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

While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making
choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various
ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the
brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he
listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the
means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself
the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He
bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New
York freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He
sent Dumay on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned,
after making a double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase
of cottons at a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his
family in the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the
principles of banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of
a native of Provence.

This double operation of Dumay's was worth a fortune to the house of
Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his
agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand
francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's
books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune
had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's
liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never
in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as
this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the
knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune
to the richest commercial house in Havre.

Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,
or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of
economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay
laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added
something to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier's
services, until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight
thousand francs. In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie,
a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of
residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins