L'Esprit Créateur

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.” 1Writing, 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 letterwriting 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. 26 F a l l 1991 M o r tim er 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 parfums de la fleur bleue de l’Idéal, devait être le théâtre d’un combat entre les poésies qui se jouent autour de tous les levers de soleil et les labeurs de la journée, entre la Fantaisie et la Réalité. Modeste 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...