"You know all, my kind papa?" she said as soon as they were on the road to the beach.
"I know all, and a good deal more than you do," he replied.
After that remark father and daughter went some little way in silence.
"Explain to me, my child, how it happens that a girl whom her mother idolizes could have taken such an important step as to write to a stranger without consulting her."
"Oh, papa! because mamma would never have allowed it."
"And do you think, my daughter, that that was proper? Though you have been educating your mind in this fatal way, how is it that your good sense and your intellect did not, in default of modesty, step in and show you that by acting as you did you were throwing yourself at a man's head. To think that my daughter, my only remaining child, should lack pride and delicacy! Oh, Modeste, you made your father pass two hours in hell when he heard of it; for, after all, your conduct has been the same as Bettina's without the excuse of a heart's seduction;
you were a coquette in cold blood, and that sort of coquetry is head-
love, the worst vice of French women."
"I, without pride!" said Modeste, weeping; "but HE has not yet seen me."
"HE knows your name."
"I did not tell it to him till my eyes had vindicated the correspondence, lasting three months, during which our souls had spoken to each other."
"Oh, my dear misguided angel, you have mixed up a species of reason with a folly that has compromised your own happiness and that of your family."
"But, after all, papa, happiness is the absolution of my temerity,"
she said, pouting.
"Oh! your conduct is temerity, is it?"
"A temerity that my mother practised before me," she retorted quickly.
"Rebellious child! your mother after seeing me at a ball told her father, who adored her, that she thought she could be happy with me.
Be honest, Modeste; is there any likeness between a love hastily conceived, I admit, but under the eyes of a father, and your mad action of writing to a stranger?"
"A stranger, papa? say rather one of our greatest poets, whose character and whose life are exposed to the strongest light of day, to detraction, to calumny,--a man robed in fame, and to whom, my dear father, I was a mere literary and dramatic personage, one of Shakespeare's women, until the moment when I wished to know if the man himself were as beautiful as his soul."
"Good God! my poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But if, from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of their families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke of parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the misfortunes that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and which you are therefore unable to judge of, would entail upon them.
Poetry is indeed one of the pleasures of life, but it is not life itself."
"Papa, that is a suit still pending before the Court of Facts; the struggle is forever going on between our hearts and the claims of family."
"Alas for the child that finds her happiness in resisting them," said the colonel, gravely. "In 1813 I saw one of my comrades, the Marquis d'Aiglemont, marry his cousin against the wishes of her father, and the pair have since paid dear for the obstinacy which the young girl took for love. The family must be sovereign in marriage."
"My poet has told me all that," she answered. "He played Orgon for some time; and he was brave enough to disparage the personal lives of poets."
"I have read your letters," said Charles Mignon, with the flicker of a malicious smile on his lips that made Modeste very uneasy, "and I
ought to remark that your last epistle was scarcely permissible in any woman, even a Julie d'Etanges. Good God! what harm novels do!"
"We should live them, my dear father, whether people wrote them or not; I think it is better to read them. There are not so many adventures in these days as there were under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., and so they publish fewer novels. Besides, if you have read those letters, you must know that I have chosen the most angelic soul, the most sternly upright man for your son-in-law, and you must have seen that we love one another at least as much as you and mamma love each other. Well, I admit that it was not all exactly conventional; I did, if you WILL have me say so, wrong--"
"I have read your letters," said her father, interrupting her, "and I
know exactly how far your lover justified you in your own eyes for a proceeding which might be permissible in some woman who understood life, and who was led away by strong passion, but which in a young girl of twenty was a monstrous piece of wrong-doing."
"Yes, wrong-doing for commonplace people, for the narrow-minded Gobenheims, who measure life with a square rule. Please let us keep to the artistic and poetic life, papa. We young girls have only two ways to act; we must let a man know we love him by mincing and simpering, or we must go to him frankly. Isn't the last way grand and noble? We French girls are delivered over by our families like so much merchandise, at sixty days' sight, sometimes thirty, like Mademoiselle Vilquin; but in England, and Switzerland, and Germany, they follow very much the plan I have adopted. Now what have you got to say to that? Am I not half German?"
"Child!" cried the colonel, looking at her; "the supremacy of France comes from her sound common-sense, from the logic to which her noble language constrains her mind. France is the reason of the whole world.
England and Germany are romantic in their marriage customs,--though even there noble families follow our customs. You certainly do not mean to deny that your parents, who know life, who are responsible for your soul and for your happiness, have no right to guard you from the stumbling-blocks that are in your way? Good heavens!" he continued, speaking half to himself, "is it their fault, or is it ours? Ought we to hold our children under an iron yoke? Must we be punished for the tenderness that leads us to make them happy, and teaches our hearts how to do so?"