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Updated: May 26, 2025
Modeste, fully warned, recovered her impenetrable composure. Dumay's distrust was now thoroughly aroused, and he resolved to go the mayor's office early in the morning and ascertain if the architect had really been in Havre the previous day. Butscha, on the other hand, was equally determined to go to Paris and find out something about Canalis.
Dumay withdrew, his heart torn with anxiety, believing that the wretched Butscha had worn the skin of the poet to deceive Modeste; whereas Butscha himself, keen-witted as a prince seeking revenge, and far cleverer than any paid spy, was ferretting out the life and actions of Canalis, escaping notice by his insignificance, like an insect that bores its way into the sap of a tree.
Walking with Modeste, on the contrary, seemed like going back to the days of her childhood, the remembrance of which soothed her like a recollection of happiness and peace, now very far away; it was a reminiscence of the far-off limbo in which her young soul, pure and white, had floated, without rapture, but without any great grief or pain. The porteress showed them into the parlor.
Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little understood, the first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of all sentiments, a very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary.
Canalis thought he knew the reason of this change; he had tried to pique Modeste by calling marriage a catastrophe, and showing that he was aloof from it; but like others who play with fire, he had burned his fingers. Modeste's pride and her present disdain frightened him, and he endeavored to recover his ground, exhibiting a jealousy which was all the more visible because it was artificial.
When a woman loves, what she takes for disgust is simply the ability to see clearly; but in matters of sentiment she is never, especially if she is a young girl, in a condition to see clearly. If she cannot admire, she despises. And so, after passing through terrible struggles of the soul, Modeste necessarily put on the armor on which, as she had once declared, the word "Disdain" was engraved.
"Do you think he is going mad?" "You want to realize the story of Beauty and the Beast," said Modeste at length; "but you forget that the Beast turned into Prince Charming." "Do you think so?" said the dwarf. "Now I have always thought that that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible, obliterating the form under the light of the spirit.
"Writing to my father," she answered; "did you not tell me you should start in the morning?" Dumay had nothing to say to that, and he went to bed, while Modeste wrote another long letter, this time to her father.
Yes, she was the Modesté of the English Navy the same ship which more than a year before I had seen at anchor off Montreal! News travels fast in wild countries, and it took us little time to learn the destination of the Modesté. She came to anchor above Oregon City, and well below Fort Vancouver.
Modeste was a good deal astonished not to receive the fire of the poet's eyes. The evening before, as she was pointing out to him an admirable effect of setting sunlight across the water, she had said, remarking his inattention, "Well, don't you see it?" to which he replied, "I can see only your hand"; but now his admiration for the beauties of nature seemed a little too intense to be natural.
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