Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

forty thousand francs
herewith enclosed is for my wife and children.

Till we meet.--Your colonel and friend,

Charles Mignon.

"Your father is coming," said Madame Mignon to her daughter.

"What makes you think so, mamma?" asked Modeste.

"Nothing else could make Dumay hurry himself."

"Victory! victory!" cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the garden gate. "Madame, the colonel has not been ill a moment; he is coming back--coming back on the 'Mignon,' a fine ship of his own, which together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine hundred thousand francs. But he requires secrecy from all of us; his heart is still wrung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl."

"He has still to learn her death," said Madame Mignon.

"He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right, to the rapacity of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to any one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle," he whispered in Modeste's ear, "write to your father and tell him of his loss and also the terrible results on your mother's health and eyesight; prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to get the letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will have to pass through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter; you have plenty of time. I will take the letter on Monday; Monday I shall probably go to Paris."

Modeste was so afraid that Canalis and Dumay would meet that she started hastily for the house to write to her poet and put off the rendezvous.

"Mademoiselle," said Dumay, in a very humble manner and barring Modeste's way, "may your father find his daughter with no other feelings in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother before he was obliged to leave her."

"I have sworn to myself, to my sister, and to my mother to be the joy, the consolation, and the glory of my father, and _I shall keep my oath_!" replied Modeste with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumay. "Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father's return with insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl's heart from beating--you don't want me to be a mummy, do you?" she said. "My hand belongs to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my father and my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, monsieur?"

"Thank you, mademoiselle; you restore me to life," said Dumay, "but you might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!"

"Swear to me," said her mother, "that you have not engaged a word or a look with any young man."

"I can swear that, my dear mother," said Modeste, laughing, and looking at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a mischievous girl.

"She must be false indeed if you are right," cried Dumay, when Modeste had left them and gone into the house.

"My daughter Modeste may have faults," said her mother, "but falsehood is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true."

"Well! then let us feel easy," continued Dumay, "and believe that misfortune has closed his account with us."

"God grant it!" answered Madame Mignon. "You will see _him_, Dumay; but I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy."


CHAPTER XII. A DECLARATION OF LOVE,--SET TO MUSIC

At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father, was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much larger fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her new-found ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the six millions she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated by her two joys and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she seated herself at the piano, that confidant of so many young girls, who tell out their wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing them by the notes and tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his wife in the garden under the windows, telling her the secret of their own wealth, and questioning her as to her desires and her intentions. Madame Dumay had, like her husband, no other family than the Mignons. Husband and wife agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the Comte de La Bastie really meant to live in Provence, and to leave their money to whichever of Modeste's children might need it most.

"Listen to Modeste," said Madame Mignon, addressing them. "None but a girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music."

Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a maiden's love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently eat through the globe, if nothing stops it.

Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting to music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here--albeit they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had mentioned--because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too precise, of his measures.


THE MAIDEN'S SONG

Hear, arise! the lark is shaking
Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
Sleep no more; the violet, waking,
Wafts her incense to the skies.

Flowers revived, their eyes unclosing,
See themselves in drops of dew
In each calyx-cup reposing,
Pearls of a day their mirror true.

Breeze divine, the god of roses,
Passed by night to bless their bloom;
See! for him each bud uncloses,
Glows, and yields its rich perfume.

Then arise! the lark is shaking
Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
Nought is sleeping--Heart, awaking,
Lift thine incense to the skies.


"It is very pretty," said Madame Dumay. "Modeste is a musician, and that's the whole of it."

"The devil is in her!" cried the cashier, into whose heart the suspicion of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.

"She loves," persisted Madame Mignon.

By succeeding, through the undeniable testimony of the song, in making the cashier a sharer in her belief as to the state of Modeste's heart, Madame Mignon destroyed the happiness the return and the prosperity of his master had brought him. The poor Breton went down the hill to Havre and to his desk in Gobenheim's counting-room with a heavy heart; then, before returning to dinner, he went to see Latournelle, to tell his fears, and beg once more for the notary's advice and assistance.

"Yes, my dear friend," said Dumay, when they parted on the steps of the notary's door, "I now agree with madame; she loves,--yes, I am sure of it; and the devil knows the rest. I am dishonored."

"Don't make yourself unhappy, Dumay," answered the little notary. "Among us all we can surely get the better of the little puss; sooner or later, every girl in love betrays herself,--you may be sure of that. But we will talk about it this evening."

Thus it happened that all those devoted to the Mignon family were fully as disquieted and uncertain as they were before the old soldier tried the experiment which he expected would be so decisive. The ill-success of his past efforts so stimulated Dumay's sense of duty, that he determined not to go to Paris to see after his own fortune as announced by his patron, until he had guessed the riddle of Modeste's heart. These friends, to whom feelings were more precious than interests, well knew that unless the daughter were pure and innocent, the father would die of grief when he came to know the death of Bettina and the blindness of his wife. The distress of poor Dumay made such an impression on the Latournelles that they even forgot their parting with Exupere, whom they had sent off that morning to Paris. During dinner, while the three were alone, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle and Butscha turned the problem over and over in their minds, and discussed every aspect of it.

"If Modeste loved any one in Havre she would have shown some fear yesterday," said Madame Latournelle; "her lover, therefore, lives somewhere else."

"She swore to her mother this morning," said the notary, "in presence of Dumay, that she had not exchanged a look or a word with any living soul."

"Then she loves after my fashion!" exclaimed Butscha.

"And how is that, my poor lad?" asked Madame Latournelle.

"Madame," said the little cripple, "I love alone and afar--oh! as far as from here to the stars."

"How do you manage it, you silly fellow?" said Madame Latournelle, laughing.

"Ah, madame!" said Butscha, "what you call my hump is the socket of my wings."

"So that is the explanation of your seal, is it?" cried the notary.

Butscha's seal was a star, and under it the words "Fulgens, sequar,"--"Shining One, I follow thee,"--the motto of the house of Chastillonest.

"A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest," said Butscha, as if speaking to himself; "Modeste is clever enough to fear she may be loved only for her beauty."

Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for, according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,--where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being. From this, forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism, though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the spiritual world. It is rare to find a deformed person who is not gifted with some special faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness. Like instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings, highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive. This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.

Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking, he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful