BourgeoisGentilV1, Istex, Corpus, bibRecord, 001705

Modeste and Mignon: Balzac rewrites Goethe

Identifieur interne : 001705 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 001704; suivant : 001706

Modeste and Mignon: Balzac rewrites Goethe

Auteurs : Terence Cave

Source :

French Studies [ 0016-1128 ] ; 2005-07.

RBID : ISTEX:4395D1C2519E98AFC413CDC0079EECAA5CC7323E

English descriptors

Teeft :
- Auber, Balzac, Briere, Canalis, Cette, Ctional, Ctional song, Daniel auber, French reader, French studies, French translations, Gazette musicale, Goethe, Hanska, Hippolyte chelard, Incestuous union, Inner life, Ironic commentary, Katharine ellis, Kennst, Lehrjahre, Lyric imagination, Madame hanska, Meister, Meisters, Mignon, Mignon story, Modeste, Modeste mignon, Musical score, Natalie, Other hand, Oxford university press, Poetic imagination, Roger pierrot, Same time, Sexual politics, Social world, Tasso, Terence, Terence cave, Theatrical illusion, Torquato tasso, Vertus positives, Walter peveril, Wilhelm, Wilhelm meister, Wilhelm meisters lehrjahre, Xavier marmier, Young woman.

Abstract

Amid the many literary intertexts of Balzac's Modeste Mignon (1844), the works of Goethe play a key role. Modeste's first name contains a coded reference to Torquato Tasso, while her family name is borrowed from the Mignon of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Because Modeste is in many ways quite unlike Mignon, this latter reference has generally been regarded as marginal, but it can be shown that Balzac consciously plays off the Bildungsroman of his poetic but in the end solid and capable heroine against Goethe's ill-fated personification of lyrical poetry. Central to this parallel is the scene in which Modeste improvises a setting of her favourite poem by the poet she thinks she is in love with: unusually, the score (composed at Balzac's request by Daniel Auber) is printed consecutively with the narrative. This song transposes into a new literary, musical and social context Mignon's celebrated ‘Kennst du das Land?’. Modeste Mignon thus appears as both a specifically French mutation of the Mignon story and an ironic commentary on its Romantic implications.

Url:

https://api.istex.fr/ark:/67375/HXZ-5DW3HGW2-6/fulltext.pdf

DOI: 10.1093/fs/kni211

Links to Exploration step

ISTEX:4395D1C2519E98AFC413CDC0079EECAA5CC7323E

Le document en format XML

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        <month>July</month>

        <year>2005</year>

      </pub-date>

      <volume>59</volume>

      <issue>3</issue>

      <fpage>311</fpage>

      <lpage>325</lpage>

      <permissions>

        <copyright-statement>© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org</copyright-statement>

        <copyright-year>2005</copyright-year>

      </permissions>

      <self-uri content-type="arthw-pdf" xlink:href="kni211"></self-uri>

      <abstract xml:lang="en">

        <p>Amid the many literary intertexts of Balzac's <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 (1844), the works of Goethe play a key role. Modeste's first name contains a coded reference to <italic>Torquato Tasso</italic>
, while her family name is borrowed from the Mignon of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.</italic>
 Because Modeste is in many ways quite unlike Mignon, this latter reference has generally been regarded as marginal, but it can be shown that Balzac consciously plays off the <italic>Bildungsroman</italic>
 of his poetic but in the end solid and capable heroine against Goethe's ill-fated personification of lyrical poetry. Central to this parallel is the scene in which Modeste improvises a setting of her favourite poem by the poet she thinks she is in love with: unusually, the score (composed at Balzac's request by Daniel Auber) is printed consecutively with the narrative. This song transposes into a new literary, musical and social context Mignon's celebrated ‘Kennst du das Land?’. <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 thus appears as both a specifically French mutation of the Mignon story and an ironic commentary on its Romantic implications.</p>

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      <p>Mignon, Wilhelm's vulnerable protégée in Goethe's <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
, had a European afterlife of extraordinary range and complexity. She underwent a series of transformations in lyric poetry, narrative fiction, theatre and opera, while her songs attracted settings by literally dozens of composers. She is above all a figure of the nineteenth century, embodying its obsession with vulnerable adolescence, but she reappears in twentieth-century mutations also, including Alban Berg's <italic>Lulu</italic>
, a late <italic>Novelle</italic>
 entitled <italic>Mignon</italic>
 by Gerhart Hauptmann, an Italian film (<italic>Mignone è partita</italic>
), and Angela Carter's <italic>Nights at the Circus.</italic>
</p>

      <p>There are many crossings-over in this story, beginning with Mignon's own crossing of the Alps, referred to in her signature tune ‘Kennst du das Land?’: she is Italian but has a French nickname that sounds different in German.<sup><xref rid="FN1">1</xref>
</sup>
 The Fenella of Walter Scott's <italic>Peveril of the Peak</italic>
, expressly modelled on Mignon, reappears as the lead character in Auber's <italic>La Muette de Portici</italic>
, generally regarded as the first French grand opera. Angela Carter's Mignon is German rather than Italian, sings English songs as well as ‘Kennst du das Land?’, and is drafted into an international circus run by a blustering American impresario.</p>

      <p>Despite Mignon's dizzying tendency to shift across borders in this way, culturally distinct versions of Mignon's story evolved in Germany and France.<sup><xref rid="FN2">2</xref>
</sup>
 In some of the earlier German experiments in the manner of <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
, the Mignon figures are disturbingly disorderly and promiscuous;<sup><xref rid="FN3">3</xref>
</sup>
 later, no doubt because of the impact of the story of Kaspar Hauser (the famous foundling whose childhood had been spent in isolation from society and language), features unmistakably reminiscent of Mignon are projected on a feral child: in Adalbert Stifter's <italic>Katzensilber</italic>
, the child (‘das braune Mädchen’) finally returns to the ‘nature’ from which she originally emerged, whereas in <italic>Der Waldbrunnen</italic>
, Juliana is successfully assimilated into prevailing middle-class culture.</p>

      <p>In France, where Goethe was at first received with some suspicion and incomprehension, Mignon takes on a very different aspect.<sup><xref rid="FN4">4</xref>
</sup>
 Between 1825 and 1843, there were no fewer than three French translations of <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
: the most successful of these, by Xavier Marmier, appeared in 1833 and was reprinted in 1835 and 1844. It was Marmier who set the tone for a new and specifically French representation of Mignon in his <italic>Études sur Goethe</italic>
 of 1835. Marmier is sympathetic to Goethe, undertaking a wholesale rehabilitation of his reputation, but in order to make his writings comprehensible, palatable and productive for French readers and writers, a thoroughgoing cultural translation was required. Marmier's account of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic> shows that he was familiar with the whole novel, but he gives particular prominence to a lyrical evocation of the character of Mignon:

