We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young
girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her
plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of
a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it
were to watch for the passing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the
expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under
the fire of Dumay's pistols.
During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung
herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in
it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German
quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the
matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three
literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great
works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,
from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in
its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming
admiration for genius.
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