rries in
his heart; and if I speak thus openly before him it is because he has
the modesty of a nun."

"Enough, oh, enough!" cried La Briere, who hardly knew which way to
look. "My dear Canalis, you remind me of a mother who is seeking to
marry off her daughter."

"How is it, monsieur," said Charles Mignon, addressing Canalis, "that
you can even think of becoming a political character?"

"It is abdication," said Modeste, "for a poet; politics are the resource
of matter-of-fact men."

"Ah, mademoiselle, the rostrum is to-day the greatest theatre of the
world; it has succeeded the tournaments of chivalry, it is now the
meeting-place for all intellects, just as the army has been the
rallying-point of courage."

Canalis stuck spurs into his charger and talked for ten minutes on
political life: "Poetry was but a preface to the statesman." "To-day the
orator has become a sublime reasoner, the shepherd of ideas." "A poet
may point the way to nations or individuals, but can he ever cease to be
himself?" He quoted Chateaubriand and declared that he would one day be
greater on the political side than on the literary. "The forum of France
was to be the pharos of humanity." "Oral battles supplanted fields of
battle: there were sessions of the Chamber finer than any Austerlitz,
and orators were seen to be as lofty as generals; they spent their
lives, their courage, their strength, as freely as those who went to
war." "Speech was surely one of the most prodigal outlets of the vital
fluid that man had ever known," etc.

This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases
and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de
Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made
a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame
Latournelle and Madame Mignon. Modeste looked as though she were at the
theatre, in an attitude of enthusiasm for an actor,--very much like
that of Ernest toward herself; for though the secretary knew all these
high-sounding phrases by heart, he listened through the eyes, as it
were, of the young girl, and grew more and more madly in love with
her. To this true lover, Modeste was eclipsing all the Modestes he had
created as he read her letters and answered them.

This visit, the length of which was predetermined by Canalis, careful
not to allow his admirers a chance to get surfeited, ended by an
invitation to dinner on the following Monday.