"I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the paint of another man's glory on his cheeks."
"You said nothing could change you"; remarked the colonel, ironically.
"Ah, do not trifle with me!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands and looking at her father in distressful anxiety; "don't you see that you are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes."
"God forbid! I have told you the exact truth."
"You are very kind, father," she said after a pause, and with a sort of solemnity.
"He has kept your letters," resumed the colonel; "now suppose the rash caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?"
"Oh!--you are going too far."
"Canalis told him so."
"Has Dumay seen Canalis?"
"Yes," answered her father.
The two walked along in silence.
"So that is why that GENTLEMAN," resumed Modeste, "told me so much harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said-- Why,"
she added, interrupting herself, "his virtues, his noble qualities, his fine sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who steals glory and a name may very likely--"
"--break locks, steal purses, and cut people's throats on the highway," cried the colonel. "Ah, you young girls, that's just like you,--with your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man who once deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he ought to die."
This ridicule stopped Modeste's effervescence for a moment and least, and again there was silence.
"My child," said the colonel, presently, "men in society, as in nature everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must defend themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise?
Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman;
it is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences, short of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he does deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her wanting in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a queen, an actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems to him a queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame--and for a young girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given her that is sacred and lovely and noble,--no matter with what grace or what poetry or what precautions she surrounds her fault."
"To seek the master and find the servant!" she said bitterly, "oh! I
can never recover from it!"
"Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a heart, and he adores you, but--he DOES NOT WRITE VERSES. No, I admit, he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry.
At any rate, my dear girl," added her father, as Modeste made a gesture of disgust, "you are to see both of them, the sham and the true Canalis--"
"Oh, papa!--"
"Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the AFFAIR of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall finish with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character of these gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing excursions."
Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to what he said but replying only in monosyllables.