Many of these men, misled by vanity, think themselves quite as capable as their patron.  Pure devotion, such as Modeste conceived it, without money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare.  Nevertheless there are Mennevals to be found, more perhaps in Paris than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its peaceful toil; these are the wandering Benedictines of our social world, which offers them no other monastery.  These brave, meek hearts live, by their actions and in their hidden lives, the poetry that poets utter.  They are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in their lonely vigils and meditations,—­as truly poets as others of the name on paper, who fatten in the fields of literature at so much a verse; like Lord Byron, like all who live, alas, by ink, the Hippocrene water of to-day, for want of a better.

Attracted by the fame of Canalis, also by the prospect of political interest, and advised thereto by Madame d’Espard, who acted in the matter for the Duchesse de Chaulieu, a young lawyer of the court of Claims became secretary and confidential friend of the poet, who welcomed and petted him very much as a broker caresses his first dabbler in the funds.  The beginning of this companionship bore a very fair resemblance to friendship.  The young man had already held the same relation to a minister, who went out of office in 1827, taking care before he did so to appoint his young secretary to a place in the foreign office.  Ernest de La Briere, then about twenty-seven years of age, was decorated with the Legion of honor but was without other means than his salary; he was accustomed to the management of business and had learned a good deal of life during his four years in a minister’s cabinet.  Kindly, amiable, and over-modest, with a heart full of pure and sound feelings, he was averse to putting himself in the foreground.  He loved his country, and wished to serve her, but notoriety abashed him.  To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was far more desirable than that of the minister himself.  As soon as he became the friend and secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of labor for him, but by the end of eighteen months he had learned to understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary expression only.  The truth of the old proverb, “The cowl doesn’t make the monk,” is eminently shown in literature.  It is extremely rare to find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect accord.  The faculties are not the man himself.  This disconnection, whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds from an unexplored, possibly an unexplorable mystery.  The brain and its products of all kinds (for in art the hand of man is a continuation of his brain) are a world apart, which flourishes beneath the cranium in absolute independence of sentiments, feelings, and all that is called virtue, the virtue of citizens, fathers, and private life.  This, however true, is not absolutely so; nothing