Writing Modeste Mignon - Armine Kotin Mortimer L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 1991, pp. 26-37 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins ...

Writing Modeste Mignon
   Armine Kotin Mortimer

   L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 31, Number 3, Fall 1991, pp. 26-37 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.1991.0014

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526755/summary

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Writing Modeste Mignon

                         Armine Kotin Mortimer

I
     N THE 1844 ROMANTIC NOVEL Modeste Mignon, Balzac
     wagered that love can coexist with marriage, a program that is both
     naive and devious in the frame of La Comédie humaine. The novel’s
key device is a beguiling strategy of writing and reading: Modeste’s
ingenuously amorous anonymous correspondence with the glorious poet
Canalis whose secretary, Ernest de La Brière, reads her letters and replies
in his place. Immodestly calling herself Mile O. d’Este-M., Modeste
thinks her poetically inspired letters address Canalis, while La Brière
knows he is not what he seems to her and signs no name at all. Modeste
mistakenly ascribes La Brière’s self-representation to Canalis, whereas
La Brière writes both for himself and as if for Canalis, and struggles to
read the real Modeste behind the mask. There is thus a real and an
imaginary writer and a real and an imaginary reader on both sides, but
the omniscient reader has the pleasure of knowing more than the writers
of the letters do about each other. This strategy evolves in Barthes’s third
type of reading pleasure: “ la lecture est conductrice du Désir d’écrire;
[. . .] ce que nous désirons, c’est seulement le désir que le scripteur a eu
d’écrire, ou encore: nous désirons le désir que l’auteur a eu du lecteur
lorsqu’il écrivait, nous désirons le aimez-moi qui est dans toute
écriture.” 1 Writing, for Modeste as for us, has all the dangerous attrac­
tion of a transgression, since her father has ordered that no man may
approach her; it stems as much from this interdiction as from her tem­
perament, and it is a wily supplement to the interdiction. In this still
classical novel, writing manipulates the real reader just as it does
Modeste. Balzac wins the wager by persuading the reader that the letter-
writing translates, indeed creates, both the true selves and the ideal
destinatees of the correspondents.
    Situated in 1829, Modeste Mignon forges a new alliance between the
cynical social realism of marriage and the idealistic romanticism of love.
While a fundamental doubleness threatens happiness—“ l’homme est
double,” La Brière blankly states—the ending unites all contraries.2
Modeste’s very physiognomy signals her double nature. Purity, trans­
parence, luminosity, the signifiers of modesty, are contradicted by lips
that “ expriment la volupté” (482), the intimate signifiers of immodesty.

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The candor of her eye disputes “ la moquerie la plus instruite” ; and “ la
poésie qui régnait sur le front presque mystique était quasi démentie par
la voluptueuse expression de la bouche” (482). The physical portrait ends
with this euphemistic expression of Modeste’s sexual potential:

un observateur aurait pensé que cette jeune fille, à l’oreille alerte et fine que tout bruit
éveillait, au nez ouvert aux parfum s de la fleur bleue de l’Idéal, devait être le théâtre d ’un
com bat entre les poésies qui se jouent a utour de tous les levers de soleil et les labeurs de la
journée, entre la Fantaisie et la Réalité. M odeste était la jeune fille curieuse et pudique,
sachant sa destinée et pleine de chasteté, la vierge de l’Espagne plutôt que celle de Raphaël.
(482)

