And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to Paris,—­to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our drama for a moment.

Truly modest minds, like that of Ernest de La Briere, but especially those who, knowing their own value, also know that they are neither loved nor appreciated, can understand the infinite joy to which the young secretary abandoned himself on reading Modeste’s letter.  Could it be that after thinking him lofty and witty in soul, his young, his artless, his tricksome mistress now thought him handsome?  This flattery is the flattery supreme.  And why?  Beauty is, undoubtedly, the signature of the master to the work into which he has put his soul; it is the divine spirit manifested.  And to see it where it is not, to create it by the power of an inward look,—­is not that the highest reach of love?  And so the poor youth cried aloud with all the rapture of an applauded author, “At last I am beloved!” When a woman, be she maid, wife, or widow, lets the charming words escape her, “Thou art handsome,” the words may be false, but the man opens his thick skull to their subtle poison, and thenceforth he is attached by an everlasting tie to the pretty flatterer, the true or the deceived judge; she becomes his particular world, he thirsts for her continual testimony, and he never wearies of it, even if he is a crowned prince.  Ernest walked proudly up and down his room; he struck a three-quarter, full-face, and profile attitude before the glass; he tried to criticise himself; but a voice, diabolically persuasive, whispered to him, “Modeste is right.”  He took up her letter and re-read it; he saw his fairest of the fair; he talked with her; then, in the midst of his ecstacy, a dreadful thought came to him:—­

“She thinks me Canalis, and she has a million of money!”

Down went his happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed upon the pavement.

“Without the halo of fame I shall be hideous in her eyes,” he cried; “what a maddening situation I have put myself in!”

La Briere was too much the man of his letters which we have read, his heart was too noble and pure to allow him to hesitate at the call of honor.  He at once resolved to find Modeste’s father, if he were in Paris, and confess all to him, and to let Canalis know the serious results of their Parisian jest.  To a sensitive nature like his, Modeste’s large fortune was in itself a determining reason.  He could not allow it to be even suspected that the ardor of the correspondence, so sincere on his part, had in view the capture of a “dot.”  Tears were in his eyes as he made his way to the rue Chantereine to find the banker Mongenod, whose fortune and business connections were partly the work of the minister to whom Ernest owed his start in life.