“Modeste,” she said, “is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of another.  You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by that scaffold symphony, ‘The Last Hours of a Convict’” (the saying was Butscha’s, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand); “she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.  I’m sure I don’t know where such people” (Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Byron being such people to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie) “get their ideas.  Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as I did not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to try to read the thing.  Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but it actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn’t possibly finish it.  Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint, and waves of war!  However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we must expect absurdities,—­though his are really inexcusable.  He takes you to Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the torrents talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins!  Did you ever hear the like?  Then, after Napoleon’s campaigns, the lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling along from page to page.  Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English.  But I certainly sha’n’t learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn’t learn it to teach Exupere.  I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these English romances.  I’m too good a Norman to fall in love with foreign things,—­above all when they come from England.”

Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling at the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold.  The stern scion of a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of her doctrine.

“And, therefore, my dear Madame Mignon,” she went on, “you have taken Modeste’s fancies, which are nothing but the results of her reading, for a love-affair.  Remember, she is just twenty.  Girls fall in love with themselves at that age; they dress to see themselves well-dressed.  I remember I used to make my little sister, now dead, put on a man’s hat and pretend we were monsieur and madame.  You see, you had a very happy youth in Frankfort; but let us be just,—­Modeste is living here without the slightest amusement.  Although, to be sure, her every wish is attended to, still she knows she is shut up and watched, and the life she leads would give her no pleasure at all if it were not for the amusement she gets out of her books.  Come, don’t worry yourself; she loves nobody but you.  You ought to be very glad that she goes into these enthusiasms for the corsairs of Byron and the heroes of Walter Scott and your own Germans, Egmont, Goethe, Werther, Schiller, and all the other ‘ers.’”