Modeste and Mignon: Balzac rewrites Goethe

Abstract

Amid the many literary intertexts of Balzac's (I844), 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 Wilbelm Meisters Lebrjahre. 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.