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Updated: July 22, 2025
I shall never survive it." And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to Paris, to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our drama for a moment.
At the beginning of October, 1829, Monsieur Simon Babylas Latournelle, notary, was walking up from Havre to Ingouville, arm in arm with his son and accompanied by his wife, at whose side the head clerk of the lawyer's office, a little hunchback named Jean Butscha, trotted along like a page.
I much prefer the novels of Ducray-Dumenil to all these English romances. I'm too good a Norman to fall in love with foreign things, above all when they come from England." Madame Mignon, notwithstanding her melancholy, could not help smiling at the idea of Madame Latournelle reading Childe Harold. The stern scion of a parliamentary house accepted the smile as an approval of her doctrine.
"What an acrobat!" whispered Butscha to Latournelle, after listening to a magnificent tirade on the Catholic religion and the happiness of having a pious wife, served up in response to a remark by Madame Mignon.
And so, my friend," she added, turning her blind face toward Butscha; "you can begin at once to negotiate with Latournelle." "He's of legal age, twenty-five and a half years. As for me, it will be paying a debt, my boy, to make the purchase easy for you," said the notary. Butscha was kissing Madame Mignon's hand, and his face was wet with tears as Modeste opened the door of the salon.
"Sit there, Butscha," said Madame Latournelle, separating the head-clerk from the group around Madame Mignon and her daughter by the whole width of the table. "And you, come over here," said Dumay to his wife, making her sit close by him. Madame Dumay, a little American about thirty-six years of age, wiped her eyes furtively; she adored Modeste, and feared a catastrophe.
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.
"How so?" asked Charles Mignon. "He strikes me as a man who will waste all the fortunes with whose gifts Mademoiselle Modeste so liberally endows him," answered Latournelle. "Modeste can't avoid being liberal to a poet who called her a Madonna," said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with which Canalis had originally inspired him.
As soon as La Briere, who at first saw nothing amiss in the proposal, had consented, Canalis declared that he should pay all expenses, and he sent his valet to Havre, telling him to see Monsieur Latournelle and get his assistance in choosing the house, well aware that the notary would repeat all particulars to the Mignons.
This improvisation of modern commonplaces, clothed in sonorous phrases and newly invented words, and intended to prove that the Comte de Canalis was becoming one of the glories of the French government, made a deep impression upon the notary and Gobenheim, and upon Madame Latournelle and Madame Mignon.
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