Exceptionally acquainted with passion through her sister Bettina’s fatal
love affair, Modeste is chaste but not pure, devoured by curiosity if not
“ instruite” (503). Her warm, blond German nature, poetic and artistic,
is opposed to cold French Reason. She is both bourgeoise and noble. She
is poised on the brink of love, at the poignant, twilight moment between
girlhood and womanhood.
     Her double experience opposes humble reality to “ le poème de sa vie
idéale” (509). In a poetic passage (509-10) opposing marriage to love, the
opulence of Balzac’s most flowery rhetoric artfully conveys what it
hides. Put somewhat crudely, which is just what Balzac did not do, the
gist of the passage is something like this: a girl’s love is so innocent that it
does not include sexual desire; it is Platonic, both in its refusal of carnal
passion and in its birth in ideas and its sustaining of ideals; and it is
poetic, “ la première illusion des jeunes filles.” It is “ l’oiseau bleu du
paradis des jeunes filles,” which no hand or gun can reach, with magic
colors and scintillating precious stones that dazzle. Reality, on the other
hand, the destiny of every “ jeune fille” who is not to become a “ vieille
fille,” is “ cette hideuse Harpie accompagnée de témoins et de monsieur
le Maire,” a comic pseudo-mythic periphrasis for marriage. (Elsewhere
Balzac will write of “ les tessons de verre de la Réalité” [608].) The
opposition of Reality to Fantasy, Ideal, poetry, and “ pudeur” is the
operative dichotomy of the entire novel, and the opposition throughout
the narrative between poetry and the positive is the ultimate ramification
of doubleness. The finality of the novel will consist in reuniting con­
traries, in unifying the doubleness of Modeste, in preparing and fore­
telling the persistence and flowering of poetry within the hideous reality
of marriage. The intrinsically double correspondence, with its double
writers and double readers and replete with double meanings in its

Vo l . X X X I, N o. 3                                                                        27

L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r

address to the omniscient reader as well, is the major operator of this
reunification.

The Imaginary: Figuration, Representation
    Modeste Mignon falls handily into two parts, of nearly equal size
(56% and 44% of the whole, respectively), before and after the moment
when Charles Mignon tells Modeste she has declared her love to La
Brière and not Canalis (606). The first part is novel—both innovative and
novelistic, the second mundane—commonplace as well as worldly. The
second part replays the story of the love letters from new premises, on
the plane of social and economic realities which until then had no signifi­
cant part in the story. Although the term roman (and all its cognates)
initially has ironic connotations, the happy ending valorizes the “ novel”
of the first part without neglecting the mundane realities.
    This romantic reading stems, paradoxically, from our unshaken
belief in the success of the representation of self in the letters. In the
novel part, Modeste indulges in “ des lectures continuelles” (504), which
arouse in her “ une admiration absolue pour le génie” (505). Like Emma
Bovary, she has the

étrange faculté donnée aux imaginations vives de se fa ire acteur dans une vie arrangée
comme dans un rêve-, de se représenter les choses désirées avec une impression si m ordante
q u ’elle touche à la réalité, de jo u ir enfin par la pensée, de dévorer to u t ju sq u ’aux années, de
se m arier, de se voir vieux, d ’assister à son convoi comme Charles-Quint, de jo u e r enfin en
soi-même la comédie de la vie, et, au besoin celle de la m ort. M odeste jouait, elle, la
comédie de l’am our. (505-06, emphasis added)

The italicized terms insistently formulate a naive theory of representa­
tion, the system that underlies the writing of the self in the letters. It is
something like Barthes’s figuration, the appearance of the erotic body in
the text: “ le texte lui-même, structure diagrammatique, et non pas imita­
tive, peut se dévoiler sous forme de corps,” which attests to a figure of
the text. Representation, on the other hand, would be “une figuration
embarrassée [. . .] un espace d’alibis (réalité, morale, vraisemblance,
lisibilité, vérité, etc.).” 3 Modeste’s reading of the figuration of love in
letters resembles a naive reading of the mimetic novel. The entire first
part remains enmeshed in this system of figuration in which the risks of
inherent falsehood are known. It addresses a reader who, guided by the
device of the correspondence, confirms the power of figuration par
lettres.

