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

from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in
its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
sprang full-armed, brilliant, sincere, and strong, an overwhelming
admiration for genius. To Modeste a new book was an event; a
masterpiece that would have horrified Madame Latournelle made her
happy,--equally unhappy if the great work did not play havoc with her
heart. A lyric instinct bubbled in that girlish soul, so full of the
beautiful illusions of its youth. But of this radiant existence not a
gleam reached the surface of daily life; it escaped the ken of Dumay
and his wife and the Latournelles; the ears of the blind mother alone
caught the crackling of its flame.

The profound disdain which Modeste now conceived for ordinary men gave
to her face a look of pride, an inexpressible untamed shyness, which
tempered her Teutonic simplicity, and accorded well with a peculiarity
of her head. The hair growing in a point above the forehead seemed the
continuation of a slight line which thought had already furrowed
between the eyebrows, and made the expression of untameability perhaps
a shade too strong. The voice of this charming child, whom her father,
delighting in her wit, was wont to call his "little proverb of
Solomon," had acquired a precious flexibility of organ through the
practice of three languages. This advantage was still further enhanced
by a natural bell-like tone both sweet and fresh, which touched the
heart as delightfully as it did the ear. If the mother could no longer
see the signs of a noble destiny upon her daughter's brow, she could
study the transitions of her soul's development in the accents of that
voice attuned to love.



CHAPTER VI

A MAIDEN'S FIRST ROMANCE

To this period of Modeste's eager rage for reading succeeded the
exercise of a strange faculty given to vigorous imaginations,--the
power, namely, of making herself an actor in a dream-existence; of
representing to her own mind the things desired, with so vivid a
conception that they seemed actually to attain reality; in short, to
enjoy by thought,--to live out her years within her mind; to marry; to
grow old; to attend her own funeral like Charles V.; to play within
herself the comedy of life and, if need be, that of death. Modeste was
indeed playing, but all alone, the comedy of Love. She fancied herself
adored to the summit of her wishes in many an imagined phase of social
life. Sometimes as the heroine of a dark romance, she loved the
executioner, or the wretch who ended her days upon the scaffold, or,
like her sister, some Parisian youth without a penny, whose struggles
were all beneath a garret-roof. Sometimes she was Ninon, scorning men
amid continual fetes; or some applauded actress, or gay adventuress,