<disp-quote><p>Et puis, que pourrais-je dire de Mignon, cet être demi-réel, demi-idéal; cette création si légère et si douce, que la bulle de savon qui s'envole aux rayons du soleil n'est pas plus légère, et la note plaintive d'une harpe pas plus douce? Que pourrais-je dire encore de cette pauvre rêveuse et innocente jeune fille sur laquelle le poète semble avoir concentré tous les sentimens qui nous émeuvent le plus… Quel doux et touchant tableau que celui de cette vie toute d'abnégation, de reconnaissance, d'harmonie; cette vie passée sur une terre étrangère, parmi des êtres étrangers; cette vie sur laquelle le soleil de ce monde ne luit pas, et qui, pour se réchauffer, a besoin de s'en aller bien loin, bien loin!<sup><xref rid="FN5">5</xref>
</sup>
</p>
</disp-quote>

Taking his cue from an engraving by Moritz Retzsch, he stresses her fragility:

<disp-quote><p>A voir les traits de son visage, on remarque bien encore que c'est un enfant, mais un enfant précoce et vieilli trop tôt, et sous cette joue si pâle, dans cet amer sourire qui vient expirer sur ses lèvres, dans ces grands yeux bleus au regard immobile, fixe, ardent, on peut déjà pressentir un germe de mort. La jeune fille vient d'achever sa triste chanson. (p. 40)</p>
</disp-quote>

Both these descriptions associate her with ‘Kennst du das Land?’, and with a spiritualized yearning which looks towards a heavenly rather than an earthly home.</p>

      <p>It seems likely that Ary Sheffer was influenced by this reading when, between 1835 and 1839, he painted two images of Mignon (<italic>Mignon regrettant sa patrie, Mignon aspirant au ciel</italic>
) which were widely circulated as engravings and which rapidly came to determine the way Mignon was perceived by a French public. Indeed, when Ambroise Thomas's fabulously successful opera <italic>Mignon</italic>
 was first staged in 1866, Mignon's costumes and poses were made to conform as exactly as possible to the Ary Scheffer model. Here again, she becomes a delicate young woman with other-worldly longings, her eyes raised to the heavens.<sup><xref rid="FN6">6</xref>
</sup>
</p>

      <p>First published in 1844, Balzac's <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 was conceived in this cultural context. Although Balzac thought highly of it and claimed, shortly after its publication, that people were already beginning to speak of it as a masterpiece,<sup><xref rid="FN7">7</xref>
</sup>
 it has received relatively little critical attention,<sup><xref rid="FN8">8</xref>
</sup>
 and the connection with the Goethean model is for the most part mentioned dismissively.<sup><xref rid="FN9">9</xref>
</sup>
 It is true that, as we shall see shortly, there are few parallels between <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 and <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 at the purely narrative level; in addition, Balzac's novel bristles with allusions to all kinds of other literary texts from fairy stories such as <italic>Beauty and the Beast</italic>
 and <italic>The Sleeping Beauty</italic>
 to the comedies of Molière and Marivaux,<sup><xref rid="FN10">10</xref>
</sup>
 so that Mignon herself is liable to get lost in the crowd. Yet the novel flaunts its Franco-German theme from the very beginning: Modeste Mignon has a French father, a German mother and a sister whose name (Bettina) is borrowed from one of Goethe's female admirers.<sup><xref rid="FN11">11</xref>
</sup>
 Two of Goethe's best-known works are jointly evoked by the protagonist's name: ‘Modeste’ contains a coded reference to Leonore von Este in <italic>Torquato Tasso</italic>
,<sup><xref rid="FN12">12</xref>
</sup>
 while ‘Mignon’ becomes her surname. Since the naming of the protagonist dates from an early stage in the composition of the novel, one may assume that the double Goethean intertext was formative in the way it was conceived.<sup><xref rid="FN13">13</xref>
</sup>
</p>

      <p>The two texts are also connected in that they belong to the same period in Goethe's own career as a writer and embody complementary themes.<sup><xref rid="FN14">14</xref>
</sup>
 Tasso is a personification of the poetic imagination and its incompatibility with the everyday world; Mignon is identifiable with the lyric impulse, the spontaneous drive towards poetry and song, and she too finds it hard to make accommodations with reality. Her companion the Harpist is subject, like Tasso, to fits of melancholy and madness, and in the definitive version of the novel, both she and the Harpist die in tragic circumstances. Mignon and Tasso may thus be regarded as twin instruments for the exploration of the themes that Balzac was to take up in his own way in <italic>Modeste Mignon.</italic>
 Although he was probably unaware of the Goethean chronology, he clearly saw the thematic link and played on it in his staging of a confrontation between a young woman with a spontaneously poetic imagination and the famous poet Casalis, wavering like his Italian predecessor between two women.</p>

      <p>The primary object of this article will be to explore the ways in which Balzac uses Goethe's Mignon as a point of reference in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 and to reflect on the appearance of a fictional song, complete with musical score, in one prominent episode. However, the <italic>Tasso</italic>
 allusion will also be taken into account at a secondary level, both because of its thematic implications and as a linked example of Balzac's intertextual strategies.</p>

      <p>We may begin by remarking that the two texts are alluded to explicitly in the correspondence between Modeste and Ernest de La Brière — not surprisingly, perhaps, since both characters are avid readers. La Brière's second letter picks up the allusion in Modeste's <italic>nom de plume</italic> ‘O. d'Este-M’ to Leonore von Este, the principal object of Tasso's love in Goethe's play, in order to imagine a well-off aristocratic lady riding to the rescue of a poet in trouble:

<disp-quote><p>Une d'Este riche de six millions peut mettre un chapeau à grands bords et à plumes, brandir sa cravache, presser les flancs d'un barbe et venir, amazone brodée d'or, suivie de laquais, à un poète en disant: ‘J'aime la poésie, et je veux expier les torts de Léonore envers le Tasse!’ tandis que la fille d'un négociant se couvrirait de ridicule en l'imitant. (p. 528)</p>
</disp-quote>

The allusion is somewhat hyperbolic: Leonore, as depicted by Goethe, could hardly be said to have wronged Tasso, even if her well-meaning efforts to integrate him into court society prove to have disastrous consequences.<sup><xref rid="FN15">15</xref>
</sup>
 It has the function, however, of endowing the image of Modeste with a certain energy and initiative at the expense of her Goethean analogue; more importantly, it alerts Balzac's readers at an early stage to one of the two literary associations encapsulated in Modeste's name, while making explicit the theme of the poetic and its difficult relation to the social world.</p>