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M   o r t im e r

    When paternal authority closes Modeste’s novel, bursting her imagin­
ary bubble, fantasy fades into a mundane comedy of manners, “ the
Heiress.” The exposure of the correspondents’ real names and stations
puts into question the entire fairy-tale story of the anonymous correspon­
dence. If Love is the prime mover of the first part, that other prime
mover of La Comédie humaine, Money, now flatly introduces its incon­
trovertible materiality. Suavely addressing a sophisticated reader who
enjoys the social and economic operations of the devious moral comedy
of marriage, this part is realistic in that rank and wealth are the serious
issues, the necessities of reason instead of the poetic desires of the heart.
Playing out an archetypal structure that follows on the transgression of
interdiction, this part puts both Modeste and Ernest to several tests (will
her heart recognize her love? will he win her through his real valor, rather
than his epistolary costume?), which culminate in a mythic choice of the
weakest of three. Here representation becomes its own object; the theat­
rical posing of the heiress and the three suitors is representation for its
own sake; it is meta-representation and sometimes misrepresentation;
and it is devious because self-conscious. It is Barthes’s “ hampered
figuration,” an overt mechanism. Here is obdurate reality, the space of
alibis that resists figuration and opposes pleasure, refusing the system of
naive representation of the first part. Here too writing stops, reading
ceases. Only the romantic and mysterious correspondence justifies La
Brière’s role in this comedy, since none of the normal social routes would
have brought him to Le Havre as a suitor. While the reader enamored of
realities may enjoy the show, it is because the beguiling correspondence
has already won Balzac’s wager.

Writing Love Letters, or l ’amour parle l ’être
    The device of the letter-writing is the key mechanism by which the
reader accomplishes the union of reality and the ideal—marriage and
love. By a strategic semantic slippage, an attractive contrivance designed
to seduce the reader, love occurs doubly par lettres—both in literature
and in a correspondence. Modeste thinks she loves, through literature,
“ un homme de lettres,” Canalis, “ crayonné dans une pose assez
byronienne” (510). But La Brière is “ l’homme aux lettres,” not only the
man who produces letters but also the man created by his letter-writing.
Balzac suggests we are to participate in the creation of the fiction of his
self-representation: the “ sentiments vraiment héroïques du pauvre
secrétaire intime,” the truth of his character, are an effect of the reader’s

Vo l . X X X I, N o. 3                                                     29

L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r

imagination, which makes the letters “ plus belles qu’elles ne le sont”
(553). Thus the reader operates the passage from love by literature,
which is contrived, to love by correspondence, which is true.
     We know this if we heed an important guide. About midway an
apparently insignificant intertext inscribes into the novel the principle
governing its writing. A gently ironic, implicit comparison between La
Brière and Butscha, the faithful, devoted dwarf, introduces what seems
an inconsequential allusion to La Belle et la Bête (571-72). Laying a trap
for Modeste, Butscha asks if one can be loved independently of the
“ forme, belle ou laide, et pour son âme seulement” (571). When
Modeste reminds him, “ vous oubliez que la Bête se change en prince
Charmant,” the dwarf, one of the innumerable partial doubles of Balzac
who styles himself a model lover for a woman, claims the Beast’s chang­
ing into Prince Charming indicates “ le phénomène de l’âme rendue
visible, éteignant la forme sous sa radieuse lumière” (572). Allied with
magnetism, somnambulism and other such phenomena Balzac believed
in which impart concrete realization to the ineffable, deep inner self, this
Prince Charming effect is the very mechanism of the love letters, which
reveal the radiant light of La Brière’s soul, blinding one to the “ form ,”
the external appearance of the modest secretary. Thus the quasi­
visionary Charles Mignon penetrates immediately to the truth of Ernest’s
character: “ Charles Mignon recula de trois pas, arrêta sur La Brière un
regard qui pénétra dans les yeux du jeune homme comme un poignard
dans sa gaine, et il resta silencieux en trouvant la plus entière candeur, la
vérité la plus pure sur cette physionomie épanouie, dans ces yeux
enchantés” (598). The Beast is, after all, a Prince Charming; his beastli­
ness is merely temporary, and all happy endings throw away the mask.
     Thus the real being lies in the hidden soul, a kind of unconscious both
masked and revealed by the writing and reading. What is in question is
the truth or falsehood of the figuration. For both letter-writers, self­
representation is immodest. It is immodest of La Brière to pass himself
off as Canalis, but he is nevertheless a modest person; his writing masks
and reveals his modesty, as Balzac reminds us frequently: “ Les gens
véritablement modestes, comme l’est Ernest de La Brière” (589). As for
Modeste, her lettered signature, Mlle O. d ’Este-M., bespeaks the imagin­
ary self she creates, with an admirable economy. Displacing a single let­
ter, Modeste eliminates the generic Mignon, acquires the noble particule
d ’, the powerful name Este, and the hyphenated addition of a second
name indicated only by the mysterious M. but suggesting an alliance

