[Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac]@TWC D-Link bookModeste Mignon CHAPTER VIII 4/20
The name is a feigned one to conceal your own.
Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a person who is untruthful about herself? Question for question: Are you of an illustrious family? or a noble family? or a middle-class family? Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change; they are one: but obligations vary in the different states of life.
Just as the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position. The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in a general, and vice-versa.
Observances are not alike in all cases.
They are not the same for the gleaner in the field, for the girl who sews at fifteen sous a day, for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for the young bourgoise, for the child of a rich merchant, for the heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Este.
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