The two young men were equally impatient to see Modeste, but La Briere dreaded the interview, while Canalis approached it with the confidence of self-conceit. The eagerness with which La Briere had met the father, and the flattery of his attention to the family pride of the ex-merchant, showed Canalis his own maladroitness, and determined him to select a special role. The great poet resolved to pretend indifference, though all the while displaying his seductive powers; to appear to disdain the young lady, and thus pique her self-love. Trained by the handsome Duchesse de Chaulieu, he was bound to be worthy of his reputation as a man who knew women, when, in fact, he did not know them at all — which is often the case with those who are the happy victims of an exclusive passion. While poor Ernest, gloomily ensconced in his corner of the caleche, gave way to the terrors of genuine love, and foresaw instinctively the anger, contempt, and disdain of an injured and offended young girl, Canalis was preparing himself, not less silently, like an actor making ready for an important part in a new play; certainly neither of them presented the appearance of a happy man. Important interests were involved for Canalis. The mere suggestion of his desire to marry would bring about a rupture of the tie which had bound him for the last ten years to the Duchesse de Chaulieu. Though he had covered the purpose of his journey with the vulgar pretext of needing rest — in which, by the bye, women never believe, even when it is true — his conscience troubled him somewhat; but the word “conscience” seemed so Jesuitical to La Briere that he shrugged his shoulders when the poet mentioned his scruples.
“Your conscience, my friend, strikes me as nothing more nor less than a dread of losing the pleasures of vanity, and some very real advantages and habits by sacrificing the affections of Madame de Chaulieu; for, if you were sure of succeeding with Modeste, you would renounce without the slightest compunction the wilted aftermath of a passion that has been mown and well-raked for the last eight years. If you simply mean that you are afraid of displeasing your protectress, should she find out the object of your stay here, I believe you. To renounce the duchess and yet not succeed at the Chalet is too heavy a risk. You take the anxiety of this alternative for remorse.”
“You have no comprehension of feelings,” said the poet, irritably, like a man who hears truth when he expects a compliment.
“That is what a bigamist should tell the jury,” retorted La Briere, laughing.
This epigram made another disagreeable impression on Canalis. He began to think La Briere too witty and too free for a secretary.
The arrival of an elegant caleche, driven by a coachman in the Canalis livery, made the more excitement at the Chalet because the two suitors were expected, and all the personages of this history were assembled to receive them, except the duke and Butscha.
“Which is the poet?” asked Madame Latournelle of Dumay in the embrasure of a window, where she stationed herself as soon as she heard the wheels.
“The one who walks like a drum-major,” answered the lieutenant.
“Ah!” said the notary’s wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his body like a man who knows he is being looked at. The fault lay with the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him — as all women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus. When a woman of a certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is accustomed. Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature. Canalis, taken young by the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself that they pleased that “grande dame,” whose taste was law. Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the historian not to point them out. For instance, Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself. In the slang of the green-room, Canalis “dragged the time.” He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call “balancoires,”— the picturesque phrase of an artistic people. Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind. This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay. The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up. He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.
These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover’s age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome — without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart. Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges. Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old. People who have hearts are simple in all their ways. Now Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart. He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in meditation. In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain. His style of paying compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its cut-and-dried flattery. As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier. He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as minister of foreign affairs, “Your excellency was truly sublime!” Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration of non-success in little doses.
These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint–Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected diction — magniloquence, if you please to call it so — are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type. Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French. The Parisian is amazed that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France. Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character — as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman. True grace is elastic; it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-class vulgarity. Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be. He believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went — an error shared by several of the great men of Paris.
While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.
“Ha! do I see my soldier?” said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women. “Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?” he said, offering his hand effusively; “I comprehend them to their fullest extent after seeing mademoiselle. I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of angels.”
All present seemed by their attitudes to ask the meaning of this speech.
“I shall always consider it a triumph,” resumed the poet, observing that everybody wished for an explanation, “to have stirred to mention on of those men of iron whom Napoleon had the eye to find and make the supporting piles on which he tried to build an empire, too colossal to be lasting: for such structures time alone is the cement. But this triumph — why should I be proud of it? — I count for nothing. It was the triumph of ideas over facts. Your battles, my dear Monsieur Dumay, your heroic charges, Monsieur le comte, nay, war itself was the form in which Napoleon’s idea clothed itself. Of all of these things, what remains? The sod that covers them knows nothing; harvests come and go without revealing their resting-place; were it not for the historian, the writer, futurity would have no knowl............