Modeste Mignon Part 4

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends can take the place of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in the equinoctial storms,--all this monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it were to watch for the pa.s.sing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under the fire of Dumay's pistols.

During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister, learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction, from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot, from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in its cold guilelessness, its native chast.i.ty, but from which there sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event; a masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the beautiful illusions of its youth. But of this radiant existence not a gleam reached the surface of daily life; it escaped the ken of Dumay and his wife and the Latournelles; the ears of the blind mother alone caught the crackling of its flame.

The profound disdain which Modeste now conceived for ordinary men gave to her face a look of pride, an inexpressible untamed shyness, which tempered her Teutonic simplicity, and accorded well with a peculiarity of her head. The hair growing in a point above the forehead seemed the continuation of a slight line which thought had already furrowed between the eyebrows, and made the expression of untameability perhaps a shade too strong. The voice of this charming child, whom her father, delighting in her wit, was wont to call his "little proverb of Solomon,"

had acquired a precious flexibility of organ through the practice of three languages. This advantage was still further enhanced by a natural bell-like tone both sweet and fresh, which touched the heart as delightfully as it did the ear. If the mother could no longer see the signs of a n.o.ble destiny upon her daughter's brow, she could study the transitions of her soul's development in the accents of that voice attuned to love.

CHAPTER VI. A MAIDEN'S FIRST ROMANCE

To this period of Modeste's eager rage for reading succeeded the exercise of a strange faculty given to vigorous imaginations,--the power, namely, of making herself an actor in a dream-existence; of representing to her own mind the things desired, with so vivid a conception that they seemed actually to attain reality; in short, to enjoy by thought,--to live out her years within her mind; to marry; to grow old; to attend her own funeral like Charles V.; to play within herself the comedy of life and, if need be, that of death. Modeste was indeed playing, but all alone, the comedy of Love. She fancied herself adored to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of social life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or, like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress, exhausting in her own behalf the luck of Gil Blas, or the triumphs of Pasta, Malibran, and Florine. Then, weary of the horrors and excitements, she returned to actual life. She married a notary, she ate the plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); she owned a magnificent estate and castle, servants, horses, carriages, the choicest of everything that luxury could bestow, and kept her suitors uncertain until she was forty years old, at which age she made her choice.

This edition of the Arabian Nights in a single copy lasted nearly a year, and taught Modeste the sense of satiety through thought. She held her life too often in her hand, she said to herself philosophically and with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too often, "Well, what is it, after all?" not to have plunged to her waist in the deep disgust which all men of genius feel when they try to complete by intense toil the work to which they have devoted themselves. Her youth and her rich nature alone kept Modeste at this period of her life from seeking to enter a cloister. But this sense of satiety cast her, saturated as she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love of Good, the infinite of heaven. She conceived of charity, service to others, as the true occupation of life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of finding in it no food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an insect at the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card or drew out his last trump.

Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a singular track of thought. She imagined that if she became sinless (speaking ecclesiastically) she would attain to such a condition of sanct.i.ty that G.o.d would hear her and accomplish her desires. "Faith," she thought, "can move mountains; Christ has said so. The Saviour led his apostle upon the waters of the lake Tiberias; and I, all I ask of G.o.d is a husband to love me; that is easier than walking upon the sea." She fasted through the next Lent, and did not commit a single sin; then she said to herself that on a certain day coming out of church she should meet a handsome young man who was worthy of her, whom her mother would accept, and who would fall madly in love with her. When the day came on which she had, as it were, summoned G.o.d to send her an angel, she was persistently followed by a rather disgusting beggar; moreover, it rained heavily, and not a single young man was in the streets. On another occasion she went to walk on the jetty to see the English travellers land; but each Englishman had an Englishwoman, nearly as handsome as Modeste herself, who saw no one at all resembling a wandering Childe Harold. Tears overcame her, as she sat down like Marius on the ruins of her imagination. But on the day when she subpoenaed G.o.d for the third time she firmly believed that the Elect of her dreams was within the church, hiding, perhaps out of delicacy, behind one of the pillars, round all of which she dragged Madame Latournelle on a tour of inspection. After this failure, she deposed the Deity from omnipotence.

Many were her conversations with the imaginary lover, for whom she invented questions and answers, bestowing upon him a great deal of wit and intelligence.

