. Oh, father! she cried, looking out to the horizon. Come back and make us rich and happy. The answer which Ernest de Lebrière received some five days later will tell the reader more than any elaborate disquisition of ours. Section 9 of Modeste Mignon by Henri de Balzac. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 9 of Modeste Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Translated by Catherine Prescott Wormley. Read by Don W. Jenkins. Chapter 9 The Power of the Unseen You Monser de Canales, my friend, suffer me to give you that name. You have delighted me. I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the first. Oh, may it not be the last. Who but a poet could have excused and understood a young girl so delicately. I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines of your letter. And first let me say that most fortunately you do not know me. I can joyfully assure you that I am neither that hideous Mamzell Vilkeen, nor the very noble and withered Mamzell de Haravelle, who floats between twenty and forty years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The cardinal de Haravelle flourished in the history of the church at least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only family glory. For I take no account of the tenet generals and abbeys who write trumpery little verses. Moreover I do not live in the magnificent Villa Vilkeen. There is not in my veins, thank God, the ten millionth of a drop of that chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from Germany, on the other from the south of France. My mind has a teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am noble on my father's and on my mother's side. On my mother's I derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short my precautions are well taken. It is not in any man's power nor even in the power of the lot unmask my incognito. I shall remain veiled, unknown. As to my person and as to my belongings, as the Normans say, make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl, ignorantly happy, on whom your eyes chance to light during your visit to Havre, and I do not call myself poverty-stricken. Though ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks, I have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even in a wager, to reach me. Alas, though free as air I am watched and guarded, by myself in the first place and secondly by people of nerve and courage, who would not hesitate to put a knife in your heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat, I do not say this to excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity. I believe I have no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me. I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged of your first sermon. When you have a confession, I said to myself when I saw you so distrustful and mistaking me for Corinne, whose improvisations bore me dreadfully, that in all probability dozens of muses had already led you rashly curious into their valleys and begged you to taste the fruits of their boarding school, Parnassus. Oh, you are perfectly safe with me, my friend. I may love poetry, but I have no little verses in my pocketbook and my stockings are and will remain immaculately white. You shall not be pestered with the flowers of my heart in one or more volumes. And finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word come, you will not find, you know it now, an old maid, no, nor a poor and ugly one. Ah, my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to Habra, you have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough and trusting enough and perspicacious enough to come, having faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the depths of my heart, to come to our first meeting with the simplicity of a child. For that was what I dreamed to be the innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my treasure. But I forgive you, you live in paris, and as you say, there is always a man within a poet. Because I tell you this, will you think me some little girl who cultivates a garden full of illusions? You who are witty and wise, have you not guessed that, when Mamzelle de Estes received your pedantic lesson, she said to herself, No, dear poet, my first letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit trees, but a net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught. All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval. The man who is able to appease me, and of whom I believe myself worthy, will have my heart and my life, with the consent of my parents, for I will neither grieve them nor take them unawares. Finally I am certain of reigning over them, and besides they are wholly without prejudice. Indeed in every way I feel myself protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a treasure. Not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if need be. For let me say circumstances have furnished me with armor of proof on which is engraved the word disdain. I have the deepest horror of all that is calculating, of all that is not pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful, the ideal, without being romantic, though I have been, in my heart of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various things, just even to vulgarity which you have written me about, society and social life. For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why seek an unseen friend, you ask? Your person may be unknown to me, but your mind, your heart, I know. They please me. And I feel an infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius for their confidant. I do not wish the palm of my heart to be wasted. I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all. She will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl's thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering into the sun. I am sure you have never before met with this good fortune of the soul, the honest confidances of an honest girl. Listen to her prattle. Accept the music that she sings to you in her own heart. Later if our souls are sisters, if our characters warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving man shall await you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the castle, the palace. I don't know yet what sort of bower it will be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be possible. But you will admit, will you not, that it is poetic and that Memzell de Esther has a complying disposition. Has she not left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high-em-prize, such as Paladin sought voluntarily in the olden time? No. She seeks a perfectly spiritual and mystical alliance. Come to me when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all. Hide