"
"To seek the master and find the servant!" she said bitterly, "oh! I
can never recover from it!"
"Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the
equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet
minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a
heart, and he adores you, but--he _does not write verses_. No, I admit,
he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry.
At any rate, my dear girl," added her father, as Modeste made a
gesture of disgust, "you are to see both of them, the sham and the
true Canalis--"
"Oh, papa!--"
"Did you not swear just now to obey me in everything, even in the
_affair_ of your marriage? Well, I allow you to choose which of the two
you like best for a husband. You have begun by a poem, you shall
finish with a bucolic, and try if you can discover the real character
of these gentlemen here, in the country, on a few hunting or fishing
excursions."
Modeste bowed her head and walked home with her father, listening to
what he said but replying only in monosyllables.
CHAPTER XVI
DISENCHANTED
The poor girl had fallen humiliated from the alp she had scaled in
search of her eagle's nest, into the mud of the swamp below, where (to
use the poetic language of an author of our day) "after feeling the
soles of her feet too tender to tread the broken glass of reality,
Imagination--which in that delicate bosom united the whole of
womanhood, from the violet-hidden reveries of a chaste young girl to
the passionate desires of the sex--had led her into enchanted gardens
where, oh, bitter sight! she now saw, springing from the ground, not
the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the
black mandragora.
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