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.