Modeste Mignon

Book excerpt: Modeste Mignon is a young woman living with her blind mother and watched over by her absent father’s majordomo and wife. They’re determined to keep her from men until her father returns from his long sea voyage. She’s by all appearances the perfect daughter, but her mother believes Modeste has a secret: she’s in love! The attempts to determine whether this is true, and the aftermath, is Balzac at his wittiest. But even though she may seem like the ideal daughter, Modeste is somewhat subversive, at odds with the prevailing ideas of the time of how an ingénue should behave. Modeste Mignon, written in 1844, is one of Balzac’s last additions to the Human Comedy. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.