The high ambitions of her heart hidden within these romances were the real explanation of the prudent conduct which the good people who watched over Modeste so much admired; they might have brought her any number of young Althors or Vilquins, and she would never have stooped to such clowns. She wanted, purely and simply, a man of genius,--talent she cared little for; just as a lawyer is of no account to a girl who aims for an amba.s.sador. Her only desire for wealth was to cast it at the feet of her idol. Indeed, the golden background of these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart, filled with womanly delicacy; for its dominant desire was to make some Ta.s.so, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher Columbus happy.

Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing melodies which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau. Or she fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively his contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.

Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the seventeenth century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked herself, "loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?" She had, as the reader perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly admired the behavior of the young Englishwoman who offered herself to Crebillon, the son, who married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza Draper was her life and her happiness for several months. She made herself ideally the heroine of a like romance, and many a time she rehea.r.s.ed in imagination the sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of the wittiest of English writers.

Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials, initiated herself into a dest.i.tution where the thoughts of genius brooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to their own faculty. This n.o.ble compa.s.sion, this intuition of the struggles of toilers, this wors.h.i.+p of genius, are among the choicest perceptions that flutter through the souls of women. They are, in the first place, a secret between the woman and G.o.d, for they are hidden; in them there is nothing striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity,--that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.

Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came to Modeste a pa.s.sionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what it was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy, these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find its goal, the n.o.bility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father's hearth and bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and sentiment had lately come to a climax and taken shape. Modeste wished to be the friend and companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way superior to the crowd of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to give him her heart, her life, her infinite tenderness freed from the trammels of pa.s.sion, until she had carefully and deeply studied him.

She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it. Profound tranquillity settled down upon her soul. Her cheeks took on a soft color; and she became the beautiful and n.o.ble image of Germany, such as we have lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double existence. She performed with humble, loving care all the minute duties of the homely life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide the poetry of her ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor methodically on material things to leave their souls the freer to develop in prayer. All great minds have bound themselves to some form of mechanical toil to obtain greater mastery of thought. Spinosa ground gla.s.ses for spectacles; Bayle counted the tiles on the roof; Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus subdued, the soul could spread its wings in all security.

Madame Mignon, reading her daughter's soul, was therefore right. Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little understood, the first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of all sentiments, a very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired the blue plumage of the bird that sings afar in the paradise of young girls, which no hand can touch, no gun can cover, as it flits across the sight; she loved those magic colors, like sparkling jewels dazzling to the eye, which youth can see, and never sees again when Reality, the hideous hag, appears with witnesses accompanied by the mayor. To live the very poetry of love and not to see the lover--ah, what sweet intoxication! what visionary rapture! a chimera with flowing man and outspread wings!

The following is the puerile and even silly event which decided the future life of this young girl.

Modeste happened to see in a bookseller's window a lithographic portrait of one of her favorites, Ca.n.a.lis. We all know what lies such pictures tell,--being as they are the result of a shameless speculation, which seizes upon the personality of celebrated individuals as if their faces were public property.

In this instance Ca.n.a.lis, sketched in a Byronic pose, was offering to public admiration his dark locks floating in the breeze, a bare throat, and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess. Victor Hugo's forehead will make more persons shave their heads than the number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory of Napoleon.

This portrait of Ca.n.a.lis (poetic through mercantile necessity) caught Modeste's eye. The day on which it caught her eye one of Arthez's best books happened to be published. We are compelled to admit, though it may be to Modeste's injury, that she hesitated long between the ill.u.s.trious poet and the ill.u.s.trious prose-writer. Which of these celebrated men was free?--that was the question.

Modeste began by securing the co-operation of Francoise Cochet, a maid taken from Havre and brought back again by poor Bettina, whom Madame Mignon and Madame Dumay now employed by the day, and who lived in Havre.

Modeste took her to her own room and a.s.sured her that she would never cause her parents any grief, never pa.s.s the bounds of a young girl's propriety, and that as to Francoise herself she would be well provided for after the return of Monsieur Mignon, on condition that she would do a certain service and keep it an inviolable secret. What was it? Why, a nothing--perfectly innocent. All that Modeste wanted of her accomplice was to put certain letters into the post at Havre and to bring some back which would be directed to herself, Francoise Cochet. The treaty concluded, Modeste wrote a polite note to Dauriat, publisher of the poems of Ca.n.a.lis, asking, in the interest of that great poet, for some particulars about him, among others if he were married. She requested the publisher to address his answer to Mademoiselle Francoise, "poste restante," Havre.

