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

her father's pardon. Notwithstanding the consolations which the
ministers of religion, touched by her repentance, freely gave her, she
cried in heartrending tones with her latest breath: "Oh father!
father!" "Never give your heart without your hand," she said to
Modeste an hour before she died; "and above all, accept no attentions
from any man without telling everything to papa and mamma."

These words, so earnest in their practical meaning, uttered in the
hour of death, had more effect upon Modeste than if Bettina had
exacted a solemn oath. The dying girl, farseeing as prophet, drew from
beneath her pillow a ring which she had sent by her faithful maid,
Francoise Cochet, to be engraved in Havre with these words, "Think of
Bettina, 1827," and placed it on her sister's finger, begging her to
keep it there until she married. Thus there had been between these two
young girls a strange commingling of bitter remorse and the artless
visions of a fleeting spring-time too early blighted by the keen north
wind of desertion; yet all their tears, regrets and memories were
always subordinate to their horror of evil.

Nevertheless, this drama of a poor seduced sister returning to die
under a roof of elegant poverty, the failure of her father, the
baseness of her betrothed, the blindness of her mother caused by
grief, had touched the surface only of Modeste's life, by which alone
the Dumays and the Latournelles judged her; for no devotion of friends
can take the place of a mother's eye. The monotonous life in the
dainty little Chalet, surrounded by the choice flowers which Dumay
cultivated; the family customs, as regular as clock-work, the
provincial decorum, the games at whist while the mother knitted and
the daughter sewed, the silence, broken only by the roar of the sea in
the equinoctial storms,--all this monastic tranquillity did in fact
hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the
spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young
girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her
plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of
a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it
were to watch for the passing of a man,--the man of her dreams, the
expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under
the fire of Dumay's pistols.

During the depression caused by her sister's death Modeste flung
herself into the practice of reading, until her mind became sodden in
it. Born to the use of two languages, she could speak and read German
quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the
matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three
literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great
works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,