“A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest,” said Butscha, as if speaking to himself; “Modeste is clever enough to fear she may be loved only for her beauty.”

Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for, according to Nature’s plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish.  The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—­where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being.  From this, forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism, though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the spiritual world.  It is rare to find a deformed person who is not gifted with some special faculty,—­a whimsical or sparkling gaiety perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness.  Like instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings, highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive.  This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,—­all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.

Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle.  With all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to die,—­like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who still cried out, “Long live the Emperor,”—­he meditated how to capture Modeste’s secret for his own private knowledge.  So thinking, he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his brow:  for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which he should entrap his lady.  It would have to be, he thought, by some intercepted glance, some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon lays his finger on a hidden sore.  That evening Gobenheim did not appear, and Butscha was Dumay’s partner against Monsieur and Madame Latournelle.  During the few moment’s of Modeste’s absence, about nine o’clock, to prepare for her mother’s bedtime, Madame Mignon and her friends spoke openly to one another; but the poor clerk, depressed by the conviction of Modeste’s love, which had now seized upon him as upon the rest, seemed as remote from the discussion as Gobenheim had been the night before.

“Well, what’s the matter with you, Butscha?” cried Madame Latournelle; “one would really think you hadn’t a friend in the world.”

Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a Swedish sailor, and whose mother was dead.

“I have no one in the world but you,” he answered with a troubled voice; “and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I can never lose it—­and I will never deserve to lose it.”