Modeste Mignon Part 21

"But Butscha, where is he?"

"Let us take Butscha," said the duke, smiling.

When the people on the quays, attracted in groups by the splendor of the royal equipage, saw the funny spectacle, the three little men with the spare gigantic woman, they looked at one another and laughed.

"If you melt all three together, they might make one man fit to mate with that big cod-fish," said a sailor from Bordeaux.

"Is there any other thing you would like to take with you, madame?"

asked the duke, jestingly, while the footman awaited his orders.

"No, monseigneur," she replied, turning scarlet and looking at her husband as much as to say, "What did I do wrong?"

"Monsieur le duc honors me by considering that I am a thing," said Butscha; "a poor clerk is usually thought to be a nonent.i.ty."

Though this was said with a laugh, the duke colored and did not answer.

Great people are to blame for joking with their social inferiors.

Jesting is a game, and games presuppose equality; it is to obviate any inconvenient results of this temporary equality that players have the right, after the game is over, not to recognize each other.

The visit of the grand equerry had the ostensible excuse of an important piece of business; namely, the retrieval of an immense tract of waste land left by the sea between the mouths of the two rivers, which tract had just been adjudged by the Council of State to the house of Herouville. The matter was nothing less than putting flood-gates with double bridges, draining three or four hundred acres, cutting ca.n.a.ls, and laying out roadways. When the duke had explained the condition of the land, Charles Mignon remarked that time must be allowed for the soil, which was still moving, to settle and grow solid in a natural way.

"Time, which has providentially enriched your house, Monsieur le duc, can alone complete the work," he said, in conclusion. "It would be prudent to let fifty years elapse before you reclaim the land."

"Do not let that be your final word, Monsieur le comte," said the duke.

"Come to Herouville and see things for yourself."

Charles Mignon replied that every capitalist should take time to examine into such matters with a cool head, thus giving the duke a pretext for his visits to the Chalet. The sight of Modeste made a lively impression on the young man, and he asked the favor of receiving her at Herouville with her father, saying that his sister and his aunt had heard much of her, and wished to make her acquaintance. On this the count proposed to present his daughter to those ladies himself, and invited the whole party to dinner on the day of his return to the villa. The duke accepted the invitation. The blue ribbon, the t.i.tle, and above all, the ecstatic glances of the n.o.ble gentleman had an effect upon Modeste; but she appeared to great advantage in carriage, dignity, and conversation. The duke withdrew reluctantly, carrying with him an invitation to visit the Chalet every evening,--an invitation based on the impossibility of a courtier of Charles X. existing for a single evening without his rubber.

The following evening, therefore, Modeste was to see all three of her lovers. No matter what young girls may say, and though the logic of the heart may lead them to sacrifice everything to preference, it is extremely flattering to their self-love to see a number of rival adorers around them,--distinguished or celebrated men, or men of ancient lineage,--all endeavoring to s.h.i.+ne and to please. Suffer as Modeste may in general estimation, it must be told she subsequently admitted that the sentiments expressed in her letters paled before the pleasure of seeing three such different minds at war with one another,--three men who, taken separately, would each have done honor to the most exacting family. Yet this luxury of self-love was checked by a misanthropical spitefulness, resulting from the terrible wound she had received,--although by this time she was beginning to think of that wound as a disappointment only. So when her father said to her, laughing, "Well, Modeste, do you want to be a d.u.c.h.ess?" she answered, with a mocking curtsey,--

"Sorrows have made me philosophical."

"Do you mean to be only a baroness?" asked Butscha.

"Or a viscountess?" said her father.

"How could that be?" she asked quickly.

"If you accept Monsieur de La Briere, he has enough merit and influence to obtain permission from the king to bear my t.i.tles and arms."

"Oh, if it comes to disguising himself, _he_ will not make any difficulty," said Modeste, scornfully.

Butscha did not understand this epigram, whose meaning could only be guessed by Monsieur and Madame Mignon and Dumay.

"When it is a question of marriage, all men disguise themselves,"

remarked Latournelle, "and women set them the example. I've heard it said ever since I came into the world that 'Monsieur this or Mademoiselle that has made a good marriage,'--meaning that the other side had made a bad one."

"Marriage," said Butscha, "is like a lawsuit; there's always one side discontented. If one dupes the other, certainly half the husbands in the world are playing a comedy at the expense of the other half."

"From which you conclude, Sieur Butscha?" inquired Modeste.

"To pay the utmost attention to the manoeuvres of the enemy," answered the clerk.

"What did I tell you, my darling?" said Charles Mignon, alluding to their conversation on the seash.o.r.e.

"Men play as many parts to get married as mothers make their daughters play to get rid of them," said Latournelle.

"Then you approve of stratagems?" said Modeste.

"On both sides," cried Gobenheim, "and that brings it even."

This conversation was carried on by fits and starts, as they say, in the intervals of cutting and dealing the cards; and it soon turned chiefly on the merits of the Duc d'Herouville, who was thought very good-looking by little Latournelle, little Dumay, and little Butscha. Without the foregoing discussion on the lawfulness of matrimonial tricks, the reader might possibly find the forthcoming account of the evening so impatiently awaited by Butscha, somewhat too long.