Dauriat, incapable of taking the epistle seriously, wrote a reply in presence of four or five journalists who happened to be in his office at the time, each of whom added his particular stroke of wit to the production.

Mademoiselle,--Ca.n.a.lis (Baron of), Constant Cys Melchior, member of the French Academy, born in 1800, at Ca.n.a.lis (Correze), five feet four inches in height, of good standing, vaccinated, spotless birth, has given a subst.i.tute to the conscription, enjoys perfect health, owns a small patrimonial estate in the Correze, and wishes to marry, but the lady must be rich.

He beareth per pale, gules an axe or, sable three escallops argent, surmounted by a baron's coronet; supporters, two larches, vert. Motto: "Or et fer" (no allusion to Ophir or auriferous).

The original Ca.n.a.lis, who went to the Holy Land with the First Crusade, is cited in the chronicles of Auvergne as being armed with an axe on account of the family indigence, which to this day weighs heavily on the race. This n.o.ble baron, famous for discomfiting a vast number of infidels, died, without "or" or "fer," as naked as a worm, near Jerusalem, on the plains of Ascalon, ambulances not being then invented.

The chateau of Ca.n.a.lis (the domain yields a few chestnuts) consists of two dismantled towers, united by a piece of wall covered by a fine ivy, and is taxed at twenty-two francs.

The undersigned (publisher) calls attention to the fact that he pays ten thousand francs for every volume of poetry written by Monsieur de Ca.n.a.lis, who does not give his sh.e.l.ls, or his nuts either, for nothing.

The chanticler of the Correze lives in the rue de Paradis-Poissoniere, number 29, which is a highly suitable location for a poet of the angelic school. Letters must be _post-paid_.

n.o.ble dames of the faubourg Saint-Germain are said to take the path to Paradise and protect its G.o.d. The king, Charles X., thinks so highly of this great poet as to believe him capable of governing the country; he has lately made him officer of the Legion of honor, and (what pays him better) president of the court of Claims at the foreign office. These functions do not hinder this great genius from drawing an annuity out of the fund for the encouragement of the arts and belles letters.

The last edition of the works of Ca.n.a.lis, printed on vellum, royal 8vo, from the press of Didot, with ill.u.s.trations by Bixiou, Joseph Bridau, Schinner, Sommervieux, etc., is in five volumes, price, nine francs post-paid.

This letter fell like a cobble-stone on a tulip. A poet, secretary of claims, getting a stipend in a public office, drawing an annuity, seeking a decoration, adored by the women of the faubourg Saint-Germain--was that the muddy minstrel lingering along the quays, sad, dreamy, worn with toil, and re-entering his garret fraught with poetry? However, Modeste perceived the irony of the envious bookseller, who dared to say, "I invented Ca.n.a.lis; I made Nathan!" Besides, she re-read her hero's poems,--verses extremely seductive, insincere, and hypocritical, which require a word of a.n.a.lysis, were it only to explain her infatuation.

Ca.n.a.lis may be distinguished from Lamartine, chief of the angelic school, by a wheedling tone like that of a sick-nurse, a treacherous sweetness, and a delightful correctness of diction. If the chief with his strident cry is an eagle, Ca.n.a.lis, rose and white, is a flamingo.

In him women find the friend they seek, their interpreter, a being who understands them, who explains them to themselves, and a safe confidant.

The wide margins given by Didot to the last edition were crowded with Modeste's pencilled sentiments, expressing her sympathy with this tender and dreamy spirit. Ca.n.a.lis does not possess the gift of life; he cannot breathe existence into his creations; but he knows how to calm vague sufferings like those which a.s.sailed Modeste. He speaks to young girls in their own language; he can allay the anguish of a bleeding wound and lull the moans, even the sobs of woe. His gift lies not in stirring words, nor in the remedy of strong emotions, he contents himself with saying in harmonious tones which compel belief, "I suffer with you; I understand you; come with me; let us weep together beside the brook, beneath the willows." And they follow him! They listen to his empty and sonorous poetry like infants to a nurse's lullaby. Ca.n.a.lis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness which is genuine in the prose writer and artificial in the poet, by his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his infantile philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early youth that he leads us back to the prairie-land of our illusions. We can be pitiless to the eagles, requiring from them the quality of the diamond, incorruptible perfection; but as for Ca.n.a.lis, we take him for what he is and let the rest go. He seems a good fellow; the affectations of the angelic school have answered his purpose and succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when she plays the ingenue cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth, innocence betrayed, in short, the wounded angel.

