red to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of
social life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the
executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or,
like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles
were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men
amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress,
exhausting in her own behalf the luck of Gil Blas, or the triumphs
of Pasta, Malibran, and Florine. Then, weary of the horrors and
excitements, she returned to actual life. She married a notary, she ate
the plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a Madame
Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials
of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances:
she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric,
artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the
genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned,
possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers
to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); she
owned a magnificent estate and castle, servants, horses, carriages, the
choicest of everything that luxury could bestow, and kept her suitors
uncertain until she was forty years old, at which age she made her
choice.

This edition of the Arabian Nights in a single copy lasted nearly a
year, and taught Modeste the sense of satiety through thought. She held
her life too often in her hand, she said to herself philosophically and
with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too often, "Well, what
is it, after all?" not to have plunged to her waist in the deep disgust
which all men of genius feel when they try to complete by intense toil
the work to which they have devoted themselves. Her youth and her rich
nature alone kept Modeste at this period of her life from seeking to
enter a cloister. But this sense of satiety cast her, saturated as
she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love of Good, the
infinite of heaven. She conceived of charity, service to others, as the
true occupation of life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of
finding in it no food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like
an insect at the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing
garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the
grumblings o