nothing. I have bombs for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear friend, but I have the sense of fifty. And unfortunately I have known through the experience of another all the horrors and delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can contain, what infamy. But I myself am an honest girl. Know I have no illusions, but I have something better, something real. I have beliefs and a religion. See, I open the ball of our confidences. Whoever I marry, provided I choose him for myself, may sleep in peace, or go to the East Indies, sure that he will find me on his return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me. And in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he has been the hero. Yes I have resolved within my heart never to follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the life to a body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that woman be who thwarts the man she loves? An illness, a disease, not life. By life I mean that joyous health which makes each hour a pleasure. But to return to your letter which will always be precious to me. Yes, jesting apart it contains that which I desired, an expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family life as air to lungs, and without which no happiness is possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now no longer a chimera. I do, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, and my impregnable fortress. I have read your last verses in the review, ah, with what delight now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of your secret soul. Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you, that you are her solitary thought, without a rival except in her father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject these pages full of you written for you, seen by no eye but yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet that your confidences, provided they are full and true, will suffice for the happiness of your Odeestim. Good heavens! Can I be in love already? cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet. Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty? Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the Unseen. The Unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that somber vastness fires flash and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canales, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a hair-bell by a mountain-torn, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. Labriere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent, and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through peak. Mamzell, is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless regrets, showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness? I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter in which you have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble the head in the heart of a man. Therefore I make the most of the little self-possession you have left me to offer my humble remonstrances. Do you really believe, Mamzell, that letters more or less true in relation to life of the writers, more or less in sincere, for those which we write to each other are the expression of the moment at which we pin them and not of the general tenor of our lives? Do you believe, I say, that beautiful as these may be they can't at all replace the representation that we could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the heart, to which letters may suffice, and there is a life material to which more importances alas attach than you are aware of at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to harmonize in the ideal which you cherish, and this I may remark in passing is very rare. The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul which is both educated and chaste is one of those celestial flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a literary man. And I thank you with an impulse equal to your own. But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of your charity, what next? What do you expect? I have neither the genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron. Above all I have not the halo of his fictitious damnation in his false social woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind, sickly, irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousandfold more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of character and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? An exchange for your reveries is what will you gain? The dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place your projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl who was not like you, semi-German, but all together so, adored Goethe with the rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her religion, her God, knowing at the same time that he was married. Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship with sly good nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now between ourselves let us admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a man of genius is equal through comprehension and should piously worship him till death like one of those divine figures sketched by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who, when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away from men like the friend of Lord Bowlingbroke. Let us admit, I say, that the young girl would have lived forever and laid in the glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the picture? As I am neither Goethe or Lord Byron, the colossi of poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have heart. I am still young, and I have my career to make. See me for what I am. The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other empty-headed fob. And if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days, of property invested in the funds. But I am not rich. Neither do I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret. They are all uncomprehended, the fame and penury, which belong to men who are worth far more than I, dartez, for instance. Ah! What prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to these enchanting visions? Let us stop here. If I have had the happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars which shine for a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode of our lives. Before we too continue it, I might love you. I might conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which light fires in the heart, whose violence is greater than their duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you. We should end our tale in the common vulgar way, marriage, a household, children, belice, and