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

Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands.
Lately, for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of
nightingales, musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused
the attention of her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness
for composition and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.

"If your suspicions have no other foundation," said Latournelle to
Madame Mignon, "I pity your susceptibilities."

"When a Breton girl sings," said Dumay gloomily, "the lover is not far
off."

"I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising," said the
mother, "and you shall judge for yourselves--"

"Poor girl!" said Madame Dumay, "If she only knew our anxiety she
would be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially
if she thought it would save Dumay."

"My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow," said Madame
Mignon; "perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have
discovered by trickery."

Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is
everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies,
these honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being
able to ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-
affair, or the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the
result of a struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the
despotism of a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the
never-ending repetition of the first scene played by man when the
curtain of the Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.

And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right
of it?

None of the persons who were about Modeste could understand that
maiden heart--for the soul and the face we have described were in
harmony. The girl had transported her existence into another world, as
much denied and disbelieved in in these days of ours as the new world
of Christopher Columbus in the sixteenth century. Happily, she kept
her own counsel, or they would have thought her crazy. But first we
must explain the influence of the past upon her nature.

Two events had formed the soul and developed the mind of this young
girl. Monsieur and Madame Mignon, warned by the fate that overtook
Bettina, had resolved, just before the failure, to marry Modeste. They
chose the son of a rich banker, formerly of Hamburg, but established
in Havre since 1815,--a man, moreover, who was under obligations to
them. The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of