y delicacy;
for its dominant desire was to make some Tasso, some Milton, a
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher Columbus happy.

Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who
longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in
their own day. Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing melodies
which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau. Or she
fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively his
contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry
of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the seventeenth
century. "Why is there not some one woman," she asked herself, "loving,
beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be
his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page?" She had, as the reader
perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the English poet chanted
by the mouth of his Gulmare. Modeste greatly admired the behavior of
the young Englishwoman who offered herself to Crebillon, the son, who
married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza Draper was her life and her
happiness for several months. She made herself ideally the heroine of a
like romance, and many a time she rehearsed in imagination the
sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that
delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said,
were lacking in those of the wittiest of English writers.

Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the works,
but of the characters of her favorite authors,--Goldsmith, the author
of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin. The poorest and the most suffering
among them were her deities; she guessed their trials, initiated herself
into a destitution where the thoughts of genius brooded, and poured upon
it the treasures of her heart; she fancied herself the giver of material
comfort to these great men, martyrs to their own faculty. This noble
compassion, this intuition of the struggles of toilers, this worship
of genius, are among the choicest perceptions that flutter through the
souls of women. They are, in the first place, a secret between the woman
and God, for they are hidden; in them there is nothing striking, nothing
that gratifies the vanity,--that powerful auxiliary to all action among
the French.

Out of this third period of the development of her ideas, there cam