      <p>The single explicit reference to Mignon occurs in Modeste's lyrical final letter to Casalis's secretary, after she has seen him for the first time: ‘Va, poète chéri, je serai ta Mignon; mais une Mignon plus heureuse que celle de Goethe, car tu me laisseras dans ma patrie, n'est-ce pas? dans ton cœur’ (p. 584). It exactly conforms to the norm in the reception history of Goethe's novel: Mignon is remembered above all for her song ‘Kennst du das Land?’, with its yearning for a lost home and homeland converted into a sentimental metaphor. Little else in Modeste's circumstances recalls the plight of Mignon. She is not a barely pubescent child in boy's clothing; she is not the product of an incestuous union; she is living in her own home; she has not been abducted or mistreated; she has not been rescued by the man she falls in love with; she is not subject to seizures. She is half foreign, but — foreignness being always relative — she is attached by birth to Germany, not Italy. Unlike Mignon, she is extremely literate and articulate, and apparently entirely capable of looking after herself.</p>

      <p>The reference would therefore seem purely incidental were it not for Balzac's decision to give her Mignon's name as a surname. But that decision changes everything: it incites the reader to look for other, less overt parallels, all the more because the recently constructed and popularized version of Mignon known to the French public was a good deal closer than Goethe's original to the young woman represented here — poetic, passionate, given to flights of the imagination, but cleaned up and made palatable to bourgeois taste. Of these parallels, the one that most immediately fits the Mignon template and anticipates Modeste's own reference is the prominently displayed scene in which Modeste improvises on the piano a setting, reproduced in the text, of her favourite Canalis poem (pp. 560–66). The one thing that the name Mignon would immediately have conjured up for a French reader of 1844 was the image of a young woman singing a song of romantic longing, and this is precisely what Balzac provides. As we shall see later, the primary function of this scene seems indeed to be to introduce into the novel a distinct echo of Mignon and her songs, an echo which can be traced back to the opening pages, where we are told that Modeste is ‘née musicienne’, that she sings ‘airs allemands’ and that she herself composes ‘cantilènes purement mélodiques’ (pp. 499–500).</p>

      <p>Before returning to this musical strand, we need to look at some possible implicit allusions to the Mignon story, whether they be regarded as deliberate signals to the informed reader, or — less ambitiously — as evidence that Balzac's creative engagement with <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic> was neither adventitious nor superficial. Unlike her predecessor, as we have seen, Modeste is hardly a fragile waif who will die of a seizure if she sees her beloved kissing another woman. However, just before her reference to Mignon in her final letter to La Brière, she evokes her own metaphorical death:

<disp-quote><p>combien la Modeste d'aujourd'hui ressemble peu à celle de ce jour-là! L'une était dans un linceul, et l'autre (vous l'ai-je bien dit?) a reçu de vous la vie. L'amour pur et permis, l'amour, que mon père enfin revenu de voyage et riche autorisera, m'a relevée de sa main, à la fois enfantine et puissante, du fond de cette tombe où je dormais! (pp. 583–84)</p>
</disp-quote>

The reference is to the interval between Ernest's first glimpse of Modeste and her first sight of him; the metaphor seems somewhat excessive until one sees that it contains an allusion to Mignon's last song (‘So laßt mich scheinen’), which she sings dressed as an angel and which anticipates her imminent death. Equally, one should recall that Modeste's sister Bettina has died after being abandoned by a faithless lover, a memory which remains powerfully in Modeste's mind and determines much of her behaviour.</p>

      <p>This example illustrates a technique of transferring narrative motifs or character traits between one situation or character and another which seems to be a recurrent feature of Mignon's afterlife.<sup><xref rid="FN16">16</xref>
</sup> Another instance is a prominent aspect of the way Ernest de La Brière is depicted throughout. He is from the outset assigned feminine qualities:

<disp-quote><p>Sans cette attestation virile [his moustaches], il eût trop ressemblé peut-être à une jeune fille déguisée, tant la coupe du visage et les lèvres sont mignardes, tant on est près d'attribuer à une femme ses dents d'un émail transparent et d'une régularité quasi postiche. Joignez à ces qualités féminines un parler doux comme la physionomie, doux comme des yeux bleus à paupières turques, et vous concevrez très bien que le ministre eût surnommé son jeune secrétaire particulier Mlle de La Brière. (p. 575)</p>
</disp-quote>

Not only are his features ‘mignardes’, but he is also, insistently, said to be <italic>modest</italic>
:<sup><xref rid="FN17">17</xref>
</sup>
 the name of Modeste might indeed more appropriately have been given to him, since Modeste herself is remarkably <italic>im</italic>
modest, both in initiating and conducting the correspondence and in handling her suitors in the final part of the novel. She displays what at that time were regarded as ‘virile’ qualities: it is no accident that La Brière imagines Modeste dressed as an ‘Amazon’.<sup><xref rid="FN18">18</xref>
</sup>
 Balzac's taste for androgynous figures is well-known, but that only makes it the more plausible that he had noticed and appreciated the striking number of women characters in <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
 variously endowed with sexual ambiguity, not least Mignon herself, who insists on dressing as a boy; similarly, the mysterious woman who turns out to be Natalie is regularly referred to as ‘the Amazon’, since she is wearing a riding costume when Wilhelm first sees her. But Balzac goes much further than Goethe in using the switching of codes to alter the sexual politics. Far from being a subordinate, subdued, dependent young female like her antecedent, Modeste becomes an active and indeed dominant presence, carving out the plot (with a little help from her friends) to her own advantage.</p>

      <p>Another gender reversal, arguably, occurs in the final stages of the novel, where Modeste is invited to choose between three suitors, the brilliant but worldly poet Casalis, the impeccably aristocratic d'Hérouville, and an extremely nice, understanding chap (La Brière).<sup><xref rid="FN19">19</xref>
</sup>
 The denouement of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
 places the hero in relation to two women, Natalie and Therese, both of whom seem to be desirable spouses. Just after he has proposed to Therese, the practical commonsense woman, he rediscovers in Natalie the ‘Amazon’ who had helped to rescue him long before and who had always been the imaginary ideal woman of his dreams. When Therese accepts, he feels obliged to honour his promise. However, a twist in the plot enables him to hand Therese over to Lothario, whom she had loved but was separated from by a misunderstanding, and become engaged to Natalie. This comedy of errors is only darkened temporarily by the death of Mignon, who also loves Wilhelm even though he never considers her as a possible spouse. In short, Wilhelm, like Modeste, has <italic>l'embarras du choix</italic>
, and the choice lies between the ideal and the pragmatic.</p>

      <p>We thus come to the overall thematic opposition indicated by Balzac both in his correspondence and within the novel. When he was almost exactly halfway through <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>, Balzac wrote to Mme Hanska as follows:

<disp-quote><p>Ce sera la dernière <italic>Scène de la vie privée</italic>
 dans l'ordre et le classement définitif des idées que chacune présente. C'est la lutte entre la poésie et le fait, entre l'illusion et la société. C'est le dernier enseignement avant de passer aux scènes de l'âge mûr.<sup><xref rid="FN20">20</xref>
</sup>
</p>
</disp-quote>

