“A blue-stocking! educated till she is a terror! a girl who has read everything, who knows everything,—­in theory,” cried Canalis, hastily, noticing La Briere’s gesture, “a spoiled child, brought up in luxury in her childhood, and weaned of it for five years.  Ah! my poor friend, take care what you are about.”

“Ode and Code,” said Butscha, waking up, “you do the ode and I the code; there’s only a C’s difference between us.  Well, now, code comes from ‘coda,’ a tail,—­mark that word!  See here! a bit of good advice is worth your wine and your cream of tea.  Father Mignon—­he’s cream, too; the cream of honest men—­he is going with his daughter on this riding party; do you go up frankly and talk ‘dot’ to him.  He’ll answer plainly, and you’ll get at the truth, just as surely as I’m drunk, and you’re a great poet,—­but no matter for that; we are to leave Havre together, that’s settled, isn’t it?  I’m to be your secretary in place of that little fellow who sits there grinning at me and thinking I’m drunk.  Come, let’s go, and leave him to marry the girl.”

Canalis rose to leave the room to dress for the excursion.

“Hush, not a word,—­he is going to commit suicide,” whispered Butscha, sober as a judge, to La Briere as he made the gesture of a street boy at Canalis’s back.  “Adieu, my chief!” he shouted, in stentorian tones, “will you allow me to take a snooze in that kiosk down in the garden?”

“Make yourself at home,” answered the poet.

Butscha, pursued by the laughter of the three servants of the establishment, gained the kiosk by walking over the flower-beds and round the vases with the perverse grace of an insect describing its interminable zig-zags as it tries to get out of a closed window.  When he had clambered into the kiosk, and the servants had retired, he sat down on a wooden bench and wallowed in the delights of his triumph.  He had completely fooled a great man; he had not only torn off his mask, but he had made him untie the strings himself; and he laughed like an author over his own play,—­that is to say, with a true sense of the immense value of his “vis comica.”

“Men are tops!” he cried, “you’ve only to find the twine to wind ’em up with.  But I’m like my fellows,” he added, presently.  “I should faint away if any one came and said to me ’Mademoiselle Modeste has been thrown from her horse, and has broken her leg.’”

CHAPTER XXIV

THE POET FEELS THAT HE IS LOVED TOO WELL

An hour later, Modeste, charmingly equipped in a bottle-green cassimere habit, a small hat with a green veil, buckskin gloves, and velvet boots which met the lace frills of her drawers, and mounted on an elegantly caparisoned little horse, was exhibiting to her father and the Duc d’Herouville the beautiful present she had just received; she was evidently delighted with an attention of a kind that particularly flatters women.