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.
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