Her only desire for wealth was to cast it at the feet of her idol.

Indeed, the golden background of these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart, filled with womanly delicacy; for its dominant desire was to make some Tasso, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Murat, a Christopher Columbus happy.
Commonplace miseries did not seriously touch this youthful soul, who longed to extinguish the fires of the martyrs ignored and rejected in their own day.

Sometimes she imagined balms of Gilead, soothing melodies which might have allayed the savage misanthropy of Rousseau.

Or she fancied herself the wife of Lord Byron; guessing intuitively his contempt for the real, she made herself as fantastic as the poetry of Manfred, and provided for his scepticism by making him a Catholic.
Modeste attributed Moliere's melancholy to the women of the seventeenth century.

"Why is there not some one woman," she asked herself, "loving, beautiful, and rich, ready to stand beside each man of genius and be his slave, like Lara, the mysterious page ?" She had, as the reader perceives, fully understood "il pianto," which the English poet chanted by the mouth of his Gulmare.