“He is right, and I am wrong,” she said to herself.  “But who could ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find nothing but one of Moliere’s old men?”

When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, “flagrante delicto,” she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the object of her fault.  And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow.  This girl, this child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been misguided,—­partly by her reading, partly by her sister’s sorrows, and more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,—­was suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face.  She had been standing for three hours on the shores of the vast sea of Doubt.  Nights like these are never forgotten.  Modeste walked straight to her little Chinese table, a gift from her father, and wrote a letter dictated by the infernal spirit of vengeance which palpitates in the hearts of young girls.

CHAPTER VIII

Bladeto blade

To Monsieur de Canalis: 

Monsieur,—­You are certainly a great poet, and you are something more,—­an honest man.  After showing such loyal frankness to a young girl who was stepping to the verge of an abyss, have you enough left to answer without hypocrisy or evasion the following question?

Would you have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine, —­would your ideas, your language have been the same,—­had some one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O. d’Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce for a master?

Admit the supposition for a moment.  Be with me what you are with yourself; fear nothing.  I am wiser than my twenty years; nothing that is frank can hurt you in my mind.  When I have read your confidence, if you deign to make it, you shall receive from me an answer to your first letter.

  Having admired your talent, often so sublime, permit me to do
  homage to your delicacy and your integrity, which force me to
  remain always,

Your humble servant,
O. d’Este M.

When Ernest de La Briere had held this letter in his hands for some little time he went to walk along the boulevards, tossed in mind like a tiny vessel by a tempest when the wind is blowing from all points of the compass.  Most young men, specially true Parisians, would have settled the matter in a single phrase, “The girl is a little hussy.”  But for a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the three judges hidden in the conscience of every man.  Honor, Truth, and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways energetically.