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

attachments are genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore
that blonde beauty, escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer,
gifted with an angelic nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The
pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the
time when he poured his griefs into the Breton's heart. Dumay loved
these little ones without having seen them, solely through the
sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the
father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in
1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808. The unfortunate lieutenant-
colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings, was sent,
at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot, accompanied
by the lieutenant. No difference of epaulets could count between the
two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was disembarking
at Cannes.

Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who
had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even
by his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of
the Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying
on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite
as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had
purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men
during his magnificent campaign in France. "I tie in goddon," said the
father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet
a grief which distressed him. "I owe no mann anything--" and he died,
still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.

Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck,
Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him
lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of
the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general
after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of
Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and
left Tours before the disbandment of the army.

In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife's property out of the
funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending
to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where
persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of
Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had
saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the
hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the
anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little
girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confidence that
the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the
honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as
well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil
capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to
which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.