Modeste smiled as Henri IV. must have smiled after drawing out the characters of his three principal ministers, for the benefit of a foreign ambassador, by means of three answers to an insidious question.

On the day of the dinner, Modeste, led away by the preference she bestowed on Canalis, walked alone with him up and down the gravelled space which lay between the house and the lawn with its flower-beds.  From the gestures of the poet, and the air and manner of the young heiress, it was easy to see that she was listening favorably to him.  The two demoiselles d’Herouville hastened to interrupt the scandalous tete-a-tete; and with the natural cleverness of women under such circumstances, they turned the conversation on the court, and the distinction of an appointment under the crown,—­pointing out the difference that existed between appointments in the household of the king and those of the crown.  They tried to intoxicate Modeste’s mind by appealing to her pride, and describing one of the highest stations to which a woman could aspire.

“To have a duke for a son,” said the elder lady, “is an actual advantage.  The title is a fortune that we secure to our children without the possibility of loss.”

“How is it, then,” said Canalis, displeased at his tete-a-tete being thus broken in upon, “that Monsieur le duc has had so little success in a matter where his title would seem to be of special service to him?”

The two ladies cast a look at Canalis as full of venom as the tooth of a snake, and they were so disconcerted by Modeste’s amused smile that they were actually unable to reply.

“Monsieur le duc has never blamed you,” she said to Canalis, “for the humility with which you bear your fame; why should you attack him for his modesty?”

“Besides, we have never yet met a woman worthy of my nephew’s rank,” said Mademoiselle d’Herouville.  “Some had only the wealth of the position; others, without fortune, had the wit and birth.  I must admit that we have done well to wait till God granted us an opportunity to meet one in whom we find the noble blood, the mind, and fortune of a Duchesse d’Herouville.”

“My dear Modeste,” said Helene d’Herouville, leading her new friend apart, “there are a thousand barons in the kingdom, just as there are a hundred poets in Paris, who are worth as much as he; he is so little of a great man that even I, a poor girl forced to take the veil for want of a ‘dot,’ I would not take him.  You don’t know what a young man is who has been for ten years in the hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu.  None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,—­a habit in Louis XIV. that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance.  It is true the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have him always about her.”

Then, practising a well-known manoeuvre peculiar to her sex, Helene d’Herouville repeated in a low voice all the calumnies which women jealous of the Duchesse de Chaulieu were in the habit of spreading about the poet.  This little incident, common as it is in the intercourse of women, will serve to show with what fury the hounds were after Modeste’s wealth.