Explore "Modeste Mignon" by Honoré De Balzac on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The game opened with the baron and the duke, Gobenheim and Latournelle as partners. Modeste took a seat near the poet, to Ernest's deep disappointment; he watched the face of the wayward girl, and marked the progress of the fascination which Canalis exerted over her. La Briere had not the gift of seduction which Melchior possessed. Nature frequently denies it to true hearts, who are, as a rule, timid. This gift demands fearlessness, an alacrity of ways and means that might be called the trapeze of the mind; a little mimicry goes with it; in fact there is always, morally speaking, something of the comedian in a poet. There is a vast difference between expressing sentiments we do not feel, though we may imagine all their variations, and feigning to feel them when bidding for success on the theatre of private life.
And yet, though the necessary hypocrisy of a man of the world may have gangrened a poet, he ends by carrying the faculties of his talent into the expression of any required sentiment, just as a great man doomed to solitude ends by infusing his heart into his mind.