him a Catholic.  Modeste attributed Moliere’s melancholy to the women of the seventeenth century.  “Why is there not some one woman,” she asked herself, “loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?” She had, as the reader perceives, fully understood “il pianto,” which the English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare.  Modeste greatly admired the behavior of the young Englishwoman who offered herself to Crebillon, the son, who married her.  The story of Sterne and Eliza Draper was her life and her happiness for several months.  She made herself ideally the heroine of a like romance, and many a time she rehearsed in imagination the sublime role of Eliza.  The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of the wittiest of English writers.

Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the works, but of the characters of her favorite authors,—­Goldsmith, the author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin.  The poorest and the most suffering among them were her deities; she guessed their trials, initiated herself into a destitution where the thoughts of genius brooded, and poured upon it the treasures of her heart; she fancied herself the giver of material comfort to these great men, martyrs to their own faculty.  This noble compassion, this intuition of the struggles of toilers, this worship of genius, are among the choicest perceptions that flutter through the souls of women.  They are, in the first place, a secret between the woman and God, for they are hidden; in them there is nothing striking, nothing that gratifies the vanity, —­that powerful auxiliary to all action among the French.

Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there came to Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the hidden griefs of genius,—­to know not only what it wanted but what it was.  At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy, these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth into the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father’s hearth and bring it happiness,—­all this world of feeling and sentiment had lately come to a climax and taken shape.  Modeste wished to be the friend and companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way superior to the crowd of men.  But she intended to choose him,—­not to give him her heart, her life, her infinite tenderness freed from the trammels of passion, until she had carefully and deeply studied him.