In other words, <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 is a <italic>Bildungsroman.</italic>
 In itself, this is hardly remarkable. Balzac was no stranger to the novel of the hero's apprenticeship: <italic>Les Illusions perdues</italic>
, to mention only one example among many, is a far more developed example of the genre. But read in conjunction with the references in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 to Goethe's novel, his remark to Mme Hanska takes on a more precise significance. It licenses one to explore the hypothesis that the plot of <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 is more than accidentally related in this respect also to the <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 paradigm.</p>

      <p>The reassignment of roles is, here again, fine-tuned to produce the right thematic outcome. Modeste takes over from Wilhelm as the object of the learning process, while at the same time internalizing the lyric imagination represented by Mignon. Although references to the theatre (<italic>Tasso, Much Ado</italic>
, the comedies of Molière and Marivaux) are quite prominent in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, in thematic terms, theatrical illusion gives way to the lyric imagination as the focus of attention. Mignon is born again in Modeste's inner life as a youthful ideal which endows her with enormous energy but which she must learn to outlive. Like Wilhelm, she has her choices to make between different kinds of life-partner; given the way Ernest de La Brière is presented in the novel — morally upright, articulate, good-looking, sufficiently well-connected, endowed with a poetic sensibility, but not exactly the Ideal Man — Balzac has applied in the case of his <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 adaptation the principle he expresses in relation to <italic>Tasso</italic>
: ‘c'est la comédie de Goethe, ramenée à la vérité pure’.<sup><xref rid="FN21">21</xref>
</sup>
 Similarly, the symbolic domain of Lothario's castle, with its Masonic mysteries, is replaced in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 by the even more aristocratic yet distinctly worldly Château de Rosembray. The demonstration that Modeste can not only breathe the rarefied air of high society but positively thrive on it ensures that she will keep her noble connections (not to mention her father's somewhat ill-gotten riches<sup><xref rid="FN22">22</xref>
</sup>
) despite her relatively modest marriage: this is the mirror-image of the bourgeois Wilhelm's acceptance as the fiancé of the aristocratic Natalie. Yet the denouement of <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, despite the fairly-tale, ‘happily-ever-after’ ending,<sup><xref rid="FN23">23</xref>
</sup>
 is that of a sharp-edged social comedy, from which portentous allegories of spiritual enlightenment are banished.</p>

      <p>The shaping of Modeste has several phases. The primary conditions for what is to become a project of self-mastery and self-determination are laid down by the ruin of her father, her rejection by her earliest suitors once the crash becomes public, and the seduction and death of her sister. With the correspondence, a new phase begins: Ernest takes over, reminding her of the risks she is taking and of her duties to her family (here, the sexual politics are very much those of bourgeois France of the mid-nineteenth century). The discovery that the writer of the letters is not Canalis is a devastating blow that brings about a dramatic change: the flights of poetic imagination are extinguished, and Modeste learns to behave like Beatrice in <italic>Much Ado about Nothing</italic>
 (p. 612). Her irony, already apparent in the letters, now becomes a powerful defensive weapon in the game for worldly stakes and she acquires ‘perspicacité’ and even ‘malice’. At this point, her father assumes the role of psychagogue, offering her the choice of three suitors and ensuring by his barbed comments that she desentimentalizes the image of Ernest de La Brière. At the moment of revelation, his remark ‘c'est un de ces hommes ordinaires, à vertus positives, d'une moralité sûre, qui plaisent aux parents’ hits Modeste like a pistol shot (p. 606; cf. p. 692). Later, the visit of the great doctor Desplein doesn't merely offer her mother the hope that her cataracts may be removed, it also opens Modeste's eyes to what real genius is, how far removed from her earlier imaginings. And finally, when she finds herself among the crème de la crème of the nobility, Modeste learns fast: ‘Tout, pour elle, fut enseignement’ (p. 706). She is now equipped both to pick a man with whom she can be happy, and to live at the level of her fortune.<sup><xref rid="FN24">24</xref>
</sup>
</p>

      <p><italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 thus rewrites two related features of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
: the theme of the collision between poetry and everyday life, and the conception of the <italic>Bildungsroman.</italic>
 It is through this conjunction that Balzac's displacement of the Goethean antithesis is engineered. At the broadest level, it provides a variation on another prominent theme of nineteenth-century novels, from <italic>Northanger Abbey</italic>
 to <italic>Madame Bovary</italic>
: excessive reading of romantic fictions is a dangerous preparation for life, especially for young women.<sup><xref rid="FN25">25</xref>
</sup>
 Here, it is again Charles Mignon who makes the theme explicit via a reference to <italic>La Nouvelle Héloïse</italic>
: ‘J'ai lu vos lettres…mais, à ce propos, je dois te faire observer que ta dernière serait à peine permise à une fille séduite, à une Julie d'Étanges! Mon Dieu, quel mal nous font les romans!…’ (p. 603). The situation in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, however, is more directly focused on a misprision about the relation between a poet's life and character on the one hand and his writing on the other. In this sense, it is closer to Peter Shaffer's <italic>Amadeus</italic>
, where the divine composer is of one flesh with a smutty, emotionally immature young man. Canalis's fragrant verses, consumed so avidly by his female readers, likewise bear no relation to his own inner life and sentiments. The sensitive poetic figure Modeste seeks is not to be found in him, but (paradoxically) in Ernest de La Brière, the ‘homme ordinaire à vertus positives’.</p>

      <p>Some of the parallels I have traced are more distinct than others; certain of them could easily be accounted for in other ways, were it not for Balzac's own placing of highly visible clues at strategic points in the text. But there can be no doubt that this allusive novel uses its intertexts purposefully, creatively, and often aggressively: the presence of a ‘model’ is more often palpable through the precise way in which it is changed or countered than through more passive procedures of intertextual recycling.</p>

      <p>I return now to Modeste's improvisation of a romantic love-song to the words of the poet she thinks she's writing to. The <italic>narrative</italic>
 function of the episode is ostensibly to provide Modeste's immediate circle of family and friends with evidence that she's in love, despite the apparent lack of any male figure who might be the object of her affections: as Mme Mignon says, ‘il n'y a qu'une fille amoureuse qui puisse composer de pareilles mélodies sans connaître la musique’ (p. 560). But that motivation is rather slight for such an extravagant typographical display; Mme Mignon had already had her suspicions in any case. So it looks as if this fictional song is meant to attract the reader's attention in its own right, as a piece of narrative bravura of the kind that Balzac was addicted to. As I remarked earlier, it immediately signals to the contemporary reader a parallel with Mignon and her songs; but it is not a version of ‘Kennst du das Land?’ that Modeste sings, so we have the double question: How do we read the song itself, in its own fictional context? And what is the effect of the intertextual play?</p>

