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

Havre, blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle
classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion,
abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure
that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen
him since. Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob
Althor, the father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I
really don't know what you mean."

This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was
a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle
and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardly desertion. The
daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their
wishes gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and
grooms, and otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in
possession of an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to
kiss her hand, and take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted
his flowers and all the little proofs of tenderness with which it is
proper to surround the lady of our choice; she even worked him a
purse, believing in such ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but
cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the Vilquins, and the Althors.

Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame
Mignon and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine
with the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot
of the lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the
eldest Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful,
and of high birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of
her engagement she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million.
Her poverty, well known to all, became a sentinel defending the
approaches to the Chalet fully as well as the prudence of the
Latournelles or the vigilance of Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a
time on Mademoiselle Mignon's position only to insult her.

"Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course."

"What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the
chance to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take
her!"

"After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--"

And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste's
imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and
the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing
that Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of
them as they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed
surprise that the mother and daughter were willing to live on among
the scenes of their former splendor. From her open window behind the
closed blinds Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--