Modeste Mignon | Page 4

could shopkeepers dispose of those products if there were no
Madame Latournelle? All these absurdities of the worthy woman, who
is truly pious and charitable, might have passed unnoticed, if nature,
amusing herself as she often does by turning out these ludicrous
creations, had not endowed her with the height of a drum-major, and
thus held up to view the comicalities of her provincial nature. She has
never been out of Havre; she believes in the infallibility of Havre; she
proclaims herself Norman to the very tips of her fingers; she venerates
her father, and adores her husband.

Little Latournelle was bold enough to marry this lady after she had
attained the anti-matrimonial age of thirty-three, and what is more, he
had a son by her. As he could have got the sixty thousand francs of her
"dot" in several other ways, the public assigned his uncommon
intrepidity to a desire to escape an invasion of the Minotaur, against
whom his personal qualifications would have insufficiently protected
him had he rashly dared his fate by bringing home a young and pretty
wife. The fact was, however, that the notary recognized the really fine
qualities of Mademoiselle Agnes (she was called Agnes) and reflected
to himself that a woman's beauty is soon past and gone to a husband.
As to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court bestowed
in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle is still
so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty- five years and
seven months, that she would still provide him, if it were necessary,
with her breast and her milk,--an hyperbole which alone can fully
express her impassioned maternity. "How handsome he is, that son of
mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they walk to church,
with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is like you," Modeste
Mignon answers, very much as she might have said, "What horrid
weather!" This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite important as
an accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been the chaperone of
the young girl against whom the notary and his friend Dumay are now
plotting to set up what we have called, in the "Physiologie du Mariage,"
a "mouse-trap."
As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the purest
honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any
stranger would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to
which, however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His
eyesight, said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green
goggles for the protection of his eyes, which were constantly inflamed.
The arch of each eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair, surrounded
the tortoise-shell rim of the glasses and made a couple of circles as it
were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the human face the
effect produced by these circumferences placed one within the other,
and separated by a hollow space or line, you can hardly imagine how
perplexing such a face will be to you, especially if pale,

hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that of
Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give to cats. This double
resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas Latournelle. Above
the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown, all the more crafty in
expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the
white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across the
forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent Norman, clothed in
black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple of pins, and
knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men, would have
sought, without finding it, for the reason of such physical
misrepresentation.
Jean Butscha, a natural son abandoned by his parents and taken care of
by the clerk of the court and his daughter, and now, through sheer hard
work, head-clerk to the notary, fed and lodged by his master, who gave
him a salary of nine hundred francs, almost a dwarf, and with no
semblance of youth,--Jean Butscha made Modeste his idol, and would
willingly have given his life for hers. The poor fellow, whose eyes were
hollowed beneath their heavy lids like the touch-holes of a cannon,
whose head overweighted his body, with its shock of crisp hair, and
whose face was pock-marked, had lived under pitying eyes from the
time he was seven years of age. Is not that enough to explain his whole
being? Silent, self-contained, pious, exemplary in conduct, he went his
way over that vast tract of country named on the map of the heart
Love-without-Hope, the sublime and arid steppes of Desire. Modeste
had christened this grotesque little being