Modeste Mignon

Excerpt from Modeste Mignon: And Other Stories

"Modeste Mignon" occupies a very peculiar place in Balzac's works - a place indeed, which, though for the form's sake more than anything else the author has connected it with the rest of the "Comedie" by some repetition of personages, is almost entirely isolated. I think it has puzzled some devoted Balzacians - so much so that I have seen it omitted even from lists of his works suitable to "the young person," in which it surely should have had an eminent place. As it is distinctly late - it was written in 1844, and nothing of combined magnitude and first-class importance succeeded it except "Les Parents Pauvres" - it may not impossibly serve as a basis for the expectation that if Balzac, after his re-establishment in Paris as a wealthy personage, had received a new lease of life and vigor instead of a sentence of death, we might have had from him a series of works as different from anything that he had composed before as "Modeste Mignon" is from her sisters.

In saying this, I do not mean to put the book itself in the very first class of its author's work. It is too much of an experiment for that of an experiment as far as the heroine is concerned, the boldness and novelty of which is likely to be underestimated by almost any reader, unless he be a literary student who pays strict attention to times and seasons. Even in England (though Charlotte Bronte was planning her at this very time) the willful, unconventional heroine was something of a novelty; and when it is remembered how infinitely stricter was the standard of the French ingenue, until quite recently, than it ever, even in the depths of the eighteenth century, was in England, the audacity of the conception of Modeste may be at least generally appreciated.

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