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

charm in the very ideas she utters. Ah, my friends, I know happiness
as well as I know sorrow; I know its signs. By the kiss my Modeste
gives me I can guess what is passing within her. I know whether she
has received what she was looking for, or whether she is uneasy or
expectant. There are many gradations in a kiss, even in that of an
innocent young girl, and Modeste is innocence itself; but hers is the
innocence of knowledge, not of ignorance. I may be blind, but my
tenderness is all-seeing, and I charge you to watch over my daughter."

Dumay, now actually ferocious, the notary, in the character of a man
bound to ferret out a mystery, Madame Latournelle, the deceived
chaperone, and Madame Dumay, alarmed for her husband's safety, became
at once a set of spies, and Modeste from this day forth was never left
alone for an instant. Dumay passed nights under her window wrapped in
his cloak like a jealous Spaniard; but with all his military sagacity
he was unable to detect the least suspicious sign. Unless she loved
the nightingales in the villa park, or some fairy prince, Modeste
could have seen no one, and had neither given nor received a signal.
Madame Dumay, who never went to bed till she knew Modeste was asleep,
watched the road from the upper windows of the Chalet with a vigilance
equal to her husband's. Under these eight Argus eyes the blameless
child, whose every motion was studied and analyzed, came out of the
ordeal so fully acquitted of all criminal conversation that the four
friends declared to each other privately that Madame Mignon was
foolishly over-anxious. Madame Latournelle, who always took Modeste to
church and brought her back again, was commissioned to tell the mother
that she was mistaken about her daughter.

"Modeste," she said, "is a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works
herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of
another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by
that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was
Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand);
"she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo.
I'm sure I don't know where such people" (Victor Hugo, Lamartine,
Byron being SUCH PEOPLE to the Madame Latournelles of the bourgeoisie)
"get their ideas. Modeste kept talking to me of Childe Harold, and as
I did not wish to get the worst of the argument I was silly enough to
try to read the thing. Perhaps it was the fault of the translator, but
it actually turned my stomach; I was dazed; I couldn't possibly finish
it. Why, the man talks about comparisons that howl, rocks that faint,
and waves of war! However, he is only a travelling Englishman, and we
must expect absurdities,--though his are really inexcusable. He takes
you to Spain, and sets you in the clouds above the Alps, and makes the
torrents talk, and the stars; and he says there are too many virgins!
Did you ever hear the like? Then, after Napoleon's campaigns, the
lines are full of sonorous brass and flaming cannon-balls, rolling
along from page to page. Modeste tells me that all that bathos is put
in by the translator, and that I ought to read the book in English.
But I certainly sha'n't learn English to read Lord Byron when I didn't