      <p>Let us begin with the words. The ‘Canalis’ poem is written in the airiest and vaguest idiom of Lamartinian Romanticism. As the evocation of a young woman's poetic longings, it is unmistakably French in character, and the Frenchness is enhanced by the fact that, under the Romantic veneer, it is possible to detect a well-known sonnet by Ronsard.<sup><xref rid="FN26">26</xref>
</sup>
 To a French reader (although not perhaps to Modeste herself, steeped as she is in German culture), the name of Mignon might indeed evoke the lyric mode of Ronsard and his much-anthologized ‘Mignonne…’ poems rather than Goethe's. The author of the poem is unknown; Balzac may have persuaded a contemporary poet to write it for him, in which case the poet preferred to remain anonymous, or he may have written it himself. In either case, it was clearly tailor-made, both as a plausible product of the fictional Canalis and as a reflection of Modeste's innocence, <italic>naïveté</italic>
 and aesthetic taste.</p>

      <p>The salient fact about this episode, however, is that it turns the fictional representation of singing into a real song by including a full score (voice with piano accompaniment), printed continuously with the verbal text at the appropriate point in the narrative (pp. 562–66). The first edition of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
 had also carried settings of the songs, pasted between the pages of the text, by Johann Friedrich Reichardt (Goethe's favourite composer at that time), but it seems unlikely that Balzac knew this, since the settings are not provided in later editions or in the French translations. It is hard to believe, on the other hand, that he did not know some at least of the settings of ‘Kennst du das Land?’ that were performed in drawing-rooms the length and breadth of Europe from the early nineteenth century onwards. Beethoven, Spohr, Schubert and Fanny Hensel had all composed versions before <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 was written,<sup><xref rid="FN27">27</xref>
</sup>
 and Liszt, whom Balzac knew, set it in two slightly different versions in the early 1840s. Yet none of these bears any relation to Modeste's <italic>romance.</italic>
</p>

      <p>Balzac's letters show that he commissioned the music from Daniel Auber, who was known in particular as a composer of opera.<sup><xref rid="FN28">28</xref>
</sup>
 As we saw earlier, his <italic>La Muette de Portici</italic>
, written some sixteen years before <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, features a Mignon figure,<sup><xref rid="FN29">29</xref>
</sup>
 and it seems probable that both Balzac and Auber were aware of this connection, although it is not mentioned in the correspondence.<sup><xref rid="FN30">30</xref>
</sup>
</p>

      <p>Balzac was no novice in musical matters. In 1836–37, he had himself been commissioned to write a story for the <italic>Revue et Gazette musicale</italic>
 by its powerful editor Schlesinger, who wanted to use it to promote Meyerbeer's operas.<sup><xref rid="FN31">31</xref>
</sup>
 This story (<italic>Gambara</italic>
) includes not only a detailed account of Meyerbeer's <italic>Robert-le-Diable</italic>
, but also a similarly detailed description of an entirely fictional opera called <italic>Mahomet.</italic>
 It features a considerable amount of technical material, including key changes and harmonic effects, which was apparently supplied to a large extent by a minor composer and music critic called Jakob Struntz.<sup><xref rid="FN32">32</xref>
</sup>
 The same journal later carried a story by George Sand called <italic>Carl</italic>
, which contains some fictional music, quoted in the text, and with a complete score at the end (it was written for Sand by the operatic composer Halévy). This was in 1843, the year before <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 was written.</p>

      <p>In the episode we are considering, the narrator draws attention to the typographical innovation:

<disp-quote><p>Et voici, puisque les progrès de la Typographie le permettent, la musique de Modeste, à laquelle une expression délicieuse communiquait ce charme admiré dans les grands chanteurs, et qu'aucune typographie, fût-elle hiéroglyphique ou phonétique, ne pourra jamais rendre.</p>
</disp-quote>

In fact, when this instalment of the novel first appeared in the <italic>Journal des Débats</italic>
 of 18 May 1844, the musical score wasn't included, although the letters from Balzac to Auber show that it had already been composed by that time. In a later letter, he explains that the format of the <italic>Journal</italic> had made it typographically impossible to include the music (the review was printed in narrow columns):

<disp-quote><p>La rigoureuse dimension des feuilletons des <italic>Débats</italic>
 n'a pas permis d'en insérer la musique [i.e. the score of Auber's composition], car les procédés typographiques de la musique ne se plient pas aux dimensions des feuilletons, elle ne se compose encore que dans le format in-4° et in-8° et encore le sens musical est-il gêné par la pagination.<sup><xref rid="FN33">33</xref>
</sup>
</p>
</disp-quote>

It was thus not until the complete novel was published separately that Auber's setting appeared, and it is not difficult to see that the page-turns are indeed awkward.</p>

      <p>All this suggests that, in commissioning the setting, Balzac must have had a reasonably precise idea of the effect he wanted to produce. The song is said to be improvised at the piano by Modeste herself, and Auber sets the text continuously, reverting to the opening theme after some mildly interesting harmonic and melodic developments in the central section.<sup><xref rid="FN34">34</xref>
</sup>
 With its waltz-time accompaniment and its naïvely jaunty melodic line, it might seem to modern ears to be ill adapted to the lyrical sentiments of the poem. Yet it corresponds closely to the kind of music composed in this period for amateur performance in bourgeois households of the kind represented in <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
,<sup><xref rid="FN35">35</xref>
</sup>
 and, in the narrative preamble to the song itself, the instance of performance is generalized in exactly this way: ‘Elle se mit à son piano, ce confident de tant de jeunes filles…’(p. 560). At all events, the musical idiom, like the style of the poem, is entirely French.</p>

      <p>Modeste's song may thus be regarded as the construction of a French native equivalent to Goethe's fictional song, and in the light of the persistent identification of Mignon with her song ‘Kennst du das Land?’, both the parallel and its transformation must have been evident to many of Balzac's readers, even if they only had a very dim conception of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
 itself.</p>

      <p>This leads us back, finally, to the placing and function of this allusive artefact in the context of the novel as a whole. The reader is not invited to disparage either Modeste or her performance, yet the scene is not without its parodic character. After all, Modeste's poetic sentiments are based on an illusion which will soon be dissipated. Furthermore, an authorial intervention immediately before the representation of the song uses an aggressively ‘modern’, realist simile in order to create an ironic distance from the pseudo-romance that forms the plot of <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>:

<disp-quote><p>Les maisons peuvent brûler, les fortunes sombrer, les pères revenir de voyage, les empires crouler, le choléra ravager la cité, l'amour d'une jeune fille poursuit son vol, comme la nature sa marche, comme cet effroyable acide que la chimie a découvert, et qui peut trouer le globe si rien ne l'absorbe au centre. (pp. 560–61)</p>
</disp-quote>

Transposed into the <italic>Comédie humaine</italic>
, the Mignon story is dissected even as it unfolds.</p>

      <p>Balzac's makeover marks a moment when the Mignon industry was about to take off in France, a moment before the success of Ambroise Thomas's opera. ‘Kennst du das Land?’ was shortly to be further gallicized in a variety of ways, from Nerval's ‘Delfica’ via Baudelaire's ‘L'Invitation au voyage’ to free translations such as the aria ‘Connais-tu le pays?’ in Thomas's <italic>Mignon</italic>
, or Victor Wilder's rendering, the first two stanzas of which were set to music by Henri Duparc in 1869 (his celebrated setting of ‘L'Invitation au voyage’ followed the year after). Alongside these lyric variations, however, recastings of the Mignon story as prose narrative became increasingly frequent, especially once it had been successfully marketed on the operatic stage. At the unashamedly popularizing level, Michel Morphy's blockbusters <italic>Mignon, Les Noces de Mignon, Mignon vengée</italic>
 and <italic>La Fille de Mignon</italic>
, published between 1896 and 1912 and still being reissued in abbreviated versions after the Second World War, were only the culminating wave of this latter-day obsession with Mignon.</p>

      <p>But little of this is directly connected with <italic>Modeste Mignon.</italic>
 The most appropriate epilogue to Balzac's rewriting of Goethe is <italic>Nana</italic>
, which appeared in 1880. Much of Zola's novel is set amid the flimsy trappings of the opéra-comique; it thus positions itself at once as an avatar of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
, with its troupes of wandering actors and its discussions of the theatre, and as an ironic commentary on Thomas's opera. The explicit link with both is provided by the name of the character Rose Mignon, actress, singer and courtesan, whose compliant husband, a former musician, is usually referred to simply as ‘Mignon’. Rose is certainly neither Mignon nor Modeste, but it is difficult to believe that Zola was unaware of Balzac's novel. In any case, for the reader who knows both, Rose Mignon appears as Modeste's natural successor, offering a yet more acerbic and deflating commentary on the pervasive Romantic myth associated in this period with the name of Goethe's character.<sup><xref rid="FN36">36</xref>
</sup>
</p>

    </sec>

    <sec>

      <title></title>

      <p>

        <fn id="FN1" xml:lang="en">

          <label>1</label>

          <p>A brief plot summary of <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 may be helpful here. The youthful Wilhelm, stage-struck from childhood, bent on becoming a poet, a playwright and an actor, wanders at a leisurely pace through the world of theatrical illusion, which distracts him from the demands of family, social life and moral integrity. While on the road, he sees a girl, barely adolescent, being mistreated by the leader of some wandering acrobats, who have apparently abducted her; he rescues her, and she becomes his devoted servant. She falls in love with him, but he seems to be largely unaware of her affection. Nicknamed ‘Mignon’, she is Italian and speaks only broken German. However, she sings spontaneously and beautifully: these songs, especially ‘Kennst du das Land?’, are counted among Goethe's most celebrated lyrics. She is befriended by a melancholy wandering minstrel known as the Harpist, who also enjoys Wilhelm's protection; like him, she is fragile and vulnerable, indeed she suffers from alarming seizures when emotionally disturbed. Eventually, Wilhelm is brought, by the mysterious agency of the ‘Society of the Tower’, to realize that his theatrical ambitions are illusory, and he is reintegrated into the social world under the aegis of his ideal woman, the noble-minded Natalie. Meanwhile, Mignon, whose seizures have become more acute, is brought into this well-born and well-heeled company; seeing Wilhelm kiss a woman (Therese) to whom he appears to be engaged, she has a final fatal seizure. After her death, an Italian nobleman appears who identifies her in her coffin as the daughter of the Harpist (who has also died) and his sister, i.e. as the product of an incestuous union. In Wilhelm's story, Mignon plays only an intermittent role, but her premature death shows that she, too, is part of the fabric of illusion he had built for himself. More specifically, she represents intensity of lyric feeling, which must not, the novel appears to say, become an object in itself, and must be left behind with maturity.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN2" xml:lang="en">

          <label>2</label>

          <p>On Mignon in England, see Jean-Marie Carré, <italic>Goethe en Angleterre</italic>
 (Paris, Plon, 1920) and Susan Howe, <italic>Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen</italic>
 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1930); also my articles ‘Mignon's Afterlife in the Fiction of George Eliot’, <italic>Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate</italic>
, 56 (2003), 165–82, and ‘Singing with Tigers: Recognition in <italic>Wilhelm Meister, Daniel Deronda</italic>
 and <italic>Nights at the Circus</italic>
’, to be published in the proceedings of a colloquium held at New York University in April 2003. For the perspective of a cultural historian, see Carolyn Steedman, <italic>Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Inferiority, 1790–1930</italic>
 (London, Virago, 1995).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN3" xml:lang="en">

          <label>3</label>

          <p>See in particular Marie in Joseph von Eichendorff's <italic>Ahnung und Gegenwart</italic>
 (1815) (where the disguised page known as ‘Erwin’ is also a Mignon figure) and Flämmchen in Karl Immermann's <italic>Die Epigonen</italic>
 (1836).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN4" xml:lang="en">

          <label>4</label>

          <p>The account provided by Fernand Baldensperger, <italic>Goethe en France</italic>
 (Paris, Hachette, 1920; Geneva, Slatkine Reprints, 2000), is still useful, though it has many gaps: not least, it fails to mention Balzac's <italic>Modeste Mignon.</italic>
</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN5" xml:lang="en">

          <label>5</label>

          <p>Xavier Marmier, <italic>Études sur Goethe</italic>
 (Paris and Strasbourg, Levrault, 1835), pp. 38–39.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN6" xml:lang="en">

          <label>6</label>

          <p>See Hervé Lacombe, <italic>Les Voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle</italic>
 ([Paris], Fayard, 1997), pp. 279–82.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN7" xml:lang="en">

          <label>7</label>

          <p>Honoré de Balzac, <italic>Lettres à Madame Hanska 1832-1844</italic>
, ed. by Roger Pierrot, 2 vols (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1990), i, pp. 827–28, 832, 834, 854, 864, 884, 887, 891.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN8" xml:lang="en">

          <label>8</label>

          <p>It is of course frequently alluded to, at least briefly, in general studies on Balzac. For a recent study which is relevant to the present article, see Mireille Labouret, ‘Romanesque et romantique dans <italic>Mémoires de deux jeunes mariés</italic>
 et <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
’, <italic>L'Année Balzacienne</italic>
, 3e série, 1 (2000), 43–63.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN9" xml:lang="en">

