eight Argus eyes the blameless child, whose
every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the ordeal so fully
acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four friends declared
to each other privately that Madame Mignon was foolishly over-anxious.
Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to church and brought her
back again, was commissioned to tell the mother that she was mistaken
about her daughter.

"Modeste," she said, "is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was
Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
"she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
I'm sure I don't know where such people" (Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Byron
being _such people_ to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie) "get
their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as I did
not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to try
to read the thing. Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but it
actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn't possibly finish it.
Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint, and
waves of war! However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we must
expect absurdities,--though his are really inexcusable. He takes you to
Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the torrents
talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins! Did you
ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the lines are full
of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling along from page to
page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put in by the translator,
and that I ought to read the book in English. But I certainly sha'n't
learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't learn it to teach
Exupere. I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these
English romances. I'm too good a Norman to fall in love with foreign
things,--above all when they come from England."

Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling at
the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold. The stern scion of
a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of her doctrine.

"And, therefore, my dear Madame Mignon," she went on, "you have taken
Modeste's fancies,