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