Desplein, the famous surgeon, arrived the next morning, and stayed only long enough to send to Havre for fresh horses and have them put-to, which took about an hour. After examining Madame Mignon's eyes, he decided that she could recover her sight, and fixed a suitable time, a month later, to perform the operation. This important consultation took place before the a.s.sembled members of the Chalet, who stood trembling and expectant to hear the verdict of the prince of science. That ill.u.s.trious member of the Academy of Sciences put about a dozen brief questions to the blind woman as he examined her eyes in the strong light from a window. Modeste was amazed at the value which a man so celebrated attached to time, when she saw the travelling-carriage piled with books which the great surgeon proposed to read during the journey; for he had left Paris the evening before, and had spent the night in sleeping and travelling. The rapidity and clearness of Desplein's judgment on each answer made by Madame Mignon, his succinct tone, his decisive manner, gave Modeste her first real idea of a man of genius. She perceived the enormous difference between a second-rate man, like Ca.n.a.lis, and Desplein, who was even more than a superior man. A man of genius finds in the consciousness of his talent and in the solidity of his fame an arena of his own, where his legitimate pride can expand and exercise itself without interfering with others. Moreover, his perpetual struggle with men and things leave them no time for the c.o.xcombry of fas.h.i.+onable genius, which makes haste to gather in the harvests of a fugitive season, and whose vanity and self-love are as petty and exacting as a custom-house which levies t.i.thes on all that comes in its way.

Modeste was the more enchanted by this great practical genius, because he was evidently charmed with the exquisite beauty of Modeste,--he, through whose hands so many women had pa.s.sed, and who had long since examined the s.e.x, as it were, with magnifier and scalpel.

"It would be a sad pity," he said, with an air of gallantry which he occasionally put on, and which contrasted with his a.s.sumed brusqueness, "if a mother were deprived of the sight of so charming a daughter."

Modeste insisted on serving the simple breakfast which was all the great surgeon would accept. She accompanied her father and Dumay to the carriage stationed at the garden-gate, and said to Desplein at parting, her eyes s.h.i.+ning with hope,--

"And will my dear mamma really see me?"

"Yes, my little sprite, I'll promise you that," he answered, smiling; "and I am incapable of deceiving you, for I, too, have a daughter."

The horses started and carried him off as he uttered the last words with unexpected grace and feeling. Nothing is more charming than the peculiar unexpectedness of persons of talent.

CHAPTER XX. THE POET DOES HIS EXERCISES

This visit of the great surgeon was the event of the day, and it left a luminous trace in Modeste's soul. The young enthusiast ardently admired the man whose life belonged to others, and in whom the habit of studying physical suffering had destroyed the manifestations of egoism. That evening, when Gobenheim, the Latournelles, and Butscha, Ca.n.a.lis, Ernest, and the Duc d'Herouville were gathered in the salon, they all congratulated the Mignon family on the hopes which Desplein encouraged.

The conversation, in which the Modeste of her letters was once more in the ascendant, turned naturally on the man whose genius, unfortunately for his fame, was appreciable only by the faculty and men of science.

Gobenheim contributed a phrase which is the sacred chrism of genius as interpreted in these days by public economists and bankers,--

"He makes a mint of money."

"They say he is very grasping," added Ca.n.a.lis.

The praises which Modeste showered on Desplein had annoyed the poet.

Vanity acts like a woman,--they both think they are defrauded when love or praise is bestowed on others. Voltaire was jealous of the wit of a roue whom Paris admired for two days; and even a d.u.c.h.ess takes offence at a look bestowed upon her maid. The avarice excited by these two sentiments is such that a fraction of them given to the poor is thought robbery.

"Do you think, monsieur," said Modeste, smiling, "that we should judge genius by ordinary standards?"

"Perhaps we ought first of all to define the man of genius," replied Ca.n.a.lis. "One of the conditions of genius is invention,--invention of a form, a system, a force. Napoleon was an inventor, apart from his other conditions of genius. He invented his method of making war. Walter Scott is an inventor, Linnaeus is an inventor, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier are inventors. Such men are men of genius of the first rank. They renew, increase, or modify both science and art. But Desplein is merely a man whose vast talent consists in properly applying laws already known; in observing, by means of a natural gift, the limits laid down for each temperament, and the time appointed by Nature for an operation.

He has not founded, like Hippocrates, the science itself. He has invented no system, as did Galen, Broussais, and Rasori. He is merely an executive genius, like Moscheles on the piano, Paganini on the violin, or Farinelli on his own larynx,--men who have developed enormous faculties, but who have not created music. You must permit me to discriminate between Beethoven and la Catalani: to one belongs the immortal crown of genius and of martyrdom, to the other innumerable five-franc pieces; one we can pay in coin, but the world remains throughout all time a debtor to the other. Each day increases our debt to Moliere, but Baron's comedies have been overpaid."

"I think you make the prerogative of ideas too exclusive," said Ernest de La Briere, in a quiet and melodious voice, which formed a sudden contrast to the peremptory tones of the poet, whose flexible organ had abandoned its caressing notes for the strident and magisterial voice of the rostrum. "Genius must be estimated according to its utility; and Parmentier, who brought potatoes into general use, Jacquart, the inventor of silk looms; Papin, who first discovered the elastic quality of steam, are men of genius, to whom statues will some day be erected.