Modeste and Mignon: Balzac rewrites Goethe
St John's College, Oxford
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.
1 A brief plot summary of Wilhelm Meister 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.
2 On Mignon in England, see Jean-Marie Carré, Goethe en Angleterre (Paris, Plon, 1920) and Susan Howe, Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen (New York, Columbia University Press, 1930); also my articles ‘Mignon's Afterlife in the Fiction of George Eliot’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 56 (2003), 165–82, and ‘Singing with Tigers: Recognition in Wilhelm Meister, Daniel Deronda and Nights at the Circus’, 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, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Inferiority, 1790–1930 (London, Virago, 1995).
3 See in particular Marie in Joseph von Eichendorff's Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) (where the disguised page known as ‘Erwin’ is also a Mignon figure) and Flämmchen in Karl Immermann's Die Epigonen (1836).
4 The account provided by Fernand Baldensperger, Goethe en France (Paris, Hachette, 1920; Geneva, Slatkine Reprints, 2000), is still useful, though it has many gaps: not least, it fails to mention Balzac's Modeste Mignon.
5 Xavier Marmier, Études sur Goethe (Paris and Strasbourg, Levrault, 1835), pp. 38–39.
6 See Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle ([Paris], Fayard, 1997), pp. 279–82.
7 Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska 1832-1844, ed. by Roger Pierrot, 2 vols (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1990), i, pp. 827–28, 832, 834, 854, 864, 884, 887, 891.
8 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 Mémoires de deux jeunes mariés et Modeste Mignon’, L'Année Balzacienne, 3e série, 1 (2000), 43–63.
9 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 Torquato Tasso) are frequently referred to. Anne-Marie Meininger's preface to the Folio edition of Modeste Mignon ([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 Wilhelm Meister évoqué d'ailleurs dans le roman’ (Honoré de Balzac, Modeste Mignon, ed. by M. Regard, in La Comédie humaine, i, Etudes de m
urs: Scènes de la vie privée (Paris, Gallimard-Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), p. 452; further page numbers given below refer to this edition).
10 On the literary inbreeding of the novel, see in particular Labouret, ‘Romanesque’, and Tim Farrant, Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 296–301.
11 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 soirées 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.
12 It is important to note here that Modeste herself creates this coded allusion by inventing her nom de plume ‘O. d'Este-M.’ She is throughout the novel complicit in its wide-ranging intertextuality.
13 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 La Comédie humaine, i, 1333–35), or the famous ‘lost story’ by Mme Hanska (see Regard, introduction to Modeste Mignon, p. 448).
14 Torquato Tasso was written in the 1780s, when Goethe had also been working on the narrative that was to become Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: the fragment known as Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, 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, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, i, The Poetry of Desire (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 365.
15 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.
16 In addition to the examples mentioned in my articles cited above, note 2, J.-T. de Saint-Germain's popular moralizing story La Légende de Mignon (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.
17 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 Lettres à Madame Hanska, Balzac says of himself, ‘après avoir été Modeste, je deviens Mignon’ (p. 868).
18 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...).
19 A parodic rewriting, then, of the Judgement of Paris.
20 Lettres à Madame Hanska, p. 828.
21 Lettres à Madame Hanska, p. 884.
22 The indications are that he makes his fortune by trading in opium.
23 The narrative conclusion of Modeste Mignon is in fact much closer to the fairy tales the novel frequently alludes to than to the outcome of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: 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 The Magic Flute, 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 Wilhelm Meister is similarly marked ‘to be continued’.
24 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 Turmgesellschaft and their messengers in Wilhelm Meister, 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).
25 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.
26 Continuation des Amours, sonnet XIX, in Pierre de Ronsard, 
uvres complètes, 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 ‘illets mignons’). Compare the opening of the Canalis poem: ‘Mon cur, 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 roses–écloses is reminiscent of the still more famous ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,/Qui ce matin avait déclose...’.
27 Marmier (Études sur Goethe, p. 39) provides a highly rhetorical account of Beethoven's setting immediately before his evocation of Retzsch's engraving.
28 See Correspondance de Balzac, ed. by Roger Pierrot, 5 vols (Paris, Garnier, 1960–69), vol. 4 (1966), 685, 687.
29 Fenella in La Muette de Portici 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 Peveril of the Peak, who is in turn expressly derived from Mignon.
30 In a letter to Hippolyte Chélard (quoted below, p. 323), Balzac refers to Auber as ‘L'auteur de la Muette’, but without mentioning Fenella or Mignon.
31 I am drawing here on the detailed contextual analysis of this phase in Balzac's career (with particular reference to Gambara) provided by Katharine Ellis, ‘The Uses of Fiction: contes and nouvelles in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1844’, Revue de Musicologie, 90 (2004), 253–81. This article admirably brings out the relations between literature and music in the culture of July Monarchy Paris.
32 In a dedicatory letter to Strunz, published as a preface to Massimilla Doni (the companion story to Gambara), Balzac claims that he could not have written these two works without the ‘patiente complaisance’ and the ‘bons soins’ of the composer. See Balzac, La Comédie humaine, X, Etudes philosophiques (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, Sarrasine. Gambara. Massimila Doni, ed. by P. Brunel (Paris, Gallimard, 1995; Folio).
33 Correspondance, 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 Journal 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.
34 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.
35 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.
36 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.