ng for money, already spoiled by
success in two directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and
of laurel. A government situation worth eight thousand francs, three
thousand francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the
Academy, three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes
and the cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with another,
by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for Modeste's
hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he usually spent
five or six thousand francs more every year; but the king's privy purse
and the secret funds of the foreign office had hitherto supplied the
deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's coronation which earned him a
whole silver service,--having refused a sum of money on the ground that
a Canalis owed his duty to his sovereign.

But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his
lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to
hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue. De Marsay, who did not
like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to
the quick of his vanity. "Canalis," he said, "always reminds me of that
brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a battle
because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little tune."
Canalis's ambition was to enter political life, and he made capital of a
journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the embassy of the Duc
de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according to Parisian gossip, in
the capacity of "attache to the duchess." How many times a sarcasm or a
single speech has decided the whole course of a man's life. Colla,
the late president of the Cisalpine republic, and the best lawyer in
Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was forty years of age that
he knew nothing of botany. He was piqued, became a second Jussieu,
cultivated flowers, and compiled and published "The Flora of Piedmont,"
in Latin, a labor of ten years. "I'll master De Marsay some of these
days!" thought the crushed poet; "after all, Canning and Chateaubriand
are both in politics."

Canalis would gladly have brought forth some great political poem, but
he was afraid of the French press, whos