Modeste, recovering her first impression, renewed her confidence in that soul, in that countenance as ravis.h.i.+ng as the face of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. She paid no further attention to the publisher. And so, about the beginning of the month of August she wrote the following letter to this Dorat of the sacristy, who still ranks as a star of the modern Pleiades.

To Monsieur de Ca.n.a.lis,--Many a time, monsieur, I have wished to write to you; and why? Surely you guess why,--to tell you how much I admire your genius. Yes, I feel the need of expressing to you the admiration of a poor country girl, lonely in her little corner, whose only happiness is to read your thoughts. I have read Rene, and I come to you. Sadness leads to reverie. How many other women are sending you the homage of their secret thoughts? What chance have I for notice among so many? This paper, filled with my soul,--can it be more to you than the perfumed letters which already beset you. I come to you with less grace than others, for I wish to remain unknown and yet to receive your entire confidence --as though you had long known me.

Answer my letter and be friendly with me. I cannot promise to make myself known to you, though I do not positively say I will not some day do so.

What shall I add? Read between the lines of this letter, monsieur, the great effort which I am making: permit me to offer you my hand,--that of a friend, ah! a true friend.

Your servant, O. d'Este M.

P.S.--If you do me the favor to answer this letter address your reply, if you please, to Mademoiselle F. Cochet, "poste restante,"

Havre.

CHAPTER VII. A POET OF THE ANGELIC SCHOOL

All young girls, romantic or otherwise, can imagine the impatience in which Modeste lived for the next few days. The air was full of tongues of fire. The trees were like a plumage. She was not conscious of a body; she hovered in s.p.a.ce, the earth 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 poet's 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. Ca.n.a.lis is a short, spare man, with an air of good-breeding, a dark-complexioned, moon-shaped face, and a rather mean head like that of a man who has more vanity than pride. He loves luxury, rank, and splendor. Money is of more importance to him than to most men. Proud 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 Ca.n.a.lis are not Navarreins, nor Cadignans, nor Grandlieus. 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 att.i.tude 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. Ca.n.a.lis has not devotion enough for a Don Quixote, but he has too much elevation of thought not to put himself on the n.o.bler 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 overweighted by his reputation, and is always aiming to make himself appear 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 idylls pure and cold as the surface of a lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious little creature in a tightly b.u.t.toned 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 of laurel. A government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the Academy, three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes and the cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with another, by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for Modeste's hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he usually spent five or six thousand 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 Ca.n.a.lis owed his duty to his sovereign.

But about this time Ca.n.a.lis 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 Marsay, who did not like Ca.n.a.lis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to the quick of his vanity. "Ca.n.a.lis," he said, "always reminds me of that brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a battle because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little tune."

Ca.n.a.lis's ambition was to enter political life, and he made capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the emba.s.sy of the Duc de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according to Parisian gossip, in the capacity of "attache to the d.u.c.h.ess." How many times a sarcasm or a single speech has decided the whole course of a man's life. Colla, the late president of the Cisalpine 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 piqued, became a second Jussieu, cultivated flowers, and compiled and published "The Flora of Piedmont,"

in Latin, a labor of ten years. "I'll master De Marsay some of these days!" thought the crushed poet; "after all, Canning and Chateaubriand are both in politics."

Ca.n.a.lis 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 alexandrines to express one idea. Of all the poets of our day only three, Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and De Vigny, have been able to win the double glory of poet and prose-writer, like Racine and Voltaire, Moliere, and Rabelais,--a rare distinction in the literature of France, which ought to give a man a right to the crowning t.i.tle of poet.

So then, the bard of the faubourg Saint-Germain 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,--in short, a cat's paw and satellite. In Paris many men of celebrity in art, science, and literature have one or more train-bearers, captains of the guard, chamberlains as it were, who live in the suns.h.i.+ne of their presence,--aides-de-camp entrusted with delicate missions, allowing themselves to be compromised if necessary; workers round the pedestal of the idol; not exactly his servants, nor yet his equals; bold in his defence, 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 perceive the ingrat.i.tude of their great man; others feel that they are simply made tools of; many weary of the life; very few remain contented 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 Mohammed raised him to himself.