# Modeste Mignon/Chapter IX

To Monsieur de Canalis:
 My friend,—Suffer me to give you that name,—you have delighted  me; I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the  first—oh, may it not be the last! Who but a poet could have  excused and understood a young girl so delicately?
 I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines  of your letter. And first, let me say that most fortunately you do  not know me. I can joyfully assure you than I am neither that  hideous Mademoiselle Vilquin nor the very noble and withered  Mademoiselle d'Herouville who floats between twenty and forty  years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The  Cardinal d'Herouville flourished in the history of the Church at  least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only  family glory,—for I take no account of lieutenant-generals, and  abbes who write trumpery little verses.
 Moreover, I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is  not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that  chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from  Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a  Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am  noble on my father's and on my mother's side. On my mother's I  derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short, my  precautions are well taken. It is not in any man's power, nor even  in the power of the law, to unmask my incognito. I shall remain  veiled, unknown.
 As to my person and as to my "belongings," as the Normans say,  make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl  (ignorantly happy) on whom your eyes chanced to light during your  visit to Havre; and I do not call myself poverty-stricken,  although ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks. I  have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her  millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even on  a wager, to reach me. Alas! though free as air, I am watched and  guarded,—by myself, in the first place, and secondly, by people  of nerve and courage who would not hesitate to put a knife in your  heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat. I do not say this to  excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity; I believe I have  no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me.
 I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged, of  your first sermon.
 Will you have a confession? I said to myself when I saw you so  distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations  bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had  already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged  you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh!  you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but  I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are,  and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered  with the "Flowers of my Heart" in one or more volumes. And,  finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word "Come!"  you will not find—you know it now—an old maid, no, nor a poor  and ugly one.
 Ah! my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to  Havre! You have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God  alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough,  and trusting enough, and perspicacious enough to come—having  faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the  depths of my heart—to come to our first meeting with the  simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the  innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my  treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,  there is always a man within a poet.
 Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who  cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and  wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d'Este received  your pedantic lesson she said to herself: "No, dear poet, my first  letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the  highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a  net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock  above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught."
 All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval.  The man who is able to please me, and of whom I believe myself  worthy, will have my heart and my life,—with the consent of my  parents, for I will neither grieve them, nor take them unawares:  happily, I am certain of reigning over them; and, besides, they  are wholly without prejudice. Indeed, in every way, I feel myself  protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the  fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the  boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a  treasure,—not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if  need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with  armor of proof on which is engraved the word "Disdain." I have the  deepest horror of all that is calculating,—of all that is not  pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,  the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart  of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various  things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about  Society and social life.
 For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why  seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,  but your mind, your heart I know; they please me, and I feel an  infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius  for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be  wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a  precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You  will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl's  thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering  to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good  fortune of the soul,—the honest confidences of an honest girl.  Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in  her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters  warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await  you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the  castle, the palace—I don't know yet what sort of bower it will  be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be  possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and  that Mademoiselle d'Este has a complying disposition. Has she not  left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the  salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high  emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?  No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me  when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I  have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear  friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have  known through the experience of another all the horrors and the  delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can  contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have  no illusions; but I have something better, something real,—I have  beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
 Whoever I marry—provided I choose him for myself—may sleep in  peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his  return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;  and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he  has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to  follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the  divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why  should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the  life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that  woman be who thwarts the man she loves?—an illness, a disease,  not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour  a pleasure.
 But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.  Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an  expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family  life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is  possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as  women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now  no longer a chimera.
 Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the  reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable  fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"—ah! with  what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of  your secret soul.
 Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;  that you are her solitary thought,—without a rival except in her  father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject  these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but  yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet  that your confidences—provided they are full and true—will  suffice for the happiness of your
O. d'Este M.
"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?"
Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.
Mademoiselle,—Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in  the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him  if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless  regrets,—showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it  only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?  I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you  have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man  can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines  such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with  so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your  first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain  my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble  the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the  little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble  remonstrances.
 Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less  true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less  insincere,—for those which we write to each other are the  expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the  general tenor of our lives,—do you believe, I say, that beautiful  as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we  could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily  intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the  heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,  to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of  at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to  harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark  in passing, is very rare.
 The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul  which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial  flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for  every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a  literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.  But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of  your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the  genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have  not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social  woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like  circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt  only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,—sickly,  irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold  more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of  character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In  exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The  dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The  compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your  projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,  like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the  rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her  religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.  Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship  with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was  the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was  younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us  admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a  man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously  worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched  by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,  when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away  from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,—let us admit, I  say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the  glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of  our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the  picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of  poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed  verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I  disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am  still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.  The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me  sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very  ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other  empty-headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not  roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days,  of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do  I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil  uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are  worth far more than I,—D'Arthez, for instance.
 Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to  these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the  happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been  to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine  for a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode  of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might  conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which  light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their  duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end  our tale in the common vulgar way,—marriage, a household,  children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!—could it be?  Therefore, adieu.