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M   o r t im e r

important enough to preserve both family names in one. (By just such a
mechanism will she become vicomtesse de La Bastie-La Brière.) Este is a
sign of nobility and power, wealth and lineage, with an added flavor of
slightly exotic southern warm th.4 She deploys the modesty of her given
name into something much more pretentious: an entire family history.
Truly Modeste’s name is rich—in possibilities! On both sides, then, the
reality of the self is modest, morally or economically, whereas the written
mask is decidedly immodest. Yet the omniscient reader little doubts that
the letters have spoken the writers’ beings.
    The letters ostensibly circulate between a pseudonym and an absent
name: between the not true and the not false, in semiotic terms. When
these masks are removed, what takes place during the comedy of “ the
Heiress” relates the true and the false: the true Modeste and “ le faux
Canalis,” a periphrasis that maliciously and repeatedly designates La
Brière in the second part. Unmasking Ernest does not automatically
make him truthful; he must shed the apparent falsehood he acquired in
wearing Canalis’s name, which is Modeste’s entire complaint against
him. Knowing who really wrote the letters is not yet the condition of
what has been called one of the four happy marriages in La Comédie
humaine. 5 To arrive at the happy ending, the marriage of the ideal and
the positive, the reader sees to it that Modeste and Ernest safely avoid the
risks of falsehood inherent in the self-representations of the letters. Our
reading must satisfactorily answer Modeste’s anguished question about
Ernest: “ ses vertus, ses qualités, ses beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas un
costume épistolaire?” (607).
     In literary terms, Ernest’s self is anti-poetic. His first letter is an
immediate corrective to Modeste’s poetic enthusiasms and admiration of
genius; from the reader’s point of view, it is a stroke of pure genius, for it
is replete with double meanings addressed to the real reader. For whom is
he writing? Does he write to turn Modeste away from Canalis or to
attract her to himself? From the outset he establishes a disdain for poets,
and he does so “ from within,” with all the truth value associated with
the confessional, self-critical mode. He speaks against Canalis, under
cover of being Canalis; he does not reply as a poet, except to de-poetize;
and he wins doubly since he gives himself a disinterested air, a seeming
objectivity about himself which immediately wins points toward honesty.
This allows him extraordinary freedom to continue the correspondence
without having to pursue the falsehood that he is a poetic genius; he can
answer as a man. The first letter thus goes a long way toward rejecting

Vo l . X X X I, N o. 3                                                     31

L ’E   s p r it   C réateur

love by literature and creating love by correspondence.
    This stratagem depends on an alluring duplicity in the writing. Unlike
Modeste, we do not think of the letters as composed by the poet Canalis
(and there is no signature to remind us). Although Modeste does not yet
know that truth penetrates through the mask in La Brière’s letters, we
do, because the omniscient narrator repeatedly assures us we have heard
the true La Brière in the correspondence, “ si sincère de son côté” : “ La
Brière était trop l’homme de ses lettres, il était trop le cœur noble et pur
qu’il avait laissé voir pour hésiter à la voix de l’honneur” (590). We are
already reading the letters as a portrait of La Brière, whom we are com­
ing to know in his positive reality: honest, just, honorable, forthright,
upright (an “ esprit de rectitude” [525]). That is, we read the letters dif­
ferently than Modeste, who listens to Canalis talking and does not know
she is hearing La Brière. The function of the talking is to create the self,
and secondarily to create the self of the other in the desired image. If at
first we are amused by the layering of voices—Balzac writing for La
Brière writing for Canalis—now we no longer feel this distancing effect;
Balzac and Canalis disappear and we hear La Brière talking. Comparing
his writing to his talking about Modeste’s first letter, in the pages just
before his first reply, we see that La Brière is true to himself, for La
Brière does not talk like Canalis, and his talking speaks his being. As a
counterpoint, the letter by Canalis to the duchesse de Chaulieu (683-85)
reveals, in the tissue of its lies and its style diametrically opposed to La
Brière’s, the vain, deceitful character of the “ grand homme.” Canalis in
Le Havre is even more false than “ le faux Canalis” —false in his preen­
ing theatricality, and false to Modeste when he is told she is not a
millionaire. La Brière in using Canalis’s name, in the first part, is less
false than Canalis using La Brière’s love, in the second. The entire device
of the correspondence considered as addressed to the reader is to con­
vince us that La Brière has never ceased being true precisely because he
was “ le faux Canalis” —because he is not Canalis.
    For both writers, the narrative inscribes a transformation which
passes from the representation of self by letters as literature to the true
selves of the letters as correspondence. This mutation in Modeste is
caused by writing and is aggravated with each letter until the eighth in
which she immodestly proclaims her love—and admits her real name is
somewhat sarcastic (581-84). This extravagantly bold letter rises to a pin­
nacle of moral immodesty, in terms of both propriety and pride. The
Modeste who has given herself in letters, whom Canalis wittily names

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“ cette Immodeste” (684), is the written self that survives as a promise of
enduring love, a necessary ingredient of the united contraries of the end­
ing. Her voluptuous, desiring being here named Modeste for the first
time will be the self that archly and understatedly accepts La Brière’s
immodest Freudian riding stick a page before the end. Thus the ending
escapes from “ hampered figuration” or meta-representation and returns
us to a powerful confirmation of the truth of figuration in the poetic
speaking found in the letters, circulating signifiers of the self.

Reading: The Destinatee
    But the being spoken by the writing, on both sides, exists because of
reading. Reading produces “ la coalescence paradisiaque du sujet et de
l’Image” (Barthes, “ Sur la lecture,” 43). Taking pen in hand, Modeste
Mignon incurs the risk of reaching the wrong reader. Indeed, her first let­
ter to Canalis proves him a bad reader: “ Ce poème, cette exaltation
cachée, enfin le cœur de Modeste fut insouciamment tendu par un geste
de fat” (519). For the cynic Canalis, the anonymous female writer joins
the thirty or so others who have written the great poet; the choice to write
makes her common and commonplace, a “ rouée,” a “ vieille Anglaise”
(the nineteenth-century stereotype of the unattractive female), or poor
and out to snare a husband. Such is, for a man like Canalis, the model of
the female reader’s literary admiration. Only much later will he concede
his misreading, pompously: “ comment deviner à travers les senteurs
enivrantes de ces jolis papiers façonnés, de ces phrases qui portent à la
tête, le cœur vrai, la jeune fille, la jeune femme chez qui l’amour prend
les livrées de la flatterie et qui nous aime pour nous, qui nous apporte la
félicité?” (595). The self of the writing unknowingly courts these
dangers. A task for Modeste’s candor, then, is to safely skirt these risks
and convey the real self, to find a corresponding soul.
    Miraculously, the poem of her heart arrives in a heart of equal can­
dor; only the name was wrong. It is La Brière who reads the first letter as
a “ parfum de modestie” (522), fortuitously realizing Modeste’s very
name; whose innocence proclaims the letter is written by “ une vraie
jeune fille, sans arrière-pensée, avec enthousiasme” (520). When the
writing of Modeste’s letters reaches its desiring reader, its mixture of
imaginary and real composes a self that allies contraries: chaste, inno­
cent, idealistic, but also spiritual, passionate, desiring, and voluptuous
like her lips, a perfectly balanced combination of “ les différentes
Modestes qu’il avait créées en lisant les lettres ou en y répondant” (628).