          <label>9</label>

          <p>Labouret, ‘Romanesque’, makes no mention of this strand, even though the Goethean intertexts of the novel (especially the correspondence between Goethe and Bettina von Arnim and <italic>Torquato Tasso</italic>
) are frequently referred to. Anne-Marie Meininger's preface to the Folio edition of <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 ([Paris], Gallimard, 1982), after a first vague allusion on the opening page (p. 7), says nothing about it. In Maurice Regard's introduction to the novel, there is similarly one passing reference: ‘le nom de Mignon rappelant… un personnage de <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 évoqué d'ailleurs dans le roman’ (Honoré de Balzac, <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, ed. by M. Regard, in <italic>La Comédie humaine</italic>
, i, <italic>Etudes de mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée</italic>
 (Paris, Gallimard-Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), p. 452; further page numbers given below refer to this edition).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN10" xml:lang="en">

          <label>10</label>

          <p>On the literary inbreeding of the novel, see in particular Labouret, ‘Romanesque’, and Tim Farrant, <italic>Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre</italic>
 (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 296–301.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN11" xml:lang="en">

          <label>11</label>

          <p>Since the novel is not well known, an outline of the plot will perhaps again be helpful. Modeste's father loses his fortune and goes off to East Asia to try to recover it, instructing his family and friends to keep a close watch on Modeste and let no man come near her. This is because his elder daughter has been seduced and abandoned and subsequently dies. Modeste has an intense inner life: she reads a great deal, especially novels and poetry, and she also likes singing. She is as keen as anyone to avoid her sister's fate, but at the same time wants to find a suitable object for her passions. She decides to write to a famous poet called Melchior de Canalis, whose idealized portrait she sees in a local shop. She uses a pseudonym and an elaborate system for coping with the hazards of the post. The poet himself laughs at her letter (he's had a trunkful of those already). But his secretary, Edmond de La Brière, is fascinated by it, so Canalis tells him to reply in his name. The correspondence quickly develops into an intimate exchange, and the couple eventually fall in love. But immediately after Modeste declares her love, she discovers that the man she's been writing to isn't a poet at all, that she's been deceived (although in fact La Brière was sincere, and is a much nicer person than Canalis). Her father, who has now returned with his fortune remade, discovers what has happened and invites Modeste to make her own choice between the secretary, the poet (who has now become thoroughly interested in his own right) and a third suitor, a languid aristocrat of the bluest possible blood. These three are invited to Normandy, where the family lives, and a series of rather excruciating <italic>soirées</italic>
 and outings takes place. Modeste treats the secretary with unmitigated contempt and enjoys tormenting him; the poet looks likely to win until, at an extremely exclusive house-party arranged by the aristocrat, he's unmasked as insincere; she finally walks off into the sunset with La Brière and a generous share of her father's millions.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN12" xml:lang="en">

          <label>12</label>

          <p>It is important to note here that Modeste herself creates this coded allusion by inventing her <italic>nom de plume</italic>
 ‘O. d'Este-M.’ She is throughout the novel complicit in its wide-ranging intertextuality.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN13" xml:lang="en">

          <label>13</label>

          <p>This does not of course exclude other formative elements, such as the Goethe–Bettina correspondence, published in French translation in 1843 and mocked by Balzac in an unpublished manuscript draft (see <italic>La Comédie humaine</italic>
, i, 1333–35), or the famous ‘lost story’ by Mme Hanska (see Regard, introduction to <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
, p. 448).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN14" xml:lang="en">

          <label>14</label>

          <p><italic>Torquato Tasso</italic>
 was written in the 1780s, when Goethe had also been working on the narrative that was to become <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
: the fragment known as <italic>Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung</italic>
, which dates from the period 1777–84, already features the character Mignon and three of the four songs for which she was later to become famous, although the manuscript of this first version of the novel was only recovered in the early twentieth century. On the chronological and thematic relation between the two texts, see Nicholas Boyle, <italic>Goethe: The Poet and the Age</italic>
, i, <italic>The Poetry of Desire</italic>
 (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 365.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN15" xml:lang="en">

          <label>15</label>

          <p>Leonore von Este encourages Tasso to be more trusting of his patrons and friends and asks him to patch up his quarrel with the cynical courtier Antonio; at the same time, she seems to encourage his love for her. In raptures over this unexpected sign of her favour, he offers friendship to Antonio. When the courtier coldly rejects his offer, Tasso becomes incensed and draws his sword, a gesture regarded as a crime at the court of Ferrara. The Duke places him under house arrest, and Tasso's collapse into madness begins.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN16" xml:lang="en">

          <label>16</label>

          <p>In addition to the examples mentioned in my articles cited above, note 2, J.-T. de Saint-Germain's popular moralizing story <italic>La Légende de Mignon</italic>
 (1857, often reprinted) features not only a pious and impeccably moral Mignon, mistreated by her stepmother, but also another female character, suffering from still greater abjection and subject to mutism, whom she helps to develop her talents as a sculptress and eventually recover her speech.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN17" xml:lang="en">

          <label>17</label>

          <p>See for example p. 575, in conjunction with his name (‘le modeste La Brière’), p. 576, p. 589 (‘les gens véritablement modestes, comme l'est Ernest de La Brière’, in a sentence ending with the name of Modeste), p. 627 (Canalis says to Modeste that La Brière has ‘la modestie d'une religieuse’). There are other puns on the name in the novel, and in the <italic>Lettres à Madame Hanska</italic>
, Balzac says of himself, ‘après avoir été <italic>Modeste</italic>
, je deviens <italic>Mignon</italic>
’ (p. 868).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN18" xml:lang="en">

          <label>18</label>

          <p>See the passage quoted above, p. 315. She is thus ideally suited to Ernest, who ‘cherchait…une domination à aimer’ (p. 576; it is true that this narratorial remark is meant to explain why he has become Canalis's lap-dog…).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN19" xml:lang="en">

          <label>19</label>

          <p>A parodic rewriting, then, of the Judgement of Paris.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN20" xml:lang="en">

          <label>20</label>

          <p><italic>Lettres à Madame Hanska</italic>
, p. 828.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN21" xml:lang="en">

          <label>21</label>

          <p><italic>Lettres à Madame Hanska</italic>
, p. 884.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN22" xml:lang="en">

          <label>22</label>

          <p>The indications are that he makes his fortune by trading in opium.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN23" xml:lang="en">

          <label>23</label>

          <p>The narrative conclusion of <italic>Modeste Mignon</italic>
 is in fact much closer to the fairy tales the novel frequently alludes to than to the outcome of <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>
: before he marries Natalie, Wilhelm is to depart on a further journey, a deferment that calls in question the ‘happily-ever-after’ commonplace. Goethe's projected scenario for a continuation of <italic>The Magic Flute</italic>
, written at much the same time as the final books of the novel, sees Tamino and Pamina, married and with a child, facing a new ordeal to which no end is in sight. The allegory of the closing books of <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
 is similarly marked ‘to be continued’.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN24" xml:lang="en">

