“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.

CHAPTER XVI

DISENCHANTED

The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in search of her eagle’s nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to use the poetic language of an author of our day) “after feeling the soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality, Imagination—­which in that delicate bosom united the whole of womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to the passionate desires of the sex—­had led her into enchanted gardens where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora.”  Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,—­in short the work-day path of common life.  What ardent, aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall?  Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts?  The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the boards.  She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to see.  The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no longer spoke to her.  Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes, she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion.  She fought against reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing.  She would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the utmost.

“Poor Butscha was right,” she said one evening.