V o l . X X X I, N o. 3                                                  33

L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r

What Canalis does read accurately in Modeste’s first letter is her idealiza­
tion of genius, the source of her misrepresentation of herself as the poet’s
muse and companion. Her poetic, literary enthusiasms, treated with
irony, would indeed find a proper addressee in Canalis. This misknowl-
edge threatens to prevent her from receiving the heart of La Brière, the
anti-poetic real man, and it is this defect that La Brière’s letters will have
the task of correcting.
     Writing corrects any mistaken address because it drifts. Drifting is a
structural strategy designed to eliminate the false, to redress the error of
address, emblematized by Canalis, for Modeste’s speaking of her being
was not addressed to a postiche of a lover. The dérive is a fundamental
mechanism of the letter-writing, a key to the reader’s pleasure. Canalis
writes poems which go to Modeste’s heart and elicit her letters to
“ Canalis” ; these letters go to the heart of La Brière (and this is the point
where the circuit of correspondence ceases to be the habitual closed
loop), which causes him to write letters which go to the heart of Modeste.
Once arrived in her heart, the letters create there yet another text, the
“ livre que nous commençons” (552), the “ roman” of their love. There is
drifting on both sides of the equation between persons and texts: a sig­
nifier circulates, with a double displacement. A schematic representation
of this circuit makes it obvious that the posturing Canalis and his poems
are altogether outside the circuit; Modeste’s marriage to La Brière is
fated, structurally, by the circulating signifier that arises in Canalis’s
portrait and poems but never returns to its origin.
     Writing not only speaks the self of the writer, but also creates the self
of the reader. La Brière molds Modeste by teaching her to give up the
factitiousness of her literary ideal love and to fuse the love she learned in
books with the common destiny of a woman—marriage. In his third let­
ter (531-34), La Brière recognizes in Modeste “ le beau idéal de l’Art, la
Fantaisie” and judges her “ à la fois un poète et une poésie, avant d’être
une femme” ; he also sees in her “ un désir secret d ’agrandir le cercle
étroit de la vie à laquelle toute femme est condamnée, et de mettre la pas­
sion, l’amour dans le mariage,” a difficult but not impossible dream.
While telling her that “ ce petit roman est fini,” he advises her: “ jetez,
dans les vertus de votre sexe, l’enthousiasme passager que la littérature y
fit naître.” In her last letter, when Modeste jettisons the mask, she com­
pletes the transformation from her self as literature (the imaginary) to
the real that her love speaks.
     In addressing Modeste, La Brière’s letters seek to arrive at a destina­

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M   o r t im e r

tion as knowing as the omniscient real reader. Both the visionary father
and the blind mother, good readers of the correspondence, will confirm
the truth of La Brière’s character. The writing effectively raises Modeste
to the level of such a perspicacious reader, creating the Modeste who
allies realism and romanticism, whose willful forehead does not contra­
dict her voluptuous lips. The worldly comedy culminating in the hunt
perfects the creation and has its fitting closure, on the next to last page,
in Modeste’s acceptance of La Brière’s cravache. The riding stick is sug­
gestive; its beauty, skillful execution, and prodigious value announce and
foretell La Brière’s manly stature. Perhaps this is what Modeste, in all
her newly blossomed knowledge of sexuality, means to suggest when
with a single sentence she both informs La Brière she will marry him and
describes the gift as “ un bien singulier présent...” (712). The telling ellip­
sis invites the reader—and La Brière—to dwell on the hidden meaning,
the encoded reassurance: the imaginary is real, the real includes the
imaginary. The gift of the stick and its reception figure a reprise of the
writing and reading of the first part, now entirely on the real plane.
Modeste’s acceptance is her last act of good reading. And it shows that
she, like the reader, is now able to merge naive and devious representa­
tion, retaining the romantic and novelistic even in the context of
marriage.

