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

Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.

The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by
the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had
taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a
grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound
fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying
in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The
exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The
failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father,
leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the
fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles's return came
near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of
the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a
renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of
continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest
in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the
splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration
enjoyed by her husband, his absolute affection, giving her an
unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him,--all
these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her
doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the
bright evening of her stormy life, a hidden catastrophe, buried in the
heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention,
came as the precursor of renewed trials.

In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles
Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris,
and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal
palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped
down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the
grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon
his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All
he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his
creditors.

"Havre shall never see me doing nothing," said the colonel to the
lieutenant. "Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per
cent."

"Three, my colonel."

"At nothing, then," cried Mignon, peremptorily; "you shall have your
share in the profits of what I now undertake. The 'Modeste,' which is
no longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my
wife and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good
news."

Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. "I
think," he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, "that my