"Why not?" said Charles Mignon, quickly, observing that Ernest reddened.
Modeste coldly took up her embroidery.
"Madame may be right; I have been twice in Havre lately," replied La Briere, sitting down by Dumay.
Canalis, charmed with Modeste's beauty, mistook the admiration she expressed, and flattered himself he had succeeded in producing his desired effects.
"I should think a man without heart, if he had no devoted friend near him," said Modeste, to pick up the conversation interrupted by Madame Latournelle's awkwardness.
"Mademoiselle, Ernest's devotion makes me almost think myself worth something," said Canalis; "for my dear Pylades is full of talent; he was the right hand of the greatest minister we have had since the peace. Though he holds a fine position, he is good enough to be my tutor in the science of politics; he teaches me to conduct affairs and feeds me with his experience, when all the while he might aspire to a much better situation. Oh! he is worth far more than I." At a gesture from Modeste he continued gracefully: "Yes, the poetry that I express he carries in his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is because he has the modesty of a nun."
"Enough, oh, enough!" cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to look. "My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to marry off her daughter."
"How is it, monsieur," said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, "that you can even think of becoming a political character?"
"It is abdication," said Modeste, "for a poet; politics are the resource of matter-of-fact men."
"Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the rallying-point of courage."
Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day the orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A
poet may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever cease to be himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he would one day be greater on the political side than on the literary.
"The forum of France was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles supplanted fields of battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer than any Austerlitz, and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals;
they spent their lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as those who went to war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal outlets of the vital fluid that man had ever known," etc.
This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at the theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,--very much like that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all these high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as it were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had created as he read her letters and answered them.
This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an invitation to dinner on the following Monday.