Modeste Mignon. Оноре де Бальзак
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comprehending that genius is quite as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men during his magnificent campaign in France. “I tie in goddon,” said the father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet a grief which distressed him. “I owe no mann anything—” and he died, still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.
Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck, Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and left Tours before the disbandment of the army.
In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife’s property out of the funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confident that the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.
While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New York freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He sent Dumay on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned, after making a double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase of cottons at a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his family in the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the principles of banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of a native of Provence.
This double operation of Dumay’s was worth a fortune to the house of Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons, a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature. Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron’s books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in the world as the owner of the little house (which his master’s liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune to the richest commercial house in Havre.
Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved, or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived. Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon. When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added something to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier’s services, until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight thousand francs. In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie, a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.
The deplorable state of Madame Mignon’s health was caused in part by the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father, leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles’s return came near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration enjoyed by her husband, his absolute affection, giving her an unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him—all these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the bright evening of her stormy life, a hidden catastrophe, buried in the heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention, came as the precursor of renewed trials.
In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris, and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his creditors.
“Havre shall never see me doing nothing,” said the colonel to the lieutenant. “Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per cent.”
“Three, my colonel.”
“At nothing, then,” cried Mignon, peremptorily; “you shall have your share in the profits of what I now undertake. The ‘Modeste,’ which is no longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my wife and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good news.”
Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. “I think,” he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, “that my colonel has a plan laid out.”
The following day at dawn he accompanied his master on board the “Modeste” bound for Constantinople. There, on the poop of the vessel, the Breton said to the Provencal—
“What are your last commands, my colonel?”
“That no man shall enter the Chalet,” cried the father with strong emotion. “Dumay, guard my last child as though you were a bull-dog. Death to the man who seduces another daughter! Fear nothing, not even the scaffold—I will be with you.”
“My colonel, go in peace. I understand you. You shall find Mademoiselle Mignon on your return such as you now give her to me, or I shall be dead. You know me, and you know your Pyrenees hounds. No man shall reach your daughter. Forgive me for troubling you with words.”
The two soldiers clasped arms like men who had learned to understand each other in the solitudes of Siberia.
On the same day the Havre “Courier” published the following terrible, simple, energetic, and honorable notice:—
“The house of Charles Mignon suspends payment. But the
undersigned, assignees of the estate, undertake to pay