“I don’t know,” answered La Briere. “Has she said anything about me?” he asked after a moment’s silence. “Yes,” said Butscha, and he repeated Modeste’s speech about disguises. Poor Ernest flung himself upon a bench and held his head in his hands. He could not keep back his tears, and he did not wish Butscha to see them; but the dwarf was the very man to guess his emotion. “What troubles you?” he asked. “She is right!” cried Ernest, springing up; “I am a wretch.” And he related the deception into which Canalis had led him when Modeste’s first letter was received, carefully pointing out to Butscha that he had wished to undeceive the young girl before she herself took off the mask, and apostrophizing, in rather juvenile fashion, his luckless destiny. Butscha sympathetically understood the love in the flavor and vigor of his simple language, and in his deep and genuine anxiety. “But why don’t you show yourself to Mademoiselle Modeste for what you are?” he said; “why do you let your rival do his exercises?” “Have you never felt your throat tighten when you wished to speak to her?” cried La Briere; “is there never a strange feeling in the roots of your hair and on the surface of your skin when she looks at you,--even if she is thinking of something else?” “But you had sufficient judgment to show displeasure when she as good as told her excellent father that he was a dolt.” “Monsieur, I love her too well not to have felt a knife in my heart when I heard her contradicting her own perfections.” “Canalis supported her.” “If she had more self-love than heart there would be nothing for a man to regret in losing her,” answered La Briere. At this moment, Modeste, followed by Canalis, who had lost the rubber, came out with her father and Madame Dumay to breathe the fresh air of the starry night. While his daughter walked about with the poet, Charles Mignon left her and came up to La Briere. “Your friend, monsieur, ought to have been a lawyer,” he said, smiling and looking attentively at the young man. “You must not judge a poet as you would an ordinary man,--as you would me, for example, Monsieur le comte,” said La Briere. “A poet has a mission. He is obliged by his nature to see the poetry of questions, just as he expresses that of things. When you think him inconsistent with himself he is really faithful to his vocation. He is a painter copying with equal truth a Madonna and a courtesan. Moliere is as true to nature in his old men as in his young ones, and Moliere’s judgment was assuredly a sound and healthy one. These witty paradoxes might be dangerous for second-rate minds, but they have no real influence on the character of great men.” Charles Mignon pressed La Briere’s hand. “That adaptability, however, leads a man to excuse himself in his own eyes for actions that are diametrically opposed to each other; above all, in politics.”