Henriette Crissale together. Could it be? Therefore adieu. End of Section 9, read by Don W. Jenkins, Rancho San Diego, California, shaggybark.blogspot.com. Section 10 of Modest Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Translated by Catherine Prescott-Wormley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 10 of Modest Mignon by Henri de Balzac. Read by Don W. Jenkins. Chapter 10 The Marriage of Souls To Monsur de Canalis. My friend, your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure, but perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and asks Him for many things. He is mute. I seek to obtain in you the answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of Mamzell de Gornet and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not remember the household of Cismon de Cismondi in Geneva? The most lovely home ever known, as I have been told. Something like that of the Marquis de Piscar and his wife. Happy to old age. Ah, friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist as in a symphony answering each other from a distance vibrating with delicious melody and unison? Man alone of all creation is in himself the harp, the musician and the listener. Do you think to find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go into the world and meet the handsomest and wittiest women in Paris. May I not suppose that some one of these mermaids has deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has inspired the answer whose prosaic opinion saddened me? There is something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian coquetry. There grows a flower far up those alpine peaks called Men of Genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with the do's their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to cultivate that flower and make it bloom, for its wild yet temple fragrance can never fail. It is eternal. Do me the honour to believe that there is nothing low or commonplace in me. Where I batina, for I know to whom you allude, I should never have become Madame von Arnhem. And had I been one of Lord Byron's many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister. You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of which I dare speak without vanity. God has put in my soul the roots of that alpine flower borne on the summits of which I speak, and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-cell and see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty, intoxicating in its fragrance shall not be dragged through the vulgarities of life. It is yours, yours before any eye has blighted it, yours or ever. Yes, my poet, to you belong my thoughts. All those that are secret, those that are gayest. My heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can live in the life of the heart. I can exist on your mind. Your sentiments. They please me, and I will always be what I am, your friend. Yours is a noble, moral nature. I have recognized it. I have appreciated it, and that suffices me. And that is all my future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a poet, sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper, the guide of his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden, so devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you, his friendship, pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who listens and sometimes shakes her head, who knits by the light of the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked with rain or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny, if I do not find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband. I smile alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be any the worse if Mamzelle d'Estée does not give it two or three sons, and never becomes a madame or king, something or other? As for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a mother by taking care of others and by my secret cooperation in the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my thoughts and all my earthly efforts. I have the deepest horror of common-placeness. If I am free, if I am rich, and I know that I am young and pretty, I will never belong to any nanny just because he is the son of a peer of France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day, nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My father adores my wishes. He will never oppose them. If I please my poet and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune. I am an eagle, and you will see it in my eyes. I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I put its substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. All, my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to us through the first exercise of my will. Listen to its argument. A young girl with a lively imagination locked up in a tower is weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only are allowed to row. She invents a way to loosen her bars. She jumps from the casement. She scales the park wall. She frolics along the neighbor's sward. It is the everlasting comedy. Well, that young girl is my soul. The neighbor's park is your genius. Is it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to my poet to answer. But does the lofty reasoner after the fashion of Moyet want still better reasons? Well, here they are. My dear Gerontë, marriages are usually made in defiance of common sense. Parents make inquiries about a young man. If the Leander, who is supplied by some friend, are caught in a ballroom, is not a thief and has no visible rent in his reputation, if he has the necessary fortune, if he comes from a college or a law school and so fulfills the popular ideas of education, and if he wears his clothes with a gentlemanly air, he is allowed to meet the young lady, whose mother has ordered her to guard her tongue, to let no sign of her heart or soul appear on her face, which must wear the smile of a d'Ancius finishing a pirouette. These commands are coupled with instructions as to the danger of revealing her real character, and the additional advice of not seeming alarmingly well educated. If the settlements have all been agreed upon, the parents are good natured enough to let the pair see each other for a few moments. They are allowed to talk or walk together, but always without the slightest freedom, and knowing that they are bound by rigid rules. The man is as much dressed up in soul as he is in body, and so is the young girl. This pitiable comedy, mixed with bouquets, jewels, and theater parties, is called Paying Your Addresses. It revolts me. I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a previous and long marriage of souls. A young girl, a woman, has throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second sight, and experience are necessary to her. She plays her liberty, her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice. She risks her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator. I have the right, the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as did my mother, who, one by beauty and led by instinct, married the most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men. I know that you are free, a poet, and noble looking. Be sure that I should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo, who was already married. If my mother was one by beauty, which is perhaps the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit in the form united? Shall I not know you better by studying you in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience of receiving your addresses? This is the question, as Hamlet says. But my proceedings, dear Crisale, have at least the merit of not binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and every illusion it's tomorrow. That is why there are so many partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of love lies in two things—suffering and happiness—when, after passing through these double trials of life, two beings have shown each other their defects, as well as their good qualities, when they have really observed each other's character. Then they may go to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that our little drama thus began was to have no future? In any sense, shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence? I await your orders, Monsignor. I am with all my heart your handmaiden, O, de est a m. To Mamzelle, O, de est a m. You are a witch, a spirit, and I love you. Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls? Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with the follies which you are able to make a poet commit. If so, you have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself. My life, my future, depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will touch you. If you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can personally please you. If your reply is favourable, I change my life. I bid adieu to all the irks and pleasures which we have the folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear, and beautiful unknown, is what you dream it to be. A fusion of feelings, a perfect accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal, such as God does permit us to form in this low world. Upon the trivial round of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constant frequency of heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good, the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which at the entrance of life when thought assays its wings? Each noble intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar. For to the great majority of men the foot of reality steps instantly on the mysterious egg so seldom hatched. I cannot speak to you any more of myself, not of my past life, nor of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side, filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed, an effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word sacrifice. You have already rendered me forgetful, if not ungrateful. Does that satisfy you? O speak, say to me one word, and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de Piscere loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully. Our life will be, for me at least, that felicity and trouble which Dante made the very element of his paradiso, a poem far superior to his inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of a dreamed existence. It is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the power to love and to love endlessly, to march to the grave with slow gentleness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls. Yes, I dare to face our mutual old age, to see ourselves with whitening heads like the venerable historian of Italy, inspired always with the same affection, but transformed in soul by our life's seasons. Hear me, I can no longer be your friend only. Lo Crisale, Garante, and Argante, relive, you say in me, I am not yet old enough to drink from the cup held to my lips by the sweet hands of a veiled woman without a passionate desire to tear off the domino and mask and see the face. Do write me no more, or give me hope. Let me see you, or let me go. Must I bid you adieu? Will you permit me to sign myself, your friend? Timon Sherde Canales, what flattery! With what rapidity is the grave and Selma transformed into a hansomely ander? To what must I attribute such change, to this black which I put upon this white, these ideas which are the flowers of my soul, what a rose drawn and charcoal is to the roses of the garden? Or is it to a recollection of the young girl whom you took me for, and who is personally as light me as a waiting woman is like her mistress? Have we changed roles? Have I the sense? Have you the fancy, but a truce with jesting? Your letter has made me know the elating pleasures of the soul, the first that I have known outside of my family affections. What, says a poet, are the ties of blood which are so strong in ordinary minds compared to those divinely forged within us by mysterious sympathies. Let me thank you. No, we must not thank each other for such things. But God bless you for the happiness you have given me. Be happy in the joy you have shed into my soul. You explained to me some of the apparent injustices in social life. There is something I know not what so dazzling, so virulent glory that it belongs only to man. God forbids us women to wear its halo, but he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes the brows scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and you have now confirmed it. Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of inexpressible sweetness. A sort of peace, tender and divine, gives me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction. I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to my southern sunsets full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fates, and ardent palms. Well, after reading your letters so full of feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature and fancy that I am destined to die for when I love. One of your palms, the maiden's song, paints these delicious moments when gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need. It is one of my favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one? Well then, I think you worthy to be me. Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity, your projects, but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy your wishes. Hear me, dear, the mystery in which I am shrouded allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my heart. Hear me, if we once meet, adieu to our mutual comprehension. Will you make a compact with me? Was the first disadvantageous to you? But remember it, one you my esteem, and it is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lying throughout with esteem. Here is the compact. Take me your life in a few words, then tell me what you do in Paris day by day with no reservations and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well, having done that I will take a step myself. I will see you. I promise you that, and it is a great deal. This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure, no gallantry, as you men say, and come of it. I warn you frankly. It involves my life and more than that. Something that causes me remorse for the many thoughts that fly to you in flocks. It involves my fathers and my mother's life. I adore them, and my choice must please them. They must find a son in you. Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding their amiability, how far can they bend under a family yoke and put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated upon. Ah, though I said to my heart before I came to you, forward, onward, it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way, and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor the alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my long, long meditations. Do I not know that imminent men like you have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which they themselves have felt, that they have had many romances in their lives? Do particularly, who send forth those eerie visions of your soul that women rushed by, yet still I cried to myself onward, because I have studied more than you give me credit for the geography of the great summits of humanity which you tell me are so cold? Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossae of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall. But in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither Lord Byron nor Goethe nor Walter Scott nor Cuvier nor any inventor belongs to himself. He is the slave of his idea, and this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman. It sucks their blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The visible developments of their hidden existence do seem in their results like egotism. But who shall dare to say that the man who has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to his epoch is an ecoist? Is a mother selfish when she emulates all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what sorrows may he not fall when, like Mollier, he wishes to live the life of feeling in its most poignant crises? To me, remembering his personal life, Mollier's comedy is horrible. The generosity of genius seems to me half divine, and I place you in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah, if I had found self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now see my best-loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was sixteen. What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that fame is a lie? That he whose books expressed the feelings hidden in my heart was incapable of feeling them himself. Oh, my friend, do you know what would have become of me? I shall take you into the recesses of my soul. I should have gone to my father and said, Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire. My will abdicates. Marry me to whom you please. And the man might have been a notary, banker, miser, fool, dullard, worrisome as a rainy day, common as the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without two ideas. He would have had a resigned and attentive servant in me. But what an awful suicide! Ever could my soul have expanded in the life-giving rays of a beloved son? An old murmur should have revealed to my father or my mother or my children the suicide of the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting lightnings from her eyes and flying toward you with eager wing. See, she is there at the angle of your desk, like polyhemia, breathing the air of your presence and glancing about her with a curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have taken me to walk I should have wept apart and secretly. At sight of a glorious morning, and in my heart, or hidden in a bureau- drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor girls ill-used by love, sad poetic girls, but, ah, I have you. I believe in you, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes see how far my frankness leads me. I wish I were in the middle of the book we are just beginning. Such persistency do I feel in my sentiments. Such strength in my heart to love. Such constancy sustained by reason. Such heroism for the duties for which I was created. If indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty. If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the dreadful word folly might escape you, and I should be cruelly punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most people are for the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence into tenderness and to give pecancy to fidelity. I am filled with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation to take a lifelong care of the nest such as birds can only take for a few weeks. Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The mysterious wind of will drove me to you as the tempest brings the little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I hold here upon my heart, you cried out like your ancestor when he departed the crusades. God wills it. Ah, but you will cry out. What a chatterbox! All the people around me say, on the contrary, Hamzell is very taciturn, O-de-este-em. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 11 of Modest Mignon by Henri de Balzac translated by Catherine Prescott Wormley, read by Don W. Jenkins. Chapter 11 What Comes of Correspondence The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom the author of the comedy of human life obtained them. But their interest in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may not be shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might wear weary of the battle. The respect due to the majority in every nation under a constitutional government leads us therefore to suppress eleven other letters exchanged between Ernest and Modest during the month of September. If later on some flattering majority should arise to claim them, let us hope that we can find the means to insert them in their proper place. Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable, the truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves free play in these suppressed letters, which seem perhaps more beautiful than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by a sense of the communion of two free souls. Ernest's whole life was now wrapped up in these sweet scraps of paper. They were to him what banknotes are to a miser. While in Modest's soul, a deep love took the place of her delight in agitating a glorious life and being, in spite of distance, its mainspring. Ernest's heart was the complement of Cannelly's glory, alas, it often takes two men to make a perfect lover. Just as in literature we compose a type by collecting the peculiarities of several similar characters. How many a time a woman has been heard to say in her own salon after close and intimate conversations. Such a one is my ideal as the soul, and I love the other who is only a dream of the senses. The last letter written by Modest, which here follows, gives us a glimpse of the enchanted isle to which the meanderings of this correspondence had led the two lovers. To Monser de Cannelly's Be at Haver next Sunday. Go to church. After the morning service, walk once or twice around the nave and go out without speaking to anyone. But wear a white rose in your buttonhole. Then return to Paris where you shall receive an answer. I warn you that this answer will not be what you wish, for, as I told you, the future is not yet mine. But should I not indeed be mad and foolish to say yes without having seen you? When I have seen you I can say no without wounding you. I can make sure that you shall not see me. This letter had been sent off the evening before the day when the abortive struggle between Dumay and Modest had taken place. The happy girl was impatiently awaiting Sunday when her eyes were to vindicate or condemn her heart and her actions, a solemn moment in the life of any woman, and which three months of close communion of souls now rendered as romantic as the most imaginative maiden could have wished. Everyone except the mother had taken this torpor of expectation for the calm of innocence. No matter how firmly family laws and religious precepts may bind, there will always be the Clarisses and the Julies whose souls like flowing cups or lap the brim under some spiritual pressure. Modest was glorious in the savage energy with which she repressed her exuberant youthful happiness and remained merely quiet. Let us say frankly that the memory of her sister was more potent upon her than any social conventions. Her will was iron in the resolve to bring no grief upon her father and mother. But what tumultuous heavings were within her breast. No wonder that a mother guessed them. On the following day Modest and Madame Dumay took Madame Mignon about midday to a seat in the sun among the flowers. The blind woman turned her wan and blighted face toward the ocean. She inhaled the odors of the sea and took the hand of her daughter, who remained beside her. The mother hesitated between forgiveness and remonstrance, there she put the important question, for she comprehended the girl's love and recognized, as the pretended cannellies had done, that Modest was exceptional in nature. God grant that your father return in time. If he delays much longer he will find none but you to love him. Modest promised me once more never to leave him, she said in a fond maternal tone. Modest lifted her mother's hands through her lips and kissed them gently, replying, Did I say it again? Ah, my child, I did this thing myself. I left my father to follow my husband, and yet my father was all alone. I was all the child he had. Is that why God has so punished me? What I ask of you is to marry as your father wishes to cherish him in your heart, not to sacrifice him to your own happiness, but to make him the center of your home. Before losing my sight, I wrote him all my wishes, and I know he will execute them. God then joined him to keep his property intact and in his own hands. Not that I distrust you, my Modest, for a moment, but who can be sure of a son-in-law? Ah, my daughter, look at me. Was I reasonable? One glance of the eye decided my life. Beauty so often deceitful, in my case, spoke true, but even were it the same with you, my poor child, swear to me that you will let your father inquire into the character, the habits, the heart, and the previous life of the man you distinguish with your love, if by chance there is such a man. I will never marry without the consent of my father, answered Modest. You see, my darling, said Madame Mignon, after a long pause, that if I am dying by inches through butine is wrongdoing, your father would not survive yours, no, not for a moment. I know him. He would put a pistol to his head. There could be no life, no happiness on earth for him. Modest walked a few steps away from her mother, but immediately came back. Why did you leave me? demanded Madame Mignon. You made me cry, Mama, answered Modest. Ah, my little darling, kiss me. You love no one here. You have no lover have you? She asked, holding Modest on her lap, heart to heart. No, my dear Mama, said the little Jesuit. Can you swear it? Oh, yes, cried Modest. Madame Mignon said no more, but she still doubted. At least if you do choose your husband, will you tell your father, she resumed? I promised that to my sister and to you, Mother. What evil do you think I could commit while I wear that ring upon my finger and read those words? Think of Bettina, poor sister. At these words a truce of silence came between the pair. The mother's blighted eyes, rain tears which Modest could not check. Though she threw herself upon her knees and cried, forgive me, oh forgive me, Mother. At this instant the excellent Dumai was coming up the hill of Ingeville on the double quick, a fact quite abnormal in the present life of the cashier. Three letters had brought ruin to the Mignons. A single letter now restored their fortunes. Dumai had received from a sea-captain, just arrived from the China seas the following letter containing the first news of his patron and friend, Charles Mignon. Timon's sure Jean Dumai, my dear Dumai, I shall quickly follow barring the chances of the voyage, the vessel which carries this letter. In fact I should have taken it, but I did not wish to leave my own ship to which I am accustomed. I told you that no news was to be good news, but the first words of this letter ought to make you a happy man. I have made seven millions, at the least. I am bringing back a large part of it in Indigo, one-third in safe London securities and another third in good solid gold. Your remittances helped me to make the sum I had settled in my own mind much sooner than I expected. I wanted two millions for my daughters and a competence for myself. I have been engaged in the opium trade with the largest houses in Canton, all ten times richer than I ever was. You have no idea in Europe what these rich East India merchants are. I went to Asia Minor and purchased opium at low prices, and from thence to Canton, where I delivered my cargoes to the companies who control the trade. My last expedition was to the Philippine Islands, where I exchanged opium for Indigo of the first quality. In fact, I may have half a million more than I stated, for I reckoned the Indigo at what it cost me. I have always been well in health, not the slightest illness. That is the result of working for one's children. Since the second year I have owned a pretty little brig of seven hundred tons called the Mignon. She is built of oak, double-planked and copper-fastened, and all the interior fittings were done to suit me. She is, in fact, an additional piece of property. A sea-life and the active habits required by my business have kept me in good health. To tell you all this is the same as telling it to my two daughters and my dear wife. I trust that the wretched man who took away my Bettina deserted her when he heard of my ruin, and that I shall find the poor lost lamb at the chalet. My three dear women and my Dumai, all four of you have been ever present in my thoughts for the last three years. You are a rich man now, Dumai. Your share outside of my own fortune amounts to five hundred and sixty thousand francs, for which I send you here with a cheque, which can only be paid to you in person by the monjonauds who have been duly advised from New York. A few short months, and I shall see you all again. And all well, I trust. My dear Dumai, if I write this letter to you, it is because I am anxious to keep my fortune a secret for the present. I therefore leave to you the happiness of preparing my dear angels for my return. I have had enough of commerce, and I am resolved to leave Havre. My intention is to buy back the estate of Labastee to entail it, so as to establish an estate yielding at least a hundred thousand francs a year, then to ask the king to grant that one of my sons-in-law may succeed to my name and title. You know, my poor Dumai, what a terrible misfortune overtook us through the fatal reputation of a large fortune. My daughter's honor was lost. I have therefore resolved that the amount of my present fortune shall not be known. I shall not disembark at Havre but at Marseille. I shall sell my indigo and negotiate for the purchase of Labastee through the house of Monjonaud in Paris. I shall put my funds in the Bank of France and return to the chalet giving out that I have a considerable fortune in merchandise. My daughters will be supposed to have two or three hundred thousand francs. To choose which of my sons-in-law is worthy to succeed to my title and estate and to live with us is now the object of my life. But both of them must be, like you and me, honest, loyal, and firm men, and absolutely honorable. My dear old fellow, I have never doubted you for a moment. We have gone through wars and commerce together, and now we will undertake agriculture. You shall be my bailiff. You will like that, will you not? And so, old friend, I leave it to your discretion to tell what you think best to my wife and daughters. I rely upon your prudence. In four years great changes may have taken place in their characters. Adieu, my old Dumai. Say to my daughters and to my wife that I have never failed to kiss them in my thoughts morning and evening since I left them. The second check for forty thousand francs herewith enclosed is for my wife and children. Till we meet, your colonel and friend, Charles Mignon. Your father is coming, said Madame Mignon to her daughter. What makes you think so, Mama, asked Modeste? Nothing else could make Dumai hurry himself. Victory! Victory! cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the garden gate. Madame! The colonel has not been ill a moment. He is coming back, coming back on the Mignon, a fine ship of his own, which together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine hundred thousand francs, but he requires secrecy from all of us. His heart is still rung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl. He has still to learn her death, said Madame Mignon. He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right to the rapacity of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves, but say nothing to anyone, not even to La Tournée, if that is possible. Mamzelle, he whispered in Modeste's ear, write to your father and tell him of his loss and also the terrible results on your mother's health and eyesight. Prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to get the letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will have to pass through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter. You have plenty of time. I will take the letter on Monday. I shall probably go to Paris. Modeste was so afraid that Canelise and Dumas would meet that she started hastily for the house to write her poet and put off the rendezvous. Mamzelle, said Dumas, in a very humble manner in barring Modeste's way, may your father find his daughter with no other feelings in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother before he was obliged to leave her. I have sworn to myself, to my sister and to my mother, to be the joy, the consolation and the glory of my father, and I shall keep my oath, replied Modeste, with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumas. Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father's return with insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl's heart from beating. You don't want me to be a mummy, do you? She said. My hand belongs to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my father and my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, Montsueur? Thank you, Mamzelle. You restore me to life, said Dumas, but you might still call me Dumas, even when you box my ears. Swear to me, said the mother, that you have not engaged a word or a look with any young man. I can swear that, my dear mother, said Modeste, laughing, and looking at Dumas, who is watching her and smiling to himself like a mischievous girl. She must be false indeed, if you are right, cried Dumas, when Modeste had left them and gone into the house. My daughter Modeste may have false said her mother, but falsehood is not one of them. She is incapable of saying what is not true. Well, then let us feel easy, continued Dumas, and believe that Miss Fortune has closed his account with us. God granted, answered Madame Mignon, you will see him, Dumas, but I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy. End of Section 11, Read by Don W. Jenkins, Rancho San Diego, California, shaggybark.blogspot.com