          <label>24</label>

          <p>In this progress towards enlightenment, Modeste is assisted by a discreet group of guides: Dumay and his wife; Modeste's father; her mother, whose blindness gives her a privileged insight into the state of her daughter's soul; and, not least, the devoted Butscha. They are less remote and elusive than the members of the <italic>Turmgesellschaft</italic>
 and their messengers in <italic>Wilhelm Meister</italic>
, but they play a similar role in nudging Modeste in the right direction, often by secret stratagems and devices (the novel opens with one of these, a trick to try to make Modeste disclose the object of her affections).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN25" xml:lang="en">

          <label>25</label>

          <p>Which is not to say, of course, that Modeste Mignon is an Emma Bovary: far from it. Not only is she able to learn from experience; she is also a much more skilled and sophisticated reader.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN26" xml:lang="en">

          <label>26</label>

          <p><italic>Continuation des Amours</italic>
, sonnet <sc>xix</sc>
, in Pierre de Ronsard, <italic>Œuvres complètes</italic>
, ed. by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager and Michel Simonin, i ([Paris], Gallimard- Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1993), 188: ‘Marie levez-vous ma jeune paresseuse,/Ja la gaye Alouette au ciel a fredonné…’ (the first edition begins: ‘Mignongne, levés-vous’, but it is unlikely that Balzac knew that; on the other hand, line 7 of the later version speak of ‘œillets mignons’). Compare the opening of the Canalis poem: ‘Mon cœur, lève-toi! Déjà l'alouette/Secoue en chantant son aile au soleil’. See also the reference to dewy flowers in the second stanza of each poem. In the third stanza of Modeste's song, the rhyme <italic>roses–écloses</italic>
 is reminiscent of the still more famous ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,/Qui ce matin avait déclose…’.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN27" xml:lang="en">

          <label>27</label>

          <p>Marmier (<italic>Études sur Goethe</italic>
, p. 39) provides a highly rhetorical account of Beethoven's setting immediately before his evocation of Retzsch's engraving.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN28" xml:lang="en">

          <label>28</label>

          <p>See <italic>Correspondance de Balzac</italic>
, ed. by Roger Pierrot, 5 vols (Paris, Garnier, 1960–69), vol. 4 (1966), 685, 687.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN29" xml:lang="en">

          <label>29</label>

          <p>Fenella in <italic>La Muette de Portici</italic>
 is in fact a very different variant of the model. She is the sister of a poor Sicilian fisherman, she dies by jumping into a volcano, and above all she is mute: her part is played by a ballet-dancer, who mimes her répliques. As indicated above, Eugène Scribe, Auber's librettist, borrowed the name and the muteness of Fenella from the character of the same name in Walter Scott's <italic>Peveril of the Peak</italic>
, who is in turn expressly derived from Mignon.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN30" xml:lang="en">

          <label>30</label>

          <p>In a letter to Hippolyte Chélard (quoted below, p. 323), Balzac refers to Auber as ‘L'auteur de la <italic>Muette</italic>
’, but without mentioning Fenella or Mignon.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN31" xml:lang="en">

          <label>31</label>

          <p>I am drawing here on the detailed contextual analysis of this phase in Balzac's career (with particular reference to <italic>Gambara</italic>
) provided by Katharine Ellis, ‘The Uses of Fiction: <italic>contes</italic>
 and <italic>nouvelles</italic>
 in the <italic>Revue et gazette musicale de Paris</italic>
, 1834–1844’, <italic>Revue de Musicologie</italic>
, 90 (2004), 253–81. This article admirably brings out the relations between literature and music in the culture of July Monarchy Paris.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN32" xml:lang="en">

          <label>32</label>

          <p>In a dedicatory letter to Strunz, published as a preface to <italic>Massimilla Doni</italic>
 (the companion story to <italic>Gambara</italic>
), Balzac claims that he could not have written these two works without the ‘patiente complaisance’ and the ‘bons soins’ of the composer. See Balzac, <italic>La Comédie humaine</italic>
, <sc>x</sc>
, <italic>Etudes philosophiques</italic>
 (Paris, Gallimard- Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1979), p. 543. For further information on the genesis of the two stories, see the introductory studies by René Guise in that volume; see also Pierre Brunel's introduction to Balzac, <italic>Sarrasine. Gambara. Massimila Doni</italic>
, ed. by P. Brunel (Paris, Gallimard, 1995; Folio).</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN33" xml:lang="en">

          <label>33</label>

          <p><italic>Correspondance</italic>
, iv, 740. This letter was addressed to Hippolyte Chélard, a French composer who was Kapellmeister at the court of the Grand Duke of Weimar, and on friendly terms with Berlioz. Chélard had apparently read the novel in the <italic>Journal</italic>
 and, not realizing that Modeste's song had already been set by Auber, composed a version of his own. It seems likely that Chélard, from his Weimar vantage point, would have been thoroughly familiar with the Mignon story and, of course, the various Mignon songs.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN34" xml:lang="en">

          <label>34</label>

          <p>In this sense too the song is unlike the German settings of ‘Kennst du das Land?’, which in this period at least are predominantly strophic.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN35" xml:lang="en">

          <label>35</label>

          <p>I am indebted to Dr Katharine Ellis for supplying this assessment of the style of Auber's piece, and to other participants in my interdisciplinary seminar ‘Connections’ at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I presented a draft version of these materials, for their helpful comments.</p>

        </fn>

        <fn id="FN36" xml:lang="en">

          <label>36</label>

          <p>I am grateful to Professor Diana Knight for her thorough and extremely helpful reading of a first draft of this article, and for supplying supplementary information.</p>

        </fn>

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<abstract lang="en">Amid the many literary intertexts of Balzac's Modeste Mignon (1844), the works of Goethe play a key role. Modeste's first name contains a coded reference to Torquato Tasso, while her family name is borrowed from the Mignon of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Because Modeste is in many ways quite unlike Mignon, this latter reference has generally been regarded as marginal, but it can be shown that Balzac consciously plays off the Bildungsroman of his poetic but in the end solid and capable heroine against Goethe's ill-fated personification of lyrical poetry. Central to this parallel is the scene in which Modeste improvises a setting of her favourite poem by the poet she thinks she is in love with: unusually, the score (composed at Balzac's request by Daniel Auber) is printed consecutively with the narrative. This song transposes into a new literary, musical and social context Mignon's celebrated ‘Kennst du das Land?’. Modeste Mignon thus appears as both a specifically French mutation of the Mignon story and an ironic commentary on its Romantic implications.</abstract>
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Modeste and Mignon: Balzac rewrites Goethe

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