said Mademoiselle d'Herouville. "Some had only the wealth of the position; others, without fortune, had the wit and birth. I must admit that we have done well to wait till God granted us an opportunity to meet one in whom we find the noble blood, the mind, and fortune of a Duchesse d'Herouville."
"My dear Modeste," said Helene d'Herouville, leading her new friend apart, "there are a thousand barons in the kingdom, just as there are a hundred poets in Paris, who are worth as much as he; he is so little of a great man that even I, a poor girl forced to take the veil for want of a 'dot,' I would not take him. You don't know what a young man is who has been for ten years in the hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu.
None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,--a habit in Louis XIV. that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance. It is true the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have him always about her."
Then, practising a well-known manoeuvre peculiar to her sex, Helene d'Herouville repeated in a low voice all the calumnies which women jealous of the Duchesse de Chaulieu were in the habit of spreading about the poet. This little incident, common as it is in the intercourse of women, will serve to show with what fury the hounds were after Modeste's wealth.
Ten days saw a great change in the opinions at the Chalet as to the three suitors for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand. This change, which was much to the disadvantage of Canalis, came about through considerations of a nature which ought to make the holders of any kind of fame pause, and reflect. No one can deny, if we remember the passion with which people seek for autographs, that public curiosity is greatly excited by celebrity. Evidently most provincials never form an exact idea in their own minds of how illustrious Parisians put on their cravats, walk on the boulevards, stand gaping at nothing, or eat a cutlet; because, no sooner do they perceive a man clothed in the sunbeams of fashion or resplendent with some dignity that is more or less fugitive (though always envied), than they cry out, "Look at that!" "How queer!" and other depreciatory exclamations. In a word, the mysterious charm that attaches to every kind of fame, even that which is most justly due, never lasts. It is, and especially with superficial people who are envious or sarcastic, a sensation which passes off with the rapidity of lightning, and never returns. It would seem as though fame, like the sun, hot and luminous at a distance, is cold as the summit of an alp when you approach it. Perhaps man is only really great to his peers; perhaps the defects inherent in his constitution disappear sooner to the eyes of his equals than to those of vulgar admirers. A poet, if he would please in ordinary life, must put on the fictitious graces of those who are able to make their insignificances forgotten by charming manners and complying speeches.
