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Updated: May 19, 2025
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.
Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends can take the place of a mother's eye.
It was in fact an excessively amusing little warfare, with its marches and countermarches and stratagems, all of which were keenly enjoyed by the Dumays, the Latournelles, Gobenheim, and Butscha, who, in conclave assembled, said horrible things of these noble personages, cruelly noting and intelligently studying all their little meannesses.
They who wish to love in secret may have Pyrenean hounds, mothers, Dumays, and Latournelles to spy upon them, and yet not be in any danger; but when it comes to a lover! ah! that is diamond cut diamond, flame against flame, mind to mind, an equation whose terms are mutual.
Her cheeks took on a soft color; and she became the beautiful and noble image of Germany, such as we have lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double existence.
The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of Havre, blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion, abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen him since.
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