Modeste Mignon

Modeste Mignon is a young woman living with her blind mother and watched over by her absent father's majordomo and wife. They're determined to keep her from men until her father returns from his long sea voyage. She's by all appearances the perfect daughter, but her mother believes Modeste has a secret: she's in love! The attempts to determine whether this is true, and the aftermath, is Balzac at his wittiest. But even though she may seem like the ideal daughter, Modeste is somewhat subversive, at odds with the prevailing ideas of the time of how an ingénue should behave. Modeste Mignon, written in 1844, is one of Balzac's last additions to the Human Comedy. Perfect for readers who love witty French literature and coming-of-age stories with romantic intrigue, this Balzac masterpiece combines sharp social observation with delightful humor. If you enjoy classic European fiction that explores the complexities of young love against the backdrop of 19th-century society, Modeste Mignon delivers both entertainment and literary brilliance in true Balzacian style. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)