e to
Modeste a passionate desire to penetrate to the heart of one of these
abnormal beings; to understand the working of the thoughts and the
hidden griefs of genius,--to know not only what it wanted but what it
was. At the period when this story begins, these vagaries of fancy,
these excursions of her soul into the void, these feelers put forth into
the darkness of the future, the impatience of an ungiven love to find
its goal, the nobility of all her thoughts of life, the decision of her
mind to suffer in a sphere of higher things rather than flounder in the
marshes of provincial life like her mother, the pledge she had made to
herself never to fail in conduct, but to respect her father's hearth and
bring it happiness,--all this world of feeling and sentiment had lately
come to a climax and taken shape. Modeste wished to be the friend and
companion of a poet, an artist, a man in some way superior to the crowd
of men. But she intended to choose him,--not to give him her heart, her
life, her infinite tenderness freed from the trammels of passion, until
she had carefully and deeply studied him.

She began this pretty romance by simply enjoying it. Profound
tranquillity settled down upon her soul. 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. She
performed with humble, loving care all the minute duties of the homely
life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide the poetry of her
ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor methodically on material
things to leave their souls the freer to develop in prayer. All great
minds have bound themselves to some form of mechanical toil to obtain
greater mastery of thought. Spinosa ground glasses for spectacles; Bayle
counted the tiles on the roof; Montesquieu gardened. The body being thus
subdued, the soul could spread its wings in all security.

Madame Mignon, reading her daughter's soul, was therefore right. 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. She admired the blue plumage of
the bird that sings afar in the paradise of young girls, which no hand
can touch, no gun can