|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: quite as well as French; she had also, together with her sister,
learned English from Madame Dumay. Being very little overlooked in the
matter of reading by the people about her, who had no literary
knowledge, Modeste fed her soul on the modern masterpieces of three
literatures, English, French, and German. Lord Byron, Goethe,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine, Crabbe, Moore, the great
works of the 17th and 18th centuries, history, drama, and fiction,
from Astraea to Manon Lescaut, from Montaigne's Essays to Diderot,
from the Fabliaux to the Nouvelle Heloise,--in short, the thought of
three lands crowded with confused images that girlish head, august in
its cold guilelessness, its native chastity, but from which there
Modeste Mignon |
