"De Balzac, Honore - Modeste Mignon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Balzac Honore De)

"You are not very lively this evening," remarked Modeste.

"We are playing," said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.

No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made
still more so by explaining Dumay's position towards Modeste. If the
brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must
pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these
preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating
the main circumstances which govern all dramas.



CHAPTER III

PRELIMINARIES

Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that
the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth
Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this
catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to
Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies
were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the
department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search
of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own
Provence. Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which
gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal
Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to
save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of
the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La
Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other
people's heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist
disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the
list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and
bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was
soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and
all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a refuge for
the family in the Upper Alps.

Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley
of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his
fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches
perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of
Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity