Modeste Mignon

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To a Polish Lady.

Daughter of an enslaved land, angel through love, witch through
fancy, child by faith, aged by experience, man in brain, woman in

heart, giant by hope, mother through sorrows, poet in thy dreams,
--to THEE belongs this book, in which thy love, thy fancy, thy

experience, thy sorrow, thy hope, thy dreams, are the warp through
which is shot a woof less brilliant than the poesy of thy soul,

whose expression, when it shines upon thy countenance, is, to
those who love thee, what the characters of a lost language are to

scholars.
De Balzac.

MODESTE MIGNON
CHAPTER I

THE CHALET
At the beginning of October, 1829, Monsieur Simon Babylas Latournelle,

notary, was walking up from Havre to Ingouville, arm in arm with his
son and accompanied by his wife, at whose side the head clerk of the

lawyer's office, a little hunchback named Jean Butscha, trotted along
like a page. When these four personages (two of whom came the same way

every evening) reached the elbow of the road where it turns back upon
itself like those called in Italy "cornice," the notary looked about

to see if any one could overhear him either from the terrace above or
the path beneath, and when he spoke he lowered his voice as a further

precaution.
"Exupere," he said to his son, "you must try to carry out

intelligently a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you
are not to ask the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I

command you to toss it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man
who expects to have a hand in the government of his country is bound

to keep within him for the secrets of others. After you have paid your
respects and compliments to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon, to

Monsieur and Madame Dumay, and to Monsieur Gobenheim if he is at the
Chalet, and as soon as quiet is restored, Monsieur Dumay will take you

aside; you are then to look attentively at Mademoiselle Modeste (yes,
I am willing to allow it) during the whole time he is speaking to you.

My worthy friend will ask you to go out and take a walk; at the end of
an hour, that is, about nine o'clock, you are to come back in a great

hurry; try to puff as if you were out of breath, and whisper in
Monsieur Dumay's ear, quite low, but so that Mademoiselle Modeste is

sure to overhear you, these words: 'The young man has come.'"
Exupere was to start the next morning for Paris to begin the study of

law. This impendingdeparture had induced Latournelle to propose him
to his friend Dumay as an accomplice in the important conspiracy which

these directions indicate.
"Is Mademoiselle Modeste suspected of having a lover?" asked Butscha

in a timid voice of Madame Latournelle.
"Hush, Butscha," she replied, taking her husband's arm.

Madame Latournelle, the daughter of a clerk of the supreme court,
feels that her birth authorizes her to claim issue from a

parliamentary family. This conviction explains why the lady, who is
somewhat blotched as to complexion, endeavors to assume in her own

person the majesty of a court whose decrees are recorded in her
father's pothooks. She takes snuff, holds herself as stiff as a

ramrod, poses for a person of consideration, and resembles nothing so
much as a mummy brought momentarily to life by galvanism. She tries to

give high-bred tones to her sharp voice, and succeeds no better in
doing that than in hiding her general lack of breeding. Her social

usefulness seems, however, incontestable when we glance at the flower-
bedecked cap she wears, at the false front frizzling around her

forehead, at the gowns of her choice; for how could shopkeepers
dispose of those products if there were no Madame Latournelle? All

these absurdities of the worthy woman, who is truly pious and
charitable, might have passed unnoticed, if nature, amusing herself as

she often does by turning out these ludicrous creations, had not
endowed her with the height of a drum-major, and thus held up to view

the comicalities of her provincial nature. She has never been out of
Havre; she believes in the infallibility of Havre; she proclaims

herself Norman to the very tips of her fingers; she venerates her
father, and adores her husband.

Little Latournelle was bold enough to marry this lady after she had
attained the anti-matrimonial age of thirty-three, and what is more,

he had a son by her. As he could have got the sixty thousand francs of
her "dot" in several other ways, the public assigned his uncommon

intrepidity to a desire to escape an invasion of the Minotaur, against
whom his personal qualifications would have insufficiently protected

him had he rashly dared his fate by bringing home a young and pretty
wife. The fact was, however, that the notary recognized the really

fine qualities of Mademoiselle Agnes (she was called Agnes) and
reflected to himself that a woman's beauty is soon past and gone to a

husband. As to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court
bestowed in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle

is still so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty-
five years and seven months, that she would still provide him, if it

were necessary, with her breast and her milk,--an hyperbole which
alone can fully express her impassioned maternity. "How handsome he

is, that son of mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they
walk to church, with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is

like you," Modeste Mignon answers, very much as she might have said,
"What horrid weather!" This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite

important as an accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been
the chaperone of the young girl against whom the notary and his friend

Dumay are now plotting to set up what we have called, in the
"Physiologie du Mariage," a "mouse-trap."

As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the
purest honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any

stranger would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to
which, however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His

eyesight, said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green
goggles for the protection of his eyes, which were constantly

inflamed. The arch of each eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair,
surrounded the tortoise-shell rim of the glasses and made a couple of

circles as it were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the
human face the effect produced by these circumferences placed one

within the other, and separated by a hollow space or line, you can
hardly imagine how perplexing such a face will be to you, especially

if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that
of Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give to cats. This double

resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas Latournelle. Above
the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown, all the more crafty

in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the
white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across

the forehead. An observertaking note of this excellent Norman,
clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple

of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men,
would have sought, without finding it, for the reason of such physical

misrepresentation.
Jean Butscha, a natural son abandoned by his parents and taken care of

by the clerk of the court and his daughter, and now, through sheer
hard work, head-clerk to the notary, fed and lodged by his master, who

gave him a salary of nine hundred francs, almost a dwarf, and with no
semblance of youth,--Jean Butscha made Modeste his idol, and would

willingly have given his life for hers. The poor fellow, whose eyes
were hollowed beneath their heavy lids like the touch-holes of a

cannon, whose head overweighted his body, with its shock of crisp
hair, and whose face was pock-marked, had lived under pitying eyes

from the time he was seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain
his whole being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct,

he went his way over that vast tract of country named on the map of