The Real: Union
    To speak of the union of contraries, in La Comédie humaine, is
usually to evoke the cynical dénouement of the drama of a girl’s mar­
riage: a misalliance. In this rare novel, reuniting contraries instead vali­
dates both conflicting parts, the modest and the immodest, the naive and
the devious, the false and the true, poetry and reality, the novel and the
mundane, the lover and the husband, Love and Money, even the old and
the new aristocracies. The act of writing, which is essentially reading,
culminates in a philosophy of oneness, neutralizing doubleness by retain­
ing the best of both parts.
    Writing produces the real, what Barthes defined as “ ce qui se démon­
tre mais ne se voit pas” (Le Plaisir du texte, 74). La Brière’s letters com­
pose the unnamed real self with every sentence, while the name Canalis
designates vain, empty reality (“ ce qui se voit mais ne se démontre pas” ).
Canalis remains poetic in the pervasively negative sense, while La Brière
is figurally poetic: “ Il n’y a rien de plus poétique qu’une élégie animée
qui a des yeux, qui marche, et qui soupire sans rime” (691); and whose

Vo l . X X X I, N o. 3                                                      35

L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r

name, one might add, rhymes with Modeste’s. The earnest, serious, and
sincere Ernest will not only be a suitable mate, “ le compagnon que Dieu
vous a fait” (534), but also an heir to continue the former line of the
comtes de La Bastie of the Ancien Régime which had ended with the
Revolution and the fall of the Empire.6 The present of the novel ties the
past to the future, thus uniting Love and Money. Even the underlying
archetypal structure suggests a mythic ending: they lived happily ever
after and had many children. To join the fragmented, unnamed pieces of
the real into a whole is to practice romantic realism. The modest “ réel ‘à
hauteur d’appui’ ” one anti-romantic reader has conceded could well
be a tenacious, naive belief in figuration coupled with the devious self-
conscious acting out of the representation.7 In the ending, naive
representation or figuration will endure, even in a sophisticated or
devious reader. For the novel tells its best readers that the outcome is also
romantic, but newly romantic; it is not the superficial and artificial “ blue
flowers” of a young girl’s fantasies but the unheard-of persistence of the
ideal dream in the reality of social life.
    Reuniting contraries is the reader’s critical task as addressee of the
letters. Modeste becomes like the reader because she composes the real
from the fragmented practices by reading as well as we do, by succumb­
ing to the manipulations of figuration. And the ideal reader is essentially
“ female” ; even La Brière has the requisite feminine qualities, heavily
underscored (without his moustache, “ il eût trop ressemblé peut-être à
une jeune fille déguisée” [575]). (Others would dwell on the most impor­
tant real female reader, Mme Hanska.) Anyone who would read the end­
ing as depressing reads effectively as a “ male” —perhaps like Canalis.
The conflict between depressing and happy interpretations of the ending
is resolved by writing, and I say the reader, like Modeste, is as pleased as
a Princess Charming.

University o f Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

                                          Notes

1. R oland Barthes, “ De la lecture,” L e Bruissem ent de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984),
   44-45.
2. Balzac, M odeste M ignon, in L a Comédie humaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallim ard [Pléiade],
   1976), 541.
3. R oland Barthes, L e Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 89.
4. A m ajor intertext o f the second part, G oethe’s Torquato Tasso, concerns Léonore
   d ’Este, the princess loved by Tasso and his rival Antonio.
5. The other three are Constance Birotteau’s, Ursule M irouët’s, and Eve Séchard’s,

36                                                                          Fa ll   1991

M   o r t im e r

   according to Arlette Michel, L e Mariage et l ’am our dans l ’œ uvre romanesque
   d ’H onoré de Balzac (Paris: C ham pion, 1976), 3:1528. Michel also concludes that it is
   impossible to reconcile the ideal and the positive; but one can jo in them by ruses, traps,
   and surprises (1531). In my reading, ruses are those of writing.
6. In Germ an, E rnst approxim ates the English earnest: ernst “ serious,” im Ernst “ truly,
   verily, faithfully,” all the things the reader m ust believe La Brière is in spite o f the
   hypocrisy and sham of the rom ance p a r lettres.
7. Anne-M arie Meininger, Préface, M odeste M ignon (Paris: Gallim ard [Folio], 1982), 30.

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