Unless she loved
the nightingales in the villa park, or some fairy prince, Modeste
could have seen no one, and had neither given nor received a signal.
Madame Dumay, who never went to bed till she knew Modeste was asleep,
watched the road from the upper windows of the Chalet with a vigilance
equal to her husband's. Under these eight Argus eyes the blameless
child, whose every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the
ordeal so fully acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four
friends declared to each other privately that Madame Mignon was
foolishly over-anxious. Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to
church and brought her back again, was commissioned to tell the mother
that she was mistaken about her daughter.
"Modeste," she said, "is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was
Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
"she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
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