“Your friend, monsieur, ought to have been a lawyer,” he said, smiling and looking attentively at the young man.

“You must not judge a poet as you would an ordinary man,—­as you would me, for example, Monsieur le comte,” said La Briere.  “A poet has a mission.  He is obliged by his nature to see the poetry of questions, just as he expresses that of things.  When you think him inconsistent with himself he is really faithful to his vocation.  He is a painter copying with equal truth a Madonna and a courtesan.  Moliere is as true to nature in his old men as in his young ones, and Moliere’s judgment was assuredly a sound and healthy one.  These witty paradoxes might be dangerous for second-rate minds, but they have no real influence on the character of great men.”

Charles Mignon pressed La Briere’s hand.

“That adaptability, however, leads a man to excuse himself in his own eyes for actions that are diametrically opposed to each other; above all, in politics.”

“Ah, mademoiselle,” Canalis was at this moment saying, in a caressing voice, replying to a roguish remark of Modeste, “do not think that a multiplicity of emotions can in any way lessen the strength of feelings.  Poets, even more than other men, must needs love with constancy and faith.  You must not be jealous of what is called the Muse.  Happy is the wife of a man whose days are occupied.  If you heard the complaints of women who have to endure the burden of an idle husband, either a man without duties, or one so rich as to have nothing to do, you would know that the highest happiness of a Parisian wife is freedom,—­the right to rule in her own home.  Now we writers and men of functions and occupations, we leave the sceptre to our wives; we cannot descend to the tyranny of little minds; we have something better to do.  If I ever marry,—­which I assure you is a catastrophe very remote at the present moment,—­I should wish my wife to enjoy the same moral freedom that a mistress enjoys, and which is perhaps the real source of her attraction.”

Canalis talked on, displaying the warmth of his fancy and all his graces, for Modeste’s benefit, as he spoke of love, marriage, and the adoration of women, until Monsieur Mignon, who had rejoined them, seized the opportunity of a slight pause to take his daughter’s arm and lead her up to Ernest de La Briere, whom he had been advising to seek an open explanation with her.

“Mademoiselle,” said Ernest, in a voice that was scarcely his own, “it is impossible for me to remain any longer under the weight of your displeasure.  I do not defend myself; I do not seek to justify my conduct; I desire only to make you see that before reading your most flattering letter, addressed to the individual and no longer to the poet,—­the last which you sent to me,—­I wished, and I told you in my note written at Havre that I wished, to correct the error under which you were acting.  All the feelings that I have had the happiness to express to you are sincere.  A hope dawned on me in Paris when your father told me he was comparatively poor,—­but now that all is lost, now that nothing is left for me but endless regrets, why should I stay here where all is torture?  Let me carry away with